Fact Check: No Afghan Refugees Arrived in Cambodia yet
Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, announced on Saturday last week that Cambodia will provide a temporary refuge to 300 Afghan refugees before they are granted asylum by a third country. This announcement drew mixed reactions from both positive and negative from the social media users, especially criticism from rights groups who said that Cambodia has a weak record of protecting refugees and resettling migrants.
After this announcement was widely spread, there has been many posts in social media regarding the issue. Some of them are true and some social media posts are false. This is our investigation regarding about one of those false claims.
Social Media Claim
On August 28, 2021, a Facebook user posted a photo of a group of people sitting on a plane along with a caption “Welcome to Cambodia”. This claim came after there was an announcement that the Government of this kingdom had agreed to allow 300 Afghan refugees to stay before they would be granted asylum by a third country.
This photo attached with the claim above has received many mixed reactions and shared thousands of times by Cambodian Facebook users.
A screenshot captured the claim in Khmer language translated in English as “Welcome to Cambodia, we do not discriminate where you come from or what your religion is. Consider that all nations have equal rights, freedoms and lives”.
Fact Check
Fact Crescendo Cambodia has started its own investigation of this claim above by running a Google Reverse Image search which led us to some reliable sources as follows.
According to one of Turkish News Agencies, Anadolu, the article published on April 18, 2018 showed an exact photo of this group of people on its website with the title translated in English as "Turkey expels 778 Afghan refugees". This shows clearly that the photo published by the News Agency in 2018 is not linked to the current situation happening in Afghanistan at all.
The following is a snapshot captured from a news agency with the caption in Turkish as “Unos 324 refugiados afganos, que habían entrado en territorio turco de forma ilegal, fueron puestos a disposición de la Dirección Provincial de Inmigración en Erzurum” or translated into English through Google Translate, which means “Some 324 Afghan refugees, who had entered Turkish territory illegally, were turned over to the Provincial Directorate of Immigration in Erzurum”.
Anadolu News Report | Archived Link
The above case of deporting illegal Afghan refugees residing in Turkey back to Afghanistan was also verified and checked by AP News on August 19, 2021 recently.
Below is the text captured from AP News Report which stated in English as “The photo showed some 324 Afghan refugees who had entered Turkish territory illegally and were detained and sent back to Afghanistan, according to an April 2018 article on the Spanish-language version of the Anadolu Agency’s website”.
AP News Report | Archived Link
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Conclusion
Fact Crescendo Cambodia have found out that the claim attached with the photo above was misleading. This photo actually was not the Afghan refugees coming into Cambodia recently. In fact, this photo was first found and spotted on the Turkish News Agency website, Anadolo, in April, 2018 when Afghan refugees in that time were deported back to Afghanistan after they were found by Turkey authorities while they had been living illegally in Turkey.
