Hun Sen ready to send troops after Montagnards refugees
Phnom Penh (AsiaNews/SCMP) - Prime Minister Hun Sen will consider sending troops into Cambodia's forested northeast to root out more than 200 Montagnards, a Christian minority in Vietnam, who have fled country's central highlands after police put down protests seeking land and religious rights, in April.
The refugees have been living off tubers, rainwater in Cambodia's malaria-ridden jungles for months. Local hill tribe sources have told The Cambodia Daily that up to 250 Montagnards may be hiding in the border region and that several have fallen seriously ill.
Groups of the Montagnards have been photographed and interviewed by reporters from the English-language The Cambodia Daily newspaper, but the Hun Sen government has alternately denied their existence, called them illegal immigrants or accused them of plotting a separatist movement. "We must examine if they are illegal immigrants of if they want to form an autonomous zone. If they have hidden campsites to form an autonomous zone, we will use force to break them," he said.
Prime Minister also said the government would allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to open an office in the northeast, as long as it was not used as a refugee camp. In the meantime, the UNHCR has been restricted to operating in Phnom Penh and forbidden from opening an office where the refugees could be interviewed and given asylum.
Hun Sen's comments follow appeals last week from King Norodom Sihanouk, who is in self-exile in Pyongyang, that the refugees receive humanitarian assistance. However a team of palace officials who made a four-hour tour of the vast border region at the weekend said they could not find any refugees to whom to distribute the rice and medicine ordered by the king. "The villagers are afraid of us. They hide information," said Um Em, undersecretary of state at the palace, on Monday after returning from the tour. "We need to have a network to show us where the Montagnards are located, but right now we can't find the network."
The Cambodian government's handling of the Montagnards has been criticised by local and international human rights groups. Only the Cambodian Red Cross, headed by Hun Sen's wife, Bun Rany, says aiding the refugees falls outside its mandate of helping natural disaster victims.
Some international human rights groups say the refugees could starve in the jungle if they are not provided aid. Human Rights Watch, for instance, in late May called for an investigation of the Easter weekend protests and urged the Cambodian government to uphold the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and to allow the UNHCR to operate in the northeast.
"Crossing the border to Cambodia is not an option for the refugees," the New York-based agency said. "Both Cambodia and Vietnam have intensified the security presence along the border and Cambodia continues to forcibly return any Montagnard asylum seekers who cross the border."
The Vietnamese government has denied the existence of Montagnard refugees and barred international agencies and reporters from entering the central highlands at the time of the protests.
Hundreds of Montagnards who fled Vietnamese oppression to Cambodia in 2001 were eventually granted refugee status and asylum in the US.
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27/07/2004
