Cambodia
Packer, George
The Sqtate Department's decision to stop supporting the Cambodian rebels reminds me of an experience I had that began in Bangkok and ended in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian...
...A few who'd gone outside the wire fences in search of game or vegetables or firewood to sell on the black market had been shot...
...Anyway, Vietnamese troops had once shot at him across this border, from these mountains and these trees...
...His face had altered completely: its round contentment was crumpled between the story we'd just been told and the mob of kids that had gathered around his Nissan during the telling...
...A unit of Vietnamese infantry he encountered in a field was not convinced and fired on him when he ran, but missed...
...And school was letting out...
...He didn't see an overwhelming need for a visit...
...no one to leave without permission...
...We embraced—awkward for me because I was being thanked by him...
...It took him six days and six nights to cross Cambodia...
...therefore, we had to permit the return of the Khmer Rouge, indirectly arming them through our ally Prince Sihanouk, who had dwindled to little more than a convenient front man for them...
...The Sqtate Department's decision to stop supporting the Cambodian rebels reminds me of an experience I had that began in Bangkok and ended in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border...
...He himself had suffered nothing at their hands, but Svay Nhim said that some things you didn't have to suffer personally...
...At last he reached safety in one of the Thai border camps that were filling up with refugees from the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese...
...The sky had turned quite dramatically black and white...
...no one to buy or sell...
...Svay Nhim, who has more cause to hate the Vietnamese than the U.S...
...What had shaken him most were the tales of abuse and murder on the part of the Thai camp guards...
...Svay Nhim had agreed to help run the primary school so that he wouldn't lose his mind from boredom...
...He'd been there ever since...
...the Chinese couldn't lose face by abandoning their murderous surrogates, the Khmer Rouge...
...Although it happened three years ago, it might as well have been last month, for one feature of such places is a deadly timelessness...
...It's not unfair to give the same answer to both questions: we were saving face...
...But—like many Thais on this subject—he thought there were already far too many Cambodians in Bangkok, and he wanted the several hundred thousand in the camps to stay there, if they didn't get out, of Thailand altogether...
...In his hierarchy of fears the Thai military authorities were third, just below the Vietnamese troops who occasionally shelled the camp...
...He knew he had no story capable of mollifying the Khmer Rouge, but in the northwestern jungles he managed to avoid them...
...Wearing Khmer clothes, he persuaded most people who asked that he was a Cambodian...
...We want to do everything we can to prevent a return of the Khmer Rouge to power," said the Secretary of State on the day he announced that our recognition of the rebel coalition would be withdrawn and talks with Vietnam to end the war would start...
...The scores were old, and everybody had one to settle...
...Shame," he said more than once—and said little more, all the way back to Bangkok...
...In an hour the camp would close to visitors...
...Vietnam defeated us, Vietnam held the remains of a few thousand of our soldiers...
...One result of all this diplomatic face-saving has been that Svay Nhim and a few hundred thousand others must waste away in the border camps...
...He came out of a • Reports from Abroad bamboo office looking somewhat startled himself...
...I'd forgotten about the driver...
...So my one and only interview was with the assistant headmaster of the primary school...
...Pity and panic froze him...
...He'd never been to the camps...
...After the Vietnamese lost theirs by withdrawing in 1989, the Cambodian war entered a new, bloody phase...
...panic won and he ran out, apologizing to Svay Nhim with his eyes and scattering the children with shouts...
...And he confided that he'd had no idea it would be like this...
...He had seen, as the gem merchant insisted...
...Svay Nhim was as lean as Tae Won was fleshy—some combination of diet, anxiety, and his having once been a Buddhist monk...
...He had the air conditioner on and the windows up, so all we heard was a remote, high-pitched roar...
...the light was failing under storm clouds...
...Although those were decent and necessary decisions, there's evidence that they were made too late...
...Al this was said in a rush, and by the time he finished it was a few minutes to five...
...I blushed, went out, and hailed a driver, who blinked and smiled as if I were trying to hire a car to Kabul...
...Thailand was not just temples of golden Buddhas, the gem merchant said...
...But like most people hustling a living in Bangkok, Tae Won had a price—seventy-five dollars including gas...
...He was also a Vietnamese of Khmer origin, and this inheritance won him prison terms under both Thieu and the communists...
...Until a few months ago the State Department apparently based its Indochina policy on pure spite...
...What's more, all of them looked under twelve...
...Downtown Bangkok: A Thai gem merchant collared me in the Temple of the Golden Buddha...
...Tae Won never much liked Cambodians...
...Then Tae Won grabbed Svay Nhim's hand...
...He spent some nights in villages, others in fields...
...When the Khmer Rouge were within forty miles of Phnom Penh, we made our move...
...Alone at the top were the Khmer Rouge...
...But months went by without a word from the State Department, and it seemed that, when we finally opened our eyes, the Khmer Rouge, killers of a million Cambodians, would be in power again...
...He'd seen and heard enough from other residents of the camp to know...
...government wouldn't see what was before its eyes...
...The Khmer Rouge has apparently taken over or infiltrated enough of the country's towns and villages to stand a chance of winning elections supervised by the United Nations, which have become everybody's last hope for Cambodia...
...He was an ex-soldier, plump, bland, and meticulous about his Nissan...
...The opposite of losing face is not saving face, but willful blindness...
...Nor—and on this he was passionate—did they expect to live out their lives in the camp...
...Svay Nhim traced his route on an old and colorfully illustrated map over his office desk that suggested his journey had been full of wonderful elephants and pagodas...
...Almost at once he lost most of his cash to a profiteering money changer...
...It was the face of a man who's been taking orders for a long time, or is still trying to make sense of a perpetual enigma, or hears footsteps, or has found himself in charge of 160,000 children...
...I assumed this was due to the appearance of a Thai, an American, and a Nissan in his schoolyard, but in fact alertness was permanently stamped on his face...
...he had no idea what they were like and didn't much care...
...Pupils— clothed flotsam—poured from classrooms to the clanging of a bell...
...Some Cambodians took him in, some gave him food, some refused him...
...he belonged to the class of urbanized peasantry that barely stays out of the slums...
...It was four o'clock...
...And as we neared the Cambodian border, where rice farmers muffled by red-checked scarves were up to their knees in the paddies, he began to complain a little about our destination...
...They allowed no one to farm...
...And why did we finally reverse ourselves...
...But for the two decades in which the country disintegrated, the U.S...
...Why did we wait so long...
...But as Svay Nhim pointed out, one didn't need a personal experience of suffering to know that this war would not be best for the Khmer people, including the 160,000 of them in Site 2. q WINTER • 1991 • 31...
...An illusion of impermanence had been enforced by the Thai authorities for almost a decade...
...We both fell silent when we drove into Site 2. One hundred sixty thousand refugees lived here, and they all seemed to be out on the dirt roads...
...Things, human things, were happening here—I had an obligation to see...
...He needed only one trip to the border to see what it means to be Khmer in the late twentieth century...
...State Department does, expressed none to me...
...When we had gotten free of the last running waif and then the camp, the green mountains behind us and the sky ahead riddled with lightning, I understood that for Tae Won Site 2 had become one of those things that you didn't have to suffer personally...
...Hearing that I was a writer, the gem merchant politely wondered why I hadn't visited the camps five hours to the east...
...The second stay lasted three years and seven months...
...Most people he knew in Site 2 no longer held out any hope of emigration to Australia or the United States...
...Not long after his release in 1979, Svay Nhim followed the Vietnamese army across the border into Cambodia, taking advantage of the chaos to make a run for Thailand and freedom...
...We rolled past endless rows of tiny thatched shacks separated by tiny plots of earth, uniform and symmetrical as tombstones in a cemetery...
...His only hope, he said, was that one day he could live in his ancestral homeland, Cambodia...
...the United States couldn't lose face by accepting the fact that 30 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad the communist regime in Vietnam existed...
...We negotiated the main road out, now clogged by impossible numbers of them, like a city of orphans—the naked and the half-naked and the dressed...
...It was startling to see an adult...
...Children with wild faces, long-haired, mostly naked, swarmed around Tae Won's polished Nissan, and his jaw tensed...
...Sihanouk couldn't lose face by making a deal with his archenemy of the moment, Prime Minister Hun Sen...
...Most of those children had known nothing but the inside of a camp...
...He thought that all Thais should come here to see what was happening in their own country...
...he was ambitious and conservative...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
