COMPASSION FATIGUE' ON THE THAI FRONTIER
Steif, William
'Compassion Fatigue' on the Thai Frontier BY WILLIAM STEIF Phou Buntha is a "residual." That's jargon in the international refugee bureaucracy for someone thrown on the human trash heap. It sounds...
...Almost six months earlier, the Thai military rulers had said they would accept no new Khmer refugees, but Phou Buntha was allowed to stay...
...then it turned out that these were pre-Marxist revolutionaries, influenced more by the "natural man" concepts of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) than by Lenin...
...Khieu Samphan, politically more agile than Pol Pot, has taken the Khmer Rouge's leadership and tried to modify its image in the West...
...Sihanouk visited here in late July and immediately afterward," says Ahmad, "the first movement from here started"—4,000 Khmer elected to go to O'Smach, also known as Sihanoukburi, on the border about thirty-five miles northeast of Khao-I-Dang...
...In the current fiscal year, there are 64,000 Southeast Asian slots...
...Then the compassion-fatigued West began to lose interest...
...Last year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) asked the U.S...
...In the sweat and traffic of 5.3 million Thais in Bangkok, that doesn't sound so awful...
...And some, knowing they are superpower pawns, go back to fight from places like Sihanoukburi, where 60 per cent of the people have malaria...
...Phou Buntha has it exactly right: "I very cried...
...They've been long-established, and hold Lao and hill tribes-people, about 85,000 in all...
...He had been in the import-export business in Phnom Penh but says, in French, "I will not work for the Vietnamese communists...
...The Thai soldiers in watchtowers attest to the Thai attitude, but Ahmad says "it's not all guarded"—that is, it's possible to sneak in and out sometimes...
...Those who left are hard-core," says Ahmad...
...involvement in Cambodia in the early 1970s...
...The Vietnamese are down to some 8,000, either "land people," who've walked across Cambodia and are held in a scabrous camp known as NW82 near Khao-I-Dang, or "boat people," who've survived Thai pirates' attacks and wind up at Sikhiu or Songkhla...
...The Thais provide transport...
...just two of the nine children died under the Khmer Rouge...
...To enter this country, the refugee must have worked for the United States or a U.S.-allied government, or must have a close family relationship in the United States—parent, spouse, children...
...Other U.N...
...The Vietnamese waited more than three years and invaded Cambodia in early 1979 to "liberate" it...
...There are almost a dozen more refugee camps in Thailand, mostly in the north and northeast...
...That provoked an international outcry, led by the Thais' ally, the United States...
...On the cots are Khmer children...
...She is thirty-one, slim, smooth-skinned, with short, wavy black hair...
...they probably will not be filled...
...There is no Western plumbing, just big water tanks...
...Try Seng Hout Aka Phou Buntha...
...The Vietnamese, in 1981, "persuaded" Heng Samrin to institute a military draft so that Heng Samrin now has an army of 30,000 operating alongside the Vietnamese...
...Thong Srey Tho was hit in the right foot...
...Afterward, I see them fondling their stumps...
...for gentle Phou Buntha it is certain death...
...In 1974, the family was recalled to Phnom Penh by General Lon Nol's government...
...They were trying to flee the enveloping Khmer Rouge terror that eventually took 1.5 million to 2.5 million lives in a country of 7.25 million people...
...Bangkok's military rulers decreed that no refugee arriving after August 1981 could leave for resettlement until every refugee who arrived previously had moved out...
...There are very few new arrivals"—officially none, because in early 1980 Thailand closed its borders to new Khmer refugees...
...In the middle of the camp is a big soccer field...
...If a Vietnamese, or even a Lao or a hill tribesman, can reach first asylum and wants to enter the United States, his or her chances are much better than those of a Khmer...
...The low Cambodian mountains are visible on the horizon...
...Those are the four official Khmer camps within Thailand...
...It was a small, supposedly Marxist movement founded by Khieu Samphan, the theoretician, and Pol Pot, the activist, after their return from Parisian schooling in the 1950s...
...Now there are only 32,000 Khmer at Khao-I-Dang, which is run by the office of the Thai military government...
...She is close to them because "they stay with me under my guardianship the whole period of my husband's mission in Vientiane...
...U.S...
...Americans tend to think of the "dominoes" of Southeast Asia as they think about the Balkans...
...The nearest Cambodian town to Angkor Wat today is Siem Reap...
...The refugees are there on sufferance, mostly because of Western pressure...
...They were sent to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, in 1970...
...Until late 1980, Southeast Asian refugees entered the United States on the "parole authority" of the U.S...
...It is an indefinite wait...
...For their investment, the Soviets get a first-class naval base at Camranh Bay and a small war on the northern China-Vietnam border that keeps the People's Republic of China busy...
...she asks...
...agencies, individual governments, and voluntary organizations have spent hundreds of millions more...
...Late in the Carter Administration, 14,000 a month, most of them Vietnamese, were entering the United States...
...Try Seng Hout, maiden name Phou Buntha, has encountered Western bureaucrats...
...It amounted to little until the United States ousted Sihanouk and placed Lon Nol in charge at Phnom Penh...
...The United Nations Border Relief Operation, a branch of the U.N...
...The United States, because of its defeat in Vietnam, has always stuck with the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations and managed to exclude the Heng Samrin regime from a U.N...
...High Commissioner for Refugees, says the industrial world— Western Europe, the United States, Japan—suffers from "compassion fatigue...
...Fifty-one per cent of the residents are under age fifteen and about 10,000 of these are in school...
...Little countries, small populations...
...seat...
...Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia in April 1975, and the next year Phou Buntha, her husband, and her children took a train for Battambang, a small western Cambodian city about sixty miles from the Thai border...
...wink, to 25,000 to 30,000 Khmer Rouge troops fighting the Vietnamese and the puppet regime of Heng Samrin along the Thai-Cambodian border...
...Son Sann remarked in Washington in mid-October that if the Khmer people were forced to choose between a return of the Khmer Rouge and Heng Samrin, "the people will choose the Heng Samrin regime...
...The new law defined a refugee as a person who has a "well-founded fear" of home-country persecution...
...She has twenty-eight patients, "mostly amputees from the border camps...
...There are almost 300,000 Khmer like Phou Buntha on or near the Thai-Cambodian border, waiting...
...The INS administers the law to its letter...
...The Chinese also supply weaponry to two smaller forces in the border area: the 9,000 men of the Kampuchean National Liberation Front, created by one-time Cambodian Premier Son Sann in 1979, and the 3,000-plus men of the Armee Nationale Sihanoukienne created by Sihanouk within the last year...
...They remained in Vientiane after Phou Buntha's family returned to Phnom Penh, and fled to the United States in 1975...
...Today that's not a good idea, but you can still hear shots and shelling from Aranyaprathet, as you could three years ago...
...I think so, and that is a hard thing to say in the face of a high American unemployment rate...
...Folk memories in this part of the world are very long...
...she wears a crude wooden foot on the stump of her leg...
...Traders and soldiers prey on them...
...He says "a small proportion" of the Khmer here either have relatives abroad (and so some hope of resettlement) or prefer to remain here because of previous occupations...
...The Chinese supply weapons, certainly with Thai connivance and maybe with a U.S...
...No food...
...These tend to be the Phnom Penh crowd, the educated group, 10 to 20 per cent of the people...
...Those still here are more rational in their decisions, or want to wait for the right moment...
...Phou Buntha greets me in the traditional Khmer manner, a smile and palms of the hands placed together in front of her face...
...Some want to resettle, some want to go home, some will be refugees forever William Steif, a former correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, writes frequently from abroad...
...I was first there at the end of October 1979, and saw 28,000 Khmer sitting on the clammy ground in stunned silence...
...none likes the others...
...The Khmer never had much to do with the United States...
...From the Thai viewpoint, that seems to be progress...
...The exact numbers change from day to day, but Thailand now plays host officially to about 168,000 refugees, down from a peak of 307,000 in mid-1980...
...On September 12, 1980, she arrived at Khao-I-Dang two and a half miles from the border...
...Like many refugees, she pulls out papers to prove herself, and rumpled photos of children, husband, and herself on vacation at a beach resort...
...A French voluntary agency in a nearby bamboo longhouse provides artificial limbs...
...role...
...She is one of nine children of a teacher/ farmer in a town about sixty miles from Phnom Penh...
...They take my husband in forest and hit him...
...The Soviets invest $3 million to $6 million daily to prop up the Hanoi Stalinists who run reunited Vietnam poorly...
...Eran Henriksen, a tough Icelandic woman who has worked at refugee camps for seven years and now is on duty at Khao-I-Dang, says: "They smile on the outside and clasp their palms together, but inside they are torn up...
...He then headed for China to get more weapons...
...The refugees were uprooted by the 1979 Vietnamese invasion and are waiting...
...The United States lavishly supplies the Thai military, and the Thais punish Vietnamese border incursions furiously...
...She has an alien number: A22095362...
...power in Vietnam enabled the Khmer Rouge to grow and seize power...
...All have red dirt floors, bamboo tables, benches, sleeping platforms...
...One of her husband's brothers, Kaun Dara Try, seventeen, is at Khao-I-Dang with Phou Buntha...
...Vietnam is larger and longer than Italy and has fifty million people...
...Of 580,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos who have sought asylum in Thailand since 1975, about 400,000 have departed for third-country resettlement: 67 per cent came to the United States, about 11 per cent to France, about 5 per cent each to Canada and Australia...
...Her own family in Cambodia is luckier...
...No matter what hap: pens, they'll stay put, hoping for eventual resettlement, knowing their kids will be fed...
...The major Khmer refugee problem began after Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia...
...Many Khmer at Khao-I-Dang still refer to the Vietnamese invasion as "the liberation...
...If I go back to my country I certainly will die," says Phou Buntha...
...Khao-I-Dang is a considerable improvement over the Sakeo of October 1979...
...Hanoi rotates fresh recruits from North Vietnam to finish their military training in the front lines on the Thai-Cambodian border...
...A refugee who makes it to Panat Nikhon has a pretty good chance of eventual resettlement...
...It has new masonry buildings and a thriving market, where Thais try to hustle a visitor into elongated pedicabs...
...In fiscal 1981, the United States provided 168,000 slots for Southeast Asian refugees...
...At Khao-I-Dang, I see some results of this waiting...
...Wooden outhouses serve groups of families...
...But the money is secondary compared to what's happening to the people...
...Panat Nikhon, near Bangkok, is a kind of advanced processing center, where refugees (compartmentalized so the Khmer have as little as possible to do with Vietnamese or other refugees) get English-language training and Western orientation...
...Finally, within Thailand, there is Panat Nikhon, with about 5,000 Khmer...
...Alias Ahmad, a Malay who used to work for a bank at Kuala Lumpur, is UNHCR's director for both Khao-I-Dang and Sakeo II...
...in the Khmer language that means "Siam Defeated...
...Not all the Khmer want to resettle...
...Khmer Rouge soldiers stop us...
...Some—no one knows how many—want to go home to their rice paddies, forests, and the fishing of Tonle Sap, Cambodia's rich inland lake...
...Some Khmer have chicken coops inside their houses, some just outside...
...Maybe you help me...
...The outer office of his bamboo long-house contains charts showing how many refugees are on hand each day...
...The charts report that Khao-I-Dang has 161 foreign and 93 Thai staff members, as well as 21 international private relief agencies, including the Order of Malta...
...Aranya-prathet, a mile or so from the Cambodian border, looks like it's cashed in on Khmer adversity...
...The children offer the traditional Khmer greeting—smile, palms of hands together...
...It has been replaced by Sakeo II, also known as Ban Kaeng, a couple of miles away on better-drained ground...
...Just before the 1980 Presidential election, Congress enacted and Carter signed a new refugee law...
...The game is more complex than dominoes...
...UNHCR, alone, has spent $262 million on refugee camps in Thailand since 1975...
...They are leftovers from past and present power struggles in Southeast Asia...
...Sihanouk, pouting in China and North Korea, and Son Sann tried to steer clear of the Khmer Rouge, but early in 1982, under pressure from the Thais, their ASEAN allies (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines), and probably the United States, agreed to form a paper-thin coalition with the Khmer Rouge...
...The camp's busiest place was the mortuary tent...
...As they approached Khao-I-Dang, Thai guards opened fire...
...Rucha Da and her crew fit them and exercise the amputees...
...I very cried," she says...
...There's only a slim chance that the people in them will ever be resettled in "third countries," which for all practical purposes means the United States, France, Canada, or Australia...
...The raw figures offer clues...
...A second brother-in-law, Seng Ly Try, lives at Vaux-sur-Seine in France...
...A few Khmer have lost limbs sneaking out of Khao-I-Dang, shot by Thai guards...
...The Thais dislike the Khmer almost as much as they dislike the Vietnamese...
...World Food Program, feeds all these people...
...Thong Srey Tho, thirty-seven, had a different experience last year...
...An international movement to aid Cambodia's devastated farm economy began and has returned Cambodia to rice self-sufficiency...
...We meet at a bamboo table in the bamboo-and-thatch child-care center where she works at Khao-I-Dang, the biggest official refugee camp in Thailand...
...There are about 145,000 Khmer in the unofficial camps around Aranyaprathet, another 45,000 or so along the border to the south, and about 25,000 in a northern sector where the Cambodian border turns east...
...The Khmer Rouge was an outgrowth of U.S...
...For several years, she existed with thousands of other refugees in western Cambodia's malaria-ridden hills...
...More apt is a comparison with Western Europe...
...133,000 entered...
...A sister-in-law lives with her husband, Tan Yun, at 760 South Idyllwild Avenue, Rialto, CA 92376...
...Ahmad says UNHCR and the voluntary agencies employ about 4,000 of the camp residents "and another 500 to 1,000 are self-employed in crafts and the like...
...There is one point of similarity with the Balkans...
...I have a great ambivalence about the U.S...
...It is just under three square miles in size...
...Father and children died in the forest, beaten to death...
...The new law provides thirty-three "excludable categories," such as leprosy and mental illness...
...guilt feelings about Vietnam's "boat people" and about Pol Pot's Khmer victims...
...They are in a 100-mile stretch of forests and low mountains patrolled by troops of contending factions...
...He's thinking not just of Southeast Asia but also of the Afghan-Pakistan border, Somalia, Central America...
...A further complication is today's superpower struggle...
...73,000 entered, including 4,262 processed directly from Vietnam in the "orderly departure program" formed with great difficulty by Washington and Hanoi...
...A third Khmer camp is at Kamput, sixty-five miles south of Khao-I-Dang and about nine miles from the Cambodian border...
...More than 17,000 Khmer live at Sakeo II and the Thai military plans to move them to Khao-I-Dang soon and close Sakeo II...
...I say I'll try but I know I am lying...
...It did away with the Attorney General's parole authority and gave the U.S...
...Each of these peoples is highly individualistic...
...But there are about 215,000 more Khmer clustered in squalid unofficial camps or "trading villages" right on the border...
...Sihanouk tried to keep them out of the Vietnam war...
...The aka—also known as—is the tipoff that Mrs...
...After train we walk near Thailand," she says...
...How thin...
...Since Saigon fell in 1975 the United States has resettled 600,000 Southeast Asian refugees, 200,000 in California alone...
...She had eight years of school when, at age fifteen, she married Try Seng Hout, who was twenty-four and an official in Cambodia's foreign service...
...It sounds better than garbage...
...That will permit the Thais to consolidate 50,000 Khmer in a place so close to the border that shellfire within Cambodia is clearly audible...
...There was no movement in August, slightly more than 2,000 left in September, almost none in October...
...Thailand, to the west, is larger than France and has forty-eight million people...
...authorities shuffled the 20,000 Khmer there who have a little better chance of third-country resettlement, and moved Khmer who were "not of interest" to the United States to Sakeo II or Khao-I-Dang...
...Carter said the United States would take 168,000 Southeast Asian refugees yearly, 14,000 a month, and tried to push other nations to help...
...No one is supposed to leave its grounds...
...Rucha Da, a Thai physical therapist, greets me in a bamboo-and-thatch rehabilitation ward funded by Catholic Relief Services...
...Lon Nol installed himself as leader of Cambodia in 1970, when the United States helped him overthrow the neutralist regime of Prince Nordom Sihanouk while Sihanouk was out of the country...
...They hold about 75,000 Khmer...
...As late as the 1950s, Thailand conducted a bitter feud with Cambodia over a border Buddhist ruin which the World Court eventually awarded to Cambodia.The Khmer "god-kings" of 1,000 years ago built monumental temple-cities, of which Angkor Wat is the most famous...
...As she talks she dabs at her eyes with a small white rag...
...In Southeast Asia you quickly understand that "countries of first asylum," like Thailand, do not resettle refugees...
...By the late spring of 1979, almost 100,000 Khmer crowded along the Thai-Cambodian border...
...She will not take long walks again...
...Squeezed between Vietnam and Thailand are two countries—landlocked Laos, mountainous and northerly, two-thirds the size of Switzerland, and southerly Cambodia or Kampuchea, a bit smaller than Laos but enormously fertile, the home of the Khmer culture that dominated Southeast Asia for 500 years, until the Fourteenth Century...
...By comparison with most governments, the United States looks like a humanitarian beacon...
...Last September, Prasong Soonsiri, the colonel who is secretary-general of the Thai National Security Council, called in envoys from nine Western nations and Japan to tell them if they didn't honor earlier commitments to resettle refugees, Thailand would repatriate them forcibly in 1983...
...The rest of the world just talks...
...Phou Buntha was interviewed by an international refugee relief agency two years ago...
...embassy in Bangkok to give Phou Buntha "special consideration...
...The charts say each refugee gets 2.8 kilos of rice, 500 grams of vegetables, and 150 grams of meat weekly...
...No reply...
...It is again rice paddies and the only reminder of it is an abandoned guard tower...
...Sakeo, named for a nearby Thai town, no longer exists...
...In 1980, the Thais closed their borders to new Khmer refugees, and in 1981 they initiated a policy of "humane deterrence," aimed at making Thai sanctuary so unpleasant that would-be refugees, whether Khmer, Vietnamese, or Lao, would stay home...
...In 1979,1 drove to the Thai border station where a Thai sergeant led me to a second-floor balcony and I peered at the Cambodian station and its soldiers 100 yards away...
...So new Khmer refugee camps were opened on Thai soil and President Carter's wife came to inspect them in November 1979...
...In May 1980, the camp held 130,000 Khmer who had fled their native Cambodia...
...Attorney General, meaning he could waive immigration laws...
...I have been to those places but have never seen anything quite like Sakeo, a refugee camp thirty-five miles east of Khao-I-Dang...
...I ask her to write her name, and in capital letters she writes: "Mrs...
...She gave birth but the baby died...
...My children, too...
...We stay in forest...
...John Klink, who runs the Thai operation for Catholic Relief Services, says, "Twelve-year-old girls go into the forest to gather firewood and step on land mines...
...But the United States precipitated the Khmer into the war's terrible aftermath...
...Her husband and six children are dead...
...Phou Buntha speaks Khmer, Lao, Thai, "and a little English and French...
...But it is still a refugee camp...
...In four days of June 1979, the Thais trucked 42,000 Khmer from around Aranyaprathet to the northeast and dumped them back into Cambodia...
...More tears, more dabbing with the little white rag...
...The decline of U.S...
...In fiscal 1982, ending last September 30, there were 100,000 Southeast Asian slots...
...The American media honed U.S...
...They are within a few miles of Aranyaprathet, the Thai border town whose main road leads to Battambang...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) more power...
...She is exceedingly pretty, and might as well use her maiden name...
...She was seven months pregnant when she, husband Hong Kim Sear, forty-two, and their two children left Nong Samet for Khao-I-Dang, walking...
...Of her husband's seven brothers and sisters, only those three survive...
...For the rest, everything depends on developments in Kampuchea itself...
...There are 160,000 Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia, re-equipped by the Soviets...
...Poul Hartling, the Danish U.N...
...The Chinese, Thais, and Americans all want to distract the Vietnamese—and by extension, the Soviets—from further aggression in Southeast Asia...
...That is why they wait, year after year, trapped in refugee camps and in dangerous border ghettos, while little armies chase them hither and thither and plant land mines near their huts...
...By then she'd had three babies, and she had three more in 1971, 1972, and 1973—a total of four girls and two boys...
...Is that an American responsibility...
...She is residue, condemned to life in a refugee camp...
...Phou Buntha wants to join Tan Yun and her sister-in-law in California...
...Last spring Kamput was converted from a holding center to a "processing center...
...Partly this must be due to our guilt over the fruitless Vietnam war, but partly—I am convinced—it is genuine concern for people...
...Khao-I-Dang and Sakeo II are "holding centers...
...There'll be more emphasis on post-primary school soon," says Ahmad...
...Khao-I-Dang is laid out in a Western grid pattern, with small bamboo-and-thatch houses next to one another...
...Tiny, well-tended vegetable gardens are adjacent to almost all the houses and there are plenty of refuse cans...
...The two biggest camps are Nong Samet and Nong Chan, each straddling the border and each holding about 45,000 persons...
...Sometimes "regional bandits" invade the camp, just as Khmer Rouge elements plunder nearby Thai villages...
...She is what an American diplomat in Bangkok calls "the unfinished business of the Vietnam war...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
