NEWS - Christian crackdown in CHIN

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Subject: NEWS - Christian crackdown in CHIN STATE Burma

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST - Wednesday, July 14, 1999

CHIN STATE

Christian crackdown

WILLIAM BARNES

The persecution of Christians is on the rise in Burma because the
military equates it with political deviance, the Chin Human Rights
Organisation reported yesterday.
In a land covered with Buddhist pagodas, the army has banned the
planting of crosses on hilltops in the heavily Christian ethnic Chin
state in northeast Burma.

As many as 70 Christian evangelists in, or from, the Chin state have
been arrested this year.

The security forces have also turned a blind eye to assaults by monks on
Christians, the organisation said.

The military Government has been strongly promoting Buddhism as a
potentially unifying national religion.
__________________________
United Nations info:

CUNG BIK LING, of Rural Reconstruction Nepal, said there was an urgent
crisis in Chinland, which was situated in the western part of Burma.
Ever since the Burmese Army took power in 1962, successive military
regimes had persistently carried out cultural genocide against the
indigenous Chin peoples.
Despite the fact that the Chin community provided textbooks and
teachers, the language was taught only as an optional subject, and only
up to second grade.  In fact, the Chin textbook had been banned in 1990
because one phrase referred to the Bible. Since 1995, the regime also
had banned the use of the Chin language between teachers and students in
the classroom. In court and Government offices, only Burmese could be
spoken. The Commission should ratify the Declaration on the rights of
indigenous peoples immediately to protect the existence of the Chin.

LITON BOM, of Worldview International, said that there had been
religious persecutions taking place in Chinaman in the western part of
Burma. The Chin people had converted to Christianity in an effort to
maintain their separate cultural identity in the face of the
overwhelmingly Buddhist Burmese ethnic majority. To the military rulers
who had adopted a xenophobic, crypto-Marxist philosophy, this was a
threat. The rulers had continuously manoeuvred to prevent the growth of
the Chin Chinese Church, and to forcibly introduce Buddhism to the Chin.
None of this was mentioned in the report of the Special Rapporteur of
Burma, and he ought to investigate religious persecutions suffered by
the Christians in Burma.