6,500 Hmong refugees are threatened by deportation from Thailand

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) warned on Friday of the forced deportation of 6,500 Hmong refugees from Thailand to the neighbouring Laos. The prime ministers of the two countries reached a basic agreement a few days before Christmas on the return of the refugees. „For the Hmong this is a catastrophe, since on their return to Laos they will be fearing for their lives”, explained the GfbV Asia expert Ulrich Delius. These people have been hunted in Laos by security forces like animals. It is a scandal that Thailand does not give refuge to these survivors of atrocities.

The GfbV Hmong expert, Rebecca Sommer, conducted in the spring of 2006 hundreds of interviews with Hmong who were seeking refuge in Thailand in order to document the extent of these crimes against humanity. In May 2006 she published a 50-page report, in which massacres, rapes and other severe violations of human rights against the Hmong in Laos were comprehensively documented.

In letters to the Thailand government the human rights organisation criticised the fact that Thailand now expressed its intention to pass on to the Laotian authorities all personal data concerning the refugees. After the dreadful massacres in Laos such heedless cooperation with the persecuting state is an infringement of international law.

Both the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, had spoken out against a deportation of the Hmong refugees to Laos. In Thailand also massive criticism has been expressed on the refugee policy. „The Nation”, one of the leading daily newspapers of the country, has accused the government of turning Thailand into a „pariah state” with the deportations.

Many of the refugees are children or women, who, half-starved, had sought refuge in Thailand. Some 20,000 Hmong are still hiding in the forests of Laos. The descendents of former resistance fighters, who have not been fighting for a long time, are being mercilessly hunted in Laos. Chemical weapons, bombs and grenades are being used against them from helicopters. Anyone who falls alive into the hands of the ground forces is cruelly tortured, mutilated, raped and murdered. Children also under the age of ten have also been victims of massacres.