President's Corner: Vietnamese Montagnards Still Need Protection

Refugees International was founded in 1979 by Sue Morton, an American housewife living in Tokyo, to promote the resettlement of refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam to the United States. She and other refugee rights activists were phenomenally successful; hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians have resettled in the U.S., and resettlement is continuing, although the numbers are small.

Thirty years ago, world attention was focused on the huge displacement from Asia following the U.S. retreat from Vietnam and the genocide in Cambodia. Today the world is focused on massive displacement in other places—Iraq and the Darfur region of Sudan. But the Montagnards in Vietnam—hill people from the Central Highlands there—still need protection from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S.

Montagnards have long faced persecution in Vietnam. One reason is that they sided with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In addition, many of them practice Christianity in a Communist country, and there is an independence movement in the Central Highlands. As a result, Montagnards have been seeking asylum in Cambodia, some claiming religious persecution; others claiming that the government has taken their land.

On several occasions since 2001, when Refugees International received reports that Cambodia was forcing Montagnard refugees back to Vietnam, we have intervened to protect Montagnards. In one case, the U.S. agreed to resettle from Cambodia up to 1,000 Montagnards to protect them from being returned to Vietnam. Many of them joined a large Montagnard community in North Carolina.

In 2005, UNHCR and the governments of Cambodia and Vietnam signed an agreement covering the processing of 750 Montagnards who were then seeking asylum in Cambodia. Basically, the agreement provided that the refugees could remain in Cambodia until the UNHCR determined their status; Montagnards who qualified as refugees fleeing persecution would be resettled to third countries, mainly the U.S., while others would be returned to Vietnam. Of the initial 750 Motagnards, 78% were resettled to third countries, while the balance went back to Vietnam, usually because they were determined to be economic migrants rather than refugees fleeing persecution. The arrangement continues to apply to new asylum seekers. Last year, for example, 277 new Montagnards came to UNHCR shelters in Cambodia.

The U.S. is not a party to the tri-partite agreement, but it plays a key role by offering to resettle Montagnards who qualify as refugees (Canada, Sweden, Finland and Norway have also resettled Montagnards in recent years) and by reviewing all cases that UNHCR turns down for resettlement. Last year the U.S. reviewed the cases of 75 people the UN had rejected for refugee status and agreed to resettle 33 of them.

The U.S. review process is not popular with the UNHCR or the State Department; officials in both agencies say the U.S. review undercuts the UNHCR and sets a double standard. Indeed it does—and should. That is because a U.S. law called the Lautenberg Amendment requires the U.S. to make resettlement easier for people fleeing countries that practice religious persecution. In its latest Human Rights report, the State Department charges Vietnam with restrictions on religious freedom and specifically says:

“Police and local officials in some areas strove to prevent Protestants who
belonged to unregistered or unrecognized groups from assembling to worship. This
situation was particularly acute in some areas of the Central Highlands.”

The State Department is considering changes that could make it more difficult for Montagnards rejected for refugee status to get their applications reviewed—and perhaps accepted—by the U.S. This would be a mistake. Vietnam was been reducing religious repression and allowing more outside observers to monitor conditions in the Central Highlands, but as long as Montagnards can demonstrate continued repression and make legitimate claims for asylum in third countries, the U.S. should do all it can to protect them. The numbers are small, but the principle of protection from persecution is large and indivisible.

Khmer Rouge War Crimes Trial Still in Doubt

RI Consultant Eugene Carlson has sent more from Phnom Penh. (You can also read his earlier postcard from Cambodia.)

Are the aging leaders of Cambodia’s bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge heading to trial at last?

Nearly 30 years after their defeat, will a United Nations-sponsored war crimes tribunal finally convene to judge the perpetrators of “Year Zero” -- the uniquely barbaric revolution that tortured and murdered up to one quarter of Cambodia’s population in the 1970s and kindled one of the greatest refugee flows of modern times?

Maybe yes. Maybe no.

Odds of the trial getting underway, always part of the conversational undercurrent in Phnom Penh, ramped up in recent days, due in part to an unusual gathering of government officials, diplomats, academics and minor Khmer Rouge figures.

Organized by AdHoc, a local non-governmental organization, and billed as an attempt at reconciliation, the idea was to record a wide range of views on Cambodia’s holocaust and then to broadcast the proceedings in districts, town and villages throughout the country.

If the U.N. tribunal fails to gel, the thinking goes, perhaps the recorded testimony will help a questioning Cambodian population come to terms, at least partially, with their national trauma.

At the two-day conference, scholars debated the fine point of whether four years of mass murder by the Khmer Rouge met the definition of “genocide” or was merely morally appalling behavior of an extreme nature.

A particularly poignant witness was Nhem En, chief photographer at the notorious Toul Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh. His simple black and white portraits of men and women, boys and girls, destined for execution, have achieved iconic status as documents of Khmer Rouge horror. Nhem En apologized for the role he played.

“I hope these photographs will always unsettle us and make us uncomfortable,” said U.S. Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. “Each of these pictures is worth a thousand tears.”

Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes trial organizing staggers on. It’s officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Years of work by an international team of lawyers, jurists and human rights activists has pushed the trial somewhat closer to take off.

There’s a new courthouse. A panel of 30 judges and prosecutors from 11 countries, including Cambodia, has been named. Prosecutors say they’re ready to hand down indictments. Posters illustrating an anonymous Khmer Rouge leader testifying to the court have been sent around the country. Bumper stickers are on the way.

International donors have contributed the bulk of a three-year, $56 million budget. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it was contributing $100,000, no strings attached.

Yet major, perhaps insurmountable, hurdles remain. They flow largely from the U.N’s controversial decision – required to win Cambodia’s cooperation -- to yield a significant amount of discretion to Cambodian law and its judiciary. The result is that Cambodia owns five of the seats on the nine-member judges’ panel and a number of politically-connected lawyers are installed in top ECCC posts.

And here’s where the process has gone aground. It’s no secret that the local bar and judiciary take signals from the government.

Close observers of Cambodian politics say Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former mid-level Khmer Rouge combatant and an acknowledged superb political tactician in his current role, is worried that he and other high officials in Cambodia’s ruling party may be tarred by trial testimony.

(Trial rules do, however, limit prosecution to “senior leaders” of the Khmer Rouge, which eliminates Hun Sen from the start. He’s also on record as supporting the tribunal.)

Behind the scenes, however, the ECCC’s Cambodians have argued incessantly over minutiae as well as important trial rules that include such international standards as proper rules of evidence and a credible defense for the accused, all in a public forum.

The delays have been so maddening that one or more of the non-Cambodian judges are thought to be weighing the option of resigning.

Ultimately, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon could withdraw United Nations sponsorship, a move that would likely reduce Cambodia’s standing in the international legal community to a façade.

There’s also speculation that China, an historic ally of Cambodia and a supporter of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, would like the trial to quietly go away.

Beyond seeking justice for Khmer Rouge victims, many believe the future of other trials for crimes against humanity is at stake. They ask: How can an international judicial process that prosecuted mass murderers in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the former Yugoslavia, be manipulated to ignore the bloody record of the Khmer Rouge?

The logrolling is driving trial supporters crazy. One insider who’s worked at the top level of tribunal planning for several years, shrugs his shoulders, saying he has absolutely no idea whether or not the trial will take place.

Perhaps the leading indicator of doubt over an imminent start to the trial is the nonchalance shown by the expected dozen or so defendants. Only one has been detained.

Such leading lights of the Khmer Rouge as Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Nuon Chea, now elderly men, live openly and are occasionally quoted in the press.

Torture and killing? They say they had no idea. Must have been someone else.

A Postcard from Cambodia

RI Consultant Eugene Carlson wrote the following about his visit this week to the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Eugene and RI President Emeritus Lionel Rosenblatt are currently traveling in Cambodia to meet with Phnong communities in Mondolkiri Province and assess the progress of RI-supported projects. RI has a long history of working with the Phnong, you can read more about it on our website.

If tourism is key to your nation’s economic success, and one of the most popular tourist sites is difficult to get to, it makes sense to improve access. Even if the site is one of modern history’s most horrific venues.

The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek is 15 kilometers from central Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. I drove there with a friend a couple of days ago. A visit to Choeung Ek, and its companion site in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge’s house of torture at Tuol Sleng, is a gruesome must-see for most visitors to Cambodia.

After leaving the southern edge of the city, we bounced slowly along a deeply rutted dirt road. Tour buses coming and going from the same site, crawled slowly around deep potholes. Next to our track, however, highway crews were well along toward finishing an up-to-date paved road. In a country where road building and repair is a low priority, tourists will soon whisk from Phnom Penh to the gates of the Killing Fields in speed and comfort.

An estimated 17,000 men, women and children, marked for execution by the Khmer Rouge, were trucked to Choeung Ek. Shot or bludgeoned when bullets became scarce, their bodies were dumped in shallow pits dug among the trees of a longan orchard.

The remains of some 9,000 victims have been exhumed. Their skulls are stacked in a tall stupa, visible behind glass windows. Bone fragments are stacked in neat piles along paths that curve among three-dozen circular grassy pits where bodies were recovered.

Visitors walk slowly along the paths, lost in thought. Small butterflies flit among the trees. One lands briefly on a small stack of bone fragments near my feet. Children wave from a nearby field. All is quiet.

Except in the parking lot where the ubiquitous souvenir shop beckons. What items do you stock on your shelves for tourists who have just come face to face with genocide? Silver chop sticks. Bracelets. Ceremonial daggers. Ivory napkin holders. Sunglasses. Cotton scarves. Knock-offs of the cigarette lighters used by American soldiers in Vietnam. And, of course, tee-shirts.

Depressed by the tchotkes, I asked Kal Yan, the shopkeeper, to show me his best-selling item. He pointed to two books: First They Killed My Father, a survivor’s tale of the Khmer Rouge years by Loung Ung, and The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan, director of Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Project. A glimmer of good taste from the tourist trade.

Revisiting The Killing Fields

I recently watched The Killing Fields, which is based on the true story of Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times journalist who reports from Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge take power in the mid-1970s. His close relationship with Dith Pran, a local Cambodian journalist, is at the heart of the story.

It is a very moving film, and powerfully depicts how the violence and terror inflicted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia affected everyone in the country, from the local population to Western journalists and diplomats, who were eventually evacuated and left many of their Cambodian friends behind. Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his Cambodia reporting, while Dith Pran, whose support was indispensable to Schanberg's work, was left to struggle to survive the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge.

During its four years of rule, from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge tortured and executed the local population, or forced them into work camps where they lived in deplorable conditions. It is estimated that almost 2 million people died during this time.

To escape the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror many Cambodians fled to neighboring countries. About 40,000 Cambodian refugees were able to flee to Thailand while the Khmer Rouge was in power, and several hundred thousand more fled after the Vietnamese invasion in late 1978 which toppled Pol Pot. This refugee crisis led to the founding of RI in 1979. At the time of the initial refugee outflow, Lionel Rosenblatt, who later became RI's President, was working to support refugees out of the US Embassy in Thailand. His life-long commitment to refugee advocacy grew out of this experience.

RI continues to be engaged in Cambodia, supporting one of the last groups to return to their homes after the long war finally ended in the late 1990s. You can view information on our work in the region and our most recent policy recommendations here.

Both Dith Pran and actor Sam Waterston, who stars as Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields, have been involved with RI, most recently as Emeritus Board members. Sam has also taken part in various RI advocacy efforts, including narrating our documentary on the genocide in Darfur, On Our Watch. And each year on his birthday, fans of Sam Waterston generously give donations to RI in honor of the actor.