This story has been entered on the data base in 2 parts. This is part 1.
The image of tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes for the sanctuary of foreign borders has become so commonplace that it no longer is big news. Often it is not news at all. Refugees today are usually citizens of Third World nations who flee to other Third World nations, all seemingly insignificant to the developed world. As a consequence, nobody much notices them. Our governments notice them, however, and have all too often had a direct hand, overtly or covertly, in creating or exploiting the situations that produce refugees.
"In defending their sovereignty and promoting their interests, states do not flinch from pursuing policies which force people into exile and keep them there," said a 1986 study of refugees by the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues.
"It is no coincidence that the largest refugee movements have taken place in areas where local conflicts have been drawn into the broader struggle for influence at global level: Central America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.
"It is clear that mass displacements . . . are becoming the norm rather than a deviation from it."
The commission is a respected body of eminent statesmen from all over the world formed at the behest of the United Nations to consider the most intractable issues facing the UN system. Its members are perhaps too diplomatic to spell out who, specifically, is behind the "broader struggle for influence at the global level" in the Third World. It is not hard, however, to examine its short list of troubled regions and deduce who is struggling for influence and why. One could start with the two reigning military superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and trace their presence in the commission's list throughout. Central America has produced 300,000 officially recognized refugees. For the most part, they have fled governments allied with and heavily armed and advised by the United States or Soviet Union. Both powers use them as proxy instruments of war to turn back or advance the tide of revolution they deem vital to their respective interests.
In Southeast Asia, 1.5 million refugees already have fled the region as a direct result of the U.S. war in Indochina. The aftershocks of that war continue to hold 500,000 refugees in camps there today. They are in part confined at the behest of the Soviet Union and the United States, along with China and Vietnam, through direct involvement or by proxy.
In Central Asia, 5 million Afghans live in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. They began trickling out in 1978 after a Soviet-sponsored Marxist revolution in Afghanistan and then poured out after an invasion by Soviet troops in 1979. The Soviets' current retreat from Afghanistan is a testimonial to the tenacity of Afghan guerrillas. But billions of dollars in proxy aid from the United States, Saudi Arabia, China and other interested states have profoundly influenced the war, too.
In the Horn of Africa, half a million Eritreans from northern Ethiopia live in refugee camps in Sudan. Another half-million ethnic Somalis from Ethiopia's Ogaden region live in refugee camps in Somalia. They are displaced because of age-old ethnic enmities within Ethiopia. But the continuing warfare that exploits their displacement is largely financed and supplied by Soviet and U.S. military aid. For the last 20 years the two superpowers have jousted by proxy for strategic dominance of Red Sea oil-shipping routes, one of the world's crucial trade conduits.
One might add to the independent commission's list two other world hot spots, southern Africa and the Middle East.
Angola, potentially one of the wealthiest countries in black Africa, has not known a day of peace since it won independence from Portugal in 1975. The nation's economy is in shambles, and 400,000 of its people live in exile in neighboring countries. Angola's pro-Marxist government is supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in Soviet aid and military assistance, its war with insurgents fought, in part, by 57,000 Cuban soldiers. The pro-Western insurgent army makes war on the Angolan government with the help of South African troops and is supplied with $30 million annually in U.S. aid.
In Mozambique, fast becoming one of the more tortured, luckless nations on the planet, 4 million people today wander helplessly, without homes and terrorized by an anarchic, brutal insurgent army. Another million have fled to neighboring countries to perhaps the most underfinanced, ill-prepared refugee rescue mission in the world today. The "insurgency" hounding Mozambique, in the name of restoring democracy, is a proxy army, organized and financed by South Africa.
The Middle East is a world unto itself, a region of war and ethnic conflicts with roots that sink into ancient times. In the last 40 years, no other group of nations in the world has seen such heavy trafficking of arms and confusing alliances as the Middle East. Its ancient rivalries suddenly have become major foreign-policy concerns for most nations of the world, which jockey for favor and influence with the governments that control the most important supply of oil in the world.
If there is one simple lesson that the world should have learned from the 40 years of Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, it is this: Refugees are not a humanitarian problem, they are a political problem. Most refugees are the products of warfare, and war is a political action.
Yet the world likes to think of refugees mostly in humanitarian terms as poor unfortunates, innocent victims displaced from their homes who need help in feeding and clothing themselves. That attitude is a generous one, as far as it goes. The United Nations has created agencies to deal with refugees, and 13 million people worldwide are being fed and clothed in refugee camps. Knowing that, the rest of the world has a tendency to feel relieved, as though the problem has been solved and can be forgotten. Yet the most conservative estimates say that there are at least 25 million additional people who are similarly victimized, chased from their homes but displaced inside their own countries with very little international assistance to feed, shelter, clothe and protect them.
Most refugee problems are not easily solved, precisely because the politics that forced these people into exile have not been dealt with. While the rest of the world chooses to ignore or manipulate the political issues that create the camps, the refugees inside them face years and decades of living something that is really not a life at all.
To understand the effects of global political struggle on refugees, you need only consider the life of one: Moul Sam Neang.
Twelve is supposed to be a magic age for girls, the delicate first passage from childhood to womanhood. And so it could have been for Sam Neang Moul. She was the middle child in a family of eight children, the daughter of a railway station agent. When she was 12, Sam was an extremely bright 6th- grader and had set her sights on going on to the university, perhaps even becoming a doctor. The dream wasn't so far-fetched back then. Her two oldest sisters already were attending the university, and her father was committed to sending all his children to college.
But Sam was 12 at the wrong time, 1975, in the wrong place: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. For the previous five years she had lived through the uncertainty of a war that crept its inexorable way toward her. The last year was a hellish one as communist Khmer Rouge artillery periodically shelled the city. In April, 1975, victorious Khmer Rouge soldiers surged into Phnom Penh, knocking on the doors of every household and telling everyone to leave the city. Immediately.
Fear is a great teacher, and Sam had to learn the lesson instantaneously. If you are on the wrong end of a deadly weapon, you do as you're told. She watched her mother and father pack a few belongings and gather their children, and they left home. They walked north on country roads for weeks, alongside legions of distraught, bewildered, terrified city-dwellers such as themselves. When their Khmer Rouge guards told them to stop, they stopped. When they were given their watery rice gruel, they ate. They slept when they were told. They woke up when they were told. They began marching again when they were told.
Their destination was a forest in Battambang province, Cambodia's richest rice-growing area. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, had a mad dream of purifying Cambodia by eradicating every last taint of Western culture and creating the purest communist state in the world. He closed every school, abolished money and religion, broke up the tradition of family unity, shut down hospitals and murdered every educated person his army could discover.
Pol Pot divided the survivors into three categories: worker, peasant and soldier. It was an absolute slave-labor nation. If you didn't work, or if you complained, you died by execution or starvation.
Sam and her family were designated as peasants. They and a group from Phnom Penh were taken to the Battambang forest and left there with tools, little food and armed overseers. They were told to clear the land and convert it to rice paddies, though the people were not farmers.
The work was grueling, and the rations small. Everyone in Sam's family fell ill from the poor food and the resulting dysentery. In October, 1975, one of her younger brothers died. In November another younger brother died. In the following weeks an older brother died, then another, then her father.
After five months in the forest, the Khmer Rouge issued new orders. The remaining members of Sam's family were moved to a village, Prey Lean, in Battambang. Her sisters, the former university students, were moved to a commune of young adults, but Sam, her mother and an older brother stayed in Prey Lean. They were supposed to split their time between growing rice and constructing new dams and irrigation systems. "We worked from 6 until 11 every morning, and 1 until 5 every afternoon, every day, with . . . never a day off," she said. "I suffered from malarial fever and constant hunger, but you had to work anyway. If I was too sick to work, they cut my rations even more."
Life became a cycle of working and being watched over by the Khmer Rouge. Death was a constant, by disease and starvation or by the hands of the guards. People were taken away by guards and never returned. No one dared ask where they had gone.
Sam turned 13, then 14, and in January, 1977, Sam's mother received word that one of her two oldest daughters had died in the commune. In December she received word that the other had died.
"When they died, we were so weak, we couldn't cry," Sam said. "We had to ask a neighbor to help bury them." Sam, her mother and her brother continued to work and to survive. They had no way of knowing that Pol Pot's butchery was a way of life throughout Cambodia, accounting, by the end of 1978, for more than a million deaths in a country of 7.5 million people. Nor did they have any idea that Pol Pot had tried to invade Vietnam, giving the Vietnamese an excuse in turn to invade Cambodia.
Sam turned 15. She had no idea that the Vietnamese had routed Pol Pot's troops. But one day in December, 1978, the Khmer Rouge soldiers disappeared from the village . Shortly after, a man appeared one evening and told Sam's mother that the entire village must move away. Immediately. "If we didn't leave, he said the Khmer Rouge would return and kill us all," she said. "We decided we had to go, even though we didn't know why. We joined people walking on the road . There must have been thousands of them. We walked to the mountains in Poasat province, where we lived for the next four months in a forest.
"We had nothing to eat but plant leaves and roots. We had no shelter, so we lived in the shadow of the trees. We had to keep moving all of the time. Nobody helped anybody else. Sometimes my brother would sneak into a village to bring some food back to us." The Vietnamese eventually caught up with the fleeing hordes and sent them to Battambang City to join communal farms run by Vietnam's Cambodian puppet regime. Arriving in the provincial capital, Sam found a male cousin who had survived Pol Pot and had a house there. She, her mother and brother moved in with him.
Sam turned 16. Life became a bit less sinister but no less hard. The war and Pol Pot's destruction of Cambodia's agricultural base meant unrelenting food shortages and continuing hunger. Three months after her family moved in, Sam's cousin sneaked off and headed for the Thailand border just 50 miles away. A month later, Sam, her mother and brother followed.
"All of us were very weak," she said. "We weren't able to walk for very long or very fast, but in seven days we were at the border."
The border in 1979 represented freedom to the ravaged Cambodian population, and more than half a million of them gathered there. It represented refuge from the endless warfare and purposeless death. It represented their first contact in five years with the outside world, the re- establishment of ties with people who operated with some sense of sanity and order.
At least that was the hope.
But the forces that had flung Sam and her family into Cambodia's maelstrom were not about to let her go free. By 1979 the rest of the world had become aware of Pol Pot's butchery, but the initial euphoria over Cambodia's "deliverance " by Vietnam through its Cambodian invasion soon turned sour. After its successful war against America and its final unification in 1975, Vietnam had become something of a rogue country. Superb as warriors, the Vietnamese communists proved less adept at managing their own economy and people in peacetime.
The successful Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia did not sit well in many nations. Having a bellicose, militarily superior Vietnamese army sitting on its border frightened Thailand deeply. It did not please the Western alliance, either, which had visions of the domino theory at last coming true, with Vietnam poised to take the entire Malaysian peninsula. Most of all, it angered China, which saw a hated, pro-Soviet Vietnamese regime encircling its own soft underbelly.
Short of direct foreign intervention, the only conceivably effective deterrent that could dampen the Vietnamese parade was the Khmer Rouge. Initially, Pol Pot and his forces quickly crumbled in the face of superior Vietnamese firepower. But as they began their hasty retreat to the Thai- Cambodian border, the Khmer Rouge took along at gunpoint as many hapless civilians as they could.
This story has been entered on the data base in 2 parts. This is part 2.
Thus an unspeakable pact was made with one of history's most certifiably criminal governments. Not only did the Khmer Rouge continue to exist, they were rearmed by the Chinese, given training bases inside Thailand by the Thais and allowed to control "their" civilian populations along the Cambodian border. It was all done in the name of geopolitical concern over Vietnam.
To make the bitter pill a little sweeter, two other noncommunist forces were quickly organized among the Cambodian refugees along the border. One was led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's leader throughout America's war in Vietnam until he was ousted in what many believe to have been a CIA-inspired coup in 1970. The other was led by Son Sann, an aged former Cambodian prime minister under Sihanouk. Ostensibly a coalition, all three groups have been armed and field guerrilla forces inside Cambodia. The lion's share of military support and supplies, however, has gone to the Khmer Rouge. Each faction of this coalition has tens of thousands of refugees under its direct control, about 300,000 people altogether. The refugees have become, in effect, the "constituency" of each faction, instruments to prove legitimacy. On the basis of this constituency, the coalition retains the seat representing Cambodia in the United Nations and other international bodies. Among those 300,000 border people are Sam Neang Moul, her mother and her brother. When they escaped in 1979, they first found refuge just inside Cambodia in a camp called Ampil. That camp became a stronghold for the Son Sann, noncommunist forces called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front . They were luckier than those who stumbled into camps controlled by the Khmer Rouge but not much luckier.
It was an extremely precarious existence because the war went on right around the camp, which was often subject to Vietnamese shelling. But Ampil was at least on the reception end of a jerry-built international relief effort organized by the United Nations. Sam and her family and the other camp inmates for the first time in four years began to get adequate food and regular medical attention.
In Ampil, Sam watched her teenage years slip by as she turned 17, 18, 19, 20 then 21. In 1984 the Vietnamese launched a full-scale offensive on the camp, and she and her mother and brother ran again. They found refuge in another Liberation Front camp for a year, then returned to Ampil. In 1985 the Vietnamese attacked again, determined to drive all the camp inhabitants into Thailand.
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| Sam Neang, her mother and brother in front of their little hut in Site 2 |
The agency that should be caring for these Cambodians is the UN High Commission for Refugees. The Thais will not allow the UN commission into the camps because to do so would give camp inhabitants the option of resettlement in third countries around the world, thus destroying the "constituency" of the resistance. Instead, a special organization has been set up to care for the Cambodians, the UN Border Relief Operation.
The Relief Operation has no authority to provide protection for camp inhabitants. The Thais maintain strict control over the campsites, surrounding them with barbed wire and posting armed guards with orders to shoot any inmate trying to leave. The UN agency provides only food, medical attention and basic education for the inmates. It operates on an annual budget of $44 million, or 40 cents a day per person.
For 40 cents a day, you can't provide many personalized services. You can drop off food, provide water and fuel, set up and staff clinics and hospitals, put together some schools and organize some teachers and hope for the best.
"Sometimes I equate what we're doing here with a crisis-intervention center in a hospital," said an American who works with Cambodians in the camps. "We keep these people alive by attaching them to a life-support system, but then we just leave them there to vegetate."
At 8 a.m. the gates swing open at Site 2, the largest of the border camps, home to 170,000 Cambodian refugees, including Sam. They are packed into 2 square miles of squalid, dusty, nearly treeless Thai real estate surrounded by barbed wire just a mile from the Cambodian border. When the gates swing open, the traffic is one way going in, as lumbering trucks arrive bearing firewood, food rations, medical supplies and enough water to give everybody in the camp a pail a day.
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| Sam Neang's brother and his Khmer and Thai medical team |
During the day, the biggest fear is that the ever-present, muffled sound of Vietnamese artillery a few miles away inside Cambodia will become less muffled. That will mean the artillery is turned toward Site 2, as it was one day in 1987, when eight people were killed. But during the day there is at least a semblance of purpose and civility to the place. Children go to school. The ailing go to medical clinics. Mothers with infants go to training courses in nutrition. There are always lines, long ones, to stand in to get rationed food, water and firewood. At night it is a different story. Then refugees are sitting targets, vulnerable to Thai guards, to armed bandits who live in a forest just a few hundred yards north of the camp, to soldiers, and to their fellow refugees.
Since Site 2 opened in early 1985, people there have been murdered, robbed and raped with distressing frequency. The Thai guards, until recently ill-trained and underpaid, have an unpleasant history of general abuse of the refugees. Bandit gangs, frequently numbering 20 men at a time, periodically enter the camps with the presumed complicity of the guards. Once in, they terrorize whole sections of the camp, beating, raping and sometimes killing victims while searching for hidden valuables. Drunkenness among Liberation Front soldiers returning on leave to visit their families also has created major problems, according to camp workers. Because the Liberation Front is split by factions, often at odds with one another, returning soldiers often raid areas of Site 2 controlled by rival factions, setting off shootings and mayhem. Theoretically, weapons are not allowed inside the camp, but it is the crossroad of a guerrilla war, and they get inside anyway. They are a cheap commodity, especially grenades, which can be purchased by anybody for 5 cents. Early this year, two 8-year-old boys quarreled, and one threw a grenade into the other's home, killing one person and wounding eight. During the day the violence is less overt, but it nonetheless saps the spirit of the Cambodians who live there. "Our fear before was that we'd be blown up by the Vietnamese," said an American camp worker. "Now I think we are blowing up from the inside out. People ax their neighbors for making too much noise. Men kick and beat their wives in frustration. Mothers beat their children. "If you have no hope, you don't care what happens." Aid workers in the camps almost universally worry about the loss of the best of Cambodian traditions and values inside the camp. They report seeing uncharacteristically un-Cambodian behavior on the rise in all the border camps. Teenagers organize into gangs for self-protection and racketeering. Young widows and girls offer themselves as prostitutes. Mothers decide camp life has become unbearable and retreat into an almost catatonic state, abandoning their houses, children and all social contact.
I was at a wedding reception inside Site 2 early this year, seated at a table with my interpreter and six other guests, all of them refugees and friends of the groom. Above the din of a rented rock band , I tried through an interpreter to make what turned out to be awkward conversation with my fellow guests. One of them, a serious young woman seated across from me, had been listening intently for a good 30 minutes to the mostly inane chatter about food and wedding rituals, but she never joined in. Finally she spoke directly to me.
"You speak English," I said, stating the obvious with some surprise.
"I am sorry," Sam apologized, "I am only learning. I do not speak it very well."
Sam is now 25. She works as a secretary in an adult literacy program. She is slender, tall for a Cambodian, with long, flowing black hair. Her quiet, dignified diffidence completely masks the horror she has lived through for 13 years.
Later in the day, Sam related her saga in English.
She said that when she followed her cousin to the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979, she found him again in the Ampil camp. He had been a soldier in the American-supported Lon Nol regime before Pol Pot took over Cambodia. In 1982, on the basis of his American connections, he was accepted for resettlement to the United States and left. His good fortune fired Sam's imagination, allowing her to hope that she, too, might go to America. In anticipation of that, she began to teach herself English. A few months after the cousin emigrated, however, Thailand unilaterally declared that no more Cambodians would be granted refugee status. Nor would the Thais allow any more Cambodians living on the border to emigrate to third countries through Thailand.
Certainly, the policy legitimized the coalition Cambodian government in exile that Thailand was supporting. And just as certainly, the policy closed off any possibility of a new life for Sam.
The days of massive resettlement of Indochinese refugees in the West seem nearly over anyway. About 1.5 million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees have been resettled in the last nine years. Most of the receiving countries do not want to be confronted with 300,000 more Cambodians, 80 percent of whom are illiterate and unskilled peasant farmers.
"There is no way to go," Sam said in dry resignation. "Even if you dream of going, it is impossible."
She talked matter-of-factly about the past, as though she had long since come to grips with it. She had more difficulty talking about her present life- of numbing, endless boredom-and about her future, which seemed to loom before her like an immense, impenetrable blank wall. On those subjects she spoke haltingly, her voice sometimes cracking, though she never lost her composure.
"From time to time we are told we can go back to Cambodia," Sam said. "They have been saying this every year since 1982. But nothing. We still live on the border. I often ask myself, what will my future be? Will I be on the border forever? Someday I want to marry but not here, not in the camp. I've had many men ask. I want to have my wedding in Cambodia. I have no confidence in the future, living here, living like this."
What is Sam's future? The only reason she has been trapped on the border for nine years is that she and her fellow Cambodians are being used as pawns in an international chess match. The game is to keep Vietnam so off-balance in Cambodia and so isolated internationally for its Cambodian occupation that the Vietnamese will give up and go home. It appears that the game may be coming to a close. Vietnam began removing some of its 120,000 soldiers from Cambodia earlier this year and has sworn to remove all of them by 1990. Condemned by most of the rest of the world, bedeviled by its own bankrupt economy and an incipient famine, the Vietnamese seem to be sincere in wanting to leave. Their departure will represent a victory of sorts for the outside powers: the Chinese, the Thais and the Western alliance. Unfortunately, nobody thus far has come up with a suitable plan to fill the void the Vietnamese would leave in Cambodia. And that void could be cataclysmic for Sam and all of Cambodia because it is one that the Khmer Rouge plan to fill.
The countries that resuscitated the Khmer Rouge as a matter of geopolitical expediency are now horrified at the prospect of the monster they have nurtured trundling back to power in Cambodia. The Thais do not want such an unstable, venomous government next door. The Chinese do not want it either and have invited the most notorious Khmer Rouge leadership to "retire" in China and allow more moderate men to inherit Cambodian leadership.
The Western alliance, headed by the United States, tacitly went along with arming the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam but is now searching for a way to block the Khmer Rouge from regaining power. The alliance pins its hopes on returning Sihanouk to Cambodia as head of state. Nothing erases the fact, however, that the Khmer Rouge has been fighting a war on behalf of other foreign powers for the last nine years. The Khmer Rouge has maintained an ongoing presence inside Cambodia, while Sihanoukist and Liberation Front forces have not. The Khmer Rouge are not likely to drop out of the race willingly.
The Khmer Rouge already may have fired their opening volley in a civil war for the domination of post-Vietnamese Cambodia. Early in July, Sihanouk, to the consternation of his Western backers, resigned as the leader of the guerrilla coalition. He resigned, he said, because the Khmer Rouge were already starting to kill his men.
The suggestion that the manipulation of her life by powers beyond her control might now condemn her once again to the deadly embrace of the Khmer Rouge is unfathomable to Sam.
"Oh," she gasped, shaking her head, "I've had enough of that. I speak loyally, I do not want the Vietnamese in my country, but I don't want any more of that."
What she would like most, she said, is to return to school.
"I still want to go back to school. The reason I have only six years of schooling was the war. My older sisters were going to the university, and I know I would have gone, too. My father wanted that."
Sam paused for the longest moment, as though she was considering what might have been with her present predicament.
"I feel my life is like a frog in a well," she finally said. "The frog can look up from the bottom of the well, and he can only see the sky. He never sees anything, never sees anything new. He only understands the life in the well. I've never seen anything new. I know about new things like computers, but I've never seen one. While I am here, I know nothing. I only know the people in the camp."
