Thai Play Unwilling Hosts to Refugees

Louisville Courtier-Journal
Tuesday Dec. 4, 1979
by Joel Brinkley
Courier-Journal Staff Writer

ARANYAPRATHET, Thailand – To many here, it is known as the day the missionaries cried.
“It was a massacre, simply a massacre,” said Marjorie Rasmussen, a medical missionary from Louisville who has heard the tale from eyewitnesses time and time again.
The problem started in January when Thai officials refused to accept any more Cambodian refugees, saying their poor country already had too many mouths of its own to feed.
Cambodians came anyway, slipping over the border into Thailand by the thousand. They hid among their countrymen who had legally emigrated before the border was closed.
One day orders came from Bangkok that all the newcomers had to go. Right now. Thai solders combed the refugee camps and picked out Cambodians who didn’t have proper papers. About 850 in all.
When the refugees were corralled, buses moved them to the top of a slope just north of Aranyaprathet. Cambodia was down below. Thai soldiers prodded the refugees from their seats at gunpoint. The soldiers urged them forward with shouts.
Missionaries watched silently.
The 850 men, women and children obediently began trudging down the hill. Looking back, they saw M16 rifle barrels pointing at them.
Nobody knew about the problem ahead.
This hill, down which the refugees trod toward Cambodia, had earlier been a favorite for others who climbed up it to sanctuary in Thailand. Sanctuary from the hated Khmer Rouge soldiers. So to prevent Cambodians from escaping their country, the hillside had been mined, probably by the Khmer Rouge.
“They just blew up, hundreds of them,” Mrs. Rasmussen said, shaking her head. Others turned around to run back up the hill.”
But the Thai soldiers had their orders. No more Cambodian refugees in Thailand.
They opened fire.
Caught between mines and bullets, “half of them were killed,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Missionaries who have seen all sorts of horrible things, all over the world, they cry when the talk about that day.”
For months, the Thai themselves have face a terrible dilemma. Governments worldwide pressure Thailand to give Cambodians a temporary home. Meanwhile, Thai citizens grumble that refugees be kept out.
In early October, Thailand’s prime minister, Kriangsak Chomanan, officially opened the country to Cambodian refugees. But by then, so many Cambodians lay huddled at the border that it seemed almost like granting a tidal wave permission to crash over the beach.
Thailand plainly doesn’t want the 200,000 Cambodian refugees now on its soil, or the half-million others who are expected to cross the border soon.
“We are a poor country, and we have enough trouble feeding our own,” said Sae Taang, a Thai college student serving as a refugee-camp relief worker. “In the countryside, where I worked, people are upset because they think the government takes good care of the Cambodians but not of them. But my prime minister, he just says he has to.”
Some relief workers complain that the Thai government isn’t doing enough. They say that if everything were left to the Thai, refugee camps would be flat plots of ground, barbed wire fencing, guards – and not much else. International relief agencies provide nearly all of the essentials.
“We have to channel all our food and supplies through the Thai Red Cross just so it looks like the Thais are involved,” said one American relief official. “But really, the Thai are contributing barely a dime.”
At the Aranyaprathet Khmer Refugee center, for example, a Norwegian relief agency built the hospital, the New York based International Rescue Committee staffs it and the International Red Cross supplies the drugs. The YWCA runs the school, Christian Outreach, a group started to help Vietnamese refugees, distributes clothing and other supplies.
Thai soldiers man the guard shacks.
In the refugee camps, foreign relief workers are constantly aware of the Thai feelings about Cambodian refugees. “We had a fellow in here from Norway who looked at our wooden hospital cots and wanted to rush in dozens of beds with sheets,” said Kenneth Rasmussen, Marjorie Rasmussen’s husband and the only doctor at the Aranyaprathet refugee camp.
“But we had to say no because we absolutely can’t make the people in here more privileged than the Thai people outside. Outside they don’t have beds with sheets.”
Thai resentment of Cambodians runs deeper than concern about bed sheets. They fear the refugees presence might prompt the Vietnamese to invade Thailand, which has largely remained neutral throughout the years of Asian conflict – although it did allow the U.S. to operate air bases on its land during the Vietnam War.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 Vietnamese are now gathering in Western Cambodia, along 210 miles of brush and forest on the Thai border. They are there to wipe out the last forces of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, which they overthrew last January.
When the drives against the Khmer Rouge begin, Khmer Rouge soldiers are expected to flee into Thailand, and the Thai fear that the attacking Vietnamese troops will follow, right over the border.
Some of Thailand’s top commanders are assigned to lead their troops along the border. And already there have been skirmishes with “foreign forces,” as Thai military officials describe those they fought.
In the south, Khmer Rouge soldiers often cross into Thailand to rest and regroup. “A few weeks ago, several thousand of them came over, right here, and rested for awhile,” said Thai Lt. Sitti Piyasonti, who mans a border outpost south of Aranyaprathet. “The Vietnamese did not follow them this time, and we just sat and watched until they went back. But sometimes we hear the big guns shelling only 50 meters from here.”
Hanoi has sternly warned Thailand that it is “playing with fire” by allowing Khmer Rouge soldiers on its soil.
Many in Thailand wonder what their government will do when all the refugees have finally crossed the border. Government officials hope many will eventually go back home when the fighting subsides. But many refugees insist they will never return to Cambodia.
When Cambodians began streaming onto their land, the Thai viewed the camps that sprung up as temporary homes for the homeless. Now, facing reality, they talk about building a huge, permanent camp in southeastern Thailand. It would probably be the largest refugeee camp in the world.
“We hear one rumor all the time,” said Bob Beck, an American relief worker at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp. “And that is that they’ll build the new camp on a strip of land right on the southern border. Since the border there isn’t well-defined, the Thai will put the refugees on the strip of land and then just say that they’re actually in Cambodia.”

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