Vijay Nambiar, the UN special envoy for Burma, has praised this week’s meeting between the Burmese government and ethnic armed groups in Myitkyina, Kachin State, as “a significant move forward in the national reconciliation process.” The two-day talks, held in the Kachin State capital on Nov. 4-5, followed a meeting of ethnic armed groups in Laiza, the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Organization, last week. “The fact that such a meeting could take place within the country testifies to the distance that the government and ethnic armed groups have traversed since the beginning of the reform process in Myanmar,” Nambiar said in a statement issued on Tuesday.