Viewing articles tagged 'refugees'

February 2001: the highlands stand up On Friday, February 2, 2001, eight hundred people from four communes walked out of their villages at four in the morning and reached Pleiku at half past eight. By mid-morning there were thousands of them outside the provincial hall. The next day the same thing happened at Buon Ma Thuot, and over the following twelve days at Ea H’leo, at Ayun Pa,... Explainer 145 views Read More Asylum today: Cambodia, Thailand, and the reach of the state For twenty-five years the way out of the highlands has been west, on foot into Cambodia, and then onward to Bangkok. Both doors have been closing. Cambodia shut its border sites in 2002, sent back hundreds of people and has recognized almost none since. In Thailand our people live as illegal migrants with a UN card that Thai law does not recogni... Explainer 133 views Read More Easter Week 2004 On the Saturday and Sunday of Easter 2004, people came out of their villages in thirty-nine communes across seventeen districts of Gia Lai, Dak Lak and Dak Nong. They came on farm tractors with trailers behind them, packed with food for five days, because they meant to stay. They were asking for four things: their land, the right to worship, the... Reference 126 views Read More Dak Son, December 5, 1967 On the night of December 5, 1967, Viet Cong troops with flamethrowers burned a Stieng settlement called Dak Son in Phuoc Long province. That much is not in dispute and never has been. What is in dispute, though almost nobody says so, is the number: the 252 dead that everyone quotes was published by an American magazine four days after the CIA’s... Explainer 271 views Read More Moved by force: hamlets, camps and relocation, 1957–1972 For fifteen years, from 1957 into the 1970s, governments moved our villages. Saigon moved them to make room for Vietnamese settlers, then to empty the country the Viet Cong held. The American army lifted them out by helicopter so that it could fight where they had lived. A South Vietnamese general moved them again at harvest, on a few hours’ not... Explainer 79 views Read More Tet 1968 in the highlands The American field force that held the highlands wrote its own verdict on Tet four pages after it counted the dead: “Heaviest attacks were launched initially” at “the highlands population centers of Kontum and Ban Me Thuot.” The first and hardest blows of the 1968 offensive in the whole of II Corps fell on two of our market towns. Then the same... Explainer 128 views Read More Thailand’s screening mechanism: what it offers a Dega refugee Thailand has no refugee law. It has one procedure, written in 2019 and switched on in September 2023, that can give a person who cannot go home a Thai status called “Protected Person.” In its first thirty months it produced seven of them, out of an urban caseload of more than five thousand five hundred. All seven were granted in the first thirte... Explainer 80 views Read More Highland refugees of the war years In the autumn of 1970 a South Vietnamese corps commander ordered the province chiefs of the highlands to empty every one of our hamlets that had been graded C or D. Families were given a few hours’ notice, in the harvest season, and told to leave the gongs and the jars behind. At Plei De Groi, 2,500 people were moved in; by the following October... Explainer 74 views Read More Highland women in the war, 1954–1975 In 1966 the United States Army published a handbook that told its own personnel, in one identical line repeated for nineteen of our peoples, to stay away from our women. The same book recorded that in Darlac six or seven of every ten of our babies died before their first birthday, and that Rhade law puts the land in the women’s keeping. A year l... Explainer 73 views Read More