Government Says UNHCR Can Assess Assylum Claims

The government will allow the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to assess the asylum claims of Montagnards languishing in Ratanakkiri province with little food, water and medicine, government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said on Thursday.

“We will allow the UNHCR to go down to the refugee hiding places with the Royal Government to select the Montagnards and help them,” Khieu Kanharith said.

The government’s decision comes merely days after Prime Minister Hun Sen threatened to use the military to flush out any alleged Montagnard militants and as new photos surfaced of 85 Montagnards, including young children, hiding in the jungle. Human rights groups and diplomats welcomed the government’s latest decision, though the UNHCR said Thursday it is still waiting for an official word from the government.

“If they are going to say we can go up there and assist the Montagnards, that would be welcome information,” said Thamrongsak Meechubot, the UNHCR’s representative in Phnom Penh. “The government has been telling everyone [about its decision], but not us.”

Meechubot has written letters to the government asking for an interim arrangement that would allow the UNHCR to immediately help the Montagnards, instead of waiting for a new memorandum of understanding to be signed towards the end of the month. Jean-Marie Fakhouri, the Geneva-based head of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, is scheduled to visit Phnom Penh on July 26 to sign the new MOU, which is expected to contain the conditions for opening UNHCR offices in Ratanakkiri and Mondolkiri provinces.

“This is good news, if it is true,” Canadian Ambassador Stefanie Beck said Thursday of the government’s decision. “We hope the UNHCR would travel [to Ratanakkiri] very soon. We trust that this could happen under the existing agreement, and not wait for the new MOU.”

The UNHCR is ready to send staff to Ratanakkiri and mobilize assistance for the Montagnards, Meechubot said. Several aid groups have also expressed their willingness to provide support, he said.

“We are waiting for the government to tell us they want us to go,” Meechubot said.

New photographs emerged on Thursday of a group of 85 Montagnard asylum seekers, including 61 men, eight women and 16 children, the youngest of whom is 20 months old. They lacked food and shelter and were suffering from malaria, fever and rashes, Radio Free Asia reported.

The group of 85 is separate from 42 asylum seekers who have been interviewed and photographed in Ratanakkiri in the past five weeks.

Prime Minister Hun Sen wrote to Queen Norodom Monineath on Wednesday, saying that the government would provide humanitarian assistance to Montagnard asylum seekers if authorities can find them, but did not mention it would allow the UNHCR to determine their asylum claims, according to a letter posted on King Norodom Sihanouk’s Web site on Thursday.

“The government never received any information to find the location in order to help [the Montagnards] because the people who know the information always claim that if they disclose the hidden place, then the government will arrest and deport [the Montagnards] back to the Vietnamese government,” Hun Sen wrote to the Queen.

The letter did not include any reference to Montagnards who may be fighting for independence, as he alleged while talking to reporters earlier this week.

Local NGOs praised the government for letting the UNHCR determine the status of the Montagnards in the jungle, but were waiting to see whether it would actually happen.

“I think that if the government really has the goodwill to allow the UNHCR to help the refugees it is good, because right now they are lacking food and assistance,” said Pen Bonnar, head of the Ratanakkiri office of rights group Adhoc. “But I am still suspicious whether the government really wants to help. I want the government to really help the Montagnards, not just make claims and do nothing.”

Sok Sam Oeun, executive director of the Cambodian Defenders Project, called the government’s decision a “very good start.”

“I think the situation is getting better and better,” he said. “We can go step by step.”

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