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[Harold]

"Thailand faces further embarrassment over its treatment of refugees with the highly respected foreign aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres set to announce this week it is pulling out of a major project in the North.

MSF (Doctors Without Borders), which won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago, runs a refugee camp for more than 5,000 Hmong in northern Phetchabun province, but it has been long been unhappy with Thailand's treatment of the hill tribe people from Laos.

The group will stage a press conference on Wednesday to announce they will stop working at the Phetchabun camp because it opposes Thailand's policy of forcibly returning all Hmong from Huay Nam Khao in Phetchabun.

Thailand and Laos claim all 5,000 Hmong in the camp are economic migrants, and that the 2,000 or so ethnic Hmong already returned to Laos have gone back voluntarily.

MSF has been providing food, shelter and medical care worth more than 1 million euros a year to the camp, but has had continual problems with Thai military officials and the Army's psychological operations unit from Phitsanulok. There have been repeated complaints of Hmong camp leaders being jailed, harassed and denied food before being forced to "voluntarily return."

. . .MSF made a public appeal more than a year ago for international monitors to properly screen the Hmong for those with genuine refugee claims, saying dozens of people in the camp had bullet wounds and there was the potential for riots and suicides if the Hmong were not properly screened before returns undertaken. . .They said the Lao government's human rights record is poor and there is minimal transparency, because the UN or third parties are forbidden from properly monitoring the returnees."

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/05/18...al_30102912.php