Vietnamese Cambodians

On this page

1. History
2. Population
3. Citizenship
4. Floating villages
5. See also
6. References

On this page

1. History
2. Population
3. Citizenship
4. Floating villages
5. See also
6. References

A floating village on the Tonle Sap lake

Vietnamese Cambodians are the people of Vietnamese origin who live in Cambodia, the country's largest minority, many of them unable to prove their legal status.

History

Many Vietnamese families in Cambodia trace their roots to large-scale immigration more than a century ago, under French rule over Indochina. Before 1970 the Vietnamese and the Chinese were the two largest ethnic minorities in Cambodia.

Ben Kiernan wrote that about half of a community of 400,000 was expelled by the Lon Nol government in 1970, and that several thousand were killed in pogroms. In his account, the Khmer Rouge expelled more than 100,000 more in the year after their victory in 1975 and killed those who remained. He wrote that in more than a year of research in Cambodia after 1979 he found no Vietnamese resident who had lived through those years in the country. In its 2018 judgment in Case 002/02, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found the surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge responsible for genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese.

After 1979 many of those expelled returned to their home areas, above all Phnom Penh and Neak Luong, and new arrivals came from Vietnam.

Population

Counts of the community differ widely. Christoph Sperfeldt writes that the government long held back figures because the subject was sensitive. The government's 2010 report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination gave 72,775 people of Vietnamese ethnic groups. The 2019 census listed 78,090 people whose mother tongue is Vietnamese. The Minority Rights Organization estimates 400,000 to 700,000, and a census of foreigners by the Ministry of Interior found 180,000 Vietnamese nationals, about 70,000 of them classed as "old settlers". In 2019 Cambodia reported 57,444 people under the statelessness mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the first such figure it had given.

Citizenship

The 1996 Law on Nationality replaced a law of 1954. Under it, a child born in Cambodia to parents who are not citizens can become a citizen only if both parents were born in the country, where one parent had been enough before. Many families lost their papers when they were driven out or moved. JRS Asia Pacific described the community as deprived of the legal right to work, hold a bank account or buy property.

In late 2014 the authorities began a census of foreigners, and the deportations that followed sent more than 10,000 people, most of them recent arrivals, to Vietnam. A registration under the Ministry of Interior then issued new permanent resident cards for 250,000 riel a person, renewable after two years at the same price, which record their holders as immigrants of Vietnamese nationality. From 2017 officials took away earlier papers they judged irregular, and the ministry counted about 70,000 people who held them. Sperfeldt writes that the 2018 change to the nationality law did not address the problem.

Floating villages

Many Vietnamese live in floating houses on the Tonle Sap lake and river, while Khmer families who can afford it live in houses built on stilts. A study published in 2012, A Boat Without Anchors, looked at Vietnamese residents of floating villages in Kampong Chhnang province. It found that they lived in Cambodia legally and held papers naming them foreign residents, but none had proof of nationality of any state.

Authorities around the lake have been relocating floating villages onto land, citing environmental and other regulations. Kampong Chhnang was the first province to carry this out, relocating more than 10,000 people of Vietnamese and other communities. In June 2021 the authorities in Phnom Penh ordered the removal of all floating houses on the rivers around the capital, which affected some 1,300 households, most of them Vietnamese. Vietnamese residents cannot own the land at the relocation sites.

See also

• Cham people
• Khmer Krom