Twelve nights of running through the jungle brought one Montagnard to the Cambodian border and freedom last year. But now he lays awake at night thinking of his wife and seven children, still living in his Vietnamese village under the eyes of menacing authorities.
“I cannot eat. I have a headache all day. I think about my family,” said the man, one of about 900 Montagnards staying at an abandoned garment factory near Old Stadium in Phnom Penh while awaiting resettlement to the US.
The man fidgets as he speaks, rubbing his left arm near a tattoo. His eyes are shaded by a camouflage baseball cap with “USA” and a Nike logo on it. He says he is 46 and a former soldier. He does not give his name.
Like many of his fellow Montagnards, he left his family behind when he fled Vietnam after a government push to crush ethnic dissension in the Central Highlands.
After nearly a year in UN camps in Mondolkiri and Rattanakiri provinces, the Montagnards were moved in recent days to Phnom Penh. But the governments of Cambodia and Vietnam have vowed to seal the border so no more Montagnards can flee.
The former soldier spoke to a reporter as he waited for an X-ray at the National Tuberculosis Hospital. He said he remembers meeting US soldiers in 1973, when he was a 16-year-old soldier battling the North Vietnamese.
“I worked as a militia guard in our village,” he said. “I remember when I met them. They said nothing to us because we could not speak English. But they were smiling.”
He said the US soldiers did not make any promises of future resettlement to the US in exchange for fighting with them.
He left his village last year with a group of 47 men. They ran at night. Sitting next to him Thursday at the hospital was Nie Y’Cut, who said he fled Vietnam last Aug 17 with a group of 16 men.
“We were very afraid,” he said. They worried that landmines were hidden in the paths that snaked through the jungle, and when the Vietnamese police closed in they could hear the police dogs barking behind them.
The soldier speaks up again.
He says he is excited to go the US, but that it is his second choice. “We want the UN to liberate the Montagnards,” he said. “We want the UN to help us in our own home.”
The Montagnards oppose Vietnam’s land policies, which the Montagnards say allow incoming Vietnamese settlers to take over the Montagnards’ ancestral lands.
“I am afraid of the Vietnamese who want our farmland,” said Nie Y’Cut. He said he will go to the US, but as soon as Vietnam offers the Montagnards their ancestral lands back, he will return.
A UN official said Thursday that bureaucratic paperwork is about all that remains before the first of the Montagnards begin moving to the US. There are some families among the group, and they will begin to fly out in about three weeks, the UN official said. He estimated it would take two months to process all the Montagnards.
The Montagnards’ fear of Vietnamese authorities taking the back has begun to melt as they spend more time in Phnom Penh under the protection of international officials.
Still, the refugees speak in halting sentences, and as they respond to questions the often hesitate and look at their friends before continuing.
One man, who looked to be 50 but claimed to be 30, says he was too young to remember when US soldiers asked his fellow Montagnards to help them fight the North Vietnamese.
His wife and four children are still in Gia Lai, in the Central Highlands, he says. He does not say his name printed for fear that Vietnamese authorities will harass them.
He faces a tough life ahead in the US, where he has no family or relatives and does not know the language. He will use everything he learned as a farmer to try to survive in his new home, which will likely be the state of North Carolina, host to the largest Montagnard population in the US.
“It will depend on our own abilities,” he said. “We cannot estimate what will happen with our destinies.”
