UN to help return ethnic Vietnamese back home

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.