Vietnamese statement

March 17, 1993
Issue 
92

Vietnamese statement

The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry replied promptly to the charges regarding the three former Vietnamese soldiers.

A spokesperson said that "UNTAC itself and Prince Norodom Sihanouk himself have more than once confirmed that there was no evidence of the presence of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia".

She went on to point out that the head of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, had last September clearly and officially defined "foreign forces" as those "controlled and commanded by a foreign government". An UNTAC document of August 3 had given a similar definition.

The three, the spokesperson said, "have become Cambodians of Vietnamese origin". The demand that they be repatriated to Vietnam was "detrimental to the spirit as well as the wording of the Paris Agreement" and if carried out would be a violation of human rights.

False allegations about Vietnamese troops, she continued, were used as a cover for the Khmer Rouge's sabotaging of the peace agreement and its massacres of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia. The "pressing task at present is to force the [Khmer Rouge] not to sabotage" the peace effort.

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