Cambodia Suspends Australian Refugee Deal

Khmer Times/Ven Rathavong

Monday, 31 August 2015

Women ride a motorcycle past a house that is used to temporarily house asylum seekers sent from Nauru. Photo: Reuters

PHNOM PENH (Khmer Times) – The government said yesterday it would not accept any more refugee on behalf of Australia until it deals with the first four it accepted under a controversial scheme.

Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sophak said it would take about three months to train and assimilate the four.

“At the moment we do not have plans to receive more refugees yet,” he told Khmer Times. “We wait until these four refugees here settle down comfortably first.”

He said the government would discuss the issue with Australia before accepting any more.

“The fewer they come, the better,” he said. “We will take more when we can deal with them.

“With the situation of our country like this, we can’t receive hundreds or thousands of them.

The decision is a blow to the resettlement scheme, in which Australia pays Cambodia to take refugees from its offshore Pacific detention centers – which has been condemned by human rights groups.

Australia has vowed to stop asylum seekers sailing from Indonesia and Sri Lanka and landing on its shores, instead intercepting boats and shifting the people to camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru or turning them back.

Australia and Cambodia agreed last September that some refugees from the Pacific island nation of Nauru would be resettled in Cambodia in exchange for Australian aid, but only four have arrived since then.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop denied the deal had collapsed.

“Cambodia is committed to a regional solution and has committed through a memorandum of understanding with the Australian government to resettle some asylum seekers who are found to be genuine refugees,” Ms. Bishop told reporters in Sydney.

“It wishes to harness the skills of foreign workers and in this way, they can resettle people into Cambodia and help boost their GDP.”

As part of the deal announced last year, Cambodia will get A$40 million ($29 millionUSD) in additional aid regardless of how many asylum seekers it takes in.

Rights groups have condemned Australia for trying to resettle refugees in poorer countries like Cambodia, which has an economy less than 1 percent that of Australia’s. The Australian opposition’s immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, said the Cambodia deal was  “an expensive joke.”

The three Iranians and one Rohingya who travelled to Cambodia in June under the plan, have been living in a villa in Phnom Penh provided by the International Organization for Migration and funded by Australia. The IOM declined to comment on the Cambodian government’s statement, saying the refugees were continuing language training and cultural orientation and had asked for privacy.

Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said he expected the Cambodian agreement to be honored.

“There are other people in Nauru now who are prepared to go to Cambodia and we’re working through the detail of that with the officials,” he said. Additional reporting by Reuters in Sydney.