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| Vietnamese nationals stand together in Chbar Ampov district last month after they were detained by immigration officials. Photo supplied |
Interior Ministry details citizenship ‘irregularities’
Phnom Penh Post | 22 August 2016
More than 76,000 suspected
foreign nationals have Cambodian residency or citizenship documents with
“irregularities”, the Interior Ministry said on Friday, a day after the
Cambodia National Rescue Part had stirred concerns about the possibility of foreigners
voting illegally.
The progress report for the
ministry’s now-two-year-old “foreigner census” program, which showed just under
161,000 immigrants residing within the Kingdom, stated that 10,892 foreigners,
9,221 of them Vietnamese, had been deported since the census began in 2014.
The CNRP on Thursday pledged to send independent monitors to voter registration
stations to lodge complaints against those whose citizenship they deemed
questionable – a pledge that raised eyebrows given its potential to fan
tensions with ethnic Vietnamese residents, who have faced problems at the polls
in the past.
CNRP lawmaker Son Chhay
yesterday said that he was not confident of the ministry’s figures. “The number
the government announced, more than 100,000, is questionable,” Chhay said.
“Some people say there’s more than a million illegal migrants in the country,
but as a lawmaker I cannot guess the number. We have to do a serious study
before I can say anything about that.”
Chhay rebuffed insinuations that the CNRP pledge to monitor for non-Khmer voters was racially motivated, and said that he had prepared a letter to be delivered to the Interior Ministry asking to see a list of all foreigners who have acquired citizenship since the start of the year, in order to determine whether identity documents presented by would-be voters not born in Cambodia are genuine.
The ministry’s report was just
the latest in a string of recent government missives pertaining to its at-times
controversial eastern neighbour.
Last week, Prime Minister Hun
Sen reiterated a months-old order banning the leasing of Cambodian land near
the border to Vietnamese nationals, posting on his Facebook page that it is
“forbidden to rent land to Vietnamese people”. And on Saturday, the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs issued a diplomatic note to the Vietnamese Embassy calling on
it to halt a litany of contentious border-area developments across five
provinces.
CPP Puppet: Blah, blah, blah...
Viet Master: Ha, ha, ha...
Meanwhile, researcher Sok
Touch [the good cop], appointed by the government to carry out a study of its Vietnam border
demarcation efforts, gave a frank seminar to officials at the Peace Palace on
Thursday criticising both what he characterised as the government’s
mismanagement of the frontier, and the opposition’s use of the border as a
wedge issue.
Var Kimhong [the bad cop], senior minister
for border affairs, pushed back at Touch yesterday for the criticism, saying
that there was “no need for Sok Touch to do a study”, and admonishing him not
to “look down on border authorities”.
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