Refugees awaken ghosts of Vietnam
Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, all it took was the influx into Cambodia of some 680 Montagnards from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to resuscitate some of the ghosts of the Vietnam War.
The end result is a squabble involving a number of American advocacy groups, the Cambodian government, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's human rights envoy in Phnom Penh, the UNHCR(UN refugee agency), the Vietnamese government and the US State Department - the intensity of which is totally out of proportion both with the issues involved and the number of people concerned.
The term Montagnards was coined by the French to describe the indigenous populations of Vietnam's Central Highlands consisting of a group of five major tribes belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian
group. Despised by the Vietnamese who referred to them as savages, they lived in remote mountain settlements, practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and adhered to their own ancestral habits.
The first exodus to Cambodia occurred in 2001, when some 300 Montagnards arrived in Phnom Penh claiming that they were persecuted in Vietnam. The second exodus occurred early this year with the arrivals numbering about 400. Cambodia, having adhered to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, was committed to provide every Montagnard with a hearing so as to determine whether there was a claim to refugee status, namely a serious and credible fear of persecution for political, religious or ethnic reasons.
Consistent with its mandate, the UNHCR rescreened the Montagnards for refugee status with the result that 443 were recognized as refugees while 143 did not meet the criteria, with those remaining having simply disappeared.
Under normal circumstances such a small number of refugees would have gone unnoticed. That it did not was a 30-year-old throwback to the days of the Vietnam War and hinged on two issues, which had already bedeviled the boat people issue, namely, that all people leaving Vietnam are not necessarily persecuted and that those not recognized as refugees have only the choice between voluntary return and deportation.
As a signatory to the Refugee Convention, Cambodia is committed not to return to its country of origin any recognized refugee on the assumption that doing so would expose him or her to persecution. Conversely, Cambodia has no obligation to accept for permanent asylum a refugee who happens to be on its soil. It has, however, the right to return to the country of origin a person who has applied for refugee status but does not meet the criteria for been recognized as such. This was the same position adopted by all the countries of Southeast Asia during the boat people exodus. Countries would accept the landing of boat people on a temporary basis, provided they would either be accepted by Western countries for permanent settlement or returned to Vietnam if not entitled to refugee status.
Cambodia took the same position regarding the recent arrival of Montagnards for a number of substantive historical reasons.
The first clash between the Vietnamese and the Montagnards occurred in 1954 when the US-sponsored government of Ngo Dinh Diem, following the Geneva agreements, resettled in the Central Highlands some 200,000 low-land Vietnamese who had fled south after the partition of the country. The move was followed by a policy of Vietnamization of the Montagnards, which included the abolition of tribal courts and limitations on self-rule. This encroachment met with increasing resistance and in 1957, a group of Montagnard tribal leaders created the Bajaraka, a loose alliance opposed to the Vietnamese. In 1964 a militant faction within the Bajaraka split away from the main group and created the FULRO, a French acronym for the United Liberation Front of the Oppressed People. FULRO was an armed insurgent group essentially targeting the South Vietnamese government but in no way related to the Vietcong.
By the mid 1960s, the situation in the Central Highlands, where the Vietcong had made major inroads, had become so critical to Saigon that the Americans, who had not yet directly intervened in the war, convinced the South Vietnamese authorities to let the US Special Forces have a go in the region. Operating in small groups at the village level, the Special Forces by 1964 had succeeded in creating the CIDG (Civilian Indigenous Defense Group). These were informal units of Montagnards whose function was both to defend their hamlets and launch raids on the Ho Chi Minh trail. While the CIDG did become a minor thorn in the side of the Vietcong, their motivation was never ideological and rested on tribal loyalty and resentment against the Vietnamese. Thus, predictably, on September 24, 1964, a CIDG unit, after having restrained its Special Forces advisers, proceeded to ambush a South Vietnamese army unit, killing some 70 in the process. The incident seriously strained relations between the Americans and the Saigon government and even more so as many of the Special Forces, who had established close personal links with individual members of the CIDG, had more sympathy for the Montagnards than for the Vietnamese. Following the incident the FULRO moved its base to Cambodia, from where it organized a series of attacks against South Vietnamese units in December 1965.
While the Americans succeeded in restraining Saigon from launching a widespread counter attack, what prevailed from then on was an uneasy relation between the South Vietnamese and the FULRO, which retained its base in Cambodia.
After the fall of Saigon not much was heard about the fate of the Montagnards in Vietnam. As for those who had moved to Cambodia under the FULRO, they were mercilessly hunted down by the Khmer Rouge and sought refuge in the jungle under the most adverse conditions. What was left of them, about 400 in all including women and children, surrendered to the UN forces in Cambodia in 1992 and were swiftly evacuated to North Carolina where they joined another FULRO group that had been resettled there in 1986. By that time the name FULRO had been put in abeyance, replaced by "Montagnard Foundation". This was an organization created in South Carolina in 1990 by Ksor Kok, a native of Gia Lai province allegedly sent to the US by the founder of FULRO, Y-Bam, with the purpose of continuing the organization's mission.
While little is known about how the Montagnards fared in Vietnam after 1975, preserving their traditional way of life in a changing world must have been a challenge. Vietnam's movement toward privatization and the creation of a market economy compounded the problems of the Montagnards. Vietnam is now the world's second biggest coffee producer, most of it grown in the Central Highlands. This has put a premium on land, often owned or claimed to be owned, by the Montagnards. With their traditional way of life already threatened both by economic development and by Vietnam's demographic expansion, all it took was the combination of insensitive Vietnamese officials, heavy handed local policemen and incitement from abroad to bring the simmer to a boiling point. In absolute numbers the "crisis" was infinitesimal. Of an overall total of some 650,000 Montagnards living in the Central Highlands, those who left between 2001 and 2004 amounted to no more than 700.
In order to address the exodus, a tripartite memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed on January 5 between Cambodia, Vietnam and the UNHCR. The MoU provided that Vietnam would accept the return of those Montagnards who did not qualify for refugee status while those who did would be resettled in third countries.
Acting on the basis of the MoU, Cambodia on July 18 sent back to Vietnam 101 Montagnards who did not qualify for refugee status in addition to 43 other who had volunteered to go back.
In itself the deportation was inconsequential. The forced return of illegal migrants is a daily occurrence throughout the world. But the deportees were from Vietnam and the country of failed asylum was Cambodia. That was all it took to trigger a knee-jerk reaction among a number of American advocacy groups that had never come to terms both with America's defeat in Vietnam and with the fact that the Vietnam of today is not the Vietnam of 30 years ago. And the events that unfolded in the subsequent weeks were, in a microcosm, a mirror image of a setting on which the curtain had fallen more than a decade ago with the end of the boat people crisis.
Not all 101 Montagnards expelled in July made it to Vietnam. At the border the Vietnamese police checked their identities and seven were denied entrance. They subsequently acknowledged that they were Cambodians who had tried to pass themselves off as Montagnards in order to immigrate to the US. One had even been interviewed on the Voice of America.
Following the repatriation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) made public a statement bemoaning that the UNHCR had not monitored the returnees or given detailed information regarding their mistreatment upon return. While at first glance the statement appeared plausible it was short of two items: the names of those mistreated and the source of the information.
While globally HRW is considered credible, as an American organization it has a record of being less than credible on matters pertaining to Vietnam
Thus in 1989, when the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) for Refugees from Vietnam was adopted, HRW violently opposed the return scheme on the grounds that monitoring was insufficient and returnees would be persecuted. The plan provided that boat people who did not qualify for refugee status would have to return to Vietnam, willingly or not, under guarantees monitored by UNHCR. No facts were ever provided to substantiate these allegations, most of which came from the lunatic fringe of the Vietnamese community in the US with which HRW was associated. Ultimately, some 98,000 went back to Vietnam in what proved to be one of the most successful repatriation program of non-refugees.
In parallel with HRW another American advocacy organization, Refugees International, jumped in.
In a July 2005 report from Phnom Penh, the group's president emeritus, Lionel Rosenblatt, complained that the UNHCR had not monitored the return of the Montagnards who had been during the Vietnam War "America's staunchest allies". While the fact that none of the Montagnards concerned were old enough to have fought in the war was beside the point to Rosenblatt, his background was not.
Rosenblatt started his career with the US Foreign Service in Vietnam in 1966 where, according to his biography in the Foreign Service Journal, he did economic development and humanitarian work. Author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program, William Morrow ed 1990)contends, however, that Rosenblatt worked for the Phoenix Program.
Developed by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1967, the Phoenix Program is considered the single-greatest American human-rights aberration of the Vietnam War. Its purpose was to "neutralize" the Vietcong infrastructure. As Valentine underlines, due process was completely non-existent under the Phoenix Program and suspects, real or imagined, could be murdered, blackmailed, tortured or detained at will. At one point the program imposed monthly ""neutralization" quotas that led to further abuses in the field. The number of victims was never established but is estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000, of which many were innocent.
While recruitment for the Phoenix Program spread across all the branches of the US government, not all those approached accepted to serve. One Air Force officer who refused as a matter of conscience was Jacques Klein, who later rose to the rank of general and became one of the most respected UN troubleshooters in conflict areas. French-born, Klein reportedly commented that he would not join Phoenix because the means and methods used were "similar to those used by the Nazis in World War II".
Rosenblatt had no such qualms, and while the Vietnamese did the actual arresting and killing, a former colleague of his, Chris Thorne, confirmed that Rosenblatt was as close to the action as an American could be.
On April 22, 1975 Rosenblatt, who in the meantime had been reassigned to Washington, reappeared in Saigon, reportedly at his own initiative and expense. In three days he and a colleague succeeded in ensuring the evacuation of close to 300 Vietnamese high-ranking police and Special Branch officials who had worked for Phoenix. It was a small number compared to those the Americans had left behind and it haunted Rosenblatt for years to come.
In the years following the fall of Saigon, Rosenblatt held several positions in the State Department related to refugees from Indochina before leaving government service. In 1990 he became president of Refugees International, an advocacy group created in 1979 in the wake of the exodus from Cambodia.
Under his leadership, the organization became one of the more vocal advocacy groups in Washington concerned with literally every refugee crisis throughout the word. Vietnam, however, remained a thorn in Rosenblatt's side, and anything that even remotely smacked of normalization was an anathema to him.
Thus, following the 1989 conference that decided that Vietnamese boat people would not be recognized as refugees and would have to return to Vietnam, UNHCR officers in Hong Kong recall seeing him in 1995 addressing boat people in camps with a bullhorn, pleading with them not to go back to Vietnam. By then 20 years had passed since the fall of Saigon and the world had changed, but Rosenblatt, qualified by those who dealt with him over the years as enthusiastic, irascible, idealistic, generous, untiring, guilt-ridden and fanatic, had not. Hence, echoing the wartime American saying that the only good Vietcong was a dead one, he ventured in the Honolulu Advertiser that for the Vietnamese "the best Montagnard is a dead one".
In 2001 Rosenblatt left the presidency of Refugees International, succeeded by former senior Pentagon official Ken Bacon, but as "president emeritus" he continued to operate the organization - hence his recent mission to Cambodia.
With those Montagnards not recognized as refugees having been either deported to Vietnam or having voluntarily returned, and those recognized for resettlement in Western countries, the issue of the Montagnards in Cambodia would have been solved for all practical purposes, had it not bounced back in the form of a new form, namely the "Refusnik".
It is an accepted principal that a refugee does not have a free choice with regard to the country where he or she can settle and is therefore bound to accept any reasonable offer of asylum. During the boat people crisis a group of some 40 refugees in Hong Kong who were accepted by Denmark refused to go on the grounds they preferred to be resettled in the US. The Hong Kong authorities reacted by informing the group that if they persisted in their refusal they would be put in jail and their names withdrawn from any resettlement list. This solved the problem, but the issue of "asylum shopping" continues to bedevil developed countries where refugees from the Third World, for economic reasons, tend to seek refuge in nations that provide the highest social welfare benefits.
In terms of economic opportunities, the reverse happened in Cambodia. By early August, of the 447 remaining Montagnards, all of whom had been accepted by Western countries, 350 refused to go, arguing they wished to remain in Cambodia.
It was clear to most observers that this decision had been taken on instructions from the Montagnard Foundation with the ultimate purpose of reestablishing a FULRO base in Cambodia. This was of course unacceptable to the Cambodians.
Cambodian authorities made it clear that if the refugees did not accept resettlement abroad they would be deported to Vietnam - whatever their status. This position put the UNHCR in a quandary. While the fact Cambodia was not legally obliged to keep the refugees was acknowledged, their forced return, as long as they enjoyed refugee status, was unacceptable and amounted to "refoulement" - the forced return of a refugee to a place where he is persecuted.
"Refoulement", as a concept, is the bane of the humanitarian community and in particular of every Western government. That the issue was now totally politicized did not detract from the fact that neither the UNHCR nor the main Western governments wished to see the blatant "refoulement" of a group legally classified as refugees. Conversely, it was also being argued that if a refugee who had a credible resettlement opportunity chose to turn it down and preferred to be deported to his country of origin, his claim to refugee status might be somewhat tenuous.
The surreal legalistic debate that followed saw the irruption onto the scene of yet another player - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Human rights in Cambodia, Peter Lauprecht. Of Austrian nationality, Lauprecht is a highly respected international human-rights lawyer who describes himself as an Eurocrat who does considerable work for the European Union. Following his nomination by Annan in 2001 he took his first ever trip to Cambodia.
This summer he joined the chorus of advocacy groups denouncing the UNHCR for overlooking both the political background of the Montagnards and the fact that by August the UN refugee agency had undertaken four monitoring visits to the returnees in the Central Highlands and found that none of the allegations of mistreatment made by Human Rights Watch could be substantiated. Thus the UNHCR found itself maligned both from the advocacy groups and from within the UN system.
Hanoi, which viewed the issue as essentially political, went to considerable efforts to ensure that it would not escalate the problem, especially with regard to the UNHCR and Cambodia. Thus the Vietnamese committed themselves to take back all returnees, whether voluntary or deported and to permit the UNHCR to monitor their well-being on return. Likewise Hanoi stated that that it would permit the departure, directly from Vietnam of any Montagnard that the US wished to see resettled. That offer was more than Washington was requesting, fully aware that it might trigger a new exodus that could easily spiral out of control.
With the situation deadlocked, Cambodia announced in July that all "Refusniks" who continued to refuse third country resettlement would be forcefully deported back to Vietnam by August 25, a deadline that was later extended to September 9.
The deadline was no idle threat - a Cambodian government official, replying to a US Embassy request to further postpone the deportation, made it clear that there was no more room for maneuver, adding "and if you don't like it you can declare war on us".
Cambodian resolve ultimately brought results. By end of August the number of "Refusniks" had gone from 350 to 16. On September 3, after the Cambodians had confiscated mobile telephones given to them by an American NGO, the number was down to six.
On September 9 representatives of the US and Canadian embassies as well as of the UNHCR escorted the six Montagnards to the Vietnamese border. There they were met by another UNHCR team that had come from Hanoi and was to continue monitoring inside Vietnam.
While diplomatic observers in Phnom Penh feel that there will continue to be a trickle of Montagnards into Cambodia and that the overall question of both Hanoi's policy toward the Montagnards and the Montagnard's will or capacity to adapt to Vietnam's changing economic environment is still open, the attempt to turn what was a relatively minor occurrence, albeit with an built-in solution, into a political issue has fizzled out.
"Ultimately", commented a Western diplomat in Bangkok, "the whole affair had not much to do with Montagnards and even less to do with refugees. The real issue is that there are still a number of Americans for whom Vietnam is a war and not a country."
By Alexander Casella - Asia Times - September 14, 2005.
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