Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) will be launching a major new report on the persecution of Christians in Burma.

The report identifies a range of tactics used by the military regime to suppress Christianity and cites a document, allegedly from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which has been widely circulated in Rangoon with the headline “Programme to destroy the Christian religion in Burma”. It begins: “There shall be no home where the Christian religion is practised.”

The report, Carrying the Cross: The military regime’s campaign of restriction, discrimination and persecution against Christians in Burma, will be launched at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Burma to be held in the Wilson Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons on Tuesday 23 January 2007 from 6pm to 8pm. The meeting will be chaired by John Bercow MP. The report will be presented by CSW’s Advocacy Officer for South Asia and author of the report, Benedict Rogers, and a delegation of Chin and Kachin activists from Burma will present evidence of human rights violations.

Carrying the Cross is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind, and the first to examine the military regime’s policies towards Christians of all denominations and ethnicities in Burma. It follows reports in recent years on the persecution of Muslims and the imprisonment of Buddhist monks.

The report claims that Burma’s regime is “shaped by a fascist mentality with echoes of Hitler and the Nazis”, found in the junta’s hostility towards ethnic and religious minorities. Citizens who do not conform to the regime’s version of Burman Buddhist nationalism – which, the report argues, is a “perverted and distorted form of Buddhism” – face “potentially serious consequences”. The regime’s tactics range “from churches in Rangoon finding it difficult to obtain permission to renovate their buildings, to pastors in Chin State being killed,” the report claims.

The report quotes a plea from six Christian organisations in 2006, who wrote a letter to the junta’s Senior General Than Shwe saying: “We simply cannot let things go on without doing anything. This is because Christian associations have been suffering, and we are feeling the pain deep in our hearts.”

Carrying the Cross has received praise from several leading public figures, with Foreword written by Baroness Cox, a member of the House of Lords who has visited Burma’s border areas many times, and Preface by the former Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt. Rev. John Perry.

John Bercow MP, the Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy in Burma, who visited the Thai-Burmese border with CSW in 2004, says: “As this report makes clear, all the people of Burma are suffering at the hands of this brutal regime, whatever their religion or ethnicity. But there can be no doubt that Christians are singled out for an extra dose of discrimination and barbaric abuse. CSW has made a unique and vital contribution to the campaign for freedom in Burma by publishing this evidence. The United Nations and the international community must now act to bring an end to the sadistic behaviour of these dictators.”

The report’s author, CSW’s Advocacy Officer for South Asia Benedict Rogers, says: “It is time that the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution on Burma calling for an end to the grotesque human rights violations perpetrated by the regime. We urge the United Nations to investigate the violations of religious freedom in Burma and to put pressure on the regime to change. Burma’s people, of all religions and ethnicities, have suffered in silence for too long.”

NOTES TO EDITORS:
A delegation of Chin and Kachin activists, representing the Chin Human Rights Organisation, the Women’s League of Chinland and the Kachin Women’s Association-Thailand, are available to talk to the media about this report. They will be visiting London, Brussels, Berlin and Washington, DC. The Chin and Kachin ethnic groups are majority Christian and face particular religious discrimination. They are also available to discuss human trafficking, sexual violence, forced labour and other human rights violations in Burma.

Benedict Rogers, the author of the report, has travelled many times to Burma, including visits to the Karen, Karenni and Shan on the Thai-Burmese border, the Chin on the India-Burma border and inside Kachin State. He is the author of A Land Without Evil: Stopping the Genocide of Burma’s Karen People (Monarch, 2004).

According to the report, the regime uses the media and other propaganda to try to generate hostility towards Christians, offers inducements and sometimes uses force to convert Christians to Buddhism, denies or restricts the promotion of Christians within government or military service, and destroys churches and crosses. Christians are denied promotion beyond the rank of Major in the army, and Burma Army soldiers have been offered incentives to marry Christian women from ethnic groups such as the Chin, Kachin, Karen or Karenni, to convert them to Buddhism and “Burmanise” them.