Law Ha Lin, general secretary of the Chin Baptist Convention. They do not care about our religion,” said Rev. “The burning of churches and the burning of homes were not the result of fighting but deliberate arson. We are deeply saddened by the deliberate burning of the church,” he said, adding that the troops also plundered homes, stealing TVs, furniture and motorbikes. “There were 14 houses in the village, including the church. The remaining five houses were also set on fire,” he told The Telegraph. As they were about to leave the village, they set fire to a church on one side of the road.
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“They camped at my uncle's house, not far from the bomb shelter. Most villagers fled before the troops arrived but U Sang Hnin, 72, watched from his hiding place in a bomb shelter in his yard as soldiers alighted from about 40 trucks, fired their guns, and set homes alight before turning to the Baptist church where villagers had worshipped for some 50 years. On Thursday, Christine Schraner Burgener, the UN special envoy for Myanmar, said the country was already facing “an internal armed conflict” and warned specifically that the military was conducting clearing operations in Chin.Įarlier this month, troops stormed Rialti village, near the state’s capital of Hakha, after the anti-junta Chin Defence Force militia had reportedly attacked a military convoy in nearby Falam township. The military’s brutal ethnic cleansing operation in that state prompted a mass exodus of the Muslim minority into Bangladesh, many of whom still languish in huge refugee camps with no hope of returning home safely. “The situation in North-Western Burma today has some echoes of the situation in Rakhine State in 2017 before the military offensive against the Rohingya,” said Anna Roberts, from Burma Campaign UK.
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The deliberate targeting of religious institutions and the clergy comes amid a growing humanitarian disaster in the conflict-ridden country’s border regions and escalating clashes between the junta - which seized power in a February coup - and ad hoc guerrilla groups and long-standing ethnic armies.Ĭhin State, which has seen some of the strongest resistance since the coup and has a 90 per cent Christian population, has become the most recent flashpoint, with the United Nations, activists and insurgent groups warning of an ominous build-up of troops and military equipment that could herald a major assault. Myanmar’s military has been accused of torching and occupying churches and killing and detaining pastors in its latest brutal offensive in the majority-Christian Chin state on the northwest border with India.