53rd SESSION OF THE UNITED NATIONS SUB-COMMISSION ON THE PROMOTION AND PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS (30 JULY-17 AUGUST 2001)

STATEMENT OF THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY
(NGO WITH GENERAL CONSULTATIVE STATUS TO THE UN)

AGENDA ITEM 5
(Statement made on 8 August 2001)

delivered by Mr. Kok Ksor

My name is Kok Ksor and I speak on behalf of the Transnational Radical Party on the indigenous Montagnards inside Vietnam's Central Highlands.

In February 2001, thousands of Christian Montagnards of Vietnam's central highlands - or Degar people as we call ourselves - peacefully demonstrated, demanding that the Vietnamese Communist government respect the human rights of our people. The Vietnamese Government responded by sending thousands of armed troops including tanks and helicopter gunships into our homelands beginning a military crackdown against our race.

Our peaceful demonstrations were calling for an end to the last 26 years of religious persecution, human rights violations and confiscation of our ancestral lands by the Vietnamese communist government. In the wake of this military crackdown security forces arrested, intimidated, beat and tortured with electric prods hundreds of our people.

In the last few months the Government of Vietnam has:
executed some of our people.
burned down some of our Christian Churches.
sent thousands of soldiers into our villages, preventing us from attending to our crops in an effort to punish our people.
offered bounties for the capture of our people who have fled from the central highland repression into Cambodia.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Refugees International and US Congressional Resolution 178 have all reported that the Vietnamese authorities offered bounties to Cambodian authorities for the capture and return of our people who fled the military crackdown. Many of our villages are still under house arrest and refugees are actually being hunted down. Those of our people who were forcibly returned to Vietnam from Cambodia have been imprisoned, tortured and publicly beaten by Vietnamese security forces.

Now the central highlands - our ancestral lands - remains cordoned off by regiments of soldiers to prevent our people from escaping to Cambodia. The fate of hundreds of our people in refugee camps in Cambodia currently remains in doubt as Vietnam demands their return and rejects UN proposals for their safe return.

This current brutality against our race however, is not new to us. After the reunification of Vietnam in 1975 the Communist Vietnamese government began a brutal revenge against our race because of the Vietnam War - as over 40, 000 thousand of our people were recruited by the US Government. We served as loyal allies to America and over one quarter of our population, men women and children - 200,000 people - would die in the Vietnam War. In 1975 the communist authorities immediately treated our race as enemies and executed and imprisoned our people and began to forcibly assimilate our race.

This revenge never ended and the Vietnamese Government continues today by persecuting us and exploiting our ancestral homelands in much the same way indigenous people all over the world have suffered.

The Vietnamese government has:
confiscated our lands and natural resources.
forcibly relocated most of our villages to inferior lands to make way for coffee plantations, logging operations and transmigration polices that permits thousands of immigrants from other parts of Vietnam to settle on our ancestral homelands.
arrested, imprisoned and tortured our people for practising Christianity.
arrested, imprisoned and tortured our people who are human rights defenders.

The Vietnamese Government has:
executed some our people in the last few months and many have disappeared.
They have forced our people to live on poor agricultural land without adequate water resources while our people starve and children suffer malnutrition.
They have condemned us to poverty by the current policy of fixed field - fixed residence.
They have forced assimilation upon us and restricted us from access to education, health services and employment.
They have coerced, forced, bribed or fined thousands of our women into being sterilized while abusing aid monies from the UNDP and World Bank allocated for these family planning programs.

All these human rights violations are documented by numerous independent news sources and various NGOs. The US government has already called for independent monitors to be granted access to the region. The scale of the persecution is evident from the hundreds of my people who have fled to Cambodia and from the present involvement of the UNHCR. The US Commission for International Religious Freedom and European Parliament recently condemned the Vietnamese government's policies of religious persecution. In a recent report the International Commission of Jurists - Australian Branch - concluded that the Vietnamese government has systematically persecuted the Montagnard race since 1975.

These human rights abuses by the Vietnamese government violate virtually every norm of customary international law as well as the covenants and the instruments of international law that Vietnam has agreed to comply with.

In 1975 the Vietnamese government publicly executed my Uncle who was a Montagnard Senator. This year in May 2001 the Vietnamese security forces arrested and tortured my Mother who is in her eighties. They threatened to kill her over and over and broke three of her ribs. She spent three days in hospital and is still under house arrest.

Mr. Chairman on behalf of the Transnational Radical Party, I ask that the United Nations and the international community:
take emergency action to intervene, investigate and monitor the military crackdown in the Central Highlands.
take emergency action to safeguard our refugees in Cambodia under international guidelines and ensure the bounty schemes by Vietnamese authorities are immediately stopped.
to urgently investigate, monitor and address the underlying problems facing our people; namely the confiscations of our ancestral lands, religious persecution, abuse of sterilization policies and systematic human rights violations enacted by the Vietnamese government.
to make aid to Vietnam contingent on the Vietnamese government complying with international human rights law and for the United Nations to urge other nations who extend trade benefits or give financial aid to Vietnam to do the same.