ICC Note: The Kachin people of Northern Burma are believed to be more than 90% Christian. For decades, they have been in a struggle for independence from the military dictatorship of Myanmar. As a part of that conflict, Christian Kachin have been targeted because of their faith. In the last major military assault, more than 60 churches were reportedly burned to the ground. As one observer points out in this article, Buddhist temples are left untouched. 
3/14/2014 Burma (UCANews) – When government forces attacked Mansi township in northern Kachin state on October 22 last year, soldiers fired 60mm mortars at civilian homes for an hour before storming the village. Many of the thatched wooden buildings were burned to the ground.
To escape the shelling, 700 residents holed up in a nearby church where they remained trapped for 22 days. After state security forces finally left Mansi at the end of December, Christian relief groups that re-entered made a gruesome discovery: in a shallow grave lay three charred bodies. All showed signs of torture.
Since war erupted between state forces and the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in mid-2011, destruction of this predominantly Baptist region of Myanmar has ranked among the most severe of recent times against any Christian group in Asia.
At least 66 churches – 61 Baptist, four Catholic and one Church of God – have been destroyed in less than three years, according to Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) data collected last year. Many more remain crumbling and may well need to be demolished and rebuilt, said the KBC. As a result of the conflict at least 75,000 people have fled to temporary camps in KIA-controlled areas, leaving entire Christian communities wiped off the map.
Benedict Rogers, East Asia team leader at Christian Solidarity Worldwide, says the Kachin situation is more complex than in other Asian countries where persecution against Christians is also severe – by Islamists in Indonesia and Pakistan and hardline Hindus in India. Aggression against Christianity in northern Myanmar represents the collateral damage in a war designed to stamp out Kachin designs on autonomy, he adds.
“There is a religious dimension, in that successive military regimes have been hostile to non-Buddhist religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, and have used religion as a political tool,” says Rogers. “But the war is primarily ethnic and political.”
Kachin Baptist Pastor Chyauchyi Tanggun says persecution against Christians in northern Myanmar is no less deliberate.
When he fled his village soon after the start of the war in November 2011, Myanmar soldiers looted donation boxes at his church, burned the altar and stole the electric generator, he says. The Catholic church in the village had already been abandoned after the military used it to store munitions and food supplies for battalions fighting against the rebels.
“It’s because we’re Christians that they intentionally do these things,” he says. “They wouldn’t even place a finger on a Buddhist temple.”
Chyauchyi is one of three Baptist pastors now living in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Mai Ja Yang, the largest KIA-controlled area on Myanmar’s border with China. His congregation remains scattered in different camps across this remote frontier.
In his bamboo and brick hut in the camp, Chyauchyi shows photographs of his looted home, his clothes and possessions strewn across the floor. He took the pictures four months after fleeing his village, sneaking back through military lines in an attempt to find out what was left of his congregation.
One deacon and two young Christian men who attempted the same dangerous trip never made it back.
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