14/12/2010
By Sopheng Cheang
The Associated Press
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The Cambodian government has informed the U.N. refugee agency it will shut a compound housing 62 Vietnamese refugees on New Year's Day and send them back to Vietnam, where they allegedly face repression.
The U.N. agency, which already has granted them refugee status, pleaded Tuesday for a little more time to decide how to resettle the group.
They are the last batch of asylum-seekers from a wave of 1,812 Vietnamese hill tribe people taken in by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since 2006, said the agency's regional representative Jean-Noel Wetterwald. The agency has resettled 999 of them, mostly in the United States, and sent 751 of them home.
Cambodia is eager to close the refugee compound in Phnom Penh to deter any further arrivals of ethnic minorities from Vietnam's Central Highlands, who are collectively known as Montagnards. Many of them sided with the United States during the Vietnam War, attend Protestant churches not recognized in Vietnam and are generally distrusted by the communist government.
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