Refugees awaken ghosts of
Vietnam By Alexander Casella
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."
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