Below is an extract from a written statement submitted to the Fourth Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) by the International Federation for the Protection of the Rights of Ethnic, Religious, Linguistic and Other Minorities (IFPRERLOM) in March 2007. It condemns the summary executions of several Ahwazi. It highlights the ongoing persecution of the Khmer Khrom and Montagnards.

The indigenous Khmer Krom and Montagnards in Vietnam, continue to suffer lack of freedom to exercise even some of their most fundamental human rights. The Montagnard Degar peoples have suffered decades of persecution with confiscation of their ancestral lands, religious repression, torture, killings, unjust imprisonment and systematic discrimination and violations of their civil and political rights. The April 2004 crackdown which resulted in numerous killings in the Central Highlands has never been satisfactory investigated. Contrary to the 2002 Concluding Observations of the UN Human Rights Committee regarding “serious violations” facing the Montagnards (UN doc: CCPR/C/SR.2031), Vietnam has continued to prevent human rights monitors from having unhindered access to the central highlands. Several hundred Montagnard prisoners of conscience remain in Vietnamese prisoners under brutal conditions.

Recently, on 08 February 2007 approximately 200 Khmer Krom Buddhist Monks partook in a peaceful protest in Soc Trang (Kleang) Province to mark their right to practice their own form of their Buddhist religion. The protest for religious freedom was met with a renewed wave of oppression against Khmer Krom Buddhist Monks from the Mekong Delta. Local Vietnamese police responded quickly by surrounding nearby temples, placing 60 Buddhist Monks under effective house arrest at Wat Ta Sek, including the Venerable Kim Ngoun and the Venerable Son Thy Thon, trapped inside. At the time of writing, all four temples involved with the protest, Wat Ta Sek, Wat Peam Boun, Wat Teok Praiy, and Wat Ta Men, remain encircled by heavily armed police and military units, with entry and exit to the Temples severely restricted. Arrested Monks were forcefully disrobed, not only deeply damaging to the individual, but also facilitating Monks to be imprisoned as civilians.

Alarmed by the heavy-handed reaction and efforts to punish those responsible for nonviolent act of protest, IFPRERLOM appeals to the Human Rights Council to denounce this attempt to suppress the emerging human rights movement within the Khmer Krom community, and urges the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the situation of human rights defenders and UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief to visit, with unrestricted access, the areas of the indigenous peoples concerned.

For the full statement