Heritage site
Khao I Dang
Khao I Dang, also written Khao-I-Dang, was a refugee camp in Thailand near the Cambodian border. It took in Cambodian refugees from 1979 into the early 1990s.[1][2] It was the main route for Cambodian refugees trying to leave for other countries,[2] and until 1989 the only official one.[1]
Location
The camp lay near Aranyaprathet, a Thai town close to the border, in Sa Kaeo Province.[1] Bertrand Taithe writes that Aranyaprathet faces the Cambodian town of Poipet across the border, and that a railway once linked the two. The large aid groups that worked in the border camps were based in the town. Among them were Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).[1]
History
The first refugees from Cambodia came to Khao I Dang in 1979.[3][2] Most camps along the border were run first by a joint mission of UNICEF and the ICRC, and from 1982 by the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO). Taithe writes that Khao I Dang was the only one of the large camps that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) managed, from 1983 onward.[1] Magali An Berthon writes that the UNHCR and the Thai government ran it.[2]
Sources give different figures for its size. Taithe puts its population at 40,000 to 57,000 in the 1980s.[1] Berthon writes that it held as many as 130,000 people.[2]
Until 1989, Khao I Dang was the only official route out of the border camps to resettlement abroad. Refugees left from it mainly for the United States, then France, Canada and Australia.[1] Because only one camp offered this path, people in the UNBRO camps who heard rumors of new resettlement places tried to slip into the guarded UNHCR camp. Taithe calls this "Khao I Dang fever". Some of the camp's own residents were "illegal": refugees in hiding inside a refugee camp.[1]
In Taithe's account, Khao I Dang lasted longer than the other camps, from 1979 to 1992.[1] On March 5, 1993, the German daily taz printed a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP) saying that the camp had closed on Wednesday. AFP added that the closure largely completed the return of Cambodian refugees to their country.[3] Berthon gives 1993 as the end of its management by the UNHCR and the Thai government.[2]
Life in the camp
Taithe writes that the Cambodian camps grew into real cities, and that Khao I Dang was urban and open to aid groups. It was also the camp most open to foreign visitors, so it came to stand for all the refugee camps, although it was unlike the others.[1] MSF ran the camp's referring hospital. Two French psychiatrists who worked at Khao I Dang, Jean-Pierre Hiégel and Colette Hiégel Landrac, joined traditional healing with Western psychiatry. They called the approach "humanitarian psychiatry". Researchers came to the camp to study survivors of the genocide and, later, the lives of Cambodians resettled in the West.[1]
Caring for Young Refugees, a Japanese group, began weaving training in the camp in 1980. A few Cambodian weavers there sometimes made pidan, silk tapestries showing scenes in traditional Cambodian style.[4] Berthon writes that weavers in the camps used the cheap materials at hand, such as cotton and polyester, to make simple cloths like the krama. A plaid krama woven at Khao I Dang between 1987 and 1989 was bought by an Australian migration officer and is held by Museums Victoria in Australia.[2]
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, small dance troupes started among Cambodians abroad to keep the heritage of the Royal Ballet and Khmer classical dance alive. One of them was the Khao I Dang troupe in Thailand.[5]
People who passed through
The Cambodian-born Canadian professor Sorpong Peou spent the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia, up to the Vietnamese invasion of late 1978. He left Cambodia alone in 1979 and spent several months at Khao I Dang. He then moved to another camp and later to a transit camp, and reached Canada in 1982.[6]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Cambridge University Press, Bertrand Taithe, The Cradle of the New Humanitarian System? International Work and European Volunteers at the Cambodian Border Camps, 1979–1993, Contemporary European History 25(2) (May 2016)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Royal College of Art, Magali An Berthon, Silk and Post-Conflict Cambodia: Embodied Practices and Global and Local Dynamics of Heritage and Knowledge Transference (1991-2018) (PhD thesis, October 2021)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 die tageszeitung (taz), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lager geschlossen (March 5, 1993; in German)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily, Michelle Vachon, Weaving Pidan (April 30, 2014)
- ↑ Angkor Database, Le Ballet Royal (The Royal Ballet) (c. 2004)
- ↑ VOA Khmer, Q&A: Interview with Professor Sorpong Peou (January 19, 2017)