Refugees roam devastated Cambodia

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 14

Refugees roam devastated Cambodia

By

HARISH CHANDOLA,

an Indian journalist based in Singapore.

who is one of the few outsiders to have travelled in Cambodia since the Vietnamese invasion.

The roads of Cambodia are blocked with millions of people looking for their families and trying to return home after their three-year nightmare under the Pol Pot regime. Most of Cambodia's people had been moved away to remote settlements with the aim of establishing primitive communes. There everybody worked in the fields to grow rice and maize, ate in common kitchens, wore only black clothes and tried to

look the same as the next person. Money was abolished, men, women and children lived and worked separately, with men allowed to visit their wives and small children only three times a month. It was a time of hunger and misery. People were living in strange places under a social order never known before and working with primitive implements. Food production declined, but those who complained

against the system or grumbled about hunger or stole because of it were taken out and beaten to death with spades or hoes. More people were killed after Cambodia launched its border war against Vietnam in 1977; those suspected of having sympathy with the Vietnamese were labelled as spies and killed. Now the Pol Pot regime is gone (though its forces are still fighting) and the new Vietnamese-backed Government has told people they can go home. Since the population was widely scattered the returning caravans are going in all directions. Thousands are still searching for relatives. Only those who have gathered at least some members of their families are heading straight back to their villages. When they arrive most find nowhere to stay. Their houses have been destroyed and in the fields, left uncultivated for three years, the soil has hardened without water and care. The brave ones are putting up new mud and thatch huts, or repairing their old wooden houses, but there are others who are on the move again to make a new beginning. Many are trying to enter the capital, Phnom Penh, but the new authorities are not encouraging them to do so. The city has no markets yet, no currency and no work. In the countryside people can plant vegetables, tapioca and other roots and have something to eat in a few days, and if they start planting a short-term rice crop early next month they will have grain in three months. Along the road through Svay Rieng and Prey Veng Provinces, near the southeastern border with Vietnam, medium-size shanty towns have sprung up to house the returning people. The people hunt pieces of scrap to build huts. I watched an elderly man straightening a longdiscarded rusty tin to add to his collection of building material.

Such settlements have also appeared at places such as Neak Luong, a ferry crossing on the Mekong river. At any one there must be over 10,000 people there spending a day or more before finally deciding whether to head for Phnom Penh across the river or go back to their own villages. The countryside in these provinces is desolate with destroyed houses and fallow fields. We drove for 100 kilometres across this once fertile land without ever finding a patch on which anything was being grown. Irrigation canals on either side of the famous Route 1, connecting Cambodia and Vietnam, had dried up. Most of the ponds had dried up, too, but in those that still contained water or even mud groups of the refugees were looking for fish. In fact, fish is so abundant in this land that they were actually catching some. Those who were lucky were taking the fish to nearby huts to barter for other necessities.

Only on reaching Prey Veng town, the provincial capital, could we see some cultivated land. People were drawing water from a well to irrigate the fields. It was, perhaps, part of a commune set up by the Pol Pot regime.

Prey Veng, like other towns and cities, was empty. In the Cambodian-style timber houses perched on tall concrete stilts nothing remains except an odd calendar on the wall and pictures drawn with chalk by children.

Two large cementconcrete buildings three floors high constitute Prey Veng’s central market. A large water tank towers above them and around the two blocks run large drains which carry the rain water to the nearby river. Here was a reminder of the years of horror. In the rectangular openings of the drains there were skulls and limbs, not yet completely decomposed, of those who had been killed in the last days of the Pol Pot regime at the beginning of January. The authorities used to bring the victims of their wrath to this empty city to punish them. In the deserted centra! market there was a torture chamber with primitive instruments, leg and hand-irons, bars to which the victims were tied and a coal oven to heat up metal rods.

On the .other side of the market was a big wooden block soaked with dried blood, apparently used for beheading: a couple of skulls

lay on the other side, some with skin still adhering to them. After execution the bodies were dumped into the drains, and if there was no rain, water was released from the large overhead tank to flush them away. These last ones were just dumped and not flushed; the stench was unbearable.

The city’s largest pagoda had been made into an ammunition store. Wooden boxes of artillery shells with Chinese markings were piled ro.of-high. A meditating Buddha had been beheaded and others damaged. Monks’ quarters in the compound had been demolished. There were shallow unmarked graves everywhere. Wherever one dug, even with a stick, one uncovered bones. Mr Samon, the chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Council of Prey Veng province, representing the new regime, said about a hundred people had been brought to the city daily for torture and killing. The population of the province before Pol Pot came to power in 1975 was over 200,000 but nobody knows its population now and it will take some time to count those who have survived. 0.F.N.5., Copyright.