Panel set up to check condition of repatriated Brus

A committee has been set up to monitor the conditions of members of Bru community, who were repatriated from the refugee camps of Tripura, Mamit district Deputy Commissioner Lalbiaksangi said today.
The panel will oversee the conditions and problems faced by the repatriated Brus and submit a report to the state government and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Lalbiaksangi told PTI over phone from Mamit.
She said the committee was constituted in view of the proposed resumption of repatriation process scheduled to commence from November this year.
The committee was constituted following the directions of Satyendra Garg, Joint Secretary (Northeast), Ministry of Home Affairs, during his visit to Damdiai in Mizoram-Tripura- Bangladesh border district of Mamit on Saturday.

The DC said the Monitoring Committee is chaired by the Deputy Commissioner and has three official members from the district administration and three members from the Bru community.
According to the Road Map-V for Bru Repatriation, approved recently by the MHA, 3,445 Bru families were proposed to be repatriated from the relief camps in Tripura.

The effort to repatriate 3,500 Bru families during June to September last year failed as not a single Bru came forward in their respective relief camps before the Mizoram officials, to be identified as bona fide residents of Mizoram.
Thousands of Bru families fled Mizoram and migrated to Tripura due to communal tension triggered by a murder inside the Mizoram-Bangladesh-Tripura border Dampa Tiger Reserve by suspected Bru militants on October 21, 1997.

The first effort to repatriate them from November 16, 2009, was not only scuttled by another murder, but triggered another round of exodus.
Though a number of Bru families returned to Mizoram during repeated repatriation processes and some of them returned on their own, a sizable number of families remained in the neighbouring state.