Encounters on the Front Line: Cambodia: A Memoir

By Elaine Harvey

In 1980 Elaine Harvey worked for the International Red Cross in the Cambodian refugee camps immediately after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. It was a time when sorrow fell like monsoon rain. “I was not a victim of war, poverty, or starvation, but I was a witness. As a witness, I came to understand that front lines take a toll i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaine Harvey
• Release date: May 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781927559673

Elaine Harvey

Elaine Harvey is a nurse, a writer, a healing touch practitioner and a traveller. A diverse career and her adventurous spirit have taken her to remote regions of the world with experiences in Asia and Africa marking her world view. She currently resides in Victoria, on the west coast of Canada. Encounters on the Front Line is Elaine's first book of creative non-fiction.

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Chronology

1953: King Norodom Sihanouk declares Cambodia’s independence from France.

1960-70: The Cambodian communist party, known as the Khmer Rouge, emerges.

1965-73: The US began a four year long carpet-bombing of Cambodia, to eliminate the Vietnamese communist forces in Cambodia. The resulting socio-political upheaval contributed to the rise of the Pol Pot regime. The rural population flees to Phnom Pehn, the capital, looking for safety from the bombing.

1970: King Sihanouk overthrown by right-wing coup d’etat.

1970-1975: Cambodian Civil War, between the Khmer Rouge backed by China and the Khmer Republic, under Lon Nol, supported by the U.SA.

1975, April 17: Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge. Forced evacuation of the entire city to the country. Khmer Republic party members executed; Lon Nol escapes. All foreigners expelled. 1975 is named Year Zero.

1975-1979: Under the Khmer Rouge with Pol Pot as Prime Minister, Cambodia withdraws from the world. Renamed Democratic Kampuchea. A reign of terror.

1979, January: Phnom Penh is captured by the Vietnamese. Communist puppet government with Khmer Rouge defectors. Widespread famine throughout the country, now called the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge retreat to the border of Thailand. Hundreds of thousands of civilians flee to the Thai border.

1980-1989: Warfare between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese continues. The Khmer Rouge hold a seat at the United Nations as the legitimate power in Kampuchea.

1989: Vietnam formally withdraws from Kampuchea and the State of Cambodia is established.

1991: Prince Sihanouk returns to Cambodia, from his exile in China.

1990-1992: United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) sends twenty thousand peacekeepers to supervise and promote democratic elections.

1993: Sihanouk is re-instated as king in the Kingdom of Cambodia.

1998: Death of Pol Pot from unknown causes. Collapse of Khmer Rouge movement.

2004: Sihanouk’s son, Norodom Sihamoni, instated as king of the constitutional monarchy.

2009- 2010: The International Tribunal for war crimes against humanity and genocide takes place in Phnom Penh.

2011: Hun Sen, Prime Minister of the Cambodia People’s Party (CPP) is the longest-serving leader in Southeast Asia. In power through various coalitions since 1985.

The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot

"To preserve you is no gain; to destroy you is no loss."

- Khmer Rouge slogan.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, is considered one of the most heinous despots of the 20th Century. The goal of his totalitarian ideology was to transform Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian state, with the cultivation of rice as the cornerstone of this vision. It was a society where young and uneducated peasants held absolute power over the urban, educated class. The revolution justified human life as irrelevant and expendable.

1.     Currency and private property were eliminated.

2.     Cites were evacuated.

3.     All foreign embassies were closed, telephone and mail services were stopped.

4.     Schools were destroyed, books forbidden. Speaking a foreign language resulted in execution.

5.     Artists, musicians, the educated, intellectuals, skilled workers and anyone associated with Lon Nol’s Republic were eliminated.

6.     Ethnic minorities - the Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Islamic Chams were targeted for execution.

7.     Buddhism was outlawed and approximately fifty thousand monks were killed.

8.     Hospitals and medicines were destroyed.

9.     The basic unit of Cambodian society, the family, was attacked. Parents and children were forced apart. Eating with the family was forbidden and communal eating enforced. Children were indoctrinated as Khmer Rouge recruits.

10.   Positive emotions, love and affection were not allowed to be expressed. Marriage was only authorized by the regime.

11.   Music, idle chatter and holidays were banned.

12.   Urban people were forced to work in rural labour camps from sunrise to sunset. Anyone who was disloyal was killed.

"When the Khmer Rouge did come to town, in April 1975, only a few foreigners remained in Phnom Penh. Closeted in the French embassy they watched, at first more astonished than appalled, as the victorious young army began to empty the entire city at gunpoint. Hospital patients, refugees, schoolchildren, all had to take one of the main roads out of the city. Most of the Cambodians in the embassy were ordered to leave its supposed sanctuary and to trek into the countryside as well. The foreigners were trucked to the Thai border. From then on, the Khmer Rouge closed Cambodia almost entirely from the outside world and embarked upon one of the most radical and bloody revolutions in history.

For the next three and a half years, the few thousand refugees who managed to escape to Thailand were the principle source of news about the country. They told from the start a consistent story—of deaths from starvation and exhaustion during the evacuation of Phnom Penh; of forced evacuation of almost all the towns after Phnom Penh, of relocation to new villages or work zones, of inadequate food supplies and non-existent medical care, of a rule of terror conducted by young boys with AK 47’s, on behalf of a shadowy, all powerful organization, known as Angka (Angkar). Refugees spoke of people being shot, clubbed to death, or buried alive for disobeying orders, asking questions or in some other way infringing the rules that Angka laid down. Among the dreadful tales were those of babies being beaten to death against trees."

William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience.

Cambodia

Thailand–Cambodian border, 1980: refugee camps.

Book One

1980:

The Border

Heaven is high, Earth wide.

Bitter between them flies my sorrow.

~ Li Po

1

The Front Line

The stirring of the Red Cross camp wakes me after a restless sleep. A barking dog and the drone of a mosquito play on my edgy anticipation. We left Toronto two days ago, its bracing minus four in February, a stark contrast with this morning’s sticky heat.

Sheila, her mop of curly hair in a tangled mess, crawls out of bed. We pull on our clothes in the narrow space between the two cots, our bags still strewn on the floor. The bamboo door swings shut behind us as we set out for our first day in a Cambodian refugee camp.

The cafeteria is the gathering place of international aid workers; a hub of foreign languages: Italian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese and English. Our team, twelve of the fourteen French Canadian, sit at a plywood table in a long row of tables in the barn-like space. Sheila and I, the only two not from Quebec, squeeze in beside our weary compatriots. The usually animated Québécois chatter is subdued as we eat breakfast, jet-lagged and dazed.

Bernhard, a tall angular man with hair the colour of straw joins us at our table. He’s one of the Swiss administrators for the ICRC¹ and speaks in a volley of languages; at least his French, English and German are fluent. His manner is no-nonsense as he describes security, logistics, and operations. Four of us, Sheila, Solange, Marie-France, and I are going to Mak Moun, known as Camp 204, on the troubled border, while the rest of the team is assigned to Khao I Dang, a large holding centre for refugees, six miles inside Thailand.

The road is paved to Aranyaprathet, a busy, ramshackle town close to the border, then degrades into a rough track through sparse bush and tall elephant grass. We are in rural Thailand, but the area is thronged with people, ox carts, motorbikes, army vehicles, and international aid trucks, all heading for the border, moving too slow or too fast. Thai soldiers wave us down at a number of roadside military checkpoints—young men, if not teenage boys, brandishing submachine guns and machismo. Be very respectful and very careful, our Thai driver says. This is their territory.

We can hardly contain our excitement as we approach the camp. Coming round the last stretch of bumpy track we enter into a sudden density of people and tightly packed shacks. This is not a town. It is not a village. Mak Moun, Camp 204, is the most abysmal human habitat I have ever seen.

Sixty thousand refugees are living in this crowded field of filth and stench, surrounded by stagnant puddles of green water. Small huts are made of thatch or pieced together with blue plastic or scraps of cardboard and coarse rice sacking. Some are mounted on flimsy bamboo platforms but most are haphazardly built on the bare earth. Hammocks and strung laundry clutter the space between the shacks. There are no outhouse facilities; the children squat in plain view.

We inch slowly through the crowd in our convoy of four white Land Cruisers. Hundreds of faces, dark, light, young and old, swim in and out of focus. Red, green and blue-chequered kroma, the traditional Khmer scarves, are loosely wrapped around their heads or slung over their shoulders, carrying a baby or a few possessions. The children run alongside our trucks, waving, their antics belying the wretched conditions they live in.

Men and women wave too and smile. I can’t fathom the atrocities these people have endured: forced labour camps, starvation, and mass killings. A wave of despair rolls over me, like a dark cloud filling a clear sky, as I begin to comprehend their resilience in this appalling human disaster.

We get out of our vehicles in the muddy parking area in front of the ICRC field hospital, a primitive structure of bamboo and thatch. A hand-written banner is strung along a barbed-wire fence beside the lot, proclaiming: We thank to all people in the world who give us all food.

The hospital is one big room with fifty wood-slat cots, occupied by a forlorn-looking group of men, women and children. They wear threadbare clothes or sarongs, skinny arms and legs exposed. A few have lost their limbs; landmine victims. Families sit with the patients on the cots or squat on the dirt floor. This is their broken-down life in Mak Moun.

The delivery room and an emergency room are sectioned off from the main ward by dirty, blood-stained mosquito nets draped from poles. No matter how rudimentary this field hospital is, without running water, electricity and virtually no equipment, we admire the work done in the two months before our arrival.

Solange and Marie-France take up positions on the main ward as nurse and doctor. Sheila, a midwife, assumes her position as the maternity nurse of Mak Moun. Within minutes of arriving, I volunteer as the emergency nurse. The tour is complete; there is no orientation; I am on the job.

My ER is in total disorder. A khaki canvas stretcher mounted on wood poles sits in the centre of the room, and a pile of cartons alongside one wall are covered in thick dust. The boxes are full of dressing supplies, a few surgical instruments, and dead bugs. As there isn’t a table, I place a loose board on the earthen floor in the corner to serve as my work area. A worker fetches two buckets of water from the UNICEF² holding tank outside. One is for washing our hands; the other turns milky-white as I mix it with Dettol, for cleaning instruments. The first Khmer words I learn are teuk for water and awkun for thank you.

A man with a bloody face and body welts walks in, apparently beaten by a Thai soldier. A teenage boy who stepped on a landmine has a leg full of shrapnel. A little girl, her finger sliced open, sits patiently on the ground, waiting alone without family.

Dr. Pierre, the medical director of the camp, arrives, and sutures her finger. He’s a compact man, brown hair in a brush cut, not quick to smile, but quiet and withdrawn compared to his gregarious French compatriots. It seems unlikely I’ll have any direction from him, so I proceed with my work. The day is hectic, with one patient after another.

Our workers, who are also refugees, assist us with everything from cleaning to bedside care, translating and keeping us informed. They are our inside eyes, our internal intelligence, all of them untrained men and women who show up onsite to help. The workers are neither paid a salary nor registered as employees. If one of them speaks a few words of French or English, he or she is recruited on the spot.

Sheila finds a shy young woman named Song. She doesn’t speak a word of English or French but she knows how to deliver babies. Sheila, tall and slim, is wearing loose blue operating room pants. Song wears a torn T-shirt and a sarong that’s been scrubbed many times. I watch the two of them calmly deliver a baby on our first day in camp, never ceasing to marvel at this extraordinary event. The mother gets up shortly after the delivery and walks away with her newborn child.

The nurses on the ward have their hands full, the patients severely malnourished, extremely ill or near death. Malaria, dysentery and pneumonia are the primary concerns. Cholera and typhoid are other worrisome possibilities. New patients arrive every day, part of the steady influx of people fleeing Kampuchea. Their cruel journey ends here in Mak Moun.

Some children with sad eyes and swollen bellies stare at us; others are too weak and emaciated to even swat the flies that land on their bare bodies. I sit down on a cot, beside a mother. Her shoulder-length hair covers her face and falls on her soiled green blouse, as she gazes at her baby. The little boy is a living skeleton, with wrinkled loose skin falling off his bones. He looks like an old man ready to die.

Our Thai driver rounds up the team in late afternoon for the return to Wattana Nakhorn, an hour’s drive from the border. In the back of the open pickup we sit in silence, all of us sweaty, dirty and exhausted. Everything goes in and out of focus.

Home is light years away, though I left just a few days ago. I was exhausted even then, having spent a long week preparing for a journey that two weeks before I didn’t know I was taking. For years I’ve wanted to do this work, disaster response or humanitarian aid, as long as I’ve been a nurse. When the opportunity came to work for the Red Cross, I jumped.

It was a hectic whirlwind of work, appointments, immunizations, and packing up a complicated life. A tangled relationship was playing out its last note. Leaving for a Cambodian refugee camp was one way to say goodbye, a radical leap from one world to another.

The truck swerves through the chaotic traffic, a jarring ride in the blasting heat. We pull into the gravel Red Cross parking lot on the outskirts of Wattana. It’s a welcome relief to see our camp with its rows of unpainted plywood huts after our first encounter, face to face, with a refugee camp.

Nurses, doctors, technicians and administrators are waiting their turn at the string of outdoor shower stalls, under a corrugated tin roof. I crave a shower to wash off the sweat and stress of the day. The clean cool water is a momentary luxury.

Sheila and I eat dinner alone in the mess hall, surrounded by others, but too tired to talk. We gulp a quick Thai Tiger Beer, then head straight for bed, only to be kept awake all night by a raucous Thai opera blaring on the village loudspeaker.

Day two in Mak Moun. We stop first at the Red Cross warehouse on the outskirts of Aranyaprathet. The friendly Thai staff help us sort and load the daily medical supplies into our vehicles as well as boxes of bottled water.

Red Cross personnel—Dr. Wilfred from Germany, Dr. Kaito from Japan, Dr. Pierre and the Swiss administrators—come and go all morning and afternoon, attending to the immediate needs in the hospital, or assessing camp security. They confer in hushed tones. Everyone seems to be speculating with an opinion on refugees, on international politics, on disaster management and war. I pick up bits and pieces of information as best I can.

Within the border camps there are several fighting factions of Khmer Serai, the free Cambodians, with powerful warlords vying for control. Van Saren, the most ruthless and corrupt of them, rules Mak Moun with his band of rebel fighters. It is said they siphon off huge amounts of international aid, from sacks of rice to medicine, selling them to the Khmer and the Vietnamese inside Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces are nearby too, still in command of jungle enclaves along the four-hundred-mile Thai-Cambodian border. The Vietnamese who have control of parts of the country are waging intermittent battles with them. Apparently an escalation of conflict is imminent.

The complexity of the Cambodian crisis, from the historical roots of the conflict to the immediate humanitarian concerns, is immensely confusing. I do understand that the border is an indeterminate line and Mak Moun sits on this shifting, unstable territory. A shudder of fear catches me in the throat.

A steady stream of patients, both the camp refugees and the Khmer Serai rebels, arrive in my small makeshift ER. There is no paper work, no introduction and no common language; the injured simply turn up with fresh cuts and old wounds, some of them badly infected.

A soldier staggers in with a gunshot wound to his chest, blood oozing down his tattooed skin and ragged clothes. He has shiny gold loops on both ears, and an automatic rifle is slung over his shoulder. His breathing is laboured; the bullet’s hit his lung. I clean off the blood, apply pressure and send him, via the truck that serves as an ambulance, to Khao I Dang, the only place where surgery is possible, forty-five minutes away.

The main hospital is run by Isobel, a Swiss nurse who arrived a month before us. I admire her efficiency, but her prim and proper Sunday school demeanour is trying. Dr. Pierre isn’t easy either, he hardly says hello. He’s very reserved or he’s burnt out after several weeks on the border, but I trust him. We work side by side. I rarely ask questions; when I do, his answer is brief.

Having my Canadian team nearby is reassuring. Sheila is effervescent; her laugh-out-loud spontaneity and down to earth personality charm everyone. Solange and Marie-France are gentle and soft-spoken. Our mélange of French and English, sprinkled with a few new words of Khmer, makes all of us laugh. We form a band of best friends.

On our mid-afternoon break we stroll near the hospital, not daring to go any further. Bernhard has instructed us in the use of walkie-talkies. If we receive a message to evacuate the camp, we must leave immediately, no questions asked. He’s also given us strict orders not to step off the paths, as the brush may be laced with land mines.

As if this isn’t enough, we are expected to jump into an evacuation trench beside the hospital if the camp is attacked. It’s ten feet deep and twenty feet long, with mucky water at the bottom. Worse yet is the filthy outhouse behind the hospital.

We venture a little further down the dirt road that runs through the densely crowded camp, everything suspended in the hazy heat. An ancient wooden cart pulled by a water buffalo and stacked with empty Coca-Cola bottles creaks by. Two boys swat the buffalo, swinging their arms in rhythm with the rolling of the wheels. An old man sits in the shade of a tree, repairing a tire for a decrepit bicycle with a bamboo crossbar. He works in slow motion; there is nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Tonight at Wattana a meeting for all ICRC staff is held to discuss the impending conflict. Sheila and I exchange furtive glances as the immensity of the situation hits us. The border is a battleground of four warring factions—the Thai, the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Serai, and the Vietnamese. It is feared that the next offensive will be by the Vietnamese, in the area of Mak Moun. The casualties will be handled by the hospital where I am in charge of the ER.

We are told to choose teams: A team willing to go to the border in dangerous situations, B team on standby, and C team to stay in base camp in Aranyaprathet. Without hesitation, Sheila and I choose A.

My immersion is sudden, intense and overwhelming. My background in intensive care nursing and previous travels in the Third World help, but it’s more than that. A deeper conviction is calling. This is where my life is leading and this is where I want to be: working on the front line.

Thousands of small huts were crammed higgledy-piggledy together. Piles of melon skins, chicken bones, beer bottles, empty tin cans and plastic bags lay over the ground. A stream running through them, low because it was dry season now, contained only a foul-smelling slick of sewage. A little girl squatting to defecate was at once covered in a cloud of flies—flies were like a film over the camp. There was no running water; when the tanks, filled daily by the ICRC ran dry, early, people bathed and washed their clothes in the dank stream. Arrogant young soldiers, some with ancient weapons, some with new, prowled around the camp overseeing food distribution, arresting newcomers, sometimes shooting those who tried to leave.

Mak Moun—a rural slum, the largest of the Cambodian encampments along the Thai-Cambodian border, an unsettling limbo of poverty, extortion and menace, where murders were rife and the threat of artillery attack, by Vietnamese or Thai troops, was constant …

~ William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience

1   International Committee of the Red Cross - ICRC. Established in 1863 to ensure the protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife. Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

2   UNICEF - United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund. Established in 1951 to care for those forced to flee their homes because of persecution or war.

2

High Alert

It’s the month of March and Mak Moun is on high alert. The Khmer Rouge, who fled Kampuchea after the Vietnamese occupation, also have camps on the border, but Mak Moun is Khmer Serai, so why would it be a target? We wonder how much the ICRC security coordinators know. How and from whom do they obtain their information about guerrilla movements, imminent attacks or Vietnamese offensives?

We are told that the Vietnamese soldiers are not far away, only half a mile, just behind a ridge of trees that I can see from my ER. Sheila and I whisper and worry, staying close to the walkie-talkie hanging from the bamboo pole.