11 Aug 2014 07:47
Thou Yien Son, 61, lives his life on water. His house is a precarious wooden platform tied to a bamboo raft and his income comes from his boat, which he uses to catch fish to sell at the local market. Yien Son doesn't have anything else, not even citizenship. He is one of the 700,000 ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia, a country that considers these individuals as illegal immigrants, despite them having lived in the country for generations.
Most of the ethnic Vietnamese arrived in Cambodia during the French Protectorate (1863- 1953) to work in administrative positions in the countryside. In 1975, Khmer Rouge took power and Vietnamese citizens were forcibly deported to Vietnam or killed. During exile, most of them lost the papers that proved their Cambodian origin. At their return in the 1980's, they were considered as immigrants and became stateless.
Without papers, the ethnic Vietnamese cannot buy land and most of them dwell on floating villages in the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake. One of those villages is Yien Son's Phum Kandal. “I came back because my grandparents and my parents were born and died here. This is my land”, said Yien Son. He also complained that the Vietnamese are also subjected to arbitrary taxes and extortion from local authorities.
But there is one hope. On the 30th of July The Khmer Rouge Tribunal opened a new case against the top leaders of the regime that will judge, among other crimes, the genocide and deportation of the Vietnamese community in Cambodia. More than 40 ethnic Vietnamese representatives will participate as civil parties and they will try to regain their lost citizenship as reparation. This same tribunal recently condemned Nuon Chea, the second most senior leader in the Khmer Rouge, and Khieu Samphan, head of State, to life prison for crimes against humanity.
