At least 30,000 people fled into China in August 2009, prompting Chinese authorities to open seven refugee camps and provide food, drinking water, shelter and first aid.34 In a three-day conflict, the Burma Army gained control of Kokang territory and forced rebel forces led by Peng Jiasheng to flee into China. The SPDC installed a new leadership in the Kokang region, led by regime loyalist Bai Souqian. At least 500 people were reported killed.35
The KIA and the Wa, another ethnic group in the area, were on high alert. The United Wa State Army (UWSA), one of the largest and best equipped armed groups in Burma, with an estimated 20,000 troops, expected they would be the next target, and were poised for battle.36 The KIA’s chief of staff, Major General Gunhtang Gam Shawng, ordered his troops to shoot at Burma Army soldiers if they entered KIA territory.37 China was unusually outspoken, summoning the Burmese ambassador to Beijing to explain the regime’s actions. China was particularly angry about instability on its borders and threats to ethnic Chinese people and business interests in the area. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said China had ‘made representations about harm caused to the rights of Chinese citizens in Myanmar, restated China’s position, demanded Myanmar rapidly investigate, punish law-breakers and report the results to China.’ The regime should ‘take prompt measures, earnestly protect the legal rights of Chinese citizens in Myanmar, and make sure similar incidents do not happen again.’38
The attacks on the Kokang, and the continued abuses in Kachin State, demonstrate how fragile the ceasefire agreements are and how little they mean in reality. Since 2008 relations between the KIO and the regime have continued to deteriorate. On 7 October 2009, KIO Chairman Zawng Hra sent a letter to Senior General Than Shwe, noting that the junta had conceived a plan ‘to liquidate our organisation’. In extraordinarily measured, but equally brave terms, he continued: ‘Accordingly, we feel it proper to bring to your attention all the facts that pertain to our status.’ Emphasising the KIO’s commitment to peace, he reminded Than Shwe that ‘on nine occasions’ the KIO had explained its position to the regime, as to why it could not accept the proposal to become a border guard force. Such an idea was ‘quite unrealistic’ until a mutually acceptable political settlement had been reached.39 The regime responded by cutting off all communications with the KIA,40 describing the KIO and its armed wing as ‘insurgents’, a phrase that had not been used since the ceasefire.41 A KIO liaison office was raided by the Tatmadaw, and a new political party that had been set up by a former senior KIO leader to contest the regime’s elections was refused registration. Two other Kachin parties were also rejected, and fifteen pro-KIO independent candidates were disqualified. Some villages under KIO control were not allowed to take part in the poll.42 Pressure on the Kachin mounted, until the mortars finally started to fire in June 2011. After seventeen years of fragile peace, the Kachin were back at war. ‘We do not want to hold arms – we are not a warlike people. We just want our political rights,’ Zawng Hra told me. ‘When we asked for political negotiation, the response of the government was war.’43
On 28 July, Aung San Suu Kyi wrote an open letter to President Thein Sein and four armed groups – the KIO, as well as the Karen National Union, New Mon State Party and Shan State Army – calling for ‘immediate ceasefires and a peaceful resolution of the conflicts’ and offering herself as a mediator.44 For five months, there was little sign of a response from the regime. However, in December 2011 the KIO received an official letter from Naypyidaw, requesting formal peace talks. A month later, the two sides met in Ruili, China, for two days. I was with the KIO in Laiza at the time, and followed the talks closely. The KIO took a clear and firm position: this time round, they were not interested in offers of economic development and cessation of hostilities. For seventeen years they had abided by a ceasefire agreement, in the hope that the key promise – a political process leading to a political solution – would be fulfilled. They had waited in vain, and were not prepared to return to such an unsatisfactory ceasefire agreement. They want peace, but they want it to be genuine and secure, and that can only be achieved if a ceasefire is accompanied by a political process. Ultimately, they told me, they want the ‘spirit of Panglong’ to prevail – the establishment of a federal democracy in which they and other ethnic nationalities have a degree of autonomy and equal rights, within the Union of Burma. ‘We are committed to a federal Burma,’ a senior KIO leader emphasised to me. ‘We do not want to secede from the Union.’45
5
A Cross to Bear in the West
‘We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.’
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
IN 1993, PASTOR Zang Kho Let was arrested and interrogated by the Tatmadaw. When his answers failed to satisfy his interrogators, they cut open his mouth to his neck. They did this, they said, ‘so you will no longer preach’.1
While such barbaric punishments for religious activity are the extreme, the Chin people in western Burma are suffering inhumane treatment at the hands of the regime, on three counts: ethnicity, religion and politics. The regime’s attitude to non-Burman and non-Buddhist ethnic and religious groups is shaped by a fascist mentality which has echoes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In Burmese, this is summed up in the phrase ‘Amyo, Batha, Thathana’, which means ‘one race, one language, one religion’. As a non-Burman ethnic group the Chin face discrimination. As a non-Buddhist religious group – indeed, an overwhelmingly Christian population whose faith is integral to their identity and culture – they face religious persecution. And as a group with several pro-democracy organisations, some of them armed, the regime regards the Chin as opponents. To compound their plight, Chin State is the poorest, most remote and least developed part of the country, with almost non-existent health care provision and few natural resources. There is no high school education beyond the age of fifteen, and there are no universities in Chin State. According to Chin sources, for a population of approximately one million, there are an estimated 184 nursery schools, 1,167 primary schools, 83 middle schools and just 25 high schools.2
The Chin consist of various subgroups, clans and tribes and a multiplicity of different dialects. Originating in the Tibeto-Burman group, the Chin are believed to have come to Burma from western China and eastern Tibet. The groups considered to be Chin are too numerous to mention, but include the Asho, Cho, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo or Lushai, Zomi, Kuki and Mara.3 Their lands straddle the borders between Burma, India and Bangladesh, so that the Chins in Burma are closely related to the Mizo people in Mizoram State, India. Although each group within the Chin has their own dialect and specific culture, according to Lian Sakhong, in his book In Search of Chin Identity, the factor that unites them, and makes them all ‘Chin’, is a common adherence to a myth about their origin, expressed in folk songs and folklore. ‘The common proper name of the “Chin” is inseparably intertwined with “the myth of common descent” and the “myth of origin”,’ Sakhong writes. ‘According to the origination myth, the Chin people emerged into this world from the bowels of the earth or a cave or a rock called “Chinlung”.’4
Until the British invaded the Chin Hills in a series of battles with the local inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, the Chin had been entirely self-governing. ‘None of the surrounding powers, such as the Bengali Indian or Burman, ever conquered the Chinram,’5 writes Lian Sakhong.6 For this reason, the Chin were never converted to any of the major religions that surrounded their land – Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. Instead, they followed their own traditional beliefs, known as phunglam or ‘ways of life’.7 This was a monotheistic tradition, based around a belief in a Supreme Being, souls and life after death.8 It was perhaps for these reasons that when the Christian missionaries came, the Chins embraced Christianity virtually ‘en masse’.
Although it is believed that the first contact the Chins had with the British was in 1760, when the British East India Company occupied the Chittagong region of
what is now Bangladesh, the first recorded encounter came in 1824, when Chin villagers killed some British traders who entered Chin territory to collect bamboo and timber and refused to pay taxes to the local people.9 In the following years, the Chins made a series of raids on British territory, leading to an operation in 1860 known as the ‘Great Kuki Invasion’, in which fifteen villages in Tripura, modern-day India, were destroyed, 185 British people were killed and about one hundred captives taken.10 In Lian Sakhong’s words, ‘The British could not tolerate the challenge to their sovereignty involved in this harassment, killing and capture of their subjects.’11 A series of battles followed, in an operation which one British soldier claimed was intended not to ‘exterminate these frontier tribes, but convert them into our allies’.12 The Chin proved to be fierce and skilful fighters, regularly blocking the British troops’ routes and launching frequent ambushes.13 Sir George White, one of the leaders of the British forces, described the Chin as the ‘most difficult enemy to see or hit that I have ever fought’.14 By 1896, the British had occupied the Chin territories,15 as well as the rest of Burma, adopting ‘a policy of pacification through permanent occupation’.16 The Chin Hills Regulation was promulgated, establishing a basic colonial administration for the entire Chin territory.17 The Chin, however, had not been defeated by the military might of the British forces, but rather by famine because they had been unable to cultivate their land due to the war, and the British had burned many villages and rice barns.18 Famine, the burning of villages and the destruction of rice barns were to become regular features of Chin life a century later, under the rule of the Tatmadaw.
Christian missionaries had first arrived in Burma in the sixteenth century, when Jesuits accompanied the Portuguese traveller and mercenary Philip de Brito y Nicote, who was employed by the Arakanese King Min Razagyi.19 De Brito and an Arakanese convert from Buddhism to Christianity, Nat Shin Naung, were subsequently crucified as heretics by the King of Ava, Maha Dhamma Raja, who saw Nat Shin Naung’s conversion as an insult to Buddhism.20 Italian priests came to Burma in 1720, and in 1783 Father Sangermano arrived, and subsequently published one of the earliest histories of Burma.21 In 1807, the first Protestant missionaries arrived, sent by the London Missionary Society, but it was Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann, the first American Baptists, who made the most significant and long-lasting impact.22 They arrived in 1813, and among their contributions were the translation of the Bible and the compilation of a Burmese–English dictionary still in use today.23 It was Judson’s successors who ventured into the Chin Hills, led initially by the Reverend Arthur Carson and his wife Laura in 1899.24
Although in much of Burma the British colonialists did not welcome, and at times disapproved of, missionary activity, in the case of the Chin Hills the missionaries were invited by the British. According to Lian Sakhong, the primary objective of the British was ‘the pacification’ of the Chins, and they believed the missionaries might help this. One source claims that the British concluded that ‘if most of the Chin became Christians there would be a fairly good chance that they might welcome all other changes’.25 The British were proven right, and the Carsons were soon followed by a medical missionary, Dr E.H. East.26
The Chin, however, did not welcome the missionaries or embrace Christianity immediately, or without a struggle. As a result of their war with the British, famine and disease were rife, and the colonial occupation caused a breakdown in the traditional structures of authority in Chin society. ‘Crisis in life and conversion to Christianity … were more or less linked with each other,’ Sakhong concludes.27 Thuam Hang, the first Zomi convert, for example, accepted Christianity only after a miserable struggle over ‘great loss of economic and social status’.28 His eldest son suffered from a disease that was not just physically painful but caused him to become a social outcast. His other son had what was described as ‘tuberculosis of the spine’. Both appeared to be cured, the first by a medical operation conducted by Dr East, the second seemingly as a result of prayer. ‘The Chin people now view such a story as the “mighty work of God” in their history,’ notes Sakhong.29 Thuam Hang was baptised by Dr East in 1906.30
In the early years, Chin converts to Christianity faced persecution from within their own community. Chins regarded conversion as a betrayal of their own traditional culture and beliefs. Tsong Kham, for example, the first convert from the Bualkhua people, was beaten by three men armed with bamboo rods, each one ordered to give him fifteen strokes. In the midst of the beatings, he asked them to pause, and he prayed for strength to endure the torture. He repeated the words prayed by Jesus Christ on the cross, and by St Stephen: ‘Count it not against them, Father, for they do not understand.’ According to Sakhong, Tsong Kham then urged his torturers to resume their work. The village chief, who had ordered the punishment, was ‘filled with superstitious awe’, writes Laura Carson, and ‘no man dared to strike again’.31
Gradually, however, the Chins began to accept Christianity, in part because of its parallels with their own traditional beliefs, and in part because of the contribution of missionaries to developing their own society. In particular, the missionaries’ emphasis on education, the development of a written language which previously did not exist, medical provision and the unification of the disparate tribal groups inhabiting the Chin Hills into one common Chin identity made Christianity increasingly attractive to the Chins. Over the past century, Christianity has become ‘inseparable’ from Chin identity, and as a result, as Sakhong concludes, it has also ‘played a very important role in the people’s social and political lives, not just their religious lives’.32
Of all the Christian groups in Burma facing varying degrees of restriction, discrimination and persecution, the Chins experience religious intolerance in its starkest forms. A common Chin practice, as an expression of their faith and their culture, is to construct crosses on hillsides and mountaintops. In recent years, however, the Tatmadaw has torn almost all the crosses down. In many instances, Chin Christian villagers have themselves been forced at gunpoint to destroy their crosses, and to build Buddhist pagodas in their place. Not only are they forced to tear down the symbols of their own faith, which is so associated with their cultural identity, but they are forced to contribute labour and resources for the construction of symbols of Buddhism, the religion of their oppressors. According to Salai Bawi Lian Maung, the ‘destruction of crosses started around the early 1990s with the rapid increase in army battalions established across Chin State’. Since that time, he adds, ‘almost every cross in all nine townships in Chin State has been destroyed by the regime … Many of them have been replaced by Buddhist pagodas and statues of Buddhist monks.’33
In 1994, for example, a local Roman Catholic Church in Tonzang Township, northern Chin State, built a cross, and the local authorities ordered its destruction. The church refused, and so at midnight on 16 May the township authorities and local police burned the cross.34 The following year, a cross built on Mount Rung in Hakha, the state capital, was torn down, and when the Hakha Baptist Church attempted to rebuild the cross they were ordered not to. A few years later, a statue of a Buddhist monk was built in its place.35 On 5 January 1999, Chin Christians built a large memorial cross on a hilltop west of Thantlang, to celebrate the centenary of the arrival of Christianity among the Chins. That same night, the authorities ordered its destruction, and forced the people who had erected it to pull it down. When they refused, the police destroyed it themselves, and arrested six pastors.36 Three years later, a thirty-foot cross that had been built in Matupi, southern Chin State, in 1984 was ordered to be destroyed,37 and in 2005 a fifty-foot cross on the top of Mount Boi, believed to be the only remaining cross in Chin State, was torn down.38 It is believed that this cross was removed on the orders of a senior Tatmadaw officer, and according to Salai Bawi Lian Mang, ‘after destroying the cross, troops from Light Infantry Battalion 304 hoisted a Burmese flag as a sign of victory against Christianity in Chin State’.39
In the
place of crosses, the regime have built numerous pagodas, often forcing Chin Christian villagers to contribute labour, money and construction materials. The Chin say that for the regime the construction of pagodas is a symbol of control and occupation, so they have a political as well as religious significance. A large pagoda has been built on the third highest mountain in the country, Mount Victoria, and a cross that was destroyed on Mount Rung has been replaced with a large Buddha statue and pagoda.
It is not only crosses which the Tatmadaw destroys in Chin areas. Churches are not secure either. In 1998, several churches were destroyed on SPDC orders, and in 2000, Captain Khin Maung Myint ordered the destruction of a church in Min Tha village, Tamlu Township, in Magwe Division, next to Chin State. The following year he forced villagers to destroy two other churches in the same township. Construction of church buildings in Tiddim Township was ordered to cease in 2000, and all Christian schools in Tamu Township were forced to close.40 According to one pastor, ‘it is totally impossible to build a church’ now.41 Printing the Bible in Chin State is forbidden, and so Bibles are printed in India and smuggled in. In 2000, it was reported that 16,000 Bibles were seized by the Burma Army and burned.
The regime has attempted to forcibly convert Chin Christians to Buddhism, in various ways. In some places, Christians are offered inducements such as rice if they become Buddhists, and families are offered educational opportunities for their children if they convert. Many children from Chin Christian families have been sent to Buddhist monasteries for schooling, but once there the children are forced to participate in Buddhist worship and in many instances their heads are shaved and they are forced to become novice Buddhist monks. The same practice is occurring in Kachin State.
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 16