After flight from Vietnam, the brutal jungle
RATANAKIRI PROVINCE, - Cambodia Ksor, a member of Cambodia's Jarai minority hill tribe, stepped quietly through what appeared to be an impenetrable barrier of trees, thorns, bushes and creepers in the dense jungle of northeastern Cambodia's border with Vietnam. Twice each day, for weeks now, the 25-year-old Ksor has slipped out of his village at dawn and again under the cover of nightfall and entered the jungle to bring what supplies he can to assist some of the estimated 250 Montagnard asylum seekers - including infants, young children, the sick and elderly - who have fled neighboring Vietnam's Central Highlands and sought refuge in Cambodia. More than 120 of the Montagnards, interviewed at their makeshift jungle lairs over the past five weeks, have appealed for international assistance as they languish in dire conditions in these rain-soaked jungles, fugitives from Vietnam and hunted as illegal immigrants by the Cambodian police and military.
"I am frightened. But I dare to come here even at night to help them. I feel so much pity for them," Ksor said after delivering a mound of cold rice wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled cassava plant leaves to a Montagnard family of seven children and two adults on Saturday morning. "They are a different family to me, but they are Jarai. It is like being in the same family," he said. Most of the asylum seekers fled the neighboring Vietnamese province of Gia Lai in the aftermath of demonstrations there on April 10 and 11, when thousands of hill tribespeople in the Central Highlands took up banners and marched to demand that the government return their ancestral lands and allow them to worship in freedom. More than 1,000 of the predominantly Protestant Montagnards had trekked over the Cambodian frontier when they first protested in 2001. As those bedraggled, sick and hungry asylum seekers had emerged from their forest hiding places under United Nations protection, they told of massive Vietnamese police and military repression following the demonstrations. They claimed that their Christian faith and their combat allegiance to the United States during the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, had left them despised by the authorities in Hanoi. And the spread of coffee and rubber plantations had left them bereft of the forests where they once tended jungle farms, they said.
Those who now are in flight speak of an even more vicious backlash in the Central Highlands by the Vietnamese authorities since the April demonstrations. The U.S.-based organization Human Rights Watch has reported scores of incidents of arbitrary arrests of Montagnard activists and church leaders. Vietnam has constantly denied those charges of repression and claims that the Central Highlands are quiet and peaceful. But the area remains off-limits to independent observers and journalists, who can only travel on supervised visits. Vietnamese officials blame the Montagnard demonstrations on overseas saboteurs, who they say are trying to foment unrest to destroy the country's tranquillity. Though Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia allowed almost 1,000 Montagnards to resettle in the United States after the 2001 protests and the subsequent influx, earlier this month he denied the existence of new asylum seekers. If there were any Montagnards in Cambodia, he said, they were probably separatists plotting to establish an independent state in the highlands along the border. Hun Sen warned that he would send troops to crush those who were setting up bases in the jungle. District-level officials in Ratanakiri Province, where the largest groups of Montagnards are hiding, have also warned villagers that they face arrest if they are found to be helping the asylum seekers, and that they must cut off the lifeline that Ksor and others have been providing to those in hiding.
In a tiny clearing in the thick forest canopy, Rahlan Bang, 11 years old, her six siblings and their mother sat under the blue plastic roof of their jungle home, their heads bowed, as their father led them in prayer before they polished off the rations Ksor delivered on Saturday.
The flies, the oppressive humidity and the odor of urine and sweat seemed not to bother her six brothers and sisters, aged 1 to 17 years old. But one month of living under a sheet of plastic, existing on a constant diet of rice and plant leaves, has taken a mental and physical toll on the 11-year-old girl. "In my village I never had a problem. But since I have been here, I have been sick," she said, rubbing away tears with the sleeve of her blouse before breaking into sobs.
"I don't want to go back. I am afraid of the Vietnamese. I am afraid they will arrest my father," she said, turning her back and retreating to the back of the tent.
Her 14-year-old sister moved forward to speak: "I am very worried about our safety here. Our living conditions are terrible. I can't speak about our difficulty."
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The children don't have enough to eat and they haven't had a bath in the month since they arrived in Cambodia, said their 40-year-old mother, wrestling with the year-old infant, strapped to her back in a blanket, who fought and cried to be breast-fed.
"They see the river valley," she said, "but we can't take a bath because we are afraid of the police." The families visited in the jungle have not dared to venture out; they are afraid that the Cambodian and Vietnamese authorities hunting them may be watching all the river sources, knowing that they must eventually emerge to collect drinking water and clean themselves.
With reports from the local hill tribes that one asylum seeker died late last month from eating poisonous mushrooms, and with aid organizations prevented by the government from distributing humanitarian assistance, it may only be a matter of time before there are more fatalities. The Cambodian Red Cross has said its hands are tied until the government allows them to provide humanitarian assistance.
The Cambodian government forced the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to close its office in Ratanakiri Province in April, and since then only those Montagnards who have been able to slip in to the UN agency's office in Phnom Penh, the capital, have been granted asylum. More than 80 are housed there now, awaiting resettlement overseas. But Thamrongsak Meechubot, the UN refugee agency's acting representative in Cambodia, said Wednesday that the government had assured him of free access to provide humanitarian assistance to the asylum seekers in Ratanakiri.
Representatives from the UN, the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry will arrive in the province on Thursday in an attempt to make contact with the asylum seekers. A mechanism for determining their claims of asylum will be worked out later. But the first step will be to assess the needs of those in hiding, Meechubot said.
The Cambodian government, he said, has "assured us we will have free access to those people. We take this message very positively." But in the political chess game in which the Montagnards are caught, it is unclear what will transpire. The province's governor, Kham Khoeun, confirmed that he had sent officials to persuade local villagers to turn over the asylum seekers, but he denied that any villagers had been threatened with arrest if they helped the refugees. "We want them to come out of the jungle," Kham Khoeun said, so that the government and the UN agency can decide "whether they are really refugees or not." But he added: "They entered Cambodia illegally, and if they continue to hide in the jungle longer or organize themselves as an armed group, we will crack down."
By Kevin Doyle - International Herald Tribune - July 15, 2004
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