Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World

4. The Power of Self-Healing

W ith the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 and 1980, hundreds of thousands of malnourished Khmer tried to flee into Thailand. Initially they were denied access by the Thai government, resulting in thousands of deaths at the border. After protests by the international community , the Thais allowed the United Nations to take responsibility for them. The first waves were given official refugee status by international law, until they could be gradually resettled in America, Europe, Canada, and Australia. The Thais later refused the designation of refugee status to arrivals , labeling hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees “displaced persons.” As such, they were not allowed the protection of international law, nor could they be resettled in a third country. More than 350,000 Khmer lived as displaced persons in camps along the Thai-Cambodian border after 1982. They were cared for by a special UN agency, the United Nations Border Relief Operations (UNBRO), with the assistance of the World Food Programme Chapter 4 (WFP), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the American Refugee Committee (ARC), and more than a dozen other humanitarian relief agencies. These organizations provided direct services, including health care and social services. UNBRO provided camp residents all food and water. The host government to these displaced persons, however, remained Thailand, and its supreme military command had ultimate authority over all camp residents and activities. The military was responsible for policing the camps, inside and outside, and establishing all the rules and regulations it deemed necessary for protecting Thailand’s national sovereignty and interests. Thailand especially feared the Vietnamese army, which had occupied and controlled Cambodia after driving out the Khmer Rouge and was now ranked along its border. Each Thai-Cambodian border camp soon became a civilian satellite to a secret Cambodian guerilla camp, sponsored by the international community, including the United States and Thailand, dedicated to driving Vietnam out of Cambodia. The largest of the Thai border camps, called Site 2, was a community of more than 150,000 people, each identified only by a number . Site 2 had a long oval perimeter surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Families of six lived in bamboo structures twelve by eighteen feet in size. Sixteen families shared a common latrine. The camp had no light or electricity. Water was trucked in daily, as Site 2 had no natural water supply. For more than a decade the residents were fed the same daily diet of rice and canned fish. In the early days of the Boston clinic I heard about Site 2 over and over again from scores of Cambodian refugee patients. The UN presented these camps to the world as safe havens for fleeing Cambodians . But the patients described a different reality: for many, the camps were places of rape, murder, and human cruelty. Healing Invisible Wounds 89 One day a Cambodian refugee family at the clinic showed us a photograph of their relatives’ thatched hut in Site 2, which had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Everyone inside was killed. As we looked at the charred debris, the patients asked if someone could go to Site 2 to help their surviving relatives. We were taken aback by this request, because none of the American clinicians had ever been to a refugee camp, or even to Southeast Asia. It seemed like an extraordinary thing for patients to ask of their caregivers , yet we decided to do our best for them. A few months later, in October 1988, after receiving a small grant from the Episcopal Church of Boston, I headed to Thailand. Traveling with me was Russell Jalbert, a retired American policy maker who had been responsible for resettling Cambodian refugees on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Our mission was to evaluate the conditions in Site 2 and their impact on the psychological well-being of the refugees who lived there.1 During the eight-hour taxi ride from Bangkok to the ThaiCambodian border, reality gradually sank in. The huge expanse of vibrant green rice paddies and water buffalo, familiar from images of the Vietnam War on television, made us worry that we had entered into a dangerous environment similar to that in which many American GIs had died. As a medical doctor on a humanitarian mission, I believed we would be safe, until we heard rocket explosions in the distance as we arrived at our headquarters...