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| A van transporting Montagnards seeking asylum arrives at the General Department of Immigration in Phnom Penh in December after travelling in a convoy from Ratanakkiri.Hong Menea |
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School of Vice: The SCS [South China Sea] disputes should not be allowed to deflect the world community's attention from Hanoi's continuing rights violations and persecutions of indigenous peoples of Vietnam, whose existence it does not even recognise! These peoples, including the ethnic Khmers of the Mekong Delta and the Montagnards of central Vietnam are [and have been] paying the price for simply being in the way of Vietnam's age-old, genetic expansion. Check out Cambodia's receding border line to find out! And where is the UN Special Rapporteur to Vietnam? Are these victims of Vietnamese abuses not human enough? Is this not state-driven ethnic cleansing or racialist ill-treatment of ethnic minorities in its most inhumane form?
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Thu, 28 May 2015 ppp
Alice Cuddy and Phak Seangly
“If Cambodia doesn’t want the Montagnards to come, then [Prime Minister] Hun Sen needs to go to Hanoi and persuade the leaders there to change the abusive way they are treating the Montagnards.”
The number of Montagnard asylum seekers from Vietnam awaiting processing in Phnom Penh has jumped dramatically, with 67 now stuck in limbo, according to the United Nations.
Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said that 22 more ethnic Jarai Montagnards from Vietnam’s Central Highlands have arrived in the capital in the past two weeks, having fled alleged religious and political persecution.
But the asylum seekers – some of whom arrived in January – have been left in limbo, with the Interior Ministry’s refugee department apparently refusing to process their claims.
“We have alerted the authorities on these arrivals and received no explanation on the delay in registration,” Tan said yesterday.
“The Vietnamese police make up stories and accuse them [of being] a criminal . . . and arrest them easily,”
She added that UNHCR was unable to provide details about the new asylum seekers.
Khun Sambou, deputy head of the ministry’s General Department of Immigration, declined to comment yesterday.
Other government officials could not be reached.
Since October, well over 100 Christian Montagnards have travelled to Cambodia seeking refuge from alleged abuses.