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| The Montagnards are based in Vietnam's Central Highland provinces (Image: RFA) |
By Brent Crane
The country has long struggled to deal humanely with the refugees from Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
In May, while much of the international media focused on Cambodia’s preparation for the arrival of refugees coming to Cambodia from Nauru as part of a controversial $35 million aid deal with Australia, Phnom Penh took efforts to block the arrival of a less welcome group of asylum seekers.
“[A]lmost 1,000 [Cambodian] troops were deployed along the Vietnamese border…Soldiers…said yesterday that the main objective was clear: to catch Montagnards,” reported the Phnom Penh Post in early May.
Fleeing Montagnards, a Christian minority tribal group from the Central Highlands of Vietnam whose persecution there is well-documented, have long been an enduring thorn in Cambodia’s side. Phnom Penh, a signatory of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol that mandates Cambodia allow asylum seekers to pursue protection claims, often deports them as illegal economic migrants.
“Nowhere is the discrimination of treatment accorded to refugees more stark than in the comparison of the treatment of the Montagnards versus the red carpet treatment for the refugees from Nauru,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, to The Diplomat.
But the Montagnards are not the only ethnic asylum seekers Cambodia has sent packing. In 2009, twenty Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority from northwest China, who had fled to Cambodia were forcibly sent back to the People’s Republic. All of the adults were jailed, including four who received life sentences. Three days later Beijing announced $900 million in aid to Cambodia. While the deportation of the Uyghurs was widely and swiftly condemned by the West, the Montagnard expulsions, in comparison, have produced barely a peep.
Read the full story at The Diplomat