Burmese of Nepali descent flee to Thailand

It is when travelling beyond our borders that we Nepalis realise how much we take for granted the political and media freedoms we enjoy here at present. A recent trip to northern Thailand offered an opportunity to hear from Burmese exiles about their country’s tragic descent into conflict and suppression. 

Johnny Adhikary is a Nepali-speaking Burmese social activist who has been helping fellow Burmese of Nepali origin as well as Nepali tech workers trapped inside Burma, connecting them to the authorities through voice messages and even handwritten notes. 

Adhikary has never been to Nepal, the land of his ancestors. He is among the 300,000 Burmese of Nepali descent and has been forced into self-exile because of the suppression by the military junta which staged a coup in 2021, and has been fighting pro-democracy activists since. 

In the past month, the Burmese Army has been losing ground to ethno-separatists, having to retreat from the only two checkpoints on the Burma-China border. 

Adhikary has also been involved in the rescue of Nepali ’cyber slaves’ who were trafficked by Chinese organised crime groups luring them with high-paying IT jobs. The Chinese-owned call centres in Burma are involved in internet financial fraud and online scams and are known to physically torture workers and hold them captive without pay. 

After a crackdown in China itself, the mafia moved to Burma, Cambodia and Laos, recruiting IT professionals from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India and Nepal. The Nepal Embassy in Bangkok says 25 Nepalis have been rescued so far, and sent home. This week it sent embassy personnel to rescue two more Nepali IT workers stranded in Burma.

Borders demarcate national jurisdiction, but for these international crime syndicates in the age of global communications physical frontiers do not matter. This is the end of geography. And the instability in Burma makes it an ideal base for their operations.

The Burmese of Nepali ancestry, on the other hand, have been living in the country since the first wave arrived here during British rule. Others are descendants of Gurkha soldiers in the British Army who stayed behind after fighting the Japanese at the end of World War II. 

Most Burmese Nepali have preserved their language and culture, however, the younger generation have gradually assimilated into mainstream Burmese society. Some Nepali families have returned to Nepal in various phases over the past decades, including when people of Indian origin were driven out. 

Thailand has been the country of refuge for Burmese pro-democracy fighters, dissidents, journalists as well as some Burmese of Nepali origin. In many ways, this is like Nepalis who fled to India during the Maoist conflict, or Indians who have escaped unrest to Nepal. 

But unlike the Nepal-India open border, the Thai-Burma frontier is heavily monitored by the Burmese military and it is not easy to cross over. “We had to leave our country Nepal, and now Burma, does this mean we have also lost our right to be citizens?” asked one Nepali Burmese in Chiangmai. “We are stateless refugees, where is a country we can call our own?” 

These words reminded me of the citizenship debate in Nepal as well. Of the hundreds of thousands of Madhesi Nepalis who do not have citizenship, and the perception in the Madhes is that the Nepali state resettled Nepalis from Burma in the Tarai. 

Although the Nepali-speaking population in Burma has largely kept out of politics, they are affected by the pro-democracy movement as well as the violent crackdowns by the Burmese military. A group of Burmese Nepalis have formed the Gurkha Defence Force to fight the government.

One Nepali-speaking descendant of a Gurkha soldier who is a commander in the force was visiting Chiang Mai clandestinely, and told me: “We are fighting with fellow Burmese for democracy and end to military rule, we hope this is the last time we will have to take up arms.” 

Like other Nepali-Burmese, he wants the land of his ancestors to galvanise international support for the pro-democracy cause in Burma. He says Kathmandu could help by providing travel documents for Nepali-origin exiles in Thailand. 

Nepali soldiers in the British Army were instrumental in the defeat of the Japanese in the Burma front in 1943-44. In fact, the Japanese were so impressed with the loyalty and bravery of the Gurkhas that they even recruited some Nepali Burmese into their own military to fight against the British, and in effect against fellow Nepalis. 

Nepal and Burma have a shared history of democratic struggle. Burma’s freedom fighter and first leader Gen Aung San and Nepal’s first elected prime minister B P Koirala both fought for freedom in their countries the 1950s and 60s. Aung San designated the mountainous Kachin State as the homeland for Nepali Burmese. 

But after Gen Ne Win seized power in 1962, more than 200,000 Nepali-speakers were evicted and settled down in Mizoram, Nagaland in India and in Nepal. The Nepali refugees from Burma were mostly settled along the Tarai by King Mahendra, who had a strategic campaign for the trans-migration of mountain people to the plains bordering India. Many Tarai towns have neighbourhoods that are still called ‘Burma Tole’. 

Although the Burmese refer to Nepalis as Gurkhas, not all the families are descendants of soldiers. After the 1988 uprising, many Burmese Nepalis fled Burma and in 1995 even opened a liaison office for the imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in Kathmandu. Suu Kyi herself wrote a book about Nepal and has close connections to a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu.

And there are thousands of other Burmese Nepalis who fled to Thailand in 1964 and they and their descendants have been there ever since. China has historically supported the Burmese military for geopolitical reasons, and the two countries share a 1,300km border. Chiang Mai’s own location close to the Burma border makes it a strategically important listening post, which is why the Americans, Japanese, Chinese and Indians all have consulates here.

Mae Sot is the Thai town on the border, with Myawaddy on the Burmese side of the border. Beyond is the war zone, and also where Nepali-origin Burmese and ‘cyber slaves’ are trapped. 

The Nepal Embassy in Bangkok may need to open a liaison office in Mae Sot and keep in close touch with Thai security forces, foreign ministry, civil society and media. But the embassy suffers from a lack of resources and personnel. 

It is not just in Burma that Nepali IT personnel are held captive by the Chinese mafia, there are reports of them also in call centres in Laos and Cambodia. Six of them have been rescued from Cambodia and one from Laos, but others remain. 

The Nepali diaspora is now spread so far and wide that wherever there is a conflict in there world, be it Russia, Ukraine or Israel, there are Nepalis caught up in it. Nepal’s government and foreign ministry must keep a better record of where its nationals are, and in case they are in war zones, must have contingency plans for their rescue in an emergency. 

In the case of Burma, it is not just Nepali call centre workers who to be rescued, but Nepal also needs to support the democratic aspirations of the Burmese people and those of Nepali origin. 

Chandra Kishore is a Birganj-based commentator who writes this monthly column Borderlines for Nepali Times. @kishore_chandra

“Please rescue us”

A Nepali from Rupendehi has written a letter to the Nepal Embassy in Bangkok asking that he and 11 other Nepalis be rescued from the Thai-Burma border where they have been held captive for the past four months by a Chinese call centre.

Most of the Nepalis were said to have been recruited in Dubai by a Chinese woman identified as Ms Johana and promised a customer service job in an IT company. However, they were beaten, tortured and made to work without pay in an internet scam to cheat users around the world.

‘We asked to be released but they ignore us, instead they put us in prison and handcuffed us for 7 days and they are asking us for ransom money to release us,’ says the letter signed by a Nepali whose name we are not disclosing for his safety. “if it goes on like this we will take our life one day.”

The letter also accuses the Chinese organised criminals of applying electric shocks to them. ‘Please save our life as we have no any option what to do now in that situation,’ the letter says, and includes the names of the other Nepalis who are from Lamjung, Kathmandu, Makwanpur, Jhapa, Arghakhanchi, Sarlahi. 

Two Nepali call centre workers who managed to escape by paying $10,000 each ransom money to the Chinese are in Chiang Mai, and the Nepal Embassy is trying to fly them to Kathmandu this week.