By Sopheng Cheang
The Associated Press
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The Cambodian government has informed the U.N. refugee agency it will shut a compound housing 62 Vietnamese refugees on New Year's Day and send them back to Vietnam, where they allegedly face repression.
The U.N. agency, which already has granted them refugee status, pleaded Tuesday for a little more time to decide how to resettle the group.
They are the last batch of asylum-seekers from a wave of 1,812 Vietnamese hill tribe people taken in by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since 2006, said the agency's regional representative Jean-Noel Wetterwald. The agency has resettled 999 of them, mostly in the United States, and sent 751 of them home.
Cambodia is eager to close the refugee compound in Phnom Penh to deter any further arrivals of ethnic minorities from Vietnam's Central Highlands, who are collectively known as Montagnards. Many of them sided with the United States during the Vietnam War, attend Protestant churches not recognized in Vietnam and are generally distrusted by the communist government.
"If we don't tell them to close the site, the work of the UNHCR will be prolonged endlessly," Foreign Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong said. "We don't want the site to stay there forever."
The Foreign Ministry told the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in a letter obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press "it has decided to close down the site" on Jan. 1. The government will send the refugees back to the communist country "on a date to be notified in due course," said the letter, dated Nov. 29.
The U.N. agency said it understands the government does not want the refugees staying indefinitely in Cambodia, but hopes a little more time will be granted so resettlement can be arranged.
"We have asked the government to give us an extension of the deadline to try to see if we can find a solution," Wetterwald said in a telephone interview in Bangkok.
He said the closure would not affect the agency office in Cambodia, which opened in 1983.
Thousands of Montagnards have fled to Cambodia since 2001, when Vietnam's communist government cracked down on protests against land confiscation and restrictions on religious freedom.
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Associated Press Writer Jocelyn Gecker in Bangkok contributed to this report.
8 comments:
starsworldnews /
A few refugees living under the legal UN care bother the Viet slave gov’t.
How about the millions of Viet illegal immigrants, when will this slave gov’t send them back to VN?
Oh that’s right the latter are not on their master’s blacklist.
It is too obvious that this gov’t takes order from Hanoi.
I'm with you bro when the slave CPP gonna send those illegals Vietcong back to these home land. Why only those people that against the Vietcong gov't. I thinks ah CPP so scares of ah Youn Vietcong that why they don't send them back. But we've to wait for other president to taking cares of those googes people don't worries stop votes for ah CPP you'll see what happen.
We can compare the Montaganard refugees with the Khmer Krom.
The Khmer Krom only have more ability as the Montagnard, because under the Cambodian Constitution, the Khmer Krom have the right to live and work in Cambodia and also apply for the ID.
Most of the Montagnard are connecting to our brother Jarai in Mondulkiri and Rattankkiri. The Montagnard in Vietnam wanted to be calling Khmer and not Vietnamese. They just live on the wrong place and were born on the wrong time.
The Hanoi regime has always denied it has any maltreatment issue regarding Vietnam's ethnic groups such as the Montagnards and the Khmers of the Mekong Delta. These are the indigenous populations who have not been as smoothly welded into the Vietnamese imperialist State as Hanoi would have hoped for.
Hanoi's order to Phnom Penh to shut down the refugee centre would seem to fly in the face of relevant UN Conventions on displaced people or political refugees; undertakings to which states like Vietnam and Cambodia, being members of the UN, are expected to observe.
The presence of the Montagnards in the UN supervised centre has caused Hanoi some measure of embarassment as it is living evidence of the regime's repression of Vietnam's ethnic groups; a reality that has consistently been dismissed as 'fabrication' by Hanoi.
This decision along with the recent forced repatriation of the Urghirs to China is a sad reality for a country that had seen many of its war displaced people taking refuge in neighbouring territories in the 1980s as well as a betrayal of those who had hoped to see the country emerge as a model of tolerance and compassion in this part of the world.
Is there anything that the CPP regime would not bend over backward doing for its Hanoi patrons?
School of Vice
1,812 Montagnards VS. 4 MILLION DOG EATING ILLEGAL YOUNS IN Cambodia! We must send back 4 million illegal Youns regardless if they are legal/illegal for all I care!
Who wants to be Vietnamese LOLZ! The montaganard rather call themselves Khmer because they are part of the Mon-Khmer!
The Government of Cambodia and all Khmer descents around the world therefore have the right to help and protect them. They are Khmer Mon descent and also our brother and sisters.
fuck UN Cambodian in suffered never saw UN helping.America trope a lots of bomb in 1969 to 1975 no UN at all so Fuck UN.
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