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UN to help return ethnic Vietnamese back home

| Source: REUTERS

UN to help return ethnic Vietnamese back home

CHREY THOM, Cambodia (Reuter): Some 6,000 ethnic Vietnamese stranded at Cambodia's eastern river border for more than a year after fleeing Khmer Rouge massacres are suffering a growing sense of despair, a UN official says.

Michael Kirby, the UN's human rights chief for Cambodia, said he would try quiet diplomacy to persuade the Phnom Penh government to let the group return to their homes.

"It is simply not acceptable to have them living in boats, with illness, with their children not being educated and with a growing sense of despair," Kirby said during a day-long inspection visit on Saturday.

He said he would use "reason and persuasion" in talks with government leaders to try and get permission for the Vietnamese, to return to their traditional floating homes among the fishing communities on the Tonle Sap (Great Lake).

"Most of them (ethnic Vietnamese) have long connections over many generations in the country," said Kirby, an Australian judge here on a two-week fact-finding mission.

"They don't want to go back into Vietnam -- they want to go back to their country in Cambodia."

The estimated 6,000 trapped at the Chrey Thom border checkpoint are the remnants of about 30,000 ethnic Vietnamese who fled downriver by boat from their homes around the Great Lake during March and April 1993.

The others have managed to return from the border with Vietnam, sometimes by bribing their way back.

Forgotten

UN workers fear the Cambodian government may use a draft immigration law due to be passed early next month to bar the return of the "forgotten 6,000".

"Repeated interviews and surveys have established that all or most people have been resident in Cambodia for many years and in many cases for generations," said a United Nations human rights report compiled in March.

"Many families are facing a desperate economic situation through loss of livelihood."

Khmer Rouge guerrillas murdered about 100 ethnic Vietnamese, mostly women and children, in attacks before the May 1993 election in Cambodia.

Vietnam and Cambodia have a long history of hostility and the presence of the ethnic Vietnamese minority in Cambodia is an extremely sensitive one, complicated by recent arrivals of illegal immigrants seeking jobs.

Gradual territorial encroachment by Vietnam over the centuries has fueled Khmer suspicions, providing fertile ground for racist rabble-rousing by extremist elements including the xenophobic Khmer Rouge.

Almost all the ethnic Vietnamese at Chrey Thom hold Cambodian identity papers, including many families with passports issued by the 1960s-era Sihanouk government.

"The government doesn't allow us to go back -- I don't know why. I come from Kompong Chhnang Province. I've got 12 family members living on this boat -- only nine receive a food ration," said Doi Yang Va, born in Kompong Chhnang in 1942.

"One of my sons has already returned to the Tonle Sap. I miss my native home very much," said Vieng Nheng Nan, 49, also born in Kompong Chhnang.

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