/ 28 January 2009

Chin refugees in India ‘forced back’ to Burma

Up to 100 000 Christian Chin who have fled to India in the past 20 years to escape persecution by Burma’s Buddhist military rulers are at risk of being forced back, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday.

The New York-based rights group said local authorities and community organisations in northeastern India’s Mizoram state frequently targeted Chin migrants, one of Burma’s many oppressed ethnic minorities.

”They live at the mercy of the local population,” HRW said in a report on the plight of the Chin, whose ancestral homes are in the mountainous reaches of northwest Burma.

”The Chin in Mizoram lack jobs, housing and affordable education,” HRW consultant Amy Alexander said, adding most were relegated to temporary, labour-intensive and low-paying jobs, earning around $2 a day for 10- to 16-hour shifts.

The report comes at a time when attention has turned on the Rohingyas, another minority group in Burma, who have been fleeing abuse and harassment.

In the past two months, 550 Muslim Rohingyas are feared to have drowned after the Thai army forced 1 000 found in the Andaman Sea into wooden boats before towing them out to international waters and cutting them adrift.

Despite relatively close ethnic ties between the Chin and Mizoram natives, tensions between the two populations regularly flared into anti-Chin pogroms, the HRW report said.

”Because they are stateless and marginalised and the poorest of the poor, they tend to be the scapegoat whenever there’s an incident at the border,” HRW researcher Sara Colm said.

The largest such campaign was in 2003, when the Young Mizo Association (YMA) forced 10 000 Chin back into Burma, HRW said.

In September 2008 the YMA issued an order for the Chin to leave Mizoram by the end of the month. The threat did not materialise, but it was enough for them to go into hiding, close their churches and wait till tensions were over, HRW said.

Such incidents showed India failing in its obligations to protect refugees or asylum seekers, Alexander said.

New Delhi has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention but under international law, is bound by the principle of ”nonrefoulement”, which protects migrants from being returned to any country where they could be persecuted.

In addition to what HRW described as ”decades of systematic abuse” at the hands of the Burmese army, the Chin’s woes have been compounded by a 2007 infestation of rats that destroyed huge swathes of crops and food stores.

A recent United Nations survey estimated that 40% of people in Chin State, Burma’s poorest, did not have enough food, increasing the number of people trying to leave the country. — Reuters