About one hundred Khmer Kroms including about twenty monks stage a protest in front of Vietnam embassy as well as foreign embassies and in front of parliament house in the Australian capital city Canberra to demand Vietnam communist government to release the former abbot Tim Sakhon. Vietnam embassy in Canberra has once again ignored its citizens by refusing to meet the protesters although other embassy including England, Germany, Thailand, USA and Cambodia have greeted the protesters.
“We have met with the American ambassador who encouraged us take our petition to more embassies for them to assert pressure on the Vietnam and Cambodian government to solve this issue.” Mr. Thach Ngoc Thach told RFA. This is the first of the global protests organized the the Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation after former monk Tim Sakhon was defrocked and sent to jail in Vietnam by the Cambodian government. – KKN