Hmong Refugees

Over the past four months, the Thai military has used heightened restrictions and coercive tactics to pressure some 4,700 ethnic Lao Hmong refugees, who claim to have fled violence and persecution in Laos, to renounce their claims for protection and accept a forced return to Laos.

MSF denounces the growing pressure applied by Thailand’s army to force the 5,000 Hmong refugees living in Huai Nam Khao camp, in northern Thailand, to return to Laos. Increasingly restrictive measures have forced MSF to put a stop to its assistance activities after some four years of presence in the camp.

Bangkok/Paris, June 25, 2008 —An estimated 800 ethnic Lao Hmong refugees were forcibly returned to Laos by the Thai government on Sunday, June 22, and the Thai authorities have stated publicly that they intend to proceed over the coming days with further repatriations to Laos from among the remaining 6,700 refugees in the Huai Nam Khao camp in Thailand’s Petchabun Province. The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is calling once again on the governments of Thailand and Laos to immediately stop all forced repatriations of the Hmong refugees.

On Friday, May 23, a fire destroyed close to 60 percent of the houses in the Huai Nam Khao refugee camp in Petchabun province in northern Thailand. The blaze took hold after a week-long demonstration in the camp, which is home to nearly 8,000 Lao Hmong refugees, to protest the arrest of a community leader and the imminent threat of a forced return to Laos.

Nearly 8,000 ethnic Lao Hmong currently confined to a guarded, barbed-wire enclosed camp controlled by the Thai military in the village of Huai Nam Khao in Petchabun province in northern Thailand face the imminent threat of a forced return to Laos. Many of these refugees have told MSF, the sole nongovernmental organization working in the camp, of a life in Laos spent fleeing violent attacks and persecution, witnessing the murder of family members, suffering rape, surviving bullet and shrapnel wounds, and enduring malnutrition and disease.

On Wednesday, February 27, 2008, four ethnic Hmong families from the Huai Nam Khao refugee camp in Thailand were sent back to Laos. This confirmed fears expressed by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in October 2007 with respect to the Thai government’s plans to forcibly repatriate 8,000 Hmong before the end of 2008. The refugees are currently confined to this camp in northern Thailand’s Petchabun province and claim to have fled violence and persecution in Laos.

Bangkok/Paris, October 31, 2007 - MSF calls on the Thai government to halt all forced repatriation proceedings against the 7,500 ethnic Hmong refugees from Laos who are currently confined to a camp in northern Thailand's Petchabun province. The refugees, who claim to have fled violence and persecution in Laos, are deeply fearful of being returned to their country.

More than 7,000 Hmong refugees at the Huai Nam Khao camp in Phetchabun, Thailand, are in danger of being returned to Laos, where they fear political persecution for cooperating with the United States government during the US-Vietnam War. To this day, the Hmong continue to hide in the remote jungles of Laos, and thousands languish in squalid camps where conditions are crowded and epidemics are a constant threat.

Although Hmong populations face unhealthy and near prison-like conditions at the Huai Nam Khao camp in Thailand, they are even more frightened by the prospect of being returned to Laos because they fear for their lives there. Emmanuel Drouhin, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) program manager for Thailand, provides an update.