By Kyaw Ye Lynn

YANGON, Myanmar

Thousands of ethnic Kachin people on Monday staged a protest against the fresh military offensives as fighting escalates in several areas of Myanmar’s northern Kachin state.

At least 4,000 people have been displaced by the fighting between government troops and a powerful ethnic rebel group, the Kachin Independent Army (KIA), over the past three weeks, according to the United Nations.

People who fled their homes to escape the fighting have started arriving in the Kachin state’s capital Myitkyina on Sunday.

Ethnic community leaders and civil society groups organized a protest in Myitkyina on Monday, demanding that the government rescue those who are caught in the clashes.

“About a thousand people are trapped in armed clashes in nine out of the 18 townships of the Kachin state. The government must rescue them immediately,” said Gum San Nsang, the leader of the Kachin Alliance advocacy group based in Myitkyina.

“The government has failed to do so. The government instead blocked us from rescuing those people,” he told Anadolu Agency by phone after the protest.

Gum San Nsang accused the military of committing rights violations against ethnic Kachin villagers and using them as human shields during the renewed fightings.

“The military doesn’t allow about 160 villagers to leave their village in the Hpakant Township. They were forced to stay with the troops,” he said.

Since the 17-year ceasefire was broken in 2011, the Kachin rebels and the Myanmar military have regularly engaged in clashes in the Kachin state as well as the northeastern Shan state, both of which border the neighboring China.

The recent flare-up in the fighting came as the military began an offensive in Kachin’s Tanai Township, where gold and amber mining is a major business, earlier this month.

Thirty-two Kachin civil society groups in Myanmar and abroad sent a letter to the UN Security Council earlier this week, demanding action against the military for the atrocities in the Kachin state.

The groups say that the ethnic Kachin community has been subjected to rights violations, including executions, forced displacement, rape and sexual violence, confiscations of property, arbitrary arrest and detention and denial of humanitarian assistance for long durations.

“These types of human rights violations are not new to the Kachin people or to other ethnic groups in Burma,” said the letter, referring to Myanmar.

Gen. Nyi Nyi Tun, a military spokesperson, however, has denied the allegations and blamed the ethnic rebels for the fresh armed conflicts in Kachin.

“The accusations are groundless,” he told Anadolu Agency by phone last week.