NAYPYIDAW, Burma- Burma leaders’ superstitious love of the number nine resulted in 100,000 citizens fleeing to India.
Today, there are between 86,000 and 100,000 Burmese refugees living in the nooks and crannies of Mizoram. The tension that has been building since 1988 between the native Mizo and the refugees has reached violent new heights.
Burma’s superstitious 1987 ruler, General Ne Win, canceled all currency notes which were not divisible by nine–a number he considered to be lucky. The devaluation of so much currency wiped out many people’s life savings.
Burma’s students were the first to begin protesting, and their actions led to August 8, 1988 (prompting the rebellion thereafter to be called the 8888 Uprising,) when a student was shot outside the Rangoon Institute of Technology. His death prompted Burma’s citizens and respected monks to escalate the uprising, until September when soldiers were given orders to open fire on the crowds of protesters, killing an estimated 3,000 people. Burma’s government placed the number of deaths at only 350.
The heavy military presence in Burma was perhaps hardest on the northwestern state of Chin, which the United Nations has listed as Burma’s poorest state with at least 70 percent of its 500,000 inhabitants living well below the poverty line. The Burmese Army (Tatmadaw Kyi) and members of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) exercised their unchecked power with arbitrary arrests, restrictions on religious freedom, forced labor, extortion and confiscation of income and property.
Chin’s farmers suffered the most since their livelihood depended on their ability to cultivate a harvest. When they were ordered to leave their land for weeks to walk across the country carrying the army’s rice, or to surrender their yield to hungry soldiers, they had nothing with which to feed their own families. Famine spread through the state as abuse from the Tatmadaw and SPDC persisted and people were forced to abandon their lives and make for India.
The Indian state of Mizoram shares a 1,624 km border with Burma, and upon crossing it, Burma emigrants were issued temporary permits allowing them to visit for a month. This time frame was rarely enforced however, and most refugees ignored it completely. Making the
While India tolerates the refugees, its citizens feel no inclination to make them feel welcome. Research done by the Human Rights Law Network in 2005 found that “the majority of Chins in Mizoram end up as cheap labour in domestic work, road constructions, agriculture work, including timber sawing in jungles, roadside vegetable vendors, scavengers in the jungle for roots, tubers, leaves and herbs.”
With no legal rights whatsoever, refugees have no compensation for long work hours, job injuries, or withheld pay. They cannot go to the police for cases of harassment, muggings, theft, or sexual assault for fear of deportation. Most cannot speak the language, and are openly discriminated against.
To apply for asylum refugees must travel 2,200km to Delhi, and currently 7,000 refugees are registered and buried in the application process. While many refugees have found life in India to be harder than what they left behind, they face death or permanent imprisonment by their own country for involvement in the protests.
In March of 2011 Thein Sein became Burma’s President and the word was that Burma (now officially called the Republic of the Union of Myanmar) was striving toward Democracy. The citizens of Mizoram are ready to be rid of the refugees, who make up 10 percent of the population and they pressure the Chins to leave their country and return to Myanmar. In April 2013 an angry mob torched the Chin-inhabited village of Saikhumpha, destroying 40 homes and sending 200 people running.
Despite the pressure to return to their homeland and the assurances that it will be safe now that the regime has ended, but no immunities or protection has been offered to the refugees by the Myanmar government and the Chins remain unconvinced.
– Lydia Caswell
Sources: BBC News , Human Rights Watch , Irin News , NYT
Photo: YouTube