Understanding Christian Faith and Freedom in Burma / Myanmar
Burma/Myanmar is home to more than 135 ethnic groups, the largest of which is the predominantly Buddhist Bama (or Burman) nation, which comprises 60 percent of the population.
However, 57 percent of the land mass of Burma is occupied by the country’s ethnic minority nations, most of which are not Buddhist. The Chin (in the west, bordering India) and the Kachin (in the north, bordering China) are Christian nations, while Burma’s largest ethnic minority nation, the Karen – which includes the Karreni – (in the east, bordering Thailand) is estimated to be between 30-40 percent Christian.
Most of Burma’s Christians are Protestant; mainly Baptist, the legacy of American Baptist pioneer missionary Adoniram Judson (1788-1850).
Adoniram and Ann Judson arrived in Burma as pioneer missionaries in 1813. Despite enduring severe hardship, mortal dangers, violent persecutions, brutal imprisonment, and grief upon grief, Adoniram Judson managed to compile a grammar of the Burmese language, translate the Bible into Burmese, and lead the first converts to Jesus Christ. The influence of Ann Judson in this work cannot be overstated. Not only did she encourage and support Adonirum in all his work, Ann kept Adoniram alive in prison, guaranteed his language work was preserved, and courageously intervened (at great personal risk) to save him from execution. Critically, like many Christian missionaries (then and now), Ann Judson pioneered and championed girls’ education in Burma.
Documentary film:
Adoniram and Ann Judson: Spent For God (2018),
By Robert Fernandez; a production of Christian History Institute,
featuring Dr. Reid Trulson, Rosalee Hall Hunt, Dr Evan Burns and Allen Yeh (64 minutes).
At that time (19th Century), Burma was a feudal society, dominated by ethnic Bama Buddhists who looked down on the other mostly animist ethnic nations amongst them and treated them as worthless serfs or slaves.
The ethnic minorities embraced Christianity in part because it liberated them from the life of fear inherent in animism, but also because through it these downtrodden peoples came to be assured of God’s love and presence. Living in the light of this new worldview gave them joy, dignity, purpose and hope.
On the other hand, Burma’s Bama Buddhists resisted Christianity because, just like India’s high caste Hindus, they saw Christianity as a threat to their assumed superiority, inherited privilege, and incontestable power.
In 1885, the British annexed Burma into British-administered India, introduced democracy and capitalism, and improved the human rights situation for the ethnic minorities.
In 1937, Britain separated mostly Buddhist Burma from mostly Hindu India and established it as a crown colony.
In 1942, during World War II, Japan invaded and occupied Burma with help from the Japanese-trained Burma Independence Army.
In 1945, at the end of the war, Britain liberated Burma from Japanese occupation with help from the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), led by Aung San.
After World War II, General Aung Sun (father of Aung Sun Suu Kyi) united the ethnic nations – which were promised autonomy – and founded the Union of Burma. He then headed a parliamentary democracy and negotiated independence from Britain, before being assassinated in July 1947.
In 1948, Burma became independent with U Nu as prime minister.
While profound ethnic and religious differences made the Union fragile, and infighting left the government weak, the Bama-Buddhist Burmese military grew strong and rich. After independence, while the nation was still young, Burmese military units were required to raise a significant amount of their own revenue to pay salaries and equip themselves. What started out as a necessity, came to be the mean by which the Tatmadaw (military) came to dominate Burma’s economy.
Full report:
Economic interests of the Myanmar military (110 pages)
by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar
UN Human Rights Council, 16 Sept 2019.
On 2 March 1962, Army Chief of Staff, Ne Win staged a coup d’état and declared himself head of state. Blending Marxism, ethnic (Bama)- and religious (Buddhist)-supremacism, and Buddhist superstition, Ne Win advanced a Soviet-style nationalisation which abolished the federal system and brought all elements of society under the control of the racist military junta.
Ever since then, the ethnic nations have been lobbying – and in many cases fighting – for autonomy, as was promised by General Aung Sun. They are resisting the return of the old order – that of brutal Bama-Buddhist domination, exploitation, repression, crippling discrimination, and violent persecution.
Burma’s Bama-Buddhist, deeply-invested military regards this resistance as grounds for war.
ON THE FENCE
Geostrategic Burma: between East and West
For decades the West used sanctions to pressure Burma’s military junta.
Then, from 1988, a rising and ambitious China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, recognised Burma’s geo-strategic value – particularly its ability to provide China with access to the Indian Ocean – and took the opportunity to draw the isolated junta into its embrace.
Since the turn of the century, Burma’s geo-strategic value has increased in line with China’s rise.
Domestically though, Burma’s growing dependence on China (a long-time foe) triggered a rise in anti-China sentiment, especially amongst Burma’s military elite.
Aware of Burma’s geo-strategic value, the junta moved to extricate itself from China’s embrace, and reached out to the West. By 2012, in exchange for a series of reforms, Burma-US relations were restored.
Unfortunately, most of the junta’s reforms were less than satisfactory and even bogus.
However, it was not in the West’s economic or geo-strategic interests to advocate for ethnic minority victims of violent persecution and ethnic cleansing when Burma had just opened its resources and markets to the West. To protect its own interests, and ensure Burma did not drift back into China’s sphere of influence, the West turned a blind eye to the Tatmadaw’s corruption, human rights abuses, and military aggression.
2008 CONSTITUTION
To shore up its position ahead of “reforms”, Western engagement, greater openness, and a return to democracy, the junta had a new Constitution prepared.
Written under military rule, the 2008 Constitution serves military interests by ensuring the heavily invested Tatmadaw remains in control.
The 2008 Constitution enshrines centralised government contrary to the aspirations of Burma’s long-repressed, persecuted and brutalised ethnic nations, to which most of Burma’s Christians belong.
The 2008 Constitution is an obstacle to peace. Consider just a few articles:
Article 6: “The Union’s consistent objectives are: (f) enabling the Defence Services to be able to participate in the National political leadership role of the State.”
[NOTE: “The Union” is short for the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (the state’s official name).]
Article 37(a): “The Union is the ultimate owner of all lands and all natural resources above and below the ground, above and beneath the water and in the atmosphere in the Union.”
Though the government grants farmers tillage rights, it can grab land back whenever it wants. Consequently, struggles have long raged between the central government – which is desperate for resources (water, timber, gold, jade, amber, and fertile land for opium production) and foreign investment – and indigenous ethnic nations who would rather die fighting than surrender their ancestral lands.
Article 109 mandates that one quarter of all seats in the Pyithu Hluttaw (lower house of parliament) – that is 110 of 440 seats – shall be “Defence Services personnel nominated by the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services”.
[NOTE: the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), registered in 2010, serves as a front for the military, and serves its interests.]
This effectively gives the military the power to veto any constitutional change.
The 2008 Constitution also contains “exception clauses” that give the military the legal right to deprive people of fundamental human rights and even orchestrate a military coup if the military deems it necessary for the purpose of safeguarding the Constitution.
Article 20 (f): “The Defence Services is mainly responsible for safeguarding the Constitution.”
ELECTIONS
In November 2010, Burma held its first parliamentary election in 20 years. It was the first election since the 1990 election which the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi (already under house arrest), won in a landslide (winning 392 out of the 492 seats) only to have the results annulled.
With its leader still under house arrest, the NLD boycotted the 2010 polls. The USDP won 259 of 325 seats (5 seats were cancelled); giving the military and its proxy 369 of 440 seats (i.e. 84 percent).
Critically, the junta had made disarmament a condition of participation in the Nov 2010 elections. It was a shrewd strategy designed to disenfranchise the ethnic minorities who, despite having signed ceasefire agreements with the junta, were unwilling to have their defence forces disarmed and absorbed into a national Border Guard Force (BGF). The issue was trust! These long-persecuted ethnic minorities were simply not willing to entrust their security to a centrally controlled force dominated by the same Bama-Buddhist soldiers that had spent decades indiscriminately grabbing their land and enslaving, looting, raping, torturing and massacring their people.
Many suspect the “democratic” exercise was merely a ploy to legitimise the junta so it could label the ethnic-religious minorities as “separatists” and “insurgents” and claim a mandate to subjugate them by force.
One week after the polls, with the military’s power established, the regime released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
By mid-2011, the junta had resumed its war of ethnic cleansing against the mostly Christian Kachin, specifically in the vicinity of the proposed Myitsone Dam project – a Chinese financed Sino-Myanmar joint venture to build multiple dams along the Irrawaddy River in Kachin State. At the headwaters of the Irrawaddy, the Myitsone mega-dam would produce hydroelectricity, 90 percent of which would go to China. The project necessitates that Kachin villagers be forcibly relocated away from their villages and arable ancestral lands.
In the by-elections of 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi won a seat in the parliament.
In the general election of 2015, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won an absolute majority of seats (255 of 330 elected seats to the military-backed USDP’s 30). The writing was on the wall!
While the government was reluctant to directly or decisively target the interests of the military, it did make efforts to de-militarise the country, tackle corruption, and address military domination of the economy.
On 19 February 2019 the parliament approved the creation of a 45-member joint committee tasked with writing a bill to amend the 2008 Constitution. As would be expected, the military and its proxy in parliament – the Union Solidarity and Development Party – strongly opposed the move. According to a report in the Irrawaddy, the proposed 168 amendments deal mostly with issues around reducing the power of the military and of the president, and decentralising state power to grant the ethnic nations more autonomy. It was a bold and hopeful but incredibly risky move.
In the general elections of 8 November 2020 – which international observers deemed free and fair and a “democratic success” – the National League for Democracy (NLD) increased their absolute majority, winning 258 of 330 elected seats to the military-backed USDP’s 26.
Consequently, despite being guaranteed 25 percent of seats (as mandated by the 2008 Constitution), the Tatmadaw was faced with the prospect that its days as the real power in Burma were coming to an end.
On 26 January 2021, in a press conference in the capital Naypyitaw, military spokesman Major General Zaw Min Tun claimed the polls were marred by irregularities and fraud.
On 1 February 2021, the Tatmadaw, led by military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, seized power in military coup.
See:
Taking care of business: the coup in Myanmar is partly about protecting the economic interests of the military elite, by Htwe Htwe Thein, Associate professor, Curtin University, WA, Australia, 15 Feb 2021.
While the coup was essentially all about power and money, the consequences for Burma’s ethnic minority nations – particularly the Karen, Karenni, Kachin and Chin, who would now go on to lead the fight for an ethnically and religiously plural, free and democratic Burma – would be profound.
Analysis:
Military Coup Leaves Burma’s Christian Peoples Gravely Imperilled
By Elizabeth Kendal, Religious Liberty Monitoring, 2 March 2021
Recommended source:
Asia Times online / Myanmar
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
In July 2013, the Organisation for Protection of National Race and Religion (OPNRR), headed by Ashin Tilawka Biwuntha, a member of the government/junta appointed National Head Monks Committee, presented a petition to Burma’s President Thein Sein calling for legislation to protect national race (Bama) and religion (Buddhist).
At the time it was submitted, the petition had 1.3 million signatures. By March 2014, it had gathered a further three million supporters.
On 7 March 2014, Thein Sein ordered his twelve-member Presidential Commission to draft a law – essentially a package of four laws – that would: (1) ban polygamy; (2) ban conversion to another religion; (3) regulate interfaith marriage; and (4) restrict Muslim families to two children.
On 21 August 2015, Burma’s parliament passed the Religious Conversion Law designed to stop people leaving Buddhism. Anyone wanting to convert must apply to a board for a certificate of conversion, risking a two-year jail sentence in the process. Created to “protect” the majority religion, Burma’s Religious Conversion Law mirrors anti-conversion laws now common across Asia.
Analysis:
Burma (Myanmar): proposed Religious Conversion Law
By Elizabeth Kendal, 2 July 2014
In July 2015, Burma’s parliament passed the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage bill. Denied freedom to convert, Buddhist women will now be constrained by law to marry a Buddhist man. Non-Buddhist men will have to convert to Buddhism to marry a Buddhist woman. A non-Buddhist man who marries a Buddhist woman contrary to the law is liable to 10 years in prison.
The law is essentially a Bama-Buddhist version of Islamic Sharia marriage law.
The ban on interfaith marriage was proposed specifically to stop Muslim men from targeting Buddhist women for conversion and marriage into Islam. This is something that occurs widely in the Muslim world – especially in Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria – and is routinely predatory in nature.
However, Burma’s ban on interfaith marriage violates Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 16 (a) which states: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.”
In this, Bama Buddhist women are doubly targeted; for they may neither freely convert to Christianity, nor marry a Christian man.
-----------------------------
Recommended news sources reporting Christian persecution in Burma/Myanmar:
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com/
Morning Star News, https://morningstarnews.org
Christian Solidarity Worldwide https://www.csw.org.uk
Free Burma Rangers http://www.freeburmarangers.org