Vietnamese Security Services Interrogate Refugees in Poland

Text of report by Polish leading privately-owned centre-left newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza website, on 30 May

[Report by Grzegorz Lisicki: "Vietnamese Security Police in Poland Again"]

At least 120 refugees from Vietnam were questioned in Przemysl by Vietnam’s security police, Gazeta Wyborcza has learned.

The Vietnamese have been assisted by our Border Guards, who transport the Vietnamese individuals from detention centres. This is another stage of a story we have already reported on several times. An operation by the police and Border Guards in the Warsaw suburb of Wolka Kosowska in February arrested 89 Vietnamese individuals who were in Poland illegally. They were questioned by department A18 of the People’s Police of Vietnam, which deals with interrogating the emigrant community.

They were encouraged to cooperate with the security police and were threatened with deportation. Protests were raised by the Helsinki Foundation and the Free Speech Society [SWS], which works with Vietnamese oppositionists living in Poland. The issue quieted down, but not for long.

“We know of at least 120 individuals who since Monday have been interrogated at the Border Guards station in Przemysl,” says Robert Krzyszton from the SWS, an affiliate of Amnesty International. “We also know what such interrogations look like, having been told about them by more than 60 detainees. They include several Vietnamese individuals who were taken in the middle of the night from a centre for foreigners in Lesznowola (Mazowieckie Voivodship) and from a detention centre in Biala Podlaska. The Border Guards kept one of the men detained for several hours in a car without food, water, or a toilet.”

The Border Guards have confirmed that the interrogations took place and that they were conducted by employees of Vietnam’s Public Security Ministry. The objective, as Border Guards spokesman Colonel Wojciech Lechowski informed us, is to “verify the identities of individuals, and consequently to issue them with travel documents.”

Such “verification” means sifting out individuals who are wanted by the Vietnamese security police from among all of those individuals being questioned. The A18 officers do have such lists with them in Poland. Once they identify a wanted individual (and he or she confirms his or her identity under interrogation), the Vietnamese Embassy immediately issues them with a “travel document.”

“That is like a sentence against them. Such individuals get deported very quickly,” Krzyszton explains. That is permitted by an agreement Poland signed with Vietnam in 2004, which creates the possibility of the mutual exchange of citizens. “Although it only ‘creates the possibility,’ our officials eagerly take advantage of that possibility. If they can, they get rid of immigrants to Poland. Such interrogations are one of the elements of that strategy,” Krzyszton notes.

Vietnam is one of the world’s last communist regimes. The Vietnamese opposition is active in Poland.

According to the Vietnamese, the interrogations proceed as follows: each of the detainees is searched by the Border Guards, then taken into a room where there is a translator and a female officer addresses civilian clothing. After they state their name, the woman pulls the detainee’s dossier out of a pile on the floor. With their dossier under their arm, the detainee is marched into a room where three security police employees are waiting. “They are aggressive, screaming: where are you from, how many individuals do you know in Poland, who did you come here to, do you have family in Vietnam, where do they live?” one of the individuals interrogated relates. In the end, a document is pushed forward for them to sign. One cannot read what it contains, because one of the officers covers the text with his hand.

This time, the Vietnamese security police is no longer proposing that the individuals cooperate with them in the surveillance of the Vietnamese opposition. “That is a consequence of the scandal that erupted in February,” Krzyszton surmises.

Thus an attempt was made to hush up the issue. That is evidenced by a communique carried in the newspaper issued by the embassy after a meeting between Border Guard leaders and the Vietnamese ambassador in March. “I translated it into Polish,” says Ton Van Anh, an opposition figure living in Warsaw. “They write that the Polish side ‘is applying the proper method for resolving problems (…), by without allowing individuals who do not have information on the topic to comment on issues in a way that is inconsistent with the essence of things.’ That means the media and independent organizations,” she says.

Originally published by Gazeta Wyborcza website, Warsaw, in Polish 30 May 08.

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