Lionel Rosenblatt, Refugees International’s president emeritus, is currently surveying conditions of displacement in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. His trip will focus on four ethnic groups: the Hmong in Laos and Thailand, the Mlabri in northern Thailand, the Phnong in eastern Cambodia and the Montagnards, a group that is fleeing to Cambodia from Vietnam. The purpose of the mission is to monitor protection programs started in response to earlier RI trips to the region.

Several years ago RI was instrumental in enabling a group of Hmong refugees at Wat Tham Krabok outside of Bangkok to resettle in the U.S. However, there are other groups of Hmong that need protection from being forced back into Laos.

The Mlabri, also known as people of the yellow leaf, is a small, nomadic tribe fighting extinction. RI has been working to help the Mlabri preserve some of their land and customs.

RI helped a group of Phnong resettle into their native area in Mondulkiri Province in eastern Cambodia after they returned from Thailand following the mass killings during the Khmer Rouge period three decades ago. Since their return, RI has helped fund a local organization to support them, established a weaving program to help the Phnong earn additional money, and generated food shipments from the World Food Program during times of food shortages. The Phnong are now well established on their ancestral lands, but now the slash and burn farmers, who supplement their groups with traditional hunter-gatherer methods, face another threat: the Cambodian government is selling off vast amounts of their land to Chinese timber companies.

Montagnards continue to face discrimination by the government in the central highlands of Vietnam. As a result, Montagnards are continuing to flee to Cambodia, where the protection they get from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Cambodian government is uneven. RI is working with the UNHCR and the U.S. government to create opportunities for Montagnards to resettle to third countries.