Chins Grateful to Mizoram

Aizawl, Mar 4 : The leaders of Chin refugees, who fled military atrocities and economic hardship in Myanmar to shelter in the India’s northeast state, today expressed their gratitude to the hospitality and kindness shown to them by their Mizo brethren here.

This comes after the Young Mizo Association, the state’s largest and most influential NGO, voiced a serious concern over a US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent report on the plight of Chin refugees in Mizoram which portrayed the Mizos, and the organisation in particular, as rude and abusive to the Chin refugees.

Maintaining that the HRW had been fed baseless information by some section of the Chin community here to get global sympathy, the YMA leaders met the Chin representatives here yesterday to discuss the issue to further prevent possible enmity between the Chin migrants and Mizo society.

” We are grateful to the kindness and hospitality being shown to us by our Mizo cousins in India’s Mizoram. We strongly condemn such baseless information provided to the global human rights group that tarnished the image of the Mizos. We will find out who had disseminated such wrong information,” Cheery Zahau, co-ordinator of Women League of Chinland said here today.

” With the Indian government refusing to give refugee status to the thousands of Chin refugees staying in Mizoram, we will have no place to go if Mizos are hostile to us,” she added.

Rozathang, president of Zo Human Rights Global Network, also said, “We are extremely sorry for what has been mentioned in the HRW’s website. We will hold the responsibility while at the same time we apologise to the Mizo people.

Mizoram, which shares a 404-km border with the military-ruled Myanmar, bears the brunt of the military atrocities as at least 60,000 Myanmarese migrants are staying in Mizoram without officially being recognised as refugees. Despite that the Chin migrants from Myanmar have been causing a big social, political and economic problems, ” we never treated them like dogs as we have been accused.

On the contrary, many of them have absorbed into the society with a lot of them managed to get themselves enrolled even in the electoral roll,” a central YMA leader told UNI here.

As many of the Myanmarese migrants, forced out of their country by extreme economic hardship, have been accused of unlawful activities such as bootlegging, smuggling and thefts, the high crime rate in Mizoram has also been attributed to them. Recently, state home minister R Lalzirliana, has stated that any Myanmarese nationals found guilty of breaking the law of the land would henceforth be handed over to the military authorities in Myanmar instead of sending them to Mizoram jails.