Three Thai policemen in January approached Vietnamese refugee Nguyen Van Chung at his home in Bangkok and asked him whether he was in touch with another Vietnamese man, Truong Duy Nhat, who had fled to Thailand.
Chung said no, he had never met Nhat, a writer and critic of Vietnam’s communist government who previously had spent two years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms.”
He only knew of Nhat from his Facebook posts.
However, during a subsequent interrogation, Chung was surprised to notice a man who seemed to be a Vietnamese official and Thai police then confirmed he was indeed from Vietnam.
“Somehow, discreetly, police of Vietnam and Thailand worked together and knew everything,” Chung said from a third country, where he fled soon after.
The encounter was telling, because Nhat, the writer the police were looking for, disappeared two days later from a Bangkok shopping mall.
He resurfaced in a Vietnamese jail.
UN envoys, in letters to Vietnam and Thailand, raised suspicion of an “enforced disappearance” and expressed “grave concern.”
Thailand and Vietnam declined to comment.
Nhat’s case is not the only one in the past few months.
As ASEAN leaders met earlier this month in Bangkok, human rights campaigners decried what they called increased cooperation in the forced return of refugees and asylum seekers.
Since last year, there have been at least eight cases of Southeast Asian governments being accused of either officially arresting or cooperating in the abduction of political refugees from fellow ASEAN countries.
“A number of countries in the region are trading off political dissidents and individuals fleeing persecution as part of an unholy alliance to shore up each other’s regime,” Amnesty International director for East and Southeast Asia Nicholas Bequelin said.
Authorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand have been accused of detaining and returning critics of neighboring governments, in some cases even when they had political refugee status with the UN.
“The growing trend of Southeast Asian governments returning dissidents to neighboring states where they could be at risk is extremely worrying,” said Malaysian Legislator Charles Santiago, chairman of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.
Thailand, which hosted the ASEAN meeting, declined to comment on rights groups’ complaints.
“We don’t have information on any of these cases,” a Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said.
TURNING TIDE
Thailand was once considered a haven for advocates fleeing repression from authoritarian governments, but since a military coup in 2014, Thailand has requested return of its own political opponents from neighboring countries — and has also obliged similar requests from them, critics say.
Last month, Malaysia sent home a Thai anti-monarchy campaigner after she registered as an asylum seeker with the UN refugee agency.
The woman, Praphan Pipithnamporn, is awaiting trial on sedition and organized crime charges in Thailand.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad defended the extradition, saying that his nation is “a good neighbor.”
Last year, Thai authorities arrested two Cambodians and sent them home.
Labor advocate Sam Sokha had thrown a shoe at a poster depicting Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
She is serving a two-year prison sentence for “insulting a public official.”
Another Cambodian, Rath Rott Mony, was arrested in Bangkok in December last year and sent back. He faces three years in prison for “incitement to discriminate” for his role in a documentary on child prostitution. The verdict is due today.
While some advocates are extradited through legal channels, there have also been reports of extrajudicial abductions, such as Nhat’s.
UN envoys in letters to Vietnam and Thailand dated on April 18 were blunt about their suspicions, saying that they believed Thai immigration and police, “representatives from a Thai ministry” and Vietnamese military intelligence officers from Hanoi were involved in the suspected abduction of Nhat.
In February, three exiled Thai anti-junta advocates who had been living in Laos — Siam Theerawut, Chucheep Chivasut and Kritsana Thapthai — disappeared.
They were arrested by Vietnamese authorities while in transit and handed over to Thailand, according to US-based Thai Alliance for Human Rights.
Neither Vietnamese nor Thai authorities would comment on the report, which Reuters could not verify.
Still, the timing of the advocates’ disappearances raised suspicion, Bequelin said.
“The chain of events in Nhat’s case suggests a possible quid pro quo exchange between Thailand and Vietnam,” he said.
The bodies of two Thai advocates who fled to Laos were found on the Thai side of the Mekong River in January, cut open and weighed down with chunks of concrete.
No one knows — or is saying — what happened to them.
Additional reporting by James Pearson and Rozanna Latiff
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