Oppressed Chin refugees forced back to Burma

By UNPO
The New York-based rights group [Human Rights Watch] 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.
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http://www.unpo.org/content/view/9162/101/