Cambodia 's Refugees
by Ben Kieman,
Yale University.
Massive forced population displacement has long been a feature of Cambodian society and
history. This is true of many countries, of course. But in mainland Southeast Asia, where
population densities have always been relatively low, control of people has usually been a more
pressing aim of state than control of the relatively abundant arable land. When Thai armies
invaded Cambodia and sacked Angkor in the fifteenth century, they carried off much of the Khmer
population with them as prisoners of war and slaves. The Khmer kings at the height of their
power had done much the same with their enemies. Campaigns did generate refugees also. The
first Vietnamese intervention , in the 1650's, forced several thousand Khmers to take shelter in
Thai territory .1
But a new kind of power in the region, which aimed to control the land, was much more
effective in driving populations away. In the 1880's, French colonial forces made their first
serious attempt to control Cambodia , provoking a protracted uprising . No fewer than 195,000
Khmers fled into Thai-held territory, escaping the French repression . Thus the Cambodian
population under French rule fell by twenty percent in a couple of years.2
In their death-throes in the 1950's, French colonial forces attempted to put an end to the
nationalist challenge by forcibly regrouping the population from rural resistance strongholds.
Approximately half a million Khmer peasants were made into internal refugees by the French. In
some areas the situation would have been familiar to those working with Khmer refugees today.
One French writer described it:
The peasants of each abandoned subdistrict were grouped together in a big
rectangular village, surounded by palisades and divided by two perpendicular
tracks. The pagoda was brought in with the inhabitants. Forty or so wells were
dug. For a period the peasants of two out of four subdistricts had to abandon their
o
t distant r
c
ie -fields, and live miserably as coolies or by burning off new land.3
The US intervention in Vietnam produced another wave of Khmer refugees. From the
early 1960's, ethnic Khmers born in Vietnam began fleeing to Cambodia to escape the Saigon
government's repression in the countryside. In 1962 a Khmer Buddhist monk who had fled the
Diem regime with 400 others claimed: 'Our schools have all been closed —With the slaughter of
See Ben Kieman, 'Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot', Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars, 20, 4, 1988, pp. 2-33.
A. Rousseau, Leprotectoratfrancais du Cambodge, Dijon, 1904, pp. 169-70.
Ben Kieman, How Pol Pot Came to Power : A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930-1975, Verso,
London, 1985, pp. 86, 127.
our people, the destruction of our villages , the repression of our culture and language, it seems our
people are to be exterminated.' In 1965-68 over 17,000 Khmers, including over 2,300 Buddhist
monks, fled South Vietnam for Cambodia.1
The 1970 US invasion of Cambodia itself created 130,000 new Khmer refugees, according
to the Pentagon.2 In 1971, sixty percent of refugees surveyed in the towns gave US bombing as
the main cause of their displacement. By the end of the American B-52 carpet bombardment in
August 1973, there were an estimated 720,000 displaced persons in Cambodia. Up to three
million people, out of a population of seven million , had been forced to leave their homes at some
stage during the war.3 As the war ground on over the next two years, tens of thousands of other
villagers were forced to leave their homes by Khmer Rouge persecution in the countryside.
When Pol Pot 's Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975, they evacuated the capital
immediately, creating at least a million more refugees. These forcibly displaced people, along with
former residents of other towns and the forcibly dispersed members of ethnic minorities , came to
be officially known as 'deportees ' in Khmer Rouge parlance. Further massive population
deportations of the Pol Pot period included the 1978 evacuation of the Eastern Zone of the country,
in which the Democratic Kampuchea regime (DK) forcibly uprooted about half a million peasants
and murdered over 100,000 in less than six months. In all over a million people died under Pol
Pot 's rule.
The impact of such events is scarcely imaginable. One psychiatrist who specializes in
caring for Indochinese refugees reports : 'All of our patients have suffered multiple trauma... For
some groups, such as Cambodian widows who lived through the killing fields of Pol Pot 's
regime, the average is nine traumatic events.'4
In the DK period only about 20,000 Khmers managed to flee to Thailand, and another
150,000 to Vietnam. But the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in early 1979, which destroyed
the Pol Pot system of coercion inside the country, gave hundreds of thousands of Khmers the
chance to flee to Thailand. Some hoped to escape from the country, others to make contact with
relatives abroad, others to take advantage of the burgeoning border trade. By the end of 1979 up
to 700,000 were gathered along the Thai-Cambodia border, where they soon came under the
control of several Thai-backed anti -Vietnamese armed groups, including the same Khmer Rouge
many of them had hoped to escape forever. And these Khmer Rouge were in the process of
Ben Kieman , 'Put Not Thy Trust in Princes : Burchett on Kampuchea", in Burchett : Reporting the Other Side of
the World. 1939-1983, Quartet , London, 1986, pp. 252-269.
Seymour Hersh, Kissinger , The Price of Power : Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Summit Books,
New York, 1983, p. 202.
Ben Kieman, The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973', Vietnam Generation (Yale), 1, 1, winter
1989, pp. 4-41, esp. pp. 8, 12.
T. Lecompte, 'Clinic Pioneers Core of Refugee Trauma', The Item,20 December 1986, quoted in Josephine
Reynell, Political Pawns: Refugees on the Thai-Kampuchean Border,Oxford 1989, p. 154.
rebuilding their defeated army with the help of Thailand , China and the West, who have ensured
that the Khmer Rouge were revived and occupied the Cambodian seat in the UN, until 1990 at
least.
But the economic recovery inside Cambodia by early 1981 led nearly 200,000 Khmer
refugees to return from the Thai border to their homes in the new People's Republic of Kampuchea
(PRK), 1now called the State of Cambodia. Over the next five years another 250,000 managed to
get accepted by third countries such as the USA. But for ten years the population has kept
increasing and newcomers have kept arriving at the border , where 300,000 now remain in limbo,
unable to qualify for resettlement abroad, and unable or unwilling to return home.
Up to 100,000 Khmers on the Thai border remain under the control of the Khmer Rouge,
and only 36,000 of these are in the one Khmer Rouge camp accessible to international monitoring ,
Site 8.2 170,000 more refugees live in the allied KPNLF faction's camp known as Site 2 (38% of
them bom in border camps)3, and about 40,000 live in Site B, the camp belonging to the third antiPhnom Penh faction, the Sihanoukists. 76% of the refugees come from Battambang province
near the border.
Except perhaps for Site B, camp condit
i ons are deplorable. Overcrowding, lack of water
and social services, monotony and hopelessness rule the camps. Suicide, rape, extortion , armed
violence and family breakdown occur at horrifying levels. In the Khmer Rouge and KPNLF
camps, many people live in terror .4 Refugees are murdered , kidnapped , held for ransom, and
made
o t do forced labour. There is no way out. Thai policy ensures that the camps are not open to
third country officials for selection of applicants to resettle abroad. The refugees have become a
human wall to protect Thailand from a spillover of the Cambodian war, a mass of hostages to the
fortunes of the Thai-backed armies; in the words of Josephine Reynell, 'Political Pawns'5. She
concludes her book of that title : 'The ordinary Khmer, without whom the CGDK would have no
viability and no resistance army, without whom the conflict which serves so many political
interests could not continue , have no escape. They are trapped without a voice in a highly volatile
situation , pawns to both their own leaders and wider political interests. In the end it is they who
Age, 21 January 1981. For an analysis of the 1979- 1989 period in Cambodia, see Ben Kieman, 'Retur
n to the
Killing Fields ?', Australian Left Review, no. 110, May-June 1989, pp.17-21.
Age , 25 April 1989.
'For These Huddled Masses, Only Warped Lives', by Steven Erianger, New York Times, 9 December 1988.
See for instance, Khmer Rouge Abuses Along the Thai-Cambodian Border, Asia Watch Report, February 1989,
and Special Report on Site 8: Have the Khmer Rouge Changed ? , written by aid workers on the border, May 1988;
and on the KPNLF, Ben Kiernan, 'Pol Pot's Allies: The Right in Kampuchea', Aus tralian Left Review , no. 99,
1987, and Seeking Shelter : Cambodians in Thailand, Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, New
York, 1987. A 272-page draft of a more recent report by the latter organisation makes it clear that conditions in Site
2haveworsened and KPNLF human rights violations have increased in the past two years.
e> Josephine Reynell, Political Pawns : Refugees on the Thai-Kampuchean Border, Oxford, Refugee Studies Program,
1989.
pay the highest price , for they pay with that which cannot be retur
n ed — their lives and their
future.'
The huge population in Site 2 are deliberately marooned only 3 km. from the border, and
the camp has been shelled by both sides in the conflict. This is all the more alarming in that the
majority of the refugees are women and children, and 25 percent of them are under four years of
age.1 Fifty percent are under 15.
David Feith wrote in 1988 that 'most (refugees) want to return to Kampuchea once the
Vietnamese army has withdrawn'. The last troops went home the next year, but many refugees
did not, fearful that the Khmer Rouge would be returned to power by international fiat or stil able
to pose a threat to the country. As a WHO mental health specialist recently reported, "For the
people in Site 2, going home is not an option as long as the Khmer Rouge is a strong military
presence in the future in Kampuchea."
"In Site 2", the WHO doctor went on, "the refugees
clearly express their fear of going back to a Kampuchea with a coalition gover
n ment in which the
Khmer Rouge would take part ."2 One hopes that such a 'solution ' will not be forced upon
Cambodia.
Some refugees, like a good number of Cambodians in the country, seem confident that it
cannot be, and willing to take the s
r
ik that the State of Cambodia can hold off the Khmer Rouge on
its own if necessary. In the first three months of 1989, over 550 people from Site 2 crossed the
border back into Cambodia and were resettled in the adjacent province, and others are reported
ot
have gone on to other provinces .
The numbers of returnees to the PRK were apparently
increasing. Others in Site 2 were planning to retur
n but were awaiting help from the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
After the breakdown of the 1989 Paris conference on Cambodia, the three opposition
factions begun preparations 'to force civilians out of the refugee camps in Thailand and into areas
of Cambodia that they militarily control', according to senior international relief officials. Dith
Pran, the refugee whose story of life under Pol Pot was the basis of the film. The Killing Fields,
has accused the coalition factions of planning to use 'civilian Cambodian camp populations as
hostages and pawns' in their 'plans for civil war'.
According to the report in the Bangkok
Nation, 'Coalition officials said that after several disastrous armed forays into Cambodia, the
KPNLF was planning to occupy and populate Cambodian territory to press its claims for a future
share of power.' So the KPNLF prepared to forcibly evacuate its 170,000 captives in Site 2.3
David Feith , Stalemate : Refugees in Asia, Asian Bureau Australia , Parkville, Victoria , 1988, pp . 26-7.
Rene F. W. Diekstra, Tsychosocial and mental health problems of the Khmer refugees in Site 2 and Site 8 on the
Thai-Kampuchean border', November 1988, pp. 8, 14.
Bangkok Nation, 31 August 1989.
Even in 1986 it was not difficult to find refugees in Site 2 who were prepared to go back to
Cambodia any time they could escape the camp and evade the various forces patrolling the border.
The same is probably true of the other camps.
In 1986 a Thai official told me that Khmer refugees who had already informed UNHCR
that they wished to return home would have to go to the USA or to another third country first .
When asked why they could not be allowed to do so immediately , he replied that they would have
to wait their turns in the queue. But because Thailand has never recognised them as refugees , even
today the vast bulk of Khmer 'displaced persons' on the border cannot even get into the queue for
resettlement abroad. But large numbers do want to resettle in other countries , and these refugees
will resist repatriation schemes whatever the political future of Cambodia.
The USA should be ready to accept such people. This will require not just expressions of
generosity but also political pressure to ensure that they are given a choice. Thai policy favours the
creation of 'neutral camps' where refugees can live free of political control by the fact
i ons and meet
with international officials to discuss resettlement . But the US opposes this. Successful
repatriation can only be voluntary, and those who do not wish to return to Cambodia should be
given access -- currently denied -- to both UNHCR and third countries ' resettlement programs.
Pressure on Sihanouk and Son Sann to abandon their alliance with Pol Pot's Khmer
Rouge and to negotiate for peace with Hun Sen would help the refugees .
On March 3, 1989, an Australian radio news correspondent reported from Hong Kong that
75 Vietnamese refugees had returned voluntarily to their country. The reporter stated that the
refugees had alighted from the plane carrying 'Sony cassette players, the hallmarks of the West'.
It is remarkable how quickly Westerners can adopt things Asian as their own. The same spirit
would be welcome to Cambodian refugees.