This situation has worsened and prayer for the people and the Christian Kachins is imperative. Kachin State has recently passed laws preventing the assistance of the Christians being persecuted.
http://www.genocidewatch.com/single...18-Months-Replaces-Some-With-Buddhist-Pagodas
More recently, however, there has been an even more severe treatment of the Kachin people, 95 percent of whom are Christian. "Even Franklin Graham would have trouble getting in there." (Samaritan's Purse is often the ONLY NGO allowed into such countries, to assist the people.)
"In the last 18 months, they have bombed 60 churches. Of the 60 churches they have bombed, they have put Buddhist pagodas in 20 of those sites to reclaim them. It is a pretty severe thing," Roberts told The Christian Post in an interview. "[To] be clear, most of it is about ethnic cleansing."
U.S. advocates say Christians in Myanmar’s Kachin state need help
A displaced elderly Kachin woman rests in a temporary camp May 11 on the grounds of a Catholic church in Myitkyina, Myanmar. (Credit: Seng Mai/EPA via CNS.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Tamadaw, the military of Myanmar, has been attacking the ethnic minority Kachin people in what some observers are calling a genocide.
Although much attention has been given to the ethnic Rohingya, “If you ask the Kachin if they believe a genocide is taking place, everyone will tell you yes,” said the Rev. Bob Roberts, senior pastor at Northwood Church in Dallas, who recently visited Myanmar.
In Kachin state, which is over 90 percent Baptist and about 5 percent Catholic, the Tamadaw has burned 406 villages and 311 churches and displaced more than 130,000 people in the past seven years.
“These are gut-wrenching acts,” said Nicolee Ambrose, spokeswoman for the Interfaith Coalition to Stop Genocide in Burma.
The motivation for the attacks is an ongoing conflict that started almost as soon as Burma, now Myanmar, gained its independence from Britain in 1948.
“It’s first an ethnic problem and second a religious problem,” said Roberts, although he said that religion did play a role in the attacks.
The Christians are easy targets because they tend to flee to churches, said Roberts.
“Every single church there is a refugee center, and the shelters they provide are basically bamboo with tarps,” Roberts said.
Ndayu also said the military is harassing camps for displaced people, using human shields and blocking all humanitarian aid to the camps.
Roberts said the Christians in Kachin expect the United States will do something for them.
He said that, while he was visiting Kachin, “One of the things that made me sad was that they would ask again and again, ‘Where are the American Christians?'”
The Kachin feel a special connection to American Christianity, he said, because the vast majority of them are Baptists, whose ancestors had been converted by Adoniram Judson, U.S. missionary to Burma in the early 1800s.
Ambrose said the lifting of all sanctions on Myanmar in 2016 led to the Tamadaw increasing the number and ferocity of their attacks in Kachin.
“Ben Rhodes (a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications) and Barack Obama thought the way to hasten the creation of democracy in Burma was to lift sanctions, but lifting sanctions took away Aung San Suu Kyi’s one stick she could use to control the military.”
Suu Kyi is the head of the civilian government of Myanmar, but the military has substantial power: It controls 25 percent of the seats in parliament and about 75 percent of the economy.
“We believe the lifting of American sanctions gave license to the military for genocidal campaigns and halted democratic reforms,” Ambrose said.
Ambrose, Roberts and Ndayu all called for the United States to place sanctions against Myanmar again.
