State-controlled Vietnamese media on
Wednesday accused the United Nations' refugee agency of
stirring up an exodus of ethnic minorities from Vietnam's
restive Central Highlands into Cambodia.
A front-page article in the World
Security newspaper accused two staff from the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees of training 13 Central Highlanders
to instigate others to flee to Cambodia.
The paper identified the two as Katy
Grant, deputy head of a refugee camp in the Cambodian
capital of Phnom Penh, and Y Xuan, a Cambodian of Vietnamese
origin who is a translator in the camp.
The two also issued documents for the
13 highlanders, who were staying at the Phnom Penh camp, to
return to Vietnam so they could prod ethnic minority members
to flee, the paper said.
The two "had turned the refugee camp
into a place to train people how to create disturbances and
send them back to Vietnam," it said.
Thamrongsak Meechubot, the UNHCR
representative in Cambodia, rejected the accusation.
"For this kind of
thing, we don't even need to answer because this is clearly
baseless. UNHCR would not do this kind of thing. We have no
involvement in political issues in any country. Our
assistance is purely humanitarian," he said.
He said the 13 refugees had left the
Phnom Penh camp for Vietnam on their own because they missed
their families.
More than 1,000 ethnic minority
members, collectively known as Montagnards, fled Vietnam's
Central Highlands after a 2001 crackdown on protests by the
minorities, many of whom are Christian and claim the
government persecutes them. Vietnam is predominantly
Buddhist.
The refugees have been resettled in
other countries, mostly the United States.
The U.N. still shelters about 700
Montagnards at camps in Phnom Penh and in Cambodia's
Ratanakiri town.
