India should extend protection to Chin refugees fleeing "abuses and severe repression" in Myanmar, a leading international human rights group urged on Wednesday.
India should extend protection to Chin refugees fleeing "abuses and severe repression" in Myanmar, a leading international human rights group urged on Wednesday.
The Chin people, mostly Christians living in the remote mountains of North-Western Myanmar, are subject to forced labour, torture, extra-judicial killings and religious persecution by the country's military regime, New York-based Human Right Watch alleged.
It estimated that as many as 100,000 people had fled the Chin homeland into neighbouring India and urged the Indian government and the Mizoram state government to protect them and not to force them back into Myanmar.
"For too long, ethnic groups like the Chin have borne the brunt of abusive military rule in Burma," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "It is time for this brutal treatment to stop and for the army to be held to account for its actions. India should step forward to protect those desperately seeking sanctuary."
In the 93-page report HRW said, its findings were based on extensive research carried out from 2005 to 2008 among Chins currently living in Chin state and those who cross the border to Mizoram for trade, it said.
Others interviewed have fled the country permanently, most in recent years. It provides a rare glimpse into the plight of the "forgotten people".
Myanmar's military government, the report alleged, regularly arrests and imprisons ethnic Chin to "stifle political dissent and intimidate them".
One Chin man told Human Rights Watch, "We are like slaves, we have to do everything [the army] tells us to do".
The report alleges that abuses are also committed by the opposition Chin National Front and its armed branch, the Chin National Army, such as harassment, beatings and extortion from Chin villagers. One Chin church leader now living in Mizoram
was quoted as saying, "These underground groups, rather than being a help, make life even more difficult for us".
Human Rights Watch called on both the Myanmar's army and armed groups to end abuses, and allow humanitarian agencies unfettered access to Chin State.
Abuses, the report said, have led tens of thousands of Chin to flee Myanmar, with many crossing the border to neighboring Mizoram state in India without official documents.
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