“It is urgent to stop the fighting. Many innocent people suffer and are desperate. International aid is needed because a humanitarian emergency is underway here.
We ask the United Nations agencies and NGOs to officially open refugee camps in order to offer humanitarian aid to the displaced, in Mindat and in the neighboring areas”: this is the heartfelt appeal delivered to Agenzia Fides by Fr. Joseph Sethang, a Catholic priest and parish priest in Mindat, who has brought 80 refugees, mostly children, women and the elderly, to His Sacred Heart church in Mindat, a city in the Catholic Diocese of Hakha, capital of the Burmese state of Chin, in Western Myanmar, on the border with India and Bangladesh.
In Chin, a rural and mountainous state in the north-west of Myanmar – among the least developed in the country, with a population of about 500 thousand inhabitants, mainly of Chin ethnicity – the resistance of the “Popular Defense Forces” is strong which, after the coup of 1 February, oppose the Burmese army. In Mindat, fighting began in late April after the military refused to release seven young detainees who were peacefully protesting against the coup and in favor of democracy.
As Fides has learned, Fr. Joseph Sethang went to the jungle where the displaced had fled and led and welcomed them into his parish complex. Mang Ling, primary school headmaster, Christian elder of the Mindat Baptist Church, reports that “in the city of Mindat, out of a population of 40,000, there are now only about 700 people left. All have fled because of the fighting”. “We must stop the violence. We ask the Burmese Armed Forces and the People’s Defense Forces of Mindat to stop the fighting and stop harming innocent civilians, women, children, and the elderly who are already suffering too much”, reiterates the Catholic priest.
As reported to Fides, the military authorities are monitoring the situation in the state of Chin very carefully: in recent days the Deputy Minister of Defense arrived in Mindat and met, among others, three Catholic priests (Fr. Joseph Sethang, Father Timothy Shing, and Father John Omse) and a Baptist pastor, Rev. Sehaa Hung, asking them to convince the people who fled to return to the city. But the displaced do not dare to return to their homes in the city, fearing for their safety.
To assist the refugees in his church, Fr. Joseph Sethang in recent months had already collected food that he is now providing to the displaced. In this critical phase for the population, humanitarian aid is being provided by social organizations, especially by priests and religious in Catholic churches and by Baptist pastors. The Mindat Baptist Church is welcoming and protecting about 700 people, including the disabled, the elderly, the deaf. Until now, the Burmese army soldiers have not hit the Baptist or the Catholic churches in Mindat.
According to the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO), the military has committed “war crimes and serious violations of the Geneva Convention” in Mindat. Since martial law was imposed on May 13, according to the CHRO, the military has used local youth as human shields, occupied schools, and hospitals, destroyed property, and carried out attacks with heavy weapons by air and land. Worn out by the bloody repression and arbitrary arrests, the fighters of Mindat are among the popular forces that currently throughout the country have chosen armed resistance to oppose the military government.
