http://asia.news.yahoo.com/020425/reuters/asia-101883.html
By Kevin Doyle
SUONG DISTRICT, Cambodia (Reuters) - Most Vietnamese remember the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975 as the day of their liberation. Not so the Montagnards.
It was the start of their problems for these groups of ethnic minority hilltribe people living in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
The thousands of minority people who fought with the defeated American and South Vietnamese armies in the Vietnam war say they have endured decades of discrimination, and recently torture and beatings, at the hands of the victorious Communist regime.
“In Vietnam, there is no freedom for the Montagnards,” 32-year-old Y Bion, a quiet-spoken member of the Radhe minority, told Reuters. “We don’t have freedom of religion or education,” he said during a brief stop as Cambodian police refuelled trucks taking him and more than 500 other hilltribe refugees to the capital Phnom Penh.
“The Hanoi government, they control all.”
Y Bion is one of more than 1,000 Montagnards, a collective term referring to ethnic minority hill tribes, who fled Vietnam for Cambodia after Hanoi sent thousands of troops to quash protests over religious freedom and land rights in February 2001.
They believe Hanoi is punishing them for their disloyalty and alliance with the hated U.S. Special Forces, which fought covert operations with the help of the largely Christian minorities throughout the 1960s.
One quarter of the estimated four million people living in the Central Highlands are Montagnards, the majority belonging to one of the six main tribes - Jarai, Radhe, Bahnar, Stieng, Koho and Mnong.
The Montagnards came to Cambodia in search of asylum. And also to bring attention to their plight in the Central Highlands and their hopes for freedom.
The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch this week accused Vietnam and Cambodia of violating international agreements on human rights in a report following last February’s protests over land rights and religious freedoms in the Central Highlands.
The report says hundreds of protesters and Christian religious leaders were rounded up and detained without trial, and torture - including kicking, beating and electric shocks - was used to elicit confessions.
It said a number of churches in the Central Highlands, where poverty and illiteracy are among the highest in Vietnam, had been closed or burned by authorities.
Vietnamese diplomats in Phnom Penh - and some Cambodian officials - characterised the hill tribe refugees as a “fifth column” intent on destabilising Vietnam.
But Y Bion and other Montagnards say their fight is for the right to land, religious freedom and equality. The old Montagnard army, FULRO (a French acronym for the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races) was a thing of the past, they said.
They said vast swathes of Vietnam’s highlands have been appropriated by the state and cleared for coffee and rubber plantations, cash crops worked by Vietnamese settlers who have pushed ethnic minorities off their land.
“The government controls all our land and divides this land for the Vietnamese farmers from Hanoi,” Y Bion said. “They control all the right to live.”
Their children are discriminated against in state schools where only the Vietnamese language is taught, and fear of arrest has forced hilltribe church services underground.
Montagnards in the strategic Central Highlands were trained by the U.S. military in the early 1960s as a line of defence against Communist forces infiltrating South Vietnam from Hanoi.
With aspirations for a sovereign hilltribe homeland, many allied themselves with the U.S., hoping their efforts would be repaid with autonomy. Thousands died in the fighting, a sacrifice made in vain.
When Saigon fell, most Montagnards laid down their weapons, but hundreds also fled to the jungles on the Cambodian border to set up camps in the belief the United States would return.
In 1992, when U.N. peacekeepers discovered a 400-strong FULRO village in Cambodia, Washington jumped into action to resettle in the United States what some called America’s “forgotten army”.
When the first 38 Montagnards fled to Cambodia last March, they too were resettled in the United States, prompting scathing attacks from Hanoi who accused Washington of interfering in its internal affairs.
Phnom Penh, under international pressure, agreed recently to allow Washington to resettle the remaining 905 refugees, despite protests by Hanoi which previously demanded their deportation.
In a move seen as placating Vietnam, Cambodia said two United Nations refugee camps must shut, and branded all further hilltribe people entering Cambodia “illegal immigrants”.
Less than one hour after Y Bion and hundreds of other refugee were evacuated from a U.N. camp in northeastern Cambodia last week in preparation for resettlement in the United States, local people looted and torched the site.
But the Montagnard issue is