Viewing articles tagged 'unhcr'

How many Dega there are There are more of us than there have ever been, and we have never been so small a part of our own country. The state’s own census counted about 768,000 people in the thirteen highland peoples in 1979 and about 2,125,000 in 2019 — almost a trebling in forty years. Over the same span the population of the four highland provinces went from 1.2 mill... Reference 194 views Read More 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 The Cambodian camps, 2001–2005 The border between Vietnam and Cambodia runs through the middle of one people. The Mnong of Dak Nong are the Bunong of Mondulkiri; the Jarai of Gia Lai are one of the largest peoples of Ratanakiri. When the crackdown came after February 2001, our people walked east to west across a line that meant nothing to them, into villages where the languag... Explainer 126 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 Y Quynh Buondap Y Quynh Buondap is a Rhade Christian from Dak Lak who spent his twenties collecting the names of our prisoners and writing down what was done to our churches. He fled to Thailand with his family in 2018, was recognized as a refugee by the United Nations, and helped found Montagnards Stand for Justice. In January 2024 a Vietnamese court he never... Spotlight 78 views Read More The 2002 resettlement: from the Cambodian camps to North Carolina In the summer of 2002 about nine hundred of our people were flown from a disused factory in Phnom Penh to airports in North Carolina, fifty at a time, three or four times a week, on ordinary commercial flights. Most had been in the forest or in a camp for a year. Three quarters of them were men, and most of those men had left a wife and children... Explainer 79 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 Beyond North Carolina: Canada and other countries Most of us who were resettled went to the United States, and a smaller number to Canada. But the second country to take us was not Canada. It was Finland, in May 2005, a month before the first flight to Vancouver, and about seventy-five of our people went there. Nobody has written a word about them in twenty-one years. That is the shape of every... Explainer 66 views Read More