Intelligence sources report that the recent escalation in conflict has prompted a new wave of Chin-Kuki refugees from Myanmar seeking refuge in India through Mizoram. Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga has embraced over 32,000 refugees from Myanmar in recent years, emphasising familial and kinship bonds.
The army’s Assam Rifles met with village chiefs and representative leaders of a civil society group “Young Mizo Association” in settlements in eastern Mizoram’s Champal district near the border with Myanmar and discussed the situation in the neighbouring country, where the military junta is fighting insurgents of the People’s Defence Force (PDF).
The Assam Rifles officers met the village chiefs and representatives of the civil society group Young Mizo Association in eastern Mizoram’s Champhai district.
The gunfights between the junta’s army and the PDF, the armed wing of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, has led to hundreds of refugees fleeing to border villages in Mizoram, sources said.
Over 100 families from Myanmar have taken shelter in Zokhawthar village in Mizoram’s Champhai district, according to media reports quoting the villagers.
Zokhawthar village has received over 6,000 Myanmar refugees since February 2021.
Some 32,000 men, women and children from Myanmar have taken shelter in many districts of Mizoram after the Myanmar army took over the country again in a coup in February 2021. Six districts in Mizoram—Champhai, Siaha, Lawngtlai, Serchhip, Hnahthial and Saitual—share a 510-km-long unfenced international border with Myanmar’s Chin State. The Assam Rifles guards the India-Myanmar border. Mizoram’s neighbouring state Manipur has seen intense ethnic clashes between the hill-majority Chin-Kuki tribes and the valley-majority Meiteis over the issue of shrinking land, resources and political power amid a sharp rise in the number of refugees and illegal immigrants entering the state.
