UNBRO, the agency providing physical assistance to 300,000 Cambodian refugees along the Thai-Cambodian border, is another political creation. Its mandate does not include protecting the refugees; that is the responsibility of Thailand, which supplies the camps with armed guards. Earlier this year the special Thai camp guard unit, called Task Force 80 Rangers, was disbanded after severe international criticism of its eight-year record of criminal conduct against the refugees.
Protection in the international sense is supposed to be provided in the Thai camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) through its protection officers. Thailand, however, forbids international personnel to remain in the camps after 5 p.m. each day, and it is at night that predators of various stripes-Thai guards, bandit gangs and gangs of refugees themselves- feed on the misfortune of the inmates. Even during the day the ICRC protection officers, who are in reality unarmed humanitarian workers, are not equipped to stop trouble when it starts.
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In July, 1987, for example, ICRC representatives stood by impotently as a drunken Task Force 80 guard murdered two refugees at mid-afternoon in Site 2, the largest of the border camps with 170,000 inmates. Site 2, like all the border camps, is a ”closed” facility, ringed with barbed wire and guard towers. The refugees are, by Thai regulation, not allowed outside.
In practice, however, refugees often make short trips outside the camp. Depending on their moods, guards sometimes let refugees go through the fence to gather firewood or collect water, both of which are in short supply. Refugee traders also bribe their way in and out of the camp in the course of business.
At 1:45 p.m., July 31, 1987, two ICRC delegates inside Site 2 were summoned to its northern perimeter fence by a group of agitated refugees. A few yards outside the fence, a Task Force 80 guard had stopped a 30-year-old pregnant woman, who had left the camp in search of wood in a nearby forest. As the ICRC delegates and the refugees inside the fence watched in horror, the guard began beating the woman and then turned on her 32-year-old husband, an amputee on crutches.
”You must understand the brutality of some of the guards,” a high-ranking European refugee official said in Bangkok, asking for anonymity for diplomatic reasons. ”If they are as drunk as this one was, they are vicious, and if you try to intervene yourself, they will turn their guns on you and kill you with no thought about it. The witnesses to this incident (the ICRC delegates) did the only prudent thing they could do. They frantically tried to raise the guard commander on their walkie-talkies. Unfortunately, it happened to be the first day on the job for a new commander; he was in an introductory briefing meeting, and one of his aides had turned off his radio.
”Unable to find the Ranger commander, the people inside the fence stood wordlessly while the guard pointed his gun at the couple and forced them into the forest. Moments later some shots were fired. Two hours later the camp police were allowed to go into the forest to investigate, and within several minutes they brought two bodies out. The dead parents left three orphans. The guard simply disappeared, never to be seen again in the camp.”
Leaving the Cambodians exposed to physical abuse and international neglect for so many years has stripped many inmates of all vestiges of civility, the official said. ”The normal behavior of people should not automatically result in violence, but this population is under such stress that. . . just a negative word can set off an eruption of violence between spouses or neighbors.”
Humanitarian agencies periodically and vainly have tried to convince the Thai government to move the camps deeper inside Thailand to protect refugees from military attacks. All eight are within a mile of the Cambodian border, within easy reach of Vietnamese artillery.
I found Pra Cheau, a 53-year-old former rice farmer, digging furiously in front of his thatch hut in Site 8, a camp controlled by the Khmer Rouge, one scorchingly hot Saturday morning last March. The hole he was digging had the dimensions of an oversized grave.
He had survived the U.S. Air Force carpet bombings of Cambodia in the early 1970s. He had lived through the butchery and famine of Pol Pot`s murderous regime that killed more than 1 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1978. He had been chased by Vietnamese shot and shell for six years along the border. And still, after all those years of living on the precipice, he was on this day digging yet another bunker for the protection of himself, his wife and his 10 children.
”Now that it`s the dry season,” Pra said matter-of-factly, ”it`s time for the Vietnamese offensive to begin again. They have been shelling nearby every day. I`m afraid of the shelling, and my old bunker has caved in, so now I`m repairing it.” True to his word, while I spoke with him, a battery of Vietnamese artillery opened up from somewhere across the border.
Pra and his family live in a typical thatch hut built on stilts. It faces a wide camp service road, giving him enough room for a small vegetable garden and his bunker.
The Khmer Rouge have opened Site 8 to the outside world, allowing UN officials and humanitarian workers to visit and work in the camp daily. They have even allowed some conventions of the outside world inside Site 8. Occasionally a radio can be heard playing in some refugee huts, an activity punishable by death when Pol Pot ran Cambodia.
Schools have opened, and Khmer Rouge children are attending classes for the first time since 1975, when Pol Pot banned formal education inside Cambodia. Small-scale commerce using money, also outlawed by Pol Pot, is alive in a small but active black market along the camp fences.
But Site 8 is the only Khmer Rouge camp outsiders can enter. UN officials and humanitarian workers are stopped at the gates of the other four by armed guards. Any supplies and materials, including medicines, are left at the gate. Any information, either offered or sought, is passed along at the gate. Nobody goes inside, and no outsider knows how UN supplies are distributed or what living conditions are inside.
Site 8 is believed to be mostly populated by expendable people for whom the Khmer Rouge have little use-the sick, the lame and the old. Few fighters are recruited from the place, though young men and women are sometimes pressed into service as porters carrying supplies into Cambodia.
Even though the Khmer Rouge present it as a model camp, it is a hellhole. Fear permeates most conversations, the sort of fear that keeps someone from saying something because he could be turned in by ever-present eavesdroppers. As we talked, many of Pra Cheau`s neighbors and curious passersby on the road stopped to listen. He seemed nervous as he watched the growing collection of people, frequently looking to see who was listening.
As residents of Site 8, Pra`s family are considered Khmer Rouge loyalists. If the Khmer Rouge want him or his sons to go back to Cambodia to fight, he really won`t have much choice in the matter. The Khmer Rouge routinely moves groups of camp residents out of Site 8 to its other closed border camps. What happens to them there is a mystery.
According to the camp workers, at least 50 percent, probably as much as 80 percent, of the residents in Site 8 have no allegiance whatsoever to the Khmer Rouge. They are, in effect, prisoners of the Khmer Rouge.
Every relief worker I spoke with who has worked with the Khmer Rouge is adamant that the Khmer Rouge have not substantially changed since they murdered more than a million of their countrymen. The camp workers believe that if the Vietnamese make good their promise to withdraw from Cambodia by 1990, the Khmer Rouge will seize power once again and that the bloodbath will start all over.
”It seems the Khmer Rouge are just as cruel and bloody as they ever were,” said one of the few relief workers who had visited other Khmer Rouge camps. ”My skin would crawl when I went into those camps. People were so quiet, so robotlike. It`s really a reign of terror. I`m convinced there has to be an international presence in all the border camps.
”The lack of active concern on the part of the U.S. and others to demand that nobody be forced to live with the Khmer Rouge is one of the most appalling chapters of this century`s history. Informal surveys show that three-fourths of the Khmer Rouge civilians would go to another camp and another faction if given the chance. But the international community just doesn`t have the will to liberate the civilian population from the Khmer Rouge. So we`re condemning hundreds of thousands of people to an unspeakable fate, year after year.”
No refugees in Site 8 would openly say they wished to leave, of course, for fear of reprisals. I asked Pra why he remained under Khmer Rouge control, probably a silly question to ask in front of so many people. Pra looked stunned, and real fear seemed to creep into his eyes as he remained silent for some moments.
Finally Pra blurted that he and his family fell under Khmer Rouge domination in early 1979 while hiding in the forests after the Vietnamese invasion. He said no more about it. At that, he said he is relatively happy in Site 8, especially since his children can attend school. He is quite proud of the fact that his 22-year-old son is now enrolled in primary school and learning to read and write, something he never did.
”I`m happy with this situation,” he said. ”We get enough rice now, and we`re freer than before. All my children are studying. I refused to allow the administration to let my son be taken into the army. If the enemy
(Vietnam) is still in Cambodia, we would prefer to remain here in the camp.
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”We have no choice, anyway. If we go back to Cambodia, we will get shot. If we try to go out of the camp here, the Thais will shoot us. So we just dig here, and we live here.”
As dangerous as life can be in refugee camps, by far the most vulnerable populations in the world today are those beyond the reach of international humanitarian aid and protection. These are the ”internally displaced,”
people displaced in their own countries by war.
If they are lucky, the displaced fall under the control of benign forces, a socially conscientious government or a rebel group. If they are unlucky, they fall under control of malevolent forces who enslave, starve or murder them as Pol Pot did in Cambodia.
Unfortunately, in the last two decades there have been dozens of Cambodias in which to one degree or another the human rights of millions of internally displaced people have been ignored. El Salvador has a million internally displaced people. At least 2 million are displaced inside Afghanistan. Another 5 million to 6 million are homeless or held in servitude inside Mozambique.
Nobody knows the number of displaced inside Ethiopia because the government won`t let anybody count them. The most informed guess is at least 2 million.
If there are 13 million recognized refugees living across borders in foreign countries today, there are, by the most conservative estimates, at least twice that number living displaced in their own countries.
”In Mozambique alone,” said Jean Pierre Hocke, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, ”it is a 10-to-1 ratio of internally displaced people to registered refugees outside Mozambique. To multiply the number of worldwide refugees by two or three to arrive at the number of internally displaced is probably on the conservative side.”
The internally displaced are a grave concern to humanitarian agencies because they often live under far worse conditions than refugees in camps. If governments or rebel groups choose to murder or starve their own people within their own borders, they can do it. Even if the rest of the world is aware that massive crimes are being committed in a given nation, present international law works against intervention.
”What can be done about this?” asked the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues in its 1986 report on refugees. ”The international community is founded on the principle of state sovereignty, and governments can almost act as they please within their own borders. Their excesses may, regrettably, be condoned and even somewhat encouraged by their more powerful allies.”