Burma: Faith and Resistance in Kachin

The Revealer

“To be Kachin is to be Christian,” says Tsinyu Tanggun, an official at the Baptist church in Momauk, a small town in Burma’s northernmost Kachin State. More than 90 per cent of Burma’s one million Kachins are Christians while the rest follow pre-Christian Animist practices. Churches, most of them Baptist but also some Roman Catholic, can be seen in virtually every town and village. Christianity has become even more important among the Kachins since renewed fighting broke out between local guerrillas from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Burmese government’s forces in June 2011.

Attacks by the government’s army ended seventeen years of ceasefire with the central authorities, and there are now more than 100,000 people in camps for “Internally Displaced Persons”, or IDPs, in Kachin State. A recent report by Human Rights Watch also outlines indiscriminate attacks by the Burmese army, including heinous acts of sexual violence and torture of villagers suspected of being KIA supporters.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the Kachins see their struggle as a “Just War”, a fight to defend the interest of a mainly Christian people in a predominantly Buddhist nation. This is a concept that the KIA’s propaganda department has promoted through music and film that it distributes all over the state, and that is also what many Kachins told me when I visited rebel-held areas in December 2012, and government-controlled territory a year later.

The concept of a “Just War” also appears to have been sanctioned by the Kachin Baptist Convention, and preached by its pastors in their pulpits. “We pray for victory for the KIA,” said a pastor in Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital. I got the same message when I attended a Kachin service in a local Baptist church in Oakland, California, last Easter. They told me they collect money for the IDPs — and expressed their support for the KIA.

The Kachins, actually a group of people belonging to half-a-dozen different tribes, were converted to Christianity by American, mainly Baptist missionaries at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. A hill people, they were seen as savages by the people of the central plains, and the Burmese king Mindon, who ruled in Mandalay from 1853 to 1878, even warned the first missionaries who had come to spread the gospel in the northern mountains: “So you are to teach the Kachins! Do you see my dogs over there? I tell you, it will be easier to convert and teach these dogs. You are wasting your life.”1

But the missionaries were not deterred, and the conversion rate among the Kachins soon became one of the highest among any foreign mission in Southeast Asia. The missionaries also Romanized the main Kachin dialect, Jingphaw. The Bible and Christian hymns were translated into Jinghpaw, and the “savages of the hills”, thanks to the church, now had their own written language.

The arrival of the missionaries in tribal areas in Southeast Asia fermented a social, cultural and economic transformation. Christianity gave many poor hill tribes, and the Kachins were one of them, a common creed instead of scattered beliefs in the power of spirits. With education came self-esteem and ethnic pride — and an entirely new national consciousness.

Since Christianity was introduced in the Kachin Hills more than a century ago, the new faith and traditional, ethnic identity have become inseparable. Almost inevitably, this resulted in a gap between the people of the hills and those in the central plains and has led to serious, seemingly never-ending conflicts. The Kachins are among more than a dozen hill peoples, who for decades have been fighting against Burma’s central government. The Karens, another people with a strong Baptist component, took up arms in 1949, only a year after Burma had become independent from its former colonial power, Great Britain. The Kachins resorted to armed struggle in 1961.

The Kachins, nevertheless, have faith in their ability to resist — and in the religion that more than a century ago have them a new life. “In the end, truth and justice will prevail,” a Kachin wrote to me in an email. “And we believe God will not abandon us.”