Burmese Refugees Flee to China Town

Burmese refugees flee to China town

By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Nansan

From the nearest big Chinese city it takes many hours to drive to the border town of Nansan.

This is a remote part of China - the town which normally has about 15,000 residents and a similar sized migrant population is right up against the Burmese border.

In the middle of the town there is a steep hill. On one side it is Chinese territory. On the other side it is Burma.

For several days people have pouring over it, fleeing, they say, from the fighting on the other side between the Burmese military and the ethnic Chinese Kokang Army.

Now, though, it appears that flood had shrunk to a trickle. Locals say most of those who had wanted to flee have probably done so by now.

'Safer here'

The Chinese have erected blue tents at the bottom of the hill for the refugees.

Despite the huge numbers that are reported to have come over the border, the camp does not seem to be full - but it is hard to tell for sure because the police will not let us in.

There is not one empty hotel room in town. In the backstreets we found one group of Burmese sheltering on the ground floor of an empty apartment block.

The room was bare except for their thin mattresses. Their possessions were piled around them, but they seemed resigned to their fate.

"I came here five days ago," one woman explained. "It's safer here. I was nervous when I crossed the border, but it's OK now."

Only one of them, a man in his twenties, said he had actually seen any fighting.

"A Burmese military officer came to address a meeting in Kokang," he told us. "When he was giving his speech, fighting erupted. The Kokang army fired first."

All of them said fear of the violence was the reason they had crossed the border.

"We are scared," said another woman, "It's war over there. We don't know what's going on. We saw other people run away so we just followed them."

There were three generations here - old women, their daughters and their small children. They did not know how long they would have to stay, they said. The Chinese they had encountered - the police and others - had treated them well.

We found another woman sitting by the side of the road with her two small children. She too felt the Chinese had acted decently. "The border patrol officers helped me get my children into China," she said.

"But I'm worried about my husband, he's still on the other side."

She wanted to find a room for the night, rather than stay in the tents erected by China on the border, perhaps due to fears that in the days ahead the Chinese may start to put pressure on people to return.

As we moved on it was starting to rain. Every few minutes a police car passed by. There were large numbers of officers on patrol.

That made it hard for us to move around freely - a state of emergency has been declared in the area which gives the police greater powers to stop journalists from reporting - so it's hard to say for certain just how well the authorities are coping.