The Je Yang refugee camp is crawling with youngsters. Some run down the camp’s main dirt road in stained clothes rolling along old tires while others hang from tree branches or sit in windowsills. The elderly, looking pensive and forlorn, idle crouched in doorways while able-bodied men hammer together the frame of a new house. The air is smoky from cooking fires and near the raised huts squeezed up against the jungle lingers the unmistakable odor of human excrement.
The camp of 8,000 sits just over the border from China’s southwestern Yunnan province, in the town of Laiza, the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO). The KIO is Myanmar’s second largest ethnic rebel group. For more than fifty years its armed wing the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has been embroiled in a simmering conflict with the Tatmadaw (the Burmese military), fighting for greater autonomy within a federalized state as well as for control over the abundant natural resources native to Kachin lands. The residents in Je Yang, one of four such camps in Laiza, have all fled their homes because of the violence, which picked up in 2011 after a 17-year ceasefire was broken. There are over 100,000 refugees both in and outside Kachin state.
China, which lies just across the river from Laiza, occupies a unique role in the Kachin conflict. Its close proximity to Kachin state means that whatever happens there has a direct impact on China’s border stability. Its Jingpo minority group, in fact if not in name, are of the same ethnicity as the mostly Christian Kachin. Their separation by the border is arbitrary and most of them live as if it wasn’t there. The driver who transported me to Laiza for instance, a Jingpo man living on the Chinese side of the border in Yingjiang, has two young sons that attend school in Laiza.
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