Dangrek Incident

Dangrek incident
Part of Cambodian–Vietnamese War, and
Cambodian humanitarian crisis
see caption
Dangrek Mountain Range
LocationCambodia–Thailand border
Date8 June 1979
TargetSino-Khmer refugees in Thailand
Attack type
Death March
Deaths400–10,000
PerpetratorsRoyal Thai Army
Khmer Rouge
Vietnam

The Dangrek Incident, also known as the Preah Vihear pushback, is a border incident which took place along the Dangrek Mountain Range on the Thai-Cambodian border.

Context

Main article: Cambodian–Vietnamese War

In early 1979, Vietnamese forces overthrew the Democratic Kampuchea regime in neighboring Cambodia. The Vietnamese soldiers swept through the country and reached the armed camp of the Khmer Rouge in the Dangrek Mountains on the Cambodian–Thai border.[1] Tired of war and starved by famine after three years of rule by the Khmer Rouge, many Cambodians of the northwest wanted to avoid forced conscription or retaliation by seeking asylum in neighboring Thailand.

The Dega people who had been leading the Montagnard resistance against the Hanoi Communist regime also used the opportunity in hope of reaching out to the West, but many were caught by the Khmer Rouge soldiers under Son Sen who forced them to fight back against the Vietnamese as their "common enemy". However, in an attempt to impede them from escaping, mines were planted all around the camps where the Dega people were detained, killing and wounding many of them.[1]

Approximately 140,000 Khmer refugees sought asylum in Thailand between spring and early fall of 1979. The number of refugee-seekers in Thailand reached one percent of its total population.[2]

Timeline

Closure of Thai border (March 1979)

In March of 1979, Thailand mined and then closed its borders, anticipating an overwhelming flow of refugees.[3] Thailand's approach to Cambodian refugees was harder than to Hmong, Lao, Vietnamese, and Sino-Vietnamese due to a perception that "millions" could arrive.[4] In the no man's land along the border between Thailand and Cambodia, refugee camps started to spring. Thai officials developed a policy of "humane deterrence" in order to reduce of the number of Indochinese refugees in those camps. Those arriving by land were no longer referred to as refugees but as illegal immigrants. The camps were provided only with the bare necessities and interviews with international representatives for possible third-country resettlement were eventually suspended.[2]

Incident (June 1979)

110 buses arrived at Nong Chan, a border town north of Aranyaprathet, in the morning hours of Friday June 8th, 1979. Between 43,000 and 45,000 Cambodian refugees would ultimately be driven to Preah Vihear and forced down a cliff at gunpoint by Thai soldiers.[4][5]

A Thai authority claimed this location presented the best chance for survival, though also acknowledged there would be fatalities from "mines and booby traps."[6] Thai officials falsely claimed the refugees would be transferred to another camp; the refugees who believed this were happy to leave Nong Chan. Several refugees were beaten by soldiers to force them, frightened, onto the bus.[7] Children and women greatly exceeded the number of men among the passengers.[6] Thai soldiers told the refugees: "Thai money will not be valid in Kampuchea; we ask you to make a voluntary contribution to our army."[8] From there they were forced to walk down the "Dangrek escarpment, a mountainous and thickly forested ridge" with no way to safely cross the minefield below.[3] Some refugees combined their items of value into buckets and held a white flag while returning back towards Thai soldiers, who took both buckets before bombarding the group with bullets.[9] Among the refugees were many vulnerable families with children, including Mengly Jandy Quach, Teeda Butt Mam, and Kassie Neou, Khmer refugees who described their ordeal in autobiographies or publications.[10][11][12] Most of the refugees were ethnic Chinese.[6]

In To Bear Any Burden: the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians, Cambodian refugee Kassie Neou describes a widowed mother with a baby pleading with Thai soldiers who then shot her dead. He witnessed the baby "crawling around" and the soldiers demanding some one "take him out," but ultimately saw the baby dead on some rocks below. In the minefield at the bottom, he witnessed the bodies of an entire family he described as "All dead."[13]

In her book To Destroy You is No Loss : the Odyssey of A Cambodian Family, Cambodian refugee Teeda Butt Mam describes witnessing the patriarch of a Chinese-Cambodian family offer a Thai soldier their bucket of pooled Thai baht in exchange for freedom. She says the soldier accepted the money before shooting the entire family to death, writing that "they fell like dominoes." She writes that Thai soldiers killed "any that didn't walk or move forward on command." She further describes how families were forced to leave behind those physically unable to descend the cliff, saying, "Many were shot, others were left to die slowly. None were spared. None." When two boys attempted to make their way back up the mountain, she wrote that one was "shot between the eyes" and the "second child's head was blown off."[14]

It is estimated that thousands of Khmer refugees died, the majority from dehydration, land mines, and diarrhea.[3][15]

October 1979 (Geneva Conference)

The news of these tragic events in the Dangrek mountains stirred public opinion and caused international outrage. In order to address the tragedy faced by Indochinese refugees, a meeting was held on 23 July 1979 at United Nations Human Rights Council headquarters at Geneva, convened by the World Council of Churches, under the chairmanship of the Deputy High Commissioner, which was attended by representatives of more than 60 nations.[16] Thai Foreign Minister Uppadis Pachariyangkun was accused of using this humanitarian crisis to obtain a political victory by forcing the Vietnamese to retreat, which the latter refused to discuss.[17]

In October 1979 Thai Prime Minister Kriangsak Chamanan visited the border and was visibly shaken by the misery he witnessed.[18]

Sa Kaeo Refugee Camp was set up "almost overnight" in October 1979. Rosalynn Carter visited the camp in November 1979.[19] In November 1979, the largest camp, Khao-I-Dang, was opened. More Khmer refugees came fleeing the K5 Plan run by the Vietnamese occupation army which forced conscription on Khmer men in an attempt to build a "bamboo wall" as a Southeast Asian version of the Iron Curtain to protect Cambodia from Thai invasion.

However, after elections changed the government in Thailand, the open border policy was overturned and the Thai border was closed again by new Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda in January 1980, citing fear that the Khmer Rouge would infiltrate Thailand that way.[20] In fact, out of all the refugee camps, five of them, including Site 8, were dominated by the Khmer Rouge.[21] The Thai government created a new word, evacuees, in order to signify that the refugees would only be welcomed temporarily and that they had to be relocated elsewhere as soon as possible.[22]

Aftermath

Nurturing the Anti-Siamese sentiment of the Khmer

Because tens of thousands of Khmers had been forced by famine to find refuge in Thailand, the violent response by the Thai authorities left a mark on the modern conscience.[23] More specifically, the inhumane treatment of Khmer refugees has fuelled anti-Siamese sentiment in Cambodia. The anti-Thai riots of 2003 in Cambodia were filled with the memory of the violence inflicted on the refugees in Dangrek mountains.[15] The Dangrek events fuelled not only anti-Siamese sentiment but also anti-Vietnamese as the Khmer Rouge used the atrocities in Dongrek as a platform for lobbying against the Vietnamese occupation.[24]

Thai-Cambodian border dispute

Main article: Cambodian–Thai border dispute

Thai authorities said it offered the best chance for survival, despite the presence of landmines and other traps.[6]According to the 1904 treaty which followed the 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis, the border in this area of the Dangrek mountain range followed the watershed.[25]

Demining along the border

Main article: Land mines in Cambodia

In the aftermath of war, it has taken decades to take out the landmines left behind by the Khmer Rouge, Thai and Vietnamese soldiers in the Dangrek mountain range, and more generally across Cambodia.

References

  1. ^ a b Kiernan, Ben (2017). Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford University Press. p. 460. ISBN 978-0-19-516076-5.
  2. ^ a b Kim, Audrey U. (2003). Not Just Victims: Conversations with Cambodian Community Leaders in the United States. University of Illinois Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-252-07101-0.
  3. ^ a b c Physicians for Human Rights (1991). Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward's War, September 1991. Human Rights Watch. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-56432-001-8.
  4. ^ a b Kim, Audrey U. (2003). Not Just Victims: Conversations with Cambodian Community Leaders in the United States. University of Illinois Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-252-07101-0.
  5. ^ Shawcross, William (1985). The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience : with a report from Ethiopia. pp. 89, 90.
  6. ^ a b c d Kamm, Henry (1979-06-12). "Thais Deport 30,000 Cambodians While Others Continue to Arrive". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  7. ^ Shawcross, William (1985). The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience : with a report from Ethiopia. pp. 88, 89.
  8. ^ Shawcross, William (1985). The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience : with a report from Ethiopia. p. 89.
  9. ^ Shawcross, William (1985). The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience : with a report from Ethiopia. pp. 89, 90.
  10. ^ Quach, Mengly J. (2018). ភ្នំដងរែក: ទីពុំអាចភ្លេច [Dangrek mountains: unforgettable] (in Khmer). Mengly J. Quach University Press. ISBN 978-9924-508-11-3.
  11. ^ Butt Mam, Teeda (1989). To Destroy You Is No Loss : the Odyssey of a Cambodian Family. p. 254.
  12. ^ Santoli, Al (1986). To bear any burden : the Vietnam War and its aftermath in the words of Americans and Southeast Asians. p. 258.
  13. ^ Santoli, Al (1986). To bear any burden : the Vietnam War and its aftermath in the words of Americans and Southeast Asians. p. 258.
  14. ^ Butt Mam, Teeda (1989). To Destroy You Is No Loss : the Odyssey of a Cambodian Family. p. 254.
  15. ^ a b Hinton, Alexander (2006). "Khmerness and the Thai 'Other': Violence, Discourse and Symbolism in the 2003 Anti-Thai Riots in Cambodia". Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 37 (3): 445–468. doi:10.1017/S0022463406000737. ISSN 0022-4634. JSTOR 20071786. S2CID 162779371.
  16. ^ Stein, Barry (1979). "The Geneva Conferences and the Indochinese Refugee Crisis". The International Migration Review. 13 (4): 716–723. doi:10.2307/2545184. ISSN 0197-9183. JSTOR 2545184.
  17. ^ Chapman, William (1979-07-19). "Geneva Conference on Refugees Faces Divisions". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  18. ^ Chan, Sucheng (2004-05-05). Survivors: Cambodian refugees in the United States. University of Illinois Press. p. 48. ISBN 978-0-252-07179-9.
  19. ^ Kamm, Henry (1979-11-10). "Mrs. Carter Visits Thai Camp: 'It's Like Nothing I've Seen'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  20. ^ Robinson, Courtland (2000). "Refugee warriors at the Thai-Cambodian border". Refugee Survey Quarterly. 19 (1): 23–37. doi:10.1093/rsq/19.1.23. ISSN 1020-4067. JSTOR 45053197.
  21. ^ Widener, Jeff (1993-01-22). "Last Khmer Rouge Refugee Camp Closes". AP NEWS. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  22. ^ Kim, Audrey U. (2003). Not Just Victims: Conversations with Cambodian Community Leaders in the United States. University of Illinois Press. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-252-07101-0.
  23. ^ Shawcross, William (1985). The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience. Fontana. pp. 90–92. ISBN 978-0-00-636972-1.
  24. ^ Cambodia Office of the Prime Minister (1985). Evidence of Atrocities Committed by the Occupation Forces of the Social Republic of Vietname Against the Civilian Population of Dangrek in Western Kampuchea on 24 January 1985. Office of the Prime Minister, Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea.
  25. ^ Jenne, Nicole (2017). "The Thai–Cambodian Border Dispute: An Agency-centred Perspective on the Management of Interstate Conflict". Contemporary Southeast Asia. 39 (2): 315–347. doi:10.1355/cs39-2c. ISSN 0129-797X. JSTOR 44683772. S2CID 148823216.

Bibliography

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