Civilians don’t have enough to eat after the fighting prevented them from farming and donors bringing aid to the camp for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) camp in Mansi Township, where they’ve been living for almost a decade.
A man in charge of the more than 1,000 IDPs living in the Kachin Baptist Congress camp in Mong Hkawng village, who requested anonymity, said fighting between the Burma Army (BA) and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has prevented them from working on their rotational farms, which are located outside the camp.
“We’re worried about traveling, so we’ve stayed inside the IDP camp.”
They used to receive support from donors, he said, but the pandemic and the coup have made it extremely difficult to bring relief supplies to the camp, which is located near a BA camp in Kachin State. “If the armed groups attack the camp, the IDPs will definitely suffer,” the man said, explaining that many of the residents are women and children.
Most of the IDPs lived along the Chinese border before fleeing fighting between BA and the KIA in 2013. The KIA started fighting with the BA in 2011 after the latter broke a seventeen-year ceasefire.
