Seeds of violence: missionaries, contested indentities and Kachin Nationalism in Burma.

Abstract

Wars have ravaged Burma/Myanmar since the end of the Second World War. The central government has neither been able to consolidate its sovereignty in the remote border areas nor to guarantee cultural, economic or political autonomy to the peoples living in these areas. The present military regime negotiated ceasefire with several armed ethnic minority groups. Ceasefire groups have been offered to become ‘Border Guard Forces’, which many groups have rejected. One of those ceasefire groups is the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Besides the KIA, there are also other Kachin armed groups with complex military-economic relations with the central government. Kachins are regarded as a ‘super-ethnic category’ or a ‘multi-group ethnic category’ as the group ‘Kachin’ consists of at least six different ethno-linguistic subgroups. What unites the subgroups is Christianity and the Romanized writing system in Jinghpaw created by a Swedish-American missionary Dr. Ola Hanson. The Kachin Christians are divided into Baptist, Roman Catholic and various Evangelical Protestant churches. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the contested Kachin Christian identity, identity politics and the Christian ideologies, which provide the Kachin elites justification for their cause. The paper looks into the Kachin diaspora’s discourse carried out through various Kachin websites, where terms like ‘chosen people’ or ‘people of God’ are invoked. The paper also looks into the different Christian denominations among the Kachin, and their role in the discourse on Kachin identity.