The refugee crisis that brought so many Cambodians to Thailand was years in the making, but it was precipitated in late October 1979, when Thai Prime Minister Kriangsak Chomanand bowed to months of pressure with an “open door” policy that admitted some of the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians hovering in improvised camps along the border. They were terrorized by years of Khmer Rouge genocide, food shortages, and finally the invasion of the Vietnamese army into Cambodia in late 1978, which toppled the Khmer Rouge.
The earliest refugees who came through the “open door” policy, including many Khmer Rouge fighters, were bussed by the Thai military from just south of the border to the first organized camp at Sa Kaeo, forty miles inside Thailand. The construction of Sa Kaeo was in the hands of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which enlisted its newest recruit, Mark Malloch Brown, a British journalist – yes, a journalist – to oversee it. The task was overwhelming and the terrain not suited for drainage and latrines, but ready or not, desperate refugees arrived by the thousands to sleep on grass mats in monsoon rains before sturdier accommodations could be built. The Thai government and NGOs brought in doctors and nurses who initially dealt with emergencies in improvised tents with few supplies.
Once Bangkok-based reporters raced to the area and reported the story, it was explosive international news. Refugees were arriving severely malnourished, dehydrated, and diseased, hundreds of them so sick that they soon died. Reporters, diplomats, and their spouses were enlisted to dole out liquids with electrolytes from buckets. Doctors short of basic supplies wrote instructions on patients’ chests with marking pens. Nurses and others taught to give injections to the refugees often couldn’t find enough fat in their flesh in which to insert a needle.
Stunned by the scope of the tragedy, President Carter sent his wife Rosalynn to tour several camps as governments and NGOs sent supplies and experts to the area, and individuals from across the globe arrived to do whatever they could. The conditions at Sa Kaeo were so dire that that within weeks, UNHCR gave Mark Malloch Brown another assignment: to put KID together on a more amenable piece of land twelve miles from the border crossing. In four days, land was cleared, roads mapped, latrines dug, and thousands of thatched huts were begun, like so many LEGO houses.
Soon the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would build a noted 400-bed hospital that performed hundreds of operations in its early weeks. [There is a video on the KID Learning Center Facebook page of Malloch Brown narrating some of this work.] For the video of the early days of construction of Khao I Dang, also please visit the Khao I Dang Learning Center Facebook Page
There are many fuller accounts of KID’s history, beginning with Wikipedia. Photo caption: Crossing the border today, Poipet, Cambodia, to Aranyaprathet, Thailand. Photo credit: (c) Elizabeth Benedict
~ Khao-I-Dang Today ~ 