Most Tonle Sap residents don’t even have a name, nor do they have a single identification paper, as they have spent their whole life on floating houses and boats in isolated fishing villages.

Part 1: The fate of Vietnam’s Tonle Sap villagersPart 2: Mishaps on the way backPart 3: A life-long dilemma Part 4: The villagers with borrowed names

Some of these people once had ID papers, but they burnt them to hide their Vietnamese origin during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. After driving out the regime and gaining power, in 1987 Cambodian authorities collected any remaining ID documents in order to re-grant personal papers, but unluckily, all of the documents were lost due to an archive failure, said Kieu Van Danh – vice chairman of the association of overseas Vietnamese in Pursat Province, Cambodia.

As a result, the residents are now left without a single paper to prove their identification.

Borrowing names

When the fish stock in Tonle Sap has become exhausted and the water begins to rise with the start of the wet season, a fishing ban is put in place. As a result more residents rush back to Vietnam to find work.

Ha Thanh Village in Hung Ha Commune, Vinh Hung District, Long An Province in the Mekong Delta region, which is home to 365 returnees from Tonle Sap, is an example.

Only four of the 365 returnees met the minimum requirements to register for permanent residence and were re-granted Vietnamese citizenship in the last ten years. The rest have to borrow ID papers from friends and neighbors to get a job.

Ha Thanh now has ‘unnamed’ families spanning three generations.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Nhung, 47, has no ID papers, so her son Nguyen Vu Linh, 30, couldn’t register for residency and had to take the name Nguyen Van Dinh from the relative who lent him papers. Linh has a six-year-old son who cannot officially attend school since he has no ID.

Vo Minh Thanh, vice director of the Department of Justice in Long An, said that the children of stateless parents will automatically receive Vietnamese citizenship if they are born in Vietnam, but the challenge is verifying if their parents are stateless.

“Many parents were verified to have Cambodian nationality but lost their papers,” Thanh added.

Mr. Ba Tai decides to stay in the floating village on Tonle Sap (Photo: Tuoi Tre)

Hard to obtain citizenship papers

“The verification of the citizenship of the returnees is difficult and takes time,” said Phan Hoa Nong – head of the justice unit of Tan Hung District in Long An.

Most of them have been stateless for at least two or three generations and they don’t even remember exactly where in Vietnam their family is from. But they are certainly Vietnamese based on their tongue and customs, according to Danh.

Long An has over 1,700 returnees from Tonle Sap, while the whole Mekong Delta region has received over 8,000 people from 2,644 households.

Nguyen Thanh Nguyen, deputy chairman of the People’s Committee of Long An, admitted that, “The amount of Tonle sap returnees will continue rising in the future.””

“There is only one way now to settle the identification problem. This is to give them the status of ‘border inhabitant’ so that they can truly integrate into the community,” he said.

After a time, this status will be ‘upgraded’ to citizenship, he told Tuoi Tre.

The Ministry of Justice passed a regulation last year to facilitate solving the problem. That is to grant citizenship to those who returned to and lived in Vietnam before 1989 and to all the children born in Vietnam.

Long An authorities have approved a VND2.5 billion (US$120,200) plan for 2013-15 to assist the returnees in building houses and granting healthcare and education aid to children.

Fishermen prepare their fishing nets after returning to border provinces in Vietnam (Photo: Tuoi Tre)