GENEVA - An exiled Vietnamese dissident has called for a U.N. investigation into an alleged crackdown by the Communist authorities on hill tribes, including executions, forced sterilisations and the burning of churches.
Kok Ksor spoke on behalf of the minority Christian Montagnards -- an ethnic people allied to U.S. forces during the Vietnam War -- who staged protests in the Central Highlands last February and March demanding greater land and religious rights.
He was addressing the U.N. Sub-Commission on Human Rights, whose 26 independent experts are examining rights violations worldwide. The session late on Monday focused on indigenous peoples.
"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," said Ksor, executive director of the U.S.-based Montagnard Foundation.
"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...and offered bounties for the capture of our people who have fled from the Central Highland repression into Cambodia," he said.
Villagers remained under house arrest and refugees were being "hunted down" and forcibly returned from Cambodia to Vietnam, where they have been imprisoned and tortured, according to Ksor.
Vietnam has insisted to the United Nations that it rejects all forms of racial violence and discrimination.
ALLEGES 26 YEARS OF PERSECUTION
Ksor said his people's "peaceful" protests had aimed to end 26 years of "systematic persecution" by Communist authorities since the Vietnam War. Some 40,000 Montagnard were recruited by U.S. forces during the conflict and converted to Protestantism.
"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... This current brutality against our race, however, is not new to us," he said.
Ksor also alleged that funds from international aid bodies allocated for family planning programmes had been misused to perform forced sterilisations on Montagnard women.
The Vietnamese government has "coerced, forced, bribed or fined thousands of our women into being sterilised while abusing aid monies from the U.N. Development Programme and World Bank allocated for these family planning programmes," he said.
It was the second time in days that Vietnamese activists brought their case to United Nations human rights forums.
The Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights told a separate U.N. forum last week that the minority hill tribes were a primary target of repression.
Abuses included "expropriation from ancestral lands, religious persecution, arbitrary arrest, disappearances and the forced sterilisation of women," the group told the U.N. Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Vietnam's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Nguyen Quy Binh, assured that U.N. body, composed of 18 independent experts, that Hanoi rejected all racist violence and racial discrimination.
07:03 08-14-01
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