It was the first time I had been to a war zone, if you discount passing through the checkpoints of Northern Ireland. The preparation in itself was complicated – the rushed vaccinations, the visa for Thailand, the rather vague information about how we would contact the Scottish Red Cross nurse we were to interview in the refugee camps on the border with Kampuchea and Thailand.
For that is what Cambodia was called between 1975 and 1979 by the ruling Khmer Rouge, and I was travelling with a photographer to report on the end of a bloody conflict that left millions dead and thousands homeless.
It was a byzantine story that led to this humanitarian disaster. The Vietnamese had occupied eastern Cambodia, the US carpet bombed the area, and the Cambodian politician Norodom Sihanouk, leader of the Khmer Rouge, presented himself as a man who could achieve peace. Instead, he led his people into genocide. Now the International Red Cross was trying to pick up the pieces, setting up a tented city on the north-east border of Thailand to receive the refugees from each side of the conflict.
It was tense. The Thai soldiers guarding the camps were trigger-happy. The Red Cross personnel were there for three-month stints and were physically and emotionally done in. There was no technology to record who these people were or how many. No system to track the unaccompanied children and reunite them with the remnants of their families. Huge boards went up at the gate to every camp with photographs of the children – a haphazard attempt to let frantic relatives find their offspring. But the children took the pictures down and gave them to nurses, doctors, the Scottish dentist who’d arrived out of nowhere to fix shot-up faces and save people from starvation. They wanted someone who would care now, not the vague possibility of a happy-ever-after reunion.
One child, Ra, latched onto me as we toured the camps and did our interviews – the dying elderly couple, the man showering under a bucket, balancing on his remaining leg, the woman whose husband was shot as an ‘intellectual’ because he wore glasses. Ra clutched my hand and broke my heart. I didn’t know what would become of her.
‘Cambodia’ came back into existence in the 1990s. Those camps remained in place for decades. Girls like Ra might well have ended up in the sleazy sex parlours of Bangkok – or she might have slipped back into the steaming tropical forest and tried to re-create a life for herself. If she survived, she would be a middle-aged woman by now.
The country was devastated. The American bombing had destroyed much of the infrastructure and the Khmer Rouge did the rest. Cambodia became a graveyard and its population is still trying to pick up the pieces.
And that’s why the Lang family on our SCIAF Wee Box this year deserves our attention. Four decades isn’t enough to stick the pieces of a country and a culture back together again and rural families like the Langs are prey to a continuing lawlessness.
Families like the Langs depend on fish in the huge, languid rivers of Cambodia. But gangs have used dynamite and electrocution to steal fish stocks. Then they move on and leave the rural fishing families devastated.
SCIAF has worked with a local partner to create an advocacy system to help such families, and now local fishermen liaise with the police to patrol the rivers. The Langs are in a better situation now, thanks to your generosity – and by working to secure peaceful solutions, Cambodians have the kind of future I didn’t think I’d see in my lifetime.
Let’s fill our Wee Boxes. Be generous on SCIAF Sunday (the UK government is doubling what SCIAF raises). We might just be helping that wee lassie who held my hand to live out her life in peace.