Just one year after our executive director visited Malaysia in November 2023, Victor visited Malaysia in November 2024 and stayed there for over three weeks to meet with approximately sixty thousand Chin refugees in Malaysia. The visit this time is different in terms of the refugee population increase in Malaysia as more young Burmese refugees fled the country after the military junta forced thousands of youths into military conscription in early 2024. The Chin refugee population alone is believed to be between fifty to sixty thousand, while many other ethnic nationalities and Burmese numbers will be much higher.
The civil war intensified in 2024, and the military junta lost quite significant numbers of combat troops, military bases, camps and untold numbers of military equipment to the people’s defence forces. Burma is now on the brink of a failed state situation, and the future is not bright at all, too, since China openly interfered in the political deadlock between the people and the coup army, siding with the military regime in 2024. Other than resorting to desperate aerial bombardments indiscriminately in many civilians’ hideouts in the villages and towns, the military regime can no longer reinforce ground troops and already lost 60% of territorial control to the people’s defence forces.
Due to the ongoing civil war and military conscription law, most Burmese youths are in Thailand and Malaysia just to escape from the junta. The government of Thailand doesn’t recognize refugees in Thailand like India, Bangladesh and Malaysia and all Burmese refugees are liable to be arrested as illegal immigrants which is already worse added to the wound for all Burmese refugees in their neighbours where they crucially need some sort and security and safety. Approximately there are over 6000 Chin refugee children under 13 who need some kind of education since they have been disconnected from formal education from their original country, Burma. Some Chin community-based churches and young volunteers set up clandestine Chin children’ schools which are not legal and provided them education as much as they could to connect them with the education they critically needed.
As mentioned above, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 UNHCR refugee convention and 1967 UNHCR Protocol, all refugees are arrested daily and detained at various immigration camps in Malaysia. The worst case here is, that refugees who are not yet registered with UNHCR as formal asylum seekers are directly deported to Myanmar from Malaysia by flight. Rumour was circulating in 2021 when the Perikatan Nasional government was in power, that they wanted the UNHCR office in Kuala Lumpur to be moved to Jakarta, Indonesia as they believed the establishment of the UNHCR office in Malaysia was the reason many refugees came into the country. However, some credit should have been given to Thailand and Malaysia for continuing to tolerate the influxes of Burmese refugees into their countries for over three decades since the Burmese military junta seized power in 1988. Burma has been a thorn in the flesh of ASEAN, especially for Thailand and Malaysia.
As ASEAN Chairman in 2025, Malaysia will make drastic changes for Burma’s position in ASEAN as they know they can no longer tolerate with the ever-increasing numbers of hundreds of thousands of Burmese refugees in Malaysia illegally for years. Western countries also should unite with Malaysia in dealing with military dictatorship rule in Burma in 2025 so that all Burmese refugees from outside can return and the people of Burma can enjoy the democratic freedoms they have been fighting for several decades.
