December 27, 2009
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
Thailand’s record also includes pirate attacks and brutalizing of Vietnamese boat people at sea, the forced return to their deaths of 42,000 Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and the expulsion just a year ago of 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who were towed back to sea and left adrift in boats without motors
BANGKOK — The Thai military has mobilized troops and buses and was preparing Sunday to forcibly return 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers to Laos in a lingering echo of the Vietnam War more than three decades ago, human rights groups and other observers said.
Members of a mountain tribal group that aided the United States in its “secret war” in Laos, the asylum seekers say they fear retribution by the Laotian government, which continues to battle a ragged insurgency of several hundred Hmong fighters.
Thailand appears to be moving ahead with the repatriation despite vigorous complaints from the United States as well as from the United Nations and human rights and aid groups. It is doing so although it has screened the asylum seekers and determined that some were eligible for refugee status, human rights groups said.
“This forced repatriation would place the refugees in serious danger of persecution at the hands of the Lao authorities, who to this day have not forgiven the Hmong for being dedicated allies of the United States during the Vietnam War,” Joel Charney, acting president of Refugees International, an advocacy group based in Washington, said in a statement.
The remote encampment in Thailand is one of the last remnants of an Indochinese refugee population that once numbered 1.5 million and included boat people from Vietnam and survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
Since the war ended in 1975, the United States has processed and accepted about 150,000 Hmong refugees in Thailand. But over the past three years the Thai government has not allowed foreign governments or international agencies to interview the Hmong in a camp in Petchabun Province, 290 kilometers, or 180 miles, north of Bangkok.
Refugee experts say they are a mix of economic migrants and genuine refugees who have left Laos over the past few years. They have included dozens who display what appear to be the scars of battle wounds, as well as some older refugees who fought on the American side during the war.
A separate group of 158 asylum seekers has been interviewed by the U.N., which has labeled them “people of concern” who could face persecution on their return. But the Thai government says these asylum seekers also will eventually be forcibly repatriated.
Reporters have not been permitted into the camps since 2007, and last May the main aid group assisting the Hmong in Petchabun, Médecins Sans Frontières, withdrew from the camp in protest of the conditions there.
“We can no longer work in a camp where the military uses arbitrary imprisonment of influential leaders to pressure refugees into a ‘voluntary’ return to Laos, and forces our patients to pass through military checkpoints to access our clinic,” the group said in a statement.
On Sunday, Sunai Phasuk, the Thailand representative of Human Rights Watch, said a joint task force under military command had been assembled at the camp and had been instructed to wear body armor in case of the kind of violent resistance that has accompanied forced returns in the past.
He said Maj. Gen. Thanongsak Apirakyothin, the third army regional commander, arrived at the camp Sunday and said that the army was prepared to move and that everyone would be sent back to Laos.
“The first wave of action to clear the camp will happen on Dec. 27 night, and the deportation can start on Dec. 28 morning,” Mr. Sunai said in an e-mail message. “During that, mobile phone signals will be jammed to prevent the Hmong from contacting outsiders. More than 100 buses and trucks are to be put on standby.”
A government spokesman, Panitan Wattanayagorn, said that the exact timing of the deportations was in the hands of the military but that it would be completed by the end of December in accordance with an agreement with Laos.
He said the Laotian government had given assurances that the returnees would be well treated and that the U.N. could interview them for resettlement within 30 days of their arrival.
“We are sending back these people based on our good faith that there is no reason to believe that they will be harmed,” he said.
Speaking by telephone from Washington on Sunday, Eric Schwartz, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said he had met with high-level officials in Thailand last week and that the United States was prepared to assist both with questions of third-country asylum for those who merited protection and with the return to Laos of economic migrants.
“We recognize the challenge of irregular migration that the government of Thailand faces, but there is absolutely no need to resort to these kinds of measures,” he said.
Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International and a key figure in the planning for the post-war evacuations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, said Thailand had been an active transit point for as many as 1.5 million refugees from the wars in Indochina. “To end by pushing 4,000 refugees by truck into Laos where they can’t be monitored would be a terrible way to end this endeavor,” he said. However, Thailand’s record also includes pirate attacks and brutalizing of Vietnamese boat people at sea, the forced return to their deaths of 42,000 Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and the expulsion just a year ago of 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who were towed back to sea and left adrift in boats without motors.
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