Vietnam says seven held for Highland disorder plot
HANOI - Vietnam has arrested seven ethnic minority people in the past week for attempts to organize unrest in the restive Central Highlands, state-run media said Thursday. The Defense Ministry-run Quan Doi Nhan Dan (People's Army) daily identified seven men and said they had been apprehended in the highland province of Gia Lai.
"They planned a demonstration on Christmas night and would have then instigated people in 49 villages to come to Pleiku to slander the authorities about repressing religion," said newspaper said, referring to the provincial capital.
Early in the morning on Dec. 25 "bad elements" threw stones and used a knife to oppose a police patrol, the newspaper said. They also cut the telephone line of a People's Committee office in a district, it said.
The report is the latest in a series by state-controlled media in recent days which said authorities in the Central Highlands had detected plots to incite unrest and had made arrests to ensure a peaceful Christmas.
Many minority people are Christian.
Asked about the recent reports of disorder, Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said last week the situation in the Central Highlands coffee belt, including in Gia Lai and Daklak provinces, was normal.
Human rights groups say thousands of minority people, known loosely as Montagnards but made up of many groups, protested against repression of their religious and land rights in April.
The government quelled the demonstration but denied accusations from rights groups it had used force.
Following the crackdown, the government said hundreds of minority hill people had been incited to flee into neighboring Cambodia.
Authorities have also accused the U.N. refugee agency of luring hill people into Cambodia.
Reuters - December 30, 2004.
Vietnam accuses UNHCR of instigating refugees exodus to Cambodia
State-controlled Vietnamese media on Wednesday accused the United Nations' refugee agency of stirring up an exodus of ethnic minorities from Vietnam's restive Central Highlands into Cambodia.
A front-page article in the World Security newspaper accused two staff from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees of training 13 Central Highlanders to instigate others to flee to Cambodia.
The paper identified the two as Katy Grant, deputy head of a refugee camp in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, and Y Xuan, a Cambodian of Vietnamese origin who is a translator in the camp.
The two also issued documents for the 13 highlanders, who were staying at the Phnom Penh camp, to return to Vietnam so they could prod ethnic minority members to flee, the paper said.
The two "had turned the refugee camp into a place to train people how to create disturbances and send them back to Vietnam," it said.
Thamrongsak Meechubot, the UNHCR representative in Cambodia, rejected the accusation.
"For this kind of thing, we don't even need to answer because this is clearly baseless. UNHCR would not do this kind of thing. We have no involvement in political issues in any country. Our assistance is purely humanitarian," he said.
He said the 13 refugees had left the Phnom Penh camp for Vietnam on their own because they missed their families.
More than 1,000 ethnic minority members, collectively known as Montagnards, fled Vietnam's Central Highlands after a 2001 crackdown on protests by the minorities, many of whom are Christian and claim the government persecutes them. Vietnam is predominantly Buddhist.
The refugees have been resettled in other countries, mostly the United States.
The U.N. still shelters about 700 Montagnards at camps in Phnom Penh and in Cambodia's Ratanakiri town.
The Associated Press - December 29, 2004.
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