Displaced Kachin residents cross the Malikha river on 26 April to escape the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and Myanmar government troops.
Almost 7,000 people belonging to the largely Christian minority group in Kachin, northern Myanmar, have fled their houses since fighting between the army and a rebel group flared up in early April, according to recent figures from the Red Cross.
“It’s a war where civilians are being systematically targeted by members of Burma Army … [yet] the international community chooses to overlook it,” political analyst and writer Stella Naw told the UK’s Guardian newspaper yesterday (14 May), with international attention on Myanmar focused on the humanitarian crisis facing the country’s Rohingya Muslims.
Thousands of lives have been lost and at least 120,000 people have been displaced in the decades-long conflict between the army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) since the military seized control of the country in 1962.
“It is an invisible war,” said San Htoi, the joint secretary of Kachin Women’s Association Thailand. She told the Guardian that on a recent visit representatives of the United Nations Security Council went only to Rakhine state and “left the country without knowing [about Kachin]”.
And according to Thomas Muller, an Asia analyst for Open Doors International, a charity that supports…
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