Each year, over 80,000 unaccompanied minors, including refugees and victims of trafficking, seek entry into the United States. Since 1980, the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program has given some young people asylum in the U.S. and provided financial support and a foster family. In this essay, Rebecca Henderson follows the fates of four Chin teenagers from Burma. Each of them fled their home country of Burma, became refugees in Malaysia, and sought asylum status in the United States, with a variety of outcomes.
In an email, Rebecca explained the situation that sent the four teenagers fleeing Burma. For the past three decades, three ethnic groups in Burma—the Chin, the Shan and Kachin—have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of their promise for autonomy and equality at the signing of independence from Britain in 1947. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the problems intensified.
“Thousands of Chin joined a nationwide student uprising against the military junta in a 1988 call for democracy that ended with 3,000 protestors dead and a tightening of the military’s power under the State Law and Order Restoration Council,” Rebecca writes. “At the time of the 1988 uprising, only one battalion of Burmese soldiers was stationed in Chin State, which lies along the borders of India and Bangladesh. By 2004, the number had grown to at least ten battalions with around 5,000 soldiers stationed in Chin State, supposedly for the sake of developing the area for the good of the Chin people. The human rights abuses against the Chin include suppression of their indigenous language and religious persecution in an attempt to unify the country in one race (Burman), one language (Burmese) and one religion (Buddhism). Local schools are prohibited from teaching the Chin language, Chin Bibles are confiscated or destroyed, and the Roman-based script for the Chin language is forbidden from use on signage. Churches are routinely destroyed, crosses are torn down and replaced with Buddhist pagodas, worship services and weddings are disrupted, and pastors are sent to labor camps, tortured or killed. Whether the motive for the attacks against the Chin is political, ethnic or religious, it is clear that the Chin are under dire threat from the military regime, and tens of thousands have had no choice but to flee their land.”
Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to military conscription, imprisonment and physical abuse, as the stories of these four teens show. The names of Chin refugees in this essay have been changed to protect their identity. The stories of Chum, Lian and Mang were documented through interviews with Rebecca Henderson. The interviews were made in Texas. The information about persecution in Chin State and the plight of Chin refugees in Malaysia comes from extensive reports published by Chin Human Rights Organization, Chin Refugee Committee, Burma Underground, Chinland Guardian and Physicians for Human Rights.
THE BURMESE SOLDIERS told the brother and sister they would only be gone from their home for twenty or thirty minutes. Hlawn Tha Chum was fourteen years old at the time, tall for her age and slender. Her brother Khai, not much older, was also uncharacteristically tall for a Chin boy. The two worked hard around the house caring for their two younger siblings while their parents went out to tend the fields during the day. Khai and Chum were preparing the vegetables and rice for dinner, scrubbing clothes by hand in a basin and doing other chores around the small bamboo house when the soldiers showed up and said they must come with them to the army’s training school outside the village.
Khai and Chum protested. They couldn’t walk out with their younger siblings alone at the house—and how could they leave home without their parents’ permission? No, thank you, we’ll stay here.
The soldiers gave the children no choice. Without allowing them to leave word of their whereabouts for their parents, the soldiers forced Khai and Chum to go with them to their camp. Once at the military outpost, they told Khai he would now be joining their ranks, and they gave Chum a document to sign as a pledge of her loyalty, not to the Chin State and her people but to the government and military of Burma. When she refused to sign the paper, the soldiers beat Khai in front of her and promised to continue the punishment until she changed her mind. Chum did not budge in her resolve.
Later that evening, the soldiers informed them that they would be leaving for a new location the next morning, and Khai and Chum would be accompanying them. Terrified of being taken further from home while their parents still didn’t know where they were, the brother and sister developed a plan. They stayed awake all night and watched their guard drink enough to pass out. When they were certain he was unaware of their movements, the two teenagers made their escape. Back home, their parents clarified to them just how dangerous the situation was. The Burmese military enters Chin villages, forces the young men to join the army and the young ladies to become “girlfriends” for the officers, leaving the parents helpless to protect them. Village leaders offer the young people no protection either since the army burdens them with quotas for new soldiers from their villages’ households. Conscription often includes signing pledges like the one the soldiers gave Chum, either to support political parties backed by the junta or to condemn the Chin National Front. Refusal to sign the pledge could lead to accusations of aiding the Chin National Front, which in turn can be used by the Burmese army as a means to extort money, labor or supplies from the Chin.
Until now, these were stories heard from other villages, warnings passed along from friends and relatives in other parts of Chin State. But now the situation touched their own village, their own lives, and Khai and Chum’s father didn’t want to take any more chances. He wasted no time in getting his two oldest children out of their village and off to Rangoon, where they could pay agents to take them out of the country. Sending them away from home was the only way to keep them from being kidnapped by the army again. In the following days, soldiers came to their home repeatedly to question the parents about Chum and Khai’s location, but by that time the brother and sister were hundreds of miles away. After each interrogation, the soldiers left with no new information, but they didn’t leave empty handed, stealing animals and food from the family on their way out the door.
In another corner of Chin State, fifteen-year-old Mang, already broad-shouldered from working the land, helped his father write a letter of complaint. The family owned seven or eight acres where they farmed rice, corn and vegetables to feed themselves and to sell for money for basic expenses. Same as they were doing throughout all of Chin State, the Burmese military came to Mang’s family and told them it needed the land for its own use—Mang’s family could no longer farm the land nor could they stay in their home. In cases such as this where the government steals Chin farmland outright, tyrannical laws further prevent the farmers from moving or from clearing new land, leaving the Chin with no means of growing food or earning income. Mang and his parents were forced to move into a small hut and live in deplorable conditions.
Left without a home or a way to support his wife and son, Mang’s father decided to file a grievance against the government for stealing his land. He dictated a letter to his son about their inability to survive without a home, without land to grow food and without income to pay for their basic needs much less for his son’s education. When the words had been committed to paper, father and son took the letter to the police, a bold move in defiance of the strong-arm military of the dictatorship. They were arrested shortly afterwards.
The police locked Mang and his father in separate rooms and beat them so much that Mang lost track of how many times they punched and kicked him. They mocked the boy and asked why he felt he had a right to complain—the land belonged to Burma in the first place, and they could use it whenever and however they wanted.
Three days later, Mang’s mother, their pastor and other friends from their church were finally allowed to visit the father and son. The police told the family and friends that the only way they would be released was with a payment of 100,000 kyat each. Mang’s mother borrowed money from relatives to pay the fee, more than U.S. $200 total, an exorbitant amount for the now homeless and landless Chin farmers. Mang’s father, still bleeding out of his ear from the beating, immediately sold enough cows and other possessions to send Mang out of the country and away from further arrest. The decision to send his only child away from home must have been more painful than the wounds from his beating, for it came with no guarantee of ever seeing him again.
A year after Mang left his home, in another Chin village, a boy named Lian received notification from the Burmese army that his household must provide a laborer to porter supplies across the mountains. In regions with sound infrastructure, the military often requisitions private trucks to transport their supplies, but in remote places where there are no roads—such as Lian’s village—the army relies on human backs to carry food, materials and weapons over the mountains. Age is no barrier for the army. In one village, the adults were away working their fields so the military took a group of primary-school children as porters on a twelve-mile trek.
Twice before, Lian had portered for the army against his will. His father abandoned the family when he was thirteen, leaving him with the psychological and practical burden of being the man of the house for his mother and two younger brothers. Each time the army came looking for porters, Lian insisted that he should be the one from their family to go. He was not able to bear the thought of something happening to his mother on the trek with the soldiers.
The first time, when Lian was fourteen, he carried a thirty-pound sack of rice for six or seven miles, the straps of the bag cutting his thin shoulders on the long haul up and down mountain paths and across rivers. The next year, the army forced Lian to walk thirty-two miles carrying a large basket on his back by a strap across his forehead. The load was heavier this time, though Lian didn’t know exactly what he carried. If any of the Chin porters walked too slowly or stopped without permission, the soldiers beat and kicked them as if they were donkeys, as if they weren’t human beings struggling to bear a backbreaking load.
When the army came to Lian’s village a third time, word began to circulate that this year the villagers would be forced to porter ammunition. Fear spread from house to house. Lian heard the news and imagined the horror of carrying live ammunition through the jungle. One false step down a slick mountain path or one catch of the foot on a tree root could send him tumbling to the ground, setting off a grenade.
Four soldiers went door to door gathering their laborers, and a fifth stood guard over those already rounded up. Desperate not to porter weapons, Lian and four friends decided they would risk death in an escape attempt rather than stay and help the Burmese army. Two of the larger boys tackled the guard, holding him down long enough for Lian and the other two small boys to make a break for it. When the two larger boys let the guard up and ran for it themselves, they were followed by bullets from the guard’s gun. He could only shoot at them a few times from a distance though. He was at risk of being shot himself if he abandoned his post in pursuit and lost the rest of the group as well.
Lian sprinted out of the village as fast as he could and soon discovered that he had been separated from his friends. He paused at the side of the river down the mountain from his village, panting from his flight, and realized that he hadn’t thought ahead to what he would do if their escape were successful. He wept on the banks of the river while the reality of his situation set in. Then he made his way, alone, fifteen miles through the jungle to the nearest town. From there, his uncle helped him get transport in the back of a tarp-covered truck to Mandalay where he could begin the process of escaping the country. Lian spoke to his mother on the phone before leaving Burma and found out that of his four friends, two had been captured and imprisoned, one was caught and beaten to death, and the other remained missing.
Lian was sixteen years old when he fled his home.
CHIN HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION, a Canada-based nonprofit that has monitored the condition of the Chin since 1995, estimates that 60,000 to 80,000 Chin have fled directly across the border into India and between 30,000 and 50,000 have traveled south across Burma into Malaysia. For those taking the southern route, their eventual goal is the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, where a large Chin refugee community lives hidden in the shadows of skyscrapers and shopping malls.
Like many youth before and after them, Chum, her brother Khai, stocky Mang and wiry Lian took this southern route out of Burma with Kuala Lumpur as their destination. Each ventured south on a slightly different route, at different times, with different circumstances awaiting them in Malaysia, but they each had in mind the same purpose: freedom from the tyranny of the Burmese military dictatorship and a chance to build a different life than the one being forced on them by the army.
Once Chum and Khai made it to Rangoon, they joined a group of Chin refugees to be led by agents on foot through the jungle to Malaysia. At many places along the escape route, agents promised safe passage across difficult terrain and through checkpoints and border crossings, all for a fee that most Chin cannot afford without selling precious possessions or borrowing large amounts of money. Chum and Khai’s father did what it took to pay for his two oldest children’s passage to Kuala Lumpur. He left them in the care of agents who quickly divided the refugees into two groups, one of men and the other of women and children, a common practice designed by the agents to exercise control over their charges. The division increased the vulnerability of the women and children as well as the anxiety of the men, but they could do little to avoid the separation from their loved ones—their fate was in the hands of the agents who promised to help them through the jungle and over the border. At the time of their separation on the escape route, Chum and Khai had no way of knowing that it would be six months before they would see each other again.
Chum’s group walked day and night for four days, sometimes in the rain, sometimes with massive pythons skulking nearby. Always they moved quietly to avoid capture by the police. They had no food or water on the journey. Overpowering thirst drove some in the group to stop and drink dirty water from streams or puddles. Chum, however, was too afraid of dealing with dysentery in the jungle, far from the comfort of home and her mother’s care. She refused to drink at these spots. Their entire group, including children as young as six years old, survived the trek, but by the time they made it to Kuala Lumpur, Chum had become so emaciated that several people questioned whether she suffered from AIDS.
For Lian, one leg of the escape to Malaysia involved traveling on the ocean in a small canoe-like boat. He describes lying down on his back in the boat so that he would be hidden from view. From this position, he says, the boat was so narrow that if he reached out his arms on either side, they went over the boat’s edges and into the water. The thought of being in that boat still terrifies Lian today, but at the time he resolved he would rather drown and be eaten by fish than be shot and killed by the Burmese army. He had no choice but to go forward.
Mang also came to Malaysia by foot, by boat and in the back of trucks on a three-day journey. In order to slip unnoticed through checkpoints along the road, he was covered by heavy tarps and nearly smothered in the broiling heat. On one section of the torturous hike through the jungle, a lady in the group began to hemorrhage. Dozens of miles from medical help, nothing could be done for her. She bled to death on the jungle floor, a victim of the perilous flight out of Burma.
CHIN REFUGEES ARRIVING in Malaysia are soon confronted with a vicious truth: they have traded the deadly oppression of the Burmese regime not for freedom and safety in a welcoming country, but for a new system of fear and insecurity, for the life of an undocumented immigrant. The Malaysian government does not offer official refugee status in its country—to the Chin or to other ethnic groups—and the Chin face arrest as illegal immigrants if found by the police. While they wait for a chance to move to a better situation in a third country, most Chin live in one of two types of housing in Malaysia. The majority end up in cramped apartments in Kuala Lumpur, where up to thirty-five or forty Chin share a three- or four-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. Others flee to makeshift tent camps in the surrounding jungle where they are less likely to be subject to immigration raids, but must endure unhygienic conditions, erratic availability of water and frequent stomach illnesses. They must also walk long distances to the construction sites where they work for about U.S.$7 a day.
The wretched living conditions and fearful immigration status of the Chin stem from Malaysia’s not allowing the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to set up organized refugee camps similar to those in other countries, such as neighboring Thailand. Low wages and the high cost of rent mean that the Chin living in apartments in Kuala Lumpur often only have enough money for one meal a day, leaving Chin children particularly vulnerable to hunger and to the lack of medical care.
Additionally, Malaysia violates their signature to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child through the unwarranted arrest and detention of children and the obstruction of the registration of Chin babies at birth. Further compounding the situation, neither documented nor undocumented refugees are permitted in Malaysian schools. Hundreds of Chin children are thus deprived of the opportunity for education, except what is provided by exile groups like the Chin Students’ Organization, a small band of college-educated Chin refugees in Kuala Lumpur who can only accommodate a total of eighty students in their daily classes. For the hundreds of Chin children not able to attend school in Malaysia, their days must be spent cooped up indoors to avoid police detention.
Even after receiving identification papers from UNHCR, the Chin live with the constant threat of arrest on the street or during midnight immigration raids of their living quarters. During these raids, entire families are taken to detention centers and mothers are often separated from their infants and children. The penalties of arrest for illegal immigration are severe—fines of up to 10,000 Malaysian ringgit (U.S.$2,700), jail sentences of up to five years, caning and possible deportation.
If deported, the Chin are taken not to Burma, but to the Malaysia-Thailand border where Thai officials then decide whether to detain them further or deport them to Burma. Back in Burma they face beating, torture, life in prison or execution. Equally as terrifying for the Chin is the prospect of having their deportation waylaid by human traffickers who bribe Malaysian police to hand deportees into their custody. The trafficking agents then sell the Chin into sexual slavery or as slaves on fishing boats.
Malaysian nationals are aware of the tenuous security of the Chin in their country. Some nefarious Malaysians take advantage of this vulnerability. Employers at restaurants and construction sites trap Chin workers in slave-like conditions, withholding their pay for extended periods of time—they know the Chin will not risk being arrested on immigration charges in order to report their employers to the police. This same fear of arrest also keeps Chin women from reporting rape committed against them by Malaysians and prevents the Chin from seeking medical care in local hospitals. Many police officers themselves abuse the Chin by threatening arrest in order to extort bribes, regularly stopping the Chin on the streets and demanding to see papers proving they are in the country legally.
After arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Chum was twice stopped in this way by the police. They asked her several questions in Mandarin Chinese as a test. When she couldn’t answer fluently, they knew she was not a native of Malaysia. She was only able to avoid detention by paying bribes to the police officers. Chum says they let her go with the bribes only because she is a girl. If she were a young Chin man, she says, she would have been arrested and imprisoned.
Chum says the time she spent in Kuala Lumpur was among the scariest of her life—strong words from a girl who stood up to the Burmese army and survived a jungle march. She was given a bed in a crowded apartment building by the Chin Refugee Committee, an organization founded in Malaysia in 2001 to act as a liaison between the Chin and UNHCR. Without an older male relative to protect her, men in the apartment building repeatedly propositioned Chum. She eventually reconnected with cousins in another part of the city and moved in with them to work in their restaurant.
A few months later, she was reunited with her brother Khai, and the two of them began the process of applying for resettlement in a third country. The process did not go smoothly for Khai. He and Chum applied to be resettled together as siblings, but twice UNHCR denied Khai permission to move forward in resettlement. Because of his uncharacteristically tall height, the interview officials suspected that he was not Chin, that he was not Chum’s brother, that he was her boyfriend instead. Eventually, Chum was forced to leave him behind.
Both Mang and Lian found low-paying jobs after arriving in Kuala Lumpur. They too lived with continual anxiety over the consequences of their undocumented status. Mang describes not receiving wages for his work during his first five months in Malaysia, powerless to seek recourse against his boss. Soon after, Mang was arrested for his undocumented status and imprisoned for four months before he hired an agent to pay the police to set him free. After his release, the agent threatened to sell Mang as a slave on a fishing boat if he didn’t repay the fees. A family friend gave him the money for repayment and helped him register with UNHCR to begin the process of relocation in a third country. Before Mang left Malaysia for the U.S., however, he was dealt another brutal blow: he received news that his father had passed away in Burma, though his mother refused to tell him the cause of his death. Mang assumed the worst and blamed the military regime in Burma.
Lian’s inevitable arrest came during a night raid a few months after arriving in Malaysia. He was taken to a juvenile facility, where his guards beat him to the brink of death by caning for two days. To make matters worse, many of the Malaysian prisoners in the facility were adults who had lied about their age in order to get leniency for violent crimes, increasing the danger for the true juveniles. Lian couldn’t speak the local language and was constantly terrorized by the hazards of prison in this new country.
Though the Malaysian government itself does not grant refugee status to immigrants, it does allow UNHCR to make contact with and register refugees. One function of the Chin Refugee Committee is to visit the jails in search of Chin minors they can put in contact with UNHCR. In this way, UNHCR recognized Lian as a refugee minor, and he began receiving visits from lawyers who helped with his court appearances and won his release. A delay in paperwork led to a subsequent arrest and deportation to the Thai border, where Lian was fortunate enough to find a way to sneak back to Kuala Lumpur and seek UNHCR help once again. After a year of waiting, he completed the interview process to be relocated to the U.S.
RESETTLEMENT IN THE U.S. apart from parents or other family members has become a harsh reality for 13,000 unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) from around the world since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. The act solidified ad hoc URM policies dating from World War II and made special provisions for URMs through the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. Today, the State Department, in conjunction with UNHCR, identifies children overseas under the age of eighteen who qualify as refugees or asylees and are eligible for resettlement in the U.S. but are not under the care of a parent or guardian. In some cases, the children have been orphaned in war, though in others they have been separated from their parents while fleeing war or persecution or have been trafficked out of their home country. Once identified and under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the children are placed in licensed care settings (mostly foster homes) in twenty cities across the U.S. through two main volunteer agencies, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
With about 700 refugee children in foster care in 2012, the goal of the URM program is to help “unaccompanied minor refugees develop appropriate skills to enter adulthood and to achieve social self-sufficiency.” Children can stay in the program until age twenty-one or completion of high school. They receive services including housing, financial support, medical care, skills training, English as a Second Language tutoring and mental health services. Agencies also work to reunite children with family members where possible.
From three different parts of Chin State, each with their own story of escape, Chum, Mang and Lian arrived at the home of their new foster family in Texas within a few months of each other. Bernie and Terri Holder had already raised four biological children and adopted a daughter from Russia before opening their home to URMs in 2008. Their spacious farmhouse on the wide-open plains of Texas became a refuge for these Chin teenagers who had fled across mountains, jungle, rivers and ocean to be safe from persecution in Burma and from the hardships of detention centers and refugee hideouts in Malaysia.
Mang was the first to arrive in Texas in late 2007. He initially spent a year in the home of a foster family with whom he could not communicate and experienced ongoing conflict. Though he had already graduated from his small village school in Burma, he was enrolled as a freshman in a high school. He was with several thousand students and had to learn to change rooms in the crowded halls between classes. He didn’t speak English when he arrived; he also didn’t speak a common language with the only other refugee from Burma at the school, a boy from the Karen people who grew up in a camp in Thailand and never learned Burmese.
After a difficult first year, Mang was reassigned to the Holders’ home and has remained a part of their family since that time. When he moved to the Holders’, however, his new school required that he repeat his freshman year, a further setback to Mang who at age nineteen decided he was too old for high school. He chose to leave foster care and move from the Holders’ farm to a large city an hour away, where he could find a job and support within its substantial Chin refugee community.
Not long after resettling in the city, Mang married a young Chin bride, an asylee from Chin State who made her way to the U.S. via a detention center in Mexico. Now he works twelve-hour shifts at a factory to support his wife and their newborn baby.
His experience with the Holders is very different than his experience with his first foster family. Mang feels the love and support of Bernie and Terri Holder as parents, and the young Chin family continues to visit their farm at the holidays. They also maintain frequent contact with Mang’s mother in Burma and his wife’s family in Malaysia, hoping against hope that they can one day all be together in the same country again.
Lian was the next to arrive in Texas through the URM program. On his first night in the U.S., his case worker took him to a group foster facility for both American and refugee youth and showed him his bunk in a dorm room big enough to hold twelve children. He hadn’t eaten all day while traveling, and he couldn’t understand any of the English spoken by the other boys in his dorm. The other boys clustered together, joking and cutting up about trivialities. For all Lian knew, they could have been talking about anything in the world, but he felt sure they were laughing at him. That night, he lay awake until morning and cried in the darkness. The bunks, the foreign faces laughing in a language he couldn’t understand, his stomach growling in hunger—it all reminded him too much of his time in jail in Malaysia. Now, safely on American soil, the finality of his decision to leave Asia sank in. He felt secure at last, but he mourned the fact that he likely could never return to Chin State and might never see his mother and brothers again.
The next day he was sent home from school for wearing flip-flops, the shoes he had worn every day of his life. He was given pizza for lunch, but couldn’t eat it—it didn’t resemble food to him at all. His case worker brought him fried rice for dinner in the dorm, “the best food of my life,” he says, remembering that meal.
After three months in the group home, Lian accepted the opportunity to move in with a foster family. He arrived at the Holders’ house around the same time as Mang. He too only stayed with them a few months before dropping out of school and moving from the farmhouse into the city to stay with distant relatives and find a job. He had received word that his mother was in the hospital back in Burma. Once again, he knew his duty as the eldest son was to take care of his family. Now he earns money to send home to Burma by working long hours each night putting price tags on items at a distribution center. He has no high school diploma, no GED and says his current job and the anxieties of separation from his family are a new type of suffering for him.
Chum’s happiness upon arriving in Texas, like Mang and Lian’s, was tempered with her family’s continued difficulties in Asia. By the time she came to the U.S., Chum was once again separated not only from her family in Burma, but also from Khai in Malaysia. Directly after her flight from Kuala Lumpur to Texas, Chum moved into the Holders’ house, entering high school at seventeen as a freshman. She began learning English.
Unlike her foster brothers, she flourished in her American high school and didn’t experience the same family pressures to quit and find a job. She joined the school’s chorale, where she won an award for excellence. Her family back home was surprised—before coming to the U.S., Chum never knew she had a nice singing voice. By the end of her sophomore year, she was ready to start vocational classes at her high school in hopes of fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a cosmetologist.
Chum’s arrival in Texas also led to a reunion with a childhood friend, Peng. He had been like a brother to her while growing up in Chin State, but when they both found themselves stranded in refugee limbo in Malaysia, they developed deeper feelings for one another. Peng resettled in the U.S. several months before Chum. At the time of her arrival in Texas, she and Peng realized that their feelings had not changed. Several months after their reunion, Chum received a phone call from her parents in Chin State. They were calling to let her know that they had arranged her marriage according to the Chin custom and that her wedding would take place after she finished high school. Fortunately, the man they decided to arrange for her to marry was Peng.
THOUGH THE EVENTS leading to Chum, Mang and Lian’s flight from Burma took place in 2005 and 2006, the situation in Chin State does not appear to be improving. In 2009 and 2010, the number of Chin youth forcibly conscripted into militia and pro-junta groups increased, presumably because of the lead up to elections in the fall of 2010, with over 1,100 youth from Matupi Township in Chin State alone conscripted between June and September 2009. Along with this increase in conscription comes an increase in the number of youth who leave the country before they can be forced into service.
A 2011 report by Physicians for Human Rights paints an even grimmer picture of the situation for families and children in Chin State. Their researchers surveyed 621 households throughout all townships of Chin State and found that:
Over 91% of all surveyed households have performed forced labor.
Burmese government soldiers account for all reported rapes among surveyed households in 2009.
One out of seven surveyed households report torture and inhumane treatment by government soldiers.
One out of eight Chin households is forcibly displaced, usually in search of food.
Persecution of ethnic Chin Christians is widespread.
One-third of all forcible conscriptions are children under fifteen.
More than half of Chin households report food stolen and livestock killed by the Burmese military.
This state of affairs is obviously frightful for the tens of thousands of children who remain under the oppression of the military government in Burma. Their lives are marked by the daily fear of seeing their parents or other loved ones arrested or beaten, of losing their homes, of being forced at gunpoint to do physical labor requiring strength beyond their years. Little girls have their innocence taken from them, and boys must become men before their time. For most, they go to sleep hungry at night and wake up to face the same hardships again the next day, with little hope of improving their lives through education or hard work for their own benefit. The same government that widely proclaims to have the best interest and advancement of all its country’s ethnic groups at heart is the one that tears down their churches, forbids them to learn to read their own language and tries to kill their spirit even as it threatens their physical lives.
For those children who flee Chin State, there is no guarantee that their conditions will improve. Death along the escape route is a real possibility. Once they make it to India or Malaysia, they find that safety is still not certain—now the suffering of refugee life begins for the Chin in their exile. For Khai, this meant working for U.S. $0.95 to $1.25 an hour on a construction site and talking by phone only every couple of months with Chum in Texas and their family in Burma. The majority of Chin refugees in Malaysia are in situations similar to his. Thousands wait to register with UNHCR, but that office only has the capacity to interview eighteen Chin a week. In the meantime, the Chin live in desperate conditions with no government assistance, no health care, no social services and no protection from the Malaysian police.
Even after being relocated to North America, Europe or Australia, young Chin refugees continue to endure the lasting ravages of the war in Burma, with neither the physical nor emotional scars promising to fade any time soon. For those who are resettled as unaccompanied minors, they carry the added burden of knowing that not only is seeing their homeland again very unlikely, but they may also never again look into the face of their parents, feel their mothers’ kiss or know the comfort of their fathers’ strong arms.
It was this realization that overwhelmed Lian on his first night in Texas, that made the dorm at his youth center feel as cold and lonely as a Malaysian prison. Mang, too, continues to mourn the loss of his family and his life in Chin State. As he tells his story and recalls the details of his and his father’s arrest and later his father’s death, tears come to his eyes and his voice chokes into silence—maybe from the pain of wounds still fresh, maybe from pangs of survivor’s guilt, maybe at the thought that his dad won’t meet his grandchildren.
When he continues, Mang laments the loss of their way of life in Chin State where they worked their own land in the mountains of their ancestors. He would like to return to Burma, he says, if one day there is a new government and the persecution ends. In America, he feels safe and free, but there are too many bills to pay—in Chin State, on his own land, he didn’t have to deal with rent payments, cell phones, credit cards and insurance.
At her new home on the farm in Texas, Chum has a foster family who nurtures her and a fiancé she loves. She looks ahead to the bright future of high school graduation and pursuing the career of her dreams. But she goes through each day separated from Khai in Malaysia and her parents and other siblings in Burma. The distance from which they share her joy is long and wide. Even as Chin youth find happiness and new life in their land of refuge, their journey will continue to bear the impact of their wartime experiences for years to come.