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Burma's 'abused Chin need help'
BBC News - January 28, 2009
Jonathan Head, Bangkok – The US group Human Rights Watch has called for better protection of the Chins, one of Burma's least known and most persecuted minorities.
Ill-treatment of many ethnic minorities by the Burmese military has been extensively documented by international human rights groups. But Human Rights Watch say there has been little attention given to the plight of the Chins.
Chin state is isolated, located along Burma's western border with India. The group says they are subjected to routine abuse and forced labour by the Burmese army, but often face discrimination and hostility when they flee into India.
Grim fate
What must it be like to be the hungriest and perhaps the most repressed region of a country like Burma? That is the grim fate of the Chins, one of Burma's many large ethnic minorities, according to Human Rights Watch.
Living among the steep hills along Burma's western border, the Chins are subjected to routine abuse by the Burmese army, says the new report.
It is based on extensive interviews with Chins who have fled into the Indian state of Mizoram. It documents forced labour, sexual abuse, torture and extra-judicial killings.
Their plight is compounded by acute food shortages – the UN's World Food Programme estimates that food consumption in Chin state is the lowest in Burma. Recently it has been afflicted by a plague of rats which have eaten much of what little they can grow on the barren hillsides.
The state is tightly controlled by the Burmese military and access to foreigners restricted. Unlike minorities such as the Karen on Burma's eastern border, who can flee to Thailand when they face army harassment, almost no international attention has been given to the Chins.
Human Rights Watch says that even when they reach India they get little help, and are often forcibly repatriated.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a report based on interviews with Chin refugees across the region, said thousands of Chin have had to flee their homeland, mostly across the border to India as well as to Malaysia and Thailand.
The population of the Chin state is reckoned to be around 500,000. But between 75,000 and 100,000 Chin currently live in the Indian state of Mizoram, without support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). About 30,000 Chin live in Malaysia.
The refugees have fled lives of constant fear, hardship and harassment, and conditions that amount to little more than slavery.
HRW's report documents cases of Chin people being forced to work without pay for the Tatmadaw – the Burmese army – in projects such as road-building, construction and porterage. They worked under harsh conditions and could not attend to their crops and families.
The report documents several individual cases of arbitrary abuse ranging from harassment for money, to torture and imprisonment. The Chin people's religious symbols are also often destroyed.
Sara Colm, a senior researcher for HRW, told journalists yesterday (January 28) that the exodus of minority groups from Burma showed no signs of stopping, and had to be recognised as a problem for the whole region. "The Chin state is a template for how repression works in rural Burma," she said.
Her comments came amid a storm over the Thai military's alleged abuse of Rohingya refugees from Burma's Rakhine state, which has put pressure on Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to live up to his publicly stated commitments to human rights and justice.
Life for the Chin in their mountainous homeland, hard enough in normal circumstances, is made unbearable by the Tatmadaw which has 10 battalions stationed in the state.
An assessment in 2007 by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Burma came to the conclusion that 70 per cent of the population of the Chin state live in poverty, and 40 per cent are without adequate food sources.
The junta has done nothing to alleviate famine conditions in the state, where the 50-year bamboo flowering cycle has recently fuelled a boom in the rat population – which has attacked crops after finishing off the bamboo.
The Chins' own armed group, the Chin National Army, no longer poses a significant threat to the military regime, but its cadres make matters worse by levying taxes on locals. Any contact, even accidental, between an ordinary local and a Chin National Army cadre is grounds for being beaten, tortured and imprisoned.
Conditions in Mizoram are also not friendly, even though Mizos and Chins are ethnically closely related. Chins have been harassed by the Young Mizo Association, an ultra-nationalist vigilante organisation which constantly threatens to evict them from Mizoram and has carried out its threats.
HRW called on India to do more for Chin refugees in Mizoram, including allowing UNHCR to set up an office there.
The group also called for more assistance in remote areas of Burma. "There is a need to focus international attention on areas of Burma that are extremely remote and neglected," said Colm.
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