Burmese Chin man in Malaysia

The predominantly Buddhist Burmese military regime has been persecuting the primarily Christian population of Burma's Chin state. In order to escape the military's abuses, the Chin have been fleeing from Burma to countries like Malaysia and India. Refugees International was recently in Malaysia where a government crackdown is underway on illegal migrants. At this time Burmese refugees and asylum seekers are in danger of being picked up along with the illegal migrants and placed in detention centers. Below is the interview of one Chin man who like many others in his community is in a very vulnerable position.
Thluai Te (not his real name) is a Burmese Chin refugee living in a jungle on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. He is from Matupi township in Chin state and worked as a farmer in Burma. In 1999, while he was cultivating his field, three members of the Chin National Army or CNA, the ethnic army in Chin state fighting the Burmese military, came to him and asked for food and drinks. Being a poor farmer, Thluai did not have extra food for the CNA, but gave them whatever little he had. After a few days, Burmese soldiers came to Thluai's hut and accused him of being a member of the CNA. He was repeatedly ordered to provide the whereabouts of the CNA members he had assisted. When Thluai denied knowing anything about the location of the CNA cadres, he was arrested and brought to a military camp, where he was hit on the mouth with the butt of a gun, as a result of which two of his teeth broke, and struck on his knees with a metal rod numerous times.

After two days of torture in the military camp, Thluai was taken to a police lockup where he spent a month. In the lockup, he was barely given any food or water; often when he begged his captors for water, he was told to drink from the toilet. Thluai was sentenced to a hard labor camp without any trial or the opportunity to defend himself. He lived in the hard labor camp for about six months. Conditions in the labor camp were miserable. There was never enough food, and if someone fell ill, he was denied medicine. The prisoners had to work every day on a project to extend the highway for use by the military. Thluai recalls being beaten several times by soldiers if he slowed down during work; the soldiers either slapped him or struck him with the butts of their guns.

One day, there was a landslide which blocked the military vehicles and the soldiers told the prisoners in the camp to dig out the vehicles. During this time, Thluai managed to escape from the camp, and went to a neighboring village, where sympathetic locals sheltered him.

From the village, Thluai fled to Rangoon to find an agent --- one of the many human traffickers arranging passage from Burma into Thailand and Malaysia --- to whom he paid the amount of 200,000 Kyats [about US$200 at the black market exchange rate] to take him from Rangoon to Malaysia. But Thluai was betrayed by the agent, who instead of taking him to Malaysia sold him to the owner of a Thai fishing boat. Thluai was forced to work on the boat for almost a year. Finally, he was able to escape and sought the help of another agent, who smuggled him inside Malaysia in 2003.

Since coming to Malaysia, Thluai had been supporting himself by working as a carpenter for a construction company. However, recently when the Malaysian government announced plans to crack down on all illegal migrants and to punish any Malay employers who hire illegal laborers, Thluai's employer fired him. Now he has been without a job for a month and is living in a Burmese Chin settlement where only 20 people out of a population of 300 are still working. The rest have either been fired or are too afraid to go to work since the government began the crackdown on March 1.

Thlaui is registered with UNHCR, but lost his identification letter during a police raid on the Chin settlement in October 2004 when the police set fire to the camp shelters. Thluai told Refugees International, "I am living in a very risky situation in Malaysia, but cannot go back to Burma as I will be killed there. I have very little hope. All I can do is pray that somehow these difficult times will pass."

RI Advocate Kavita Shukla and Larry Thompson recently completed a mission to assess the plight of Burmese Chin in Malaysia.