The Group Reaches Cambodia

Clear Path Co-Founder Imbert Matthee is leading a group of CPI supporters across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. He has filed this report.

The short, energetic and somewhat nervous man with the boyish grin points to a field where his uncle was caught fishing by the Khmer Rouge. They sent him to the jungle near the Thai border and within a few months, he was executed.

Everyone in Cambodia has a story that marks a memory from 30 years of torturous civil war.

This is the story of Savorn Singha, 38, born in Bovel district, Battambang Province when the first fighting started and still shell-shocked by the trauma he shares with the rest of his country. His story is an introduction to the part of Cambodia where Clear Path International and its Cambodian partner hope to start their next project in support of landmine accident survivors.

Battambang Province and in particular the districts that straddle the Thai border have the country�s highest landmine accident rates. The day before our group arrived in the Bovel commune close to the new project site, a landmine exploded behind the community building. While our partner organization, Cambodia Volunteers for Community Development were here in April to survey landmine survivors about their interest in learning new skills to boost their income, two accidents happened back to back.
An explosion goes off at least once a week. Here�s why.
The trouble started in the 1960s. Savorn�s home village called Kauk is a good example of how communities got caught, then remained suspended in the crossfire, resulting in the thousands of landmines and pieces of unexploded ordnance that contaminate their environment to this day.
Kauk was strategically located on the Mongkol Borei River that runs somewhat parallel to the Thai border about 90 kilometers inland. At first, it was the White Khmer who set up a base in the land between the river and the border. That was the year Savorn was born: 1967. Supported by Thailand, the White Khmer fought the regime of King Sihanouk. The rebels would cross the river, capture Kauk until they were chased by Sihanouk�s troops.
The pattern would repeat itself for years. After 1970, it was the Khmer Rouge that fought the U.S.-backed government of General Lon Nol. From 1975 to 1979, the village suffered under the murderous Khmer Rouge regime until its troops were pushed back behind the river by invading Vietnamese troops.
Every week, the shells and rockets would fly overhead across the river. Khmer Rouge troops would cross the river, encircle the village, occupy it and reckon with anyone suspected of supporting the other side until the other side would launch a counter attack and beat them back across the water.
The conquering government troops would subject the villagers to the same treatment. Savorn says 20 people in his community of 120 families were killed by Khmer Rouge or government troops. School was constantly interrupted. Troops from both sides helped themselves to the village�s meager crop of rice.
�We were like a nail between the hammer and the plank,� he says, explaining that both his parents died in their fifties from �war trauma.�
The fighting across the river lasted for nearly two decades until it finally stopped in 1996. By then, Savorn had fled to Thailand, where he finished high school in one of the refugee camps and took an engineering course.
He came to Cambodia in 1992, though not to Kauk, and went to work for a village economic development project supported by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, Oxfam and the Australian Embassy. Now, he is a program manager for Village Focus International, which is helping CVCD and CPI to put together the new project in western Battambang Province.
The two organizations hope to build a destination agricultural and vocational skills training center for disabled landmine accident survivors and members of their families. It would serve beneficiaries in three districts, including Bovel, where Savorn is from.
The meaning of Bovel in Khmer aptly describes its experience since the late 1960s. The word stands for �twirling water in the lake.�
Savorn, who has helped set up and run a similar facility in Pursat, says his personal history and his village�s experience make him very passionate about the project.
�I have seen the suffering of the disabled people in my village,� he says.
One of his hometown neighbors lost an arm and an eye in an explosion. Another lost both legs. In his village, six people were killed and seven injured by landmine accidents, plowing, cutting bamboo, hunting. Two were blinded.
�I can share my experience (in development),� Savorn says. �They need my help.�