Distant Voices (62 page)

In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge stepped up their attacks. During the first half of 1992 their immediate aim was to gain control of two strategic highways leading to Phnom Penh and so cut off the northern provinces from the
capital. But Khmer Rouge commanders were also securing and expanding their ‘zones'. They did this by laying minefields around villages so as to deter people from leaving the areas they control. This is known as ‘population control'. People who try to escape or stray into a mine-infested paddy, as children frequently do, become a ‘strategic drain on the community': that is, a burden on the Government in Phnom Penh.

Cambodia has long been a war of mines; all sides use them, and refer to them as ‘eternal sentinels, never sleeping, always ready to attack'. In September 1991 the leading American human rights organisation, Asia Watch, published a report entitled ‘Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward's War'. Even for those who have known Cambodia's suffering it is a shocking document – all the more so for its expert attention to the aims and techniques of mine-laying and its effect on an impoverished peasant people.

One of the authors is Rae McGrath, a former British serviceman who is director of the Mines Advisory Group. What McGrath and his colleagues found was ‘the highest percentage of physically disabled inhabitants of any country in the world . . . the highest percentage of mine amputees of any country . . . Surgeons in Cambodia perform between 300 and 700 amputations a month because of mine injuries . . . for every victim who makes it to hospital, another will die in the fields.' ‘These grim statistics', says their report, ‘mean that the Cambodian war may be the first in history in which land mines have gained more victims than any other weapons.'
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I have seen many of the victims. They are usually civilians, such as 23-year-old Rong, a beautiful young woman lying in the hospital at Kompong Spen with her three-year-old infant beside her. When she stepped on a mine she fell into water and lay for three hours, bleeding. When her father found her, he applied a tourniquet, carried her to the road and flagged
down a motorcycle taxi. He took her to a first-aid post; it was seven hours before she reached hospital. In Cambodia direct transport is always difficult to come by; a twenty-mile excursion by bicycle, motorcycle taxi and horse may take a day. The mine that Rong stepped on had driven dirt and bacteria deep into the wound, causing infection to spread fast. The blood vessels had coagulated and there was thrombosis high up her leg. Had she been able to get to the hospital quickly, her leg might have been saved. ‘I knew there were mines around,' she said. ‘Every day I was in fear of them. But the work has to be done.'

Her story is typical. There is little hope for her future. Describing the after-effects of amputation, the Asia Watch researchers wrote:

Nearly every aspect of a Cambodian's life is set to the rhythm of rice cultivation – the flooding, the planting, the re-planting and harvesting. It is very labour intensive . . . And a person who is physically disabled can become a burden. There are no rehabilitation centres, and Cambodia has no laws to protect amputees against discrimination or exploitation. Female amputees are less desirable as wives because they cannot work in the fields, and male amputees are now allowed to become Buddhist monks. Many amputees drift to Phnom Penh and become beggars or petty criminals.
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The laying of mines in Cambodia, said Colonel Alan Beaver, the first UN officer responsible for mines clearance, ‘is probably one of the worst modern, man-made environmental disasters of the century'.
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The United Nations repatriated tens of thousands of refugees back to countryside made uninhabitable by mines and without even a strategy for a major mine-clearing operation. The Khmer Rouge refused to allow UN cartographers to assess the extent of their minefields, and the UN said it could not begin large-scale mine clearance ‘until the necessary cash resources become available'. In 1991–2 the UN was $800 million in arrears, half of which
was owed by the United States. Cambodia would be cleared of mines, said the sceptics, by people stepping on them.

This attitude was not reflected in the work of certain American and other Western volunteers in Cambodia. ‘NGOs' (Non-Government Organisations) were the country's lifeline, their work cherished by Cambodians, not least that of the American Quakers and Mennonites and, more recently, a group of Vietnam War veterans. Encouraged by our 1989 film,
Cambodia Year Ten
, they set up a prosthetics programme which for the first two months of 1992 fitted 300 ‘Jaipur limbs' to the amputee victims of mines. This is the simple, aluminium limb developed by Dr P. K. Sethi in Jaipur in India, specifically for Third World conditions. Ron Podlaski, a big, rumbustious, endearing man, who carries his wounds from the American war in Indo-China, runs the project in Phnom Penh, picking up the pieces of lives devastated by governments that now balk at spending a fraction of what they spent on backing war.
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In its report Asia Watch named two foreign powers that ‘are or have been involved in training Cambodian resistance factions in the use of mines and explosives against civilian as well as military targets'. They are China and Britain. Coming three months after the British Government's admission that it had trained the allies of the Khmer Rouge, the Asia Watch study provided evidence of the terrorist techniques on offer from the British instructors. The SAS, said Asia Watch, taught ‘mines warfare' and ‘the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay fuses'. The training ‘was conducted in strict secrecy: students were not told where they were being taken and were only allowed outside the camp during training exercises'.

Although the report did not say the British were involved
directly with the Khmer Rouge, it revealed that many of the mines and other terror weapons in the SAS training programme were standardised among all three resistance groups. For example: the Five-way Switch – a booby trap that rips off legs – is used by the Sihanoukists and the Khmer Rouge. The British trainers, the report noted, carried sidearms and wore the ‘winged dagger', the SAS cloth badge, and the SAS fawn-coloured beret.

Such a swashbuckling image of Her Majesty's special forces must be set against the impact of their work. The SAS trained the KPNLF. On February 19, 1991, said Asia Watch, the KPNLF attacked a displaced persons' camp at Sala Kran, killing nine civilians, including two children aged four and ten, a pregnant woman and a 75-year-old man. Days after the raid, ‘camp residents, terrified that their attackers would return, sent a young boy back to their village to see if it was safe to return. But he stepped on a mine and was killed. When residents learned of the boy's fate, they dispatched two older boys to the village. They, two, were killed by land mines' – mines laid presumably with skills passed on by British soldiers wearing winged-dagger patches.
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In January 1992 Amnesty International published its report,
Repression Trade UK Limited: How the UK Makes Torture and Death its Business
.
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Amnesty used as one of its main examples the secret training of Cambodian terrorists by the SAS. When asked about the Amnesty report, Lord Caithness said, ‘Oh, that's old hat. We didn't lay any mines.'
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In a letter to the
Guardian
, Rae McGrath of the Mines Advisory Group wrote,

Claims by Lord Caithness or anyone else that Cambodians were not taught to lay mines are simply untrue. They were not only taught how to lay mines, but also how to booby-trap them. In addition, they were shown where to lay mines in such a manner that ensured, in the context of Cambodia, maximum casualties among rural farmers and their families. It is important to recognise that these were, as one would expect from the SAS,
high-calibre courses lasting six months with fifty students of platoon to company commander level. Three of those months were devoted exclusively to training in the use and manufacture of explosives . . . and the use and dissemination of landmines . . . the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy.
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On March 5, 1992 former ambassador Derek Tonkin disclosed that he was one of the principals of a company, the Vietnam Trading Corporation, that was ‘very anxious to assist' in clearing mines in Cambodia.
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Tonkin later revealed that his partner, Neil Shrimpton, was negotiating with Royal Ordnance for a mine-clearing contract in Cambodia. ‘I like to keep my hand in,' said Tonkin.
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The senior British representative in Thailand at the time British troops were teaching Cambodians to lay mines was now hoping to be in business clearing them.

From 1979 to 1992 UN Development Programme (UNDP) in New York withheld development aid from Cambodia as a result of pressure from the United States, China, Britain and Singapore. Development aid comes in the form of tools, materials and expertise, with which poor countries can make a start at developing themselves. It provides such essentials as a clean water supply and decent sanitation. Cambodia has neither. Jim Howard of Oxfam estimated that less than 5 per cent of the country's drinking water was uncontaminated. In 1988 Thames Water sent a team to Phnom Penh and found that as the level of water in the city's pipes rose and fell, it spilled into the streets and drew in drainage and raw sewage. They recommended that an entirely new system be installed urgently. This has not happened, of course. There are still no resources and most of Cambodia's engineers were killed. In any other Third World country, the UNDP would fund such a priority project.
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In 1988 a senior diplomat at the British embassy in Bangkok told Oxfam's Eva Mysliwiec: ‘Cambodia is a country of about seven million people. It's of no real strategic value. As far as Britain is concerned, it's expendable.'
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Cambodia's expendability, and punishment, are exemplified by its children. Whenever I went back, I visited the National Paediatrics Hospital in Phnom Penh, the most modern hospital in the country, and I invariably found seriously ill children lying on the floors of corridors so narrow there was barely room to step over them. A relative would hold a drip; if the child was lucky, he or she would have a straw mat. Most of them suffered from, and many would die from, common diarrhoea and other intestinal ailments carried by parasites in the water supply. In hospital after hospital children died like that, needlessly and for political reasons; and they are still dying.

The international embargo ensured that hospital drug cupboards were depleted or bare; there were no vaccines; sterilisation equipment was broken; X-ray film unobtainable. At Battambang Hospital in the north-west I watched the death of an eleven-month-old baby, while her mother looked on. ‘Her name is Ratanak,' she cried. Had there been a respirator and plasma, the child would have lived. A light was kept shining on her face to keep her temperature up. Then the hospital's power went down and she died.
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In the north-west most of the children fall prey to epidemics of mosquito-carried diseases – cerebral malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. ‘Our particular tragedy', Dr Choun Noothorl, director of Battambang Hospital, told me, ‘is that we had malaria beaten here before 1975. In the 1970s the World Health Organisation assisted us with training, medicines and funding. I remember the statistics for April 1975; we had only a handful of malaria cases; it was a triumph.'

In April 1975, when Pol Pot came to power, Battambang Hospital was abandoned, its equipment and research files destroyed and most of its staff murdered. When the Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge, the World Health Organisation refused to return to Cambodia. Malaria and dengue fever did return, along with new strains which the few surviving Cambodian doctors were unable to identify because they no longer had laboratories. Today two-and-a-half million people, or a quarter of the population, are believed to have malaria. The same estimate applies to tuberculosis, which was also beaten in 1975. Most are children.
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During the 1980s former senior Foreign Office official John Pedler met many of the world's foreign-policy makers in his capacity as representative of the Cambodia Trust. He later wrote to me: ‘Specifically, I was told in Washington at the top career level that “the President has made it clear that the US will not accept the Hun Sen Government” and “we are working for a messy sort of situation with a non-Hun Sen government, but without the Khmer Rouge, who will continue to lurk in the jungles” i.e. for a state of affairs which will favour the destabilisation of Hanoi.'
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This is the ‘better result' that Washington's ideologues have sought in Indo-China.

Their hope is Sihanouk, who can no longer afford to trust his own people and moves among them behind a phalanx of ten North Korean bodyguards. It is Sihanouk who personifies the gap between extreme rural poverty and the better-off in the towns. As Catherine Lumby reported, ‘It is a class distinction which the Khmer Rouge has traditionally been quick to exploit – paying the peasants double for their rice crop and often feeding villages in return for shelter during the civil war.'
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According to William Shawcross, only Sihanouk and ‘a huge foreign presence and dollars in the countryside' can provide ‘the best guarantee' against the return of the Khmer Rouge to power.
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But what will happen when there is no longer a foreign presence? Who will catch the fluttering dollars as they fall upon the villages and hamlets? And how will
the dollars get further than other, deeper pockets? Such an exquisite colonial solution brings to mind again Emory Swank, the American ambassador who passed out $100 bills to relatives of those killed by American bombs – $100 then being the going rate for a Cambodian life.
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