28/12/2009
A picture released by the Royal Thai Army shows Hmong refugees being removed from the Huay Nam Khao camp in northern Thailand yesterday. Photo: AFPTHE Thai army has begun forcibly returning thousands of ethnic Hmong asylum seekers to communist Laos despite international protests.
''The operation started at 5.30am [yesterday],'' Colonel Thana Charuvat, who is co-ordinating the repatriation, told reporters at an army centre about 12 kilometres from the camp in Phetchabun province.
He said 5000 soldiers, officials and civilian volunteers had entered the camp in Huay Nam Khao village to begin rounding up the group of more than 4000 Hmong being held there.
Members of a mountain tribe that aided the US 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 initiated the repatriation despite complaints from the US, the United Nations and human rights and aid groups. It was doing so despite some asylum seekers being 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 Laos authorities, who to this day have not forgiven the Hmong for being dedicated allies of the US during the Vietnam War,'' said Joel Charny, acting president of advocacy group Refugees International.
The remote Hmong encampment in Phetchabun province, about 300 kilometres north of Bangkok, is a remnant of an Indochinese refugee population that once numbered 1.5 million. That included boat people from Vietnam, survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and hundreds of thousands of Hmong who crossed the Mekong River from Laos.
Since the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the US has processed and accepted about 150,000 Hmong refugees in Thailand for resettlement in the US. But in the past three years Thailand has not allowed foreign governments or agencies to interview the Hmong.
Refugee experts say the camp residents are a mix of refugees who fear persecution and economic migrants who have left Laos over the past few years. They include dozens who display what appear to be battle scars, as well as some older refugees who fought on the US side during the war.
A separate group of 158 asylum seekers has been interviewed by the UN, which has labelled them ''people of concern'' who could face persecution if returned. The Thai Government says these asylum seekers will be forcibly repatriated eventually.
Government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn said the exact timing of the deportations was in the hands of the military, but that it would be completed by Thursday, in accordance with an agreement with Laos. He said Laos had said the returnees would be treated well and the UN could interview them within 30 days of arrival to determine if any were eligible for resettlement elsewhere. ''There is no reason to believe they will be harmed,'' Mr Panitan said.
Reporters have not been allowed into the camps since 2007. Last May the main aid group assisting the Hmong in Phetchabun, Medecins Sans Frontieres, withdrew in protest at the conditions at the camps.
''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.
Colonel Thana said the group of 4000 Hmong in Huay Nam Khao village would be removed from the camp by truck and later transferred to 100 buses that carried 40 people each.
Special forces members were among the troops entering the camp and 50 mobile prison trucks also arrived there on Sunday night, said Sunai Phasuk, a Thailand analyst at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
''The army said they would first target group leaders and potential troublemakers. Those people would be snatched and sent out first,'' he said.
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