Thais halt Hmong deportation after stand-off

By Nopporn Wong-Anan | January 30, 2007

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand was forced on Tuesday to halt the deportation to Laos of 153 Hmong, the ethnic minority who fought alongside America in the Vietnam War, after the men in the group put up a struggle, the general in charge said.

"Top officials have decided to cancel the deportation," Lieutenant-General Nipat Thonglek, head of the army's border affairs, told Reuters from the border town of Nong Khai, where the group has been held since late last year.

He gave no details but apologized to Lao government officials who had arrived with three buses to repatriate them. Human rights organizations fear the group would face persecution from Vientiane's communist rulers.

Earlier, Nipat said police had managed to get 100 women and children onto the buses, but the remaining men refused to go. One human rights group said they had barricaded themselves inside the compound.

"There are three leading troublemakers among the men who refuse to go," Nipat said.

A California-based Hmong lobby group called the Factfinding Commission said two women who refused to board the buses had been beaten.

Nipat denied the report, saying: "We didn't beat them up."

Before Bangkok's change of tack, the United Nations' refugee agency criticized the deportation, saying it broke international law as every person in the group had been accorded official refugee status.

They were also being considered for resettlement elsewhere and immigration officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands had already interviewed some of the group, the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.

Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Kitti Wasinondh said the deportation had "put on hold indefinitely" after the four countries in question assured Bangkok they would take the Hmong.

UNHCR, which criticized Thailand last week for deporting 16 Hmong, said the Nong Khai group included a two-week-old child and three men described as "prominent figures who might be at particular risk."

Dubbed "America's forgotten allies" after the war, the Hmong have had a difficult relationship with the Pathet Lao communists who have run the landlocked southeast Asian nation since seizing power in 1975.

Human rights groups accused them of waging a 30-year campaign of vengeance against Hmong guerillas still hiding out in the forests. Vientiane denies the accusations.

Since the war, the United States has granted asylum to thousands of Hmong, although it has indicated in the last few years it will accept no more.