Thai Camp Closing Creates Concern
Episcopal News Service. January 15, 1987 [87008]
NEW YORK (DPS, Jan. 15) -- The projected closing this month of Thailand's Khao I Dang refugee camp, one of the last sources of hope for Cambodians trying to escape suffering in their homeland, is worrying refugee resettlement officials, former Indochinese refugees and their sponsors.
"We are greatly concerned because a lot of relatives of resettled refugees are in Khao I Dang, and we're concerned about their being able to rejoin their families," said Marion Dawson, assistant director for migration affairs for the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief. She added that several dioceses involved in the resettlement work had expressed a particular desire that families be able to rejoin already resettled refugees.
Khao I Dang, which served as the backdrop for the final scenes of the film "The Killing Fields," is located about 12 miles from the Cambodian border. Its closing means that the approximately 26,000 Cambodians who live there will be moved to camps closer to the border -- and therefore more vulnerable to on-going fighting -- and will lose their legal status as refugees. They will become "displaced persons," subject to possible repatriation. The border camps have no refugee processing mechanism, thus making the refugees' hopes of escape from them almost nil.
Cambodia, now known officially as Kampuchea, has been involved since 1979 in a battle between a Vietnamese-installed government and Cambodian resistance forces. From 1975-79, Cambodia was ruled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, under which about 2 million people are estimated to have been killed.
The Cambodian refugees "are survivors, but they may not be if sent back to the border without protection," according to Susan D. Hardman, wife of the Rev. Robert R. Hardman, rector of the Good Samaritan Church in Corvallis, Ore. In a Dec. 15 letter to Secretary of State George C. Shultz -- one of dozens protesting the closing sent to U.S. officials from those involved in resettlement programs -- she described her congregation's involvement with Cambodian refugees: "These people give back much to us who help them much."
She continued, "If you have ever been personally involved with a refugee family on a day to day basis, you can never forget them...We have walked with these people through their troubled minds, through the welfare system, through job interviews, through language classes, through all the little efforts they are making to survive and 'make it' in this foreign culture."
Despite letters like Hardman's, it appears that the camp will close, reflecting a "general trend in the United States' Indochinese program," according to Zdenka Seiner, assistant director for government relations for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. "U.S. officials are saying, 'We can't take these people forever.'"
Dawson said, "The program has gone on for a long time, but it's especially important for the Church to sustain and support compassion, no matter how long it takes to achieve justice. Thailand has been quite generous but they can't do it alone. They need help from the international community." One reason given by the Thai government for the shutdown is lack of interest by industrialized nations in resettling refugees. According to the Jan. 9 Christian Science Monitor, "the complaint is not wholly unjustified, since between 1975 to August 1986, only six nations have each resettled more than 1,000" Thailand refugees.
Khao I Dang, a sprawling camp of thatched roof huts and small vegetable gardens, has been open since 1979. Seiner and other immigration officials in contact with representative in Thailand said they believe the closing could take about a year.
But no is really sure of the time frame, whether Thai officials have begun the process and under whose authority the Khao I Dang refugees will be in their new locations, according to David Whittlesey, a spokesman for the State Department's Bureau for Refugee Programs. "Obviously things are not clear, and there is room for negotiation" with Thailand, Whittlesey said.
A first-hand report on the situation will soon be made to the Presiding Bishop's Fund Board by a former employee now travelling in Southeast Asia on business. He is Sichan Siv, a former refugee, now an American citizen and an ambassador in the tri-partite coalition representing Cambodia at the United Nations.