Police in Mondolkiri province denied allegations from human rights workers on Sunday that they, in cooperation with Vietnamese police and soldiers, arrested and deported 160 Montagnards along the border last week and are pursuing others in hiding.
“It is a lie,” Reach Samnang, Mondolkiri’s police chief, said Sunday of the allegations. “It’s not true. We have nothing to hide.”
Human rights workers on the border said they received reports on Sunday that police arrested 100 Montagnards in Pechr Chenda district’s Pou Met village on April 12. An additional 60 Montagnards were arrested
Wednesday in O’Reang district’s Dak Dam village, they alleged.
A smaller group of Montagnard asylum seekers escaped police detection and are now on the run, the human rights workers claimed.
“Vietnamese soldiers and police are traveling freely on Cambodian soil, hunting for those people,” one of the human rights workers in Mondolkiri, who declined to name himself or his organization, said Sunday.
The human rights workers said all of those arrested and in hiding in the jungles along the border have fled villages in the Vietnam Central Highlands following Montagnard demonstrations for land rights and religious freedom on April 10 that reportedly turned bloody.
After similar demonstrations in 2001, hundreds of Montagnards sought asylum in Cambodia.
Though information from the Central Highlands remains scarce since foreign journalists and diplomats, including the US Embassy in Hanoi, have been denied access to the region, Vietnamese state media reported on Saturday that 10,000 Montagnards took part in the Easter weekend demonstrations.
Thousands of Montagnards in three Vietnamese provinces—Daklak, Gia Lai and Daknong—converged on provincial capitals on April 10, according to a report on VNExpress, Vietnam’s most popular online newspaper. Some protesters carried canes, stones, swords and bows and arrows, the report said.
Another Vietnamese state-run newspaper, Thanh Nien (Young People), reported that two Montagnards died in the protests last weekend. One died after being pelted by stones thrown by other protesters, while the other was crushed by a tractor driven by a Montagnard, the newspaper reported.
Thanh Nine depicted the mostly Christian Montagnards as a raging mob, looting markets, destroying property and seriously injuring about 80 Vietnamese police and soldiers during the protests.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch gave a different account of the protests in a report issued last week, saying that clashes erupted when police used tear gas, electric truncheons and water cannons to prevent the demonstrators from entering provincial capitals.
The group also received reports of Vietnamese police firing on Montagnards and beating others to death.
“Since last weekend, dozens, if not hundreds, of Montagnards are missing,” the report said, adding that at least 270 Montagnards were deported from Cambodia last year.
(Additional reporting by The Associated Press)
