Khmer Krom in Vietnam faced with discrimination

By Khmerization
Source: RFA

Many Khmer Krom people living in Vietnam said they faced discrimination after they had protested against the confiscation of their ancestral lands by the Vietnamese authority.

They said the discrimination includes the refusal to treat them or their family members by Vietnamese hospitals, refusal by Vietnamese factories to employ their family members and their family members are under constant surveillance from the Vietnamese secret police.

A Khmer Krom from Ang commune, Tinh Bien in Moat Chrouk (An Giamg) province, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity, said the discrimination is very widespread. "I see that the Vietnamese authorities are very prejudiced against us, like when we got sick and go to seek hospitalisation, they will refuse to treat us or let us stay in the hospital. They said 'you can go to seek treatment somewhere else!' Our youngsters who work in the factories, got sick and now returned back homes with some bleeding from their noses and the hospitals refused to treat them. They won't dispense medicines to them. The same with my child who has been sick for 4-5 months already and the doctors refused to treat her. She went to the hospital and they refused to hospitalise her", she said.

Vietnamese embassy in Cambodia cannot be reached for comments at the time of this story going to air on Thursday 2nd September, with the spokesman, Mr. Trinh Ba Cam, saying he was overseas when reached by phone.

Mr. Thach Setha (pictured), president of Khmer Kampuchea Krom Community in Cambodia, who is a Khmer Krom himself, said these strategies had been used by the Vietnamese since a long, long time ago. "They applied these systemic practices to make us very difficult to survive. These practices is a grave human rights abuse and further it makes us very hard to survive", he said.

Khmer Krom in Moat Chrouk province had protested against their confiscations of their ancestral lands since 2007. They said hundreds of hectares of their ancestral lands were confiscated by the Vietnamese authority when they fled from their lands to escape fightings between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese troops in 1979.