Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said Tuesday the government will continue to deport Vietnamese ethnic minority asylum seekers, even as the government prepares a subdecree to take over from the UN’s refugee agency the process of determining who is a refugee .
“They are illegal immigrants,” Hor Namhong said. “Whenever they reach our border we send them back,” he said, brushing aside recent calls from King Norodom Sihanouk, the opposition party and human rights groups to open the border to Montagnard asylum seekers. Hor Namhong’s comments reinforce claims from human rights workers and opposition lawmakers that hundreds of Montagnards have been deported since massive Montagnard demonstrations rocked Vietnam’s Central Highlands on April 10 and April 11.
Cambodian police have denied deporting Montagnards.
Hor Namhong called the Montagnards “economic refugees” who were coming into Cambodia with the assistance of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The UNHCR “abused our sovereignty,” Hor Namhong told reporters at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “They incite Mon-
tagnards to come to Cambodia.”
Hor Namhong also said the government would prepare a subdecree that would allow the government to decide on asylum claims. He would not elaborate on what it would say. Contacted later Tuesday, Hem Heng, the foreign ministry’s spokesman, said he had no information on the contents of the subdecree.
The asylum seeker legislation stemmed from a meeting between Prime Minister Hun Sen and senior Geneva-based UNHCR officials last September. The UNHCR prepared the subdecree that is similar to asylum laws in other countries that signed the 1954 Refugee Convention, Nikola Mihajlovic, the UNHCR’s Phnom Penh office representative, said Tuesday. The UNHCR office is charged with weighing asylum claims in Cambodia.
Though Mihajlovic maintained that his office would retain a high monitoring ability over the determination process, UN human rights envoy Peter Leuprecht questioned the procedure and timing of the handover of asylum determination to the government.
“Cambodia’s recent record of failing to comply with its international obligations regarding refugees makes the timing of this ‘handing over of ownership’ particularly unfortunate,” Leuprecht wrote in his yearly human rights report.
The government’s allegations against the UNHCR were spelled out in an Interior Ministry document obtained last month, accusing the refugee office of luring Montagnards across the border and secretly moving them to Phnom Penh. The charges prompted a recent visit from Jean-Marie Fakhouri, director of the UNHCR’s Asia Bureau in Geneva.
Calling the charges of people smuggling “ludicrous,” Fakhouri said, “Unfortunately we haven’t been able to communicate [with the government] at the level that allowed me to share concerns and receive explanations about the situation.”
Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak said last week that border soldiers “can tell by the face” whether a Montagnard is a refugee or an illegal immigrant.
That statement was met with incredulity by Mihajlovic Tuesday.
“It’s a Catch-22 situation,” Mihajlovic said. “The [government] says there are no refugees, just illegals. We have to hear whether the [Montagnards] have a claim or not. But we are denied access” to the border regions.
Despite the deportations and increased police activity in the border regions over the past month, five more Montagnards arrived at UNHCR’s Phnom Penh office on Saturday, Mihajlovic said. Eighty-seven Montagnards are under UN protection in Phnom Penh.
Mihajlovic dismissed Hor Namhong’s allegations that Montagnards are “economic refugees.” “We don’t deal with economic refugees,” he said. “If they are not political refugees, they would not be under UNHCR protection.”
