HANOI, Vietnam - A senior representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will visit Vietnam next week to discuss the repatriation of about 250 ethnic minority people from Cambodia, a UNHCR official said on Thursday.
The official said Bangkok-based Jahanshah Assadi would make a one-day visit to Hanoi on Wednesday for talks with Vietnam's Vice Foreign Minister Nguyen Van Nghanh.
"The purpose of his mission if to further discuss with his Vietnamese counterpart modalities of repatriation of these people back to Vietnam," said the official, who did not want to be identified.
The official said the 250 ethnic minority people were mostly from the provinces of Gia Lai and Daklak in Vietnam's Central Highlands and had crossed into the northeastern Cambodian provinces of Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri in April and May.
He said he did not know if they had taken part in widespread protests over land and religion that swept the Vietnamese provinces in February and March.
"We want to persuade them to return to Vietnam. Some of them want to return to Vietnam and some of them don't want to," the U.N. refugee agency official said.
"At this moment, we cannot recognise them as refugees, we don't see a founded fear of persecution."
VIETNAMESE PERMISSION
The official said that during a previous visit by Assadi at the beginning of June, the UNHCR had said it would need access to the Central Highlands if it was to arrange repatriation. Hanoi had agreed in principal but no permission had yet been received.
Asked if Vietnam would let the UNHCR visit the region, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said in a statement on Wednesday: "If the UNHCR has a proposal to visit localities of Vietnam, that proposal will be considered and settled in accordance with the arrangements of the locality."
On Wednesday, the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia Kent Wiedemann visited 54 of the hill people in Rattanakiri and told them they would not have to return to Vietnam until there were guarantees their rights would be respected.
The minority people say they fled because they feared for their lives after the protests.
Wiedemann also said he wanted to determine if Cambodian provincial officials were granting asylum to people who had a legitimate fear of persecution in Vietnam.
Thirty-eight refugees were earlier this year allowed to resettle in the United States, a decision that greatly angered Vietnam.
Cambodian officials said last month Vietnam had offered a bounty for the return of people who took part in the protests.
On Tuesday, prosecutors and officials in the Central Highlands said they were investigating the unrest but had yet to set a date for any trial of perpetrators.
They said they did not know the basis of a British Broadcasting Corp report on Monday which said 41 people were to be put on trial in two weeks accused of involvement in the unrest.
00:30 06-21-01
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.