From Himal Southasian
Refugees from the war in Myanmar live in fear of harassment, imprisonment and deportation in the border areas of Northeast India and Thailand
FELIX SAT CROSS-LEGGED next to his wife on the floor of a rented parlour-sized room that one could mistake for a Zumba studio. The hall was situated in an upscale area of Mae Sot, a city on the western edge of Thailand, near its border with Myanmar. Felix was not there to learn to dance. He was there to help other refugees from Myanmar, who come here to learn to bake bread and pick up other survival skills. The refugees had all come to Mae Sot after fleeing air strikes and forced military conscription back home.
The space was run by Heroes Assist Migrants, or HAM, a Myanmar citizens’ initiative that works with the refugee community in Thailand. HAM’s founder, Kaori, who asked to be identified by a single name, collaborates with leaders in the refugee community, such as Felix, to help others who have come to Mae Sot.
Felix, who also asked to be identified by just his first name, was once a general surgeon in Yangon, but that changed during the military coup in Myanmar in 2021 and the anti-military protests that followed. “I was detained for writing that the cause of a protester’s death was due to bullet injury in his death certificate,” he told me. This action led to his detention for four days after the coup. After his release, he joined the People’s Defence Forces, a conglomeration of armed civilian groups and ethnic armed organisations fighting the ruling military junta. Inspired by his late father, who had served in a similar armed group during an earlier spell of military rule in Myanmar, Felix signed up with the defence unit of the Karen National Union (KNU). He showed me his KNU identity card, which had a mugshot of him in fatigues. It was the only proof of identity he carried.
Felix was badly injured in action when he was struck by a 60-millimetre rocket, and he retired from the KNU in 2022. Since then, he has been helping others in Myanmar from his base in Mae Sot. He works as a doctor helping people in the civil disobedience movement – political workers as well as combatants – with medical aid and food supplies. “We must have helped over ninety human-rights defenders,” he said.
Kaori started HAM in 2022 as a way to train refugees to generate income by sewing bags, making keychains, eco printing cards and other such activities. “I also wanted to divert the attention of refugees from social media, where they are constantly seeing disturbing updates from home,” she said. Along with her husband, who is the head baker at HAM, she makes bread, cakes and cookies as well as healthier versions of fast-food items like hamburgers. Like Felix, Kaori and HAM have helped the resistance across the border. “We have even catered for the weddings of our combatants in the jungles,” Kaori said.
People from Myanmar have crossed the border into Mae Sot and settled there for decades across several anti-military uprisings. The town has come to look more like Myanmar than Thailand in some ways as refugees, as well as other migrants, have made their homes and established their businesses, putting up signage in Burmese everywhere.
The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch has estimated that more than 100,000 people have fled Myanmar for neighbouring countries since just this February, when the Myanmar military passed laws enabling widespread conscription. The law mandates that men between the ages of 18 and 35 and women between the ages of 18 and 27 must serve in the armed forces for two years, with a possible extension to five years in an emergency. Most of those who have fled since February have crossed over into Thailand.
Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara, Thailand’s foreign minister until this April, said that his country was prepared to receive up to 100,000 people temporarily. Yet people who managed to cross the border, travelling through thick jungles and across the Moei River, have not been exempt from inquiries by Thai authorities. Many of these arrivals do not have proper documentation to be in Thailand.
Felix said he was once deported for lack of documentation. He claims that the real reason was his support to the armed groups fighting the military junta, particularly ethnic minorities, suggesting the Thai state’s support for refugees was not unconditional. “Mae Sot police harasses refugees, asking for 10,000 Thai Baht,” he said, corroborating earlier news reports of Thai police shaking refugees down for money. “A lot of Myanmar citizens are here but they have no human rights,” Felix added.
Meanwhile India, whose Northeast region shares a 1643-kilometre border with Myanmar, has also made no promises on safeguarding refugees, even as tens of thousands of them have come to the country in search of sanctuary. New Delhi continues a policy of pushing undocumented refugees back across the border and has promised to deport refugees to whom it has offered shelter temporarily on humanitarian grounds. These policies are particularly evident in the state of Manipur, which has been riven by its own internal conflict. As per data maintained by India for Myanmar, a collective of pro democracy activists advocating for better relations between Indians and Burmese citizens, 75 refugees from Myanmar who had been lodged in jail in Manipur’s state capital, Imphal, have been deported since March, and 133 refugees have been pushed back across the border as soon as they entered Indian territory.
In May, I spoke to a person within the National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration claiming to be the legitimate government of Myanmar that was formed in exile after the 2021 coup. He told me that most of those deported by India were women and children. According to news reports, the deportees from India have included more than 50 women and at least five children. “They were identified by the Indian government as the most vulnerable inside the prison,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In Manipur, where the internal conflict has turned the majority Meitei community and the minority Kuki-Zo tribal community against one another, refugees from Myanmar face yet another threat. The Manipur state government is led by N Biren Singh, a Meitei leader from the Bharatiya Janata Party that is also in power in New Delhi. He has blamed the ongoing conflict on “illegal immigrants” from Myanmar, and the BJP government and Meitei nationalist groups have tried to build a narrative of Kuki-Zo communities conspiring with Chin communities from Myanmar in pursuit of a separate, unified homeland of their own. Chins from Myanmar have age-old ethnic ties to Kuki-Zo and Mizo communities in India, and comprise a significant section of the refugees that have crossed into India. They are being made scapegoats for Manipur’s problems, since the reality is that the state’s conflict was set off by the state government’s contentious attempt to rework affirmative action policies – a move that pitted Meiteis and tribal communities against each other.
Makepeace Sitlhou is an independent journalist and researcher with a special interest in the Indian Northeast, reporting on politics, gender, governance, conflict, society, culture and development.