Read the latest update to this story here: Malaysia Deports More Than 1,000 Myanmar Nationals Despite High Court Order

KUALA LUMPUR— Thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who left Myanmar for better opportunities in Malaysia are facing uncertain deportation. In the days after a coup, Myanmar’s newly governing military announced it would send three ships to Kuala Lumpur Feb.  23 to retrieve 1,200 Myanmar nationals currently held in immigration detention centers.

Just who will be deported remains unclear to refugee agencies like the UNHCR, which has not had access to evaluate and register asylum seekers in Malaysian immigration detention centers since 2019.

Myanmar will not retrieve its most vulnerable group, the Rohingya Muslims, who have been stripped of their citizenship and have fled ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Buddhist nationalist military. But other religious and ethnic minorities, including thousands of Chin Christians living in Malaysia, are at risk of repatriation and returning to the persecution in Myanmar they fled from. 

Malaysia is not a signatory of the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention but accepts refugees on humanitarian grounds. The UNHCR card is the only document that protects refugees living in Malaysia from deportation. Asylum seekers, who are not protected by the UNHCR refugee status, are considered illegal migrants. Many migrants from Myanmar who came on temporary work visas or without any immigration papers were forced to remain in Malaysia when travel halted due to the coronavirus pandemic and were arrested during immigration operations in 2020.

On Feb. 1 Myanmar’s military led by commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing overthrew the civilian government. The military claimed widespread electoral fraud in the recent general elections that took place in November 2020. The National League for Democracy, led by the former state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, won by a landslide.

The coup was staged before the first parliament session following the elections, preventing the newly elected government from being approved. After the military announced its control, they detained leaders of the NLD. Currently Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's de facto leader, is under house arrest, charged with possessing illegally imported walkie-talkies.  

The military takeover, officially announced as a one-year state of emergency, comes after only ten years of civilian government in Myanmar. The country won independence from Great Britain in 1948 but was ruled by the military regime from 1962 to 2011.

Suu Kyi’s previous 15 years under house arrest  for supporting a democratic rule helped her gain the country’s sentiment and international accolades, including a Nobel Peace Prize, but her failure to stop the military’s ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the Rohingya has stained her record.

Nationwide daily protests against the military rule since Feb. 6 are the largest since the pro-democracy protests in 2007 known as the Saffron Revolution, despite a telecommunications and internet blackout imposed by the military as well as a nationwide curfew and ban on public gatherings.

What asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia are facing

More than 100,000 Rohingya and 55,000 Chin refugees and asylum seekers live in Malaysia, the two largest refugee communities in the country, along with Karen, Shan, Mon and Kachin refugees, all from states in Myanmar where the military persecuted the local ethnic populations with rape, arson, kidnappings and other violence.

Since Myanmar’s independence, inter-ethnic conflicts have plagued the country. A Buddhist majority is ethnically Bamar (69% of the population) but there are about 135 other ethnic groups, including Muslims and Christians.  

For decades, Myanmar's army has persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, continuing after Suu Kyi’s election and formation of a civilian government in 2015.  Millions of Myanmar’s minorities have fled over the last decades to neighboring Bangladesh, India, Thailand and across the Bay of Bengal to Malaysia and Indonesia. Following an army crackdown in the Rakhine state in 2017 which was described by the U.N. as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” more than 700,000 Rohingya fled across the border to Bangladesh.

For the various ethnic Myanmarese living in Malaysia as refugees or asylum seekers, the coup brings concerns over the hope for democracy in their homeland.  They wonder if they will ever go back home to a country that accepts them and gives them equal rights as ethnic and religious minorities. 

Reverend Mang Vun Lian, 47, has been serving Jesus for 13 years, both in Myanmar and since 2010 in Malaysia, where he is pastoring the Malaysian Lautu Christian Fellowship, part of the Baptist Myamarese Church.

When Lian pastored in a village in Chin state in Myanmar, the authorities seized his national identity card.

“They showed power, a lot, I mean I can say discrimination… that's why I felt very bad and sometimes not safe,” he said. While working as a Bible teacher in Yangon, the authorities often asked him for money. “If I didn't give, they would make problem with me. Because of being a Christian, they despised me. For a lot of people, religions other than Buddhism is a kind of second-class citizen.”

Even though many of the Rohingya and Chin refugees and asylum seekers have lived in Malaysia for years, their position is very fragile, with no legal access to work, healthcare or education. The UNHCR card is the only document that keeps them from being arrested or deported, and while most of the Rohingya are registered with UNHCR, less than half of the Chin are protected by UNHCR as refugees.

In this context, the coup in Myanmar raised more concerns over the safety of the Chin community in Malaysia, who largely practice Christianity. The Independent Chin Communities, an umbrella group of Chin organizations in Malaysia, requested the UNHCR in a press release following the coup “to consider re-evaluating the appeals for asylum and conduct proper investigations in order to prevent refugees from being forcefully deported to Myanmar” where they may be subject to persecution.

Community and religious leaders have been voicing their concerns to the UNHCR, the Malaysian government and other international authorities while forming plans within their communities of next steps in cases of deportation.

As a pastor of the Chin refugee community in Malaysia, Lian has been offering more than spiritual guidance for his people over the years. In his sermons, he often talks about the political contexts that influence their families back home and their own lives in Malaysia. He talks about how the Chin people became refugees and why Myanmar became poorer while the rich became richer.

“We feel sorry and we are angry,” he said. “And as a pastor, as a spiritual leader, I am preparing to preach, 'Should we obey the dictatorship?'”

In a recent Sunday service delivered online during the COVID-19 lockdown in Malaysia, Lian spoke about obeying rulers who are servants of God and disobeying the ones that are not.

“We children of God must obey our leaders only when the leaders are God’s real servants. We must oppose the military coup because they robbed the power with guns,” he preached in the Lautu Chin dialect. “They enjoyed suppressing peoples. They are happy when people are crying. They do not belong to Heaven. They are of darkness. That’s why we should never compromise with them.”

Lian also called for a peaceful form of protest, in the spirit of the teachings of Jesus. “But remember that Jesus never recommended us to be violent. We can disobey politely and seriously,” he said.

Even though he wasn’t able to get in touch with some of his peers from Myanmar due to the internet blackout, Lian read responses from the Chin community in Myanmar on social media calling for protests and praying for the country.

“We [from Malaysia] cannot help, but we can share the sorrow. Those who are living in Malaysia, everybody wants our country [Myanmar] to be a democracy and a prosperous country,” he said.

Although Suu Kyi is criticized for failing to address ethnic and religious persecution and defending the military, her political party the NLD remains the sole beacon of democracy in Myanmar.  

“Our people support Aung San Suu Kyi not because she is Aung San Suu Kyi, but because the policies of her party that can bring change in the future,”  James Bawi Thang Bik, of the Kuala Lumpur-based Alliance of Chin Refugees said. “For any minorities the only hope to get away from this military group is to vote NLD.”

Many Rohingya refugees in Malaysia say they are disillusioned by their beloved leader’s silence and denial of their people’s genocide.

“They don't want to support NLD, but they only want a democratic government, a fully democratic government, not like the previous one,” said Faizal Islam, a Rohingya community leader from Kuala Lumpur. He recounted an incident in Myanmar when a Muslim man was burned to death.

“At that time other people, they see the incident, but they keep silent,” Islam said. “We don't want this kind of democracy. We want the people of Myanmar to understand what is democracy, and we want the people of Myanmar also to protect us, if the see unfair things.”

While about 6oo,ooo Rohingya still live in Myanmar under the threat of genocide, according to a 2019 UNHCR report, more than 2 million Rohingya live outside Myanmar as stateless people.

Days after the coup, 73 Rohingya community leaders from Malaysia met online to organize a response to help their communities back in Myanmar.  

“One of the points of our meeting was that people in Myanmar need our support now, food, medicine, so we decided to prepare financial support,” said Rafik, a Rohingya community leader from Kuala Lumpur who participated in the meeting. They are asking each Rohingya in Malaysia to donate one ringgit, for a goal of 150,000 ringgit, or $37,000.

“We can’t do much from here, we can only pray and raise funds to help them,” said Rafik. “This situation will not be over soon, so we are targeting to raise the money from the community here and send them over for relief continuously over the next three months. We have to win this time, if we lose this time we fear we will face many decades of oppression.”

Amidst the coup, Malaysia announces the upcoming repatriation of Myanmar nationals

Shortly after the coup, Malaysia affirmed its support for democracy in Myanmar in a statement issued on Feb. 1 by the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

On Feb. 11, the Malaysian Immigration and the Myanmar embassy in Malaysia confirmed that 1,200 Myanmar citizens will be repatriated from immigration detention centers after the Myanmar military government, through the embassy in Malaysia, offered to send three navy ships to bring back its citizens. It is unknown if among the Myanmar nationals there are also asylum seekers.  

Malaysia's Director-General of Immigration Khairul Dzaimee Daud confirmed the details in a press release on Feb 15:

“The department would like to clarify that no UNHCR or Rohingya ethnic cardholders are involved in this repatriation program. Instead, it is just part of the normal process of deporting foreigners currently held in the Immigration Depot. Myanmar nationals involved in this program consist of those detained at the Immigration Depots for committing various offenses under the Immigration Act 1959/63 and Immigration Regulations 1963.”

The statement mentioned that during 2020, the Immigration Department deported a total of 37,038 foreigners, including 3,322 Myanmar nationals.

The UNHCR said that Malaysia should not send refugees back to Myanmar, due to customary international law meant to protect refugees.

James Bawi Thang Bik, of the Kuala Lumpur-based Alliance of Chin Refugees, expressed his concerns about the treatment of Myanmar nationals during the repatriation process and the fact that they could be coerced to serve the purposes of the military regime. The recent release of 23,314 prisoners from Myanmar prisons sparked concerns there of an increase in crime and an impending military crackdown on the population. 

“Currently in Myanmar criminal prisoners are released by the military to perform attacks against its own civilians,” Bik said. “These criminal Myanmar military can do the same thing to this group on the way back, to create more unrest in Myanmar. Then, the military will say that the country still needs them to control [the public].”