A small, woolen-hatted woman, one of thousands of ethnic Hmong recently expelled from Thailand, creeps up to the row of rare foreign visitors in her new Laotian village.
“I want to go to another country,” she whispers to the diplomats and journalists, who have been invited by the communist government for a tightly monitored trip to this remote, newly built community.
“I don’t feel good here in the village,” the 50-year-old says, while the Laotian army’s deputy chief, Brigadier General Bouasieng Champaphan, is delivering a rather different message to the audience.
Thailand faced a barrage of international criticism in December when it used troops to forcibly repatriate about 4,500 Hmong from camps in the country’s north back to Laos, despite concerns of persecution on their return.
The Hmong’s fear of retribution from the Laotian regime is a lingering remnant of the Vietnam War, when members of the ethnic hill tribe fought in a US-funded irregular army as the conflict secretly spilled into Laos.
After the communists took power in 1975, some Hmong hid in the jungle and fought a low-level insurgency against the regime. Hundreds of thousands of Lao and Hmong fled the country.
Though Thailand insisted all the Hmong recently sent back to Laos were illegal economic migrants, the UN recognized 158 of them as refugees, but was never allowed to assess if the thousands of others needed international protection.
While diplomats say there have been no reports of mistreatment, suspicions remain about the Hmong’s rights and living standards in Phonkham Village, which was built specifically for the group in central Bolikhamsai Province.
“They’ve put them on a Laos equivalent of a desert island,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “There’s no sustained access to these people or quality of access.”
Laotian officials said 3,457 of the repatriated Hmong were sent to Phonkham, while others went back to their hometowns.
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