[Vietnamization: PRK, Ratanakiri, Military] The Vietnamese Platform at Son Sann's Site 2; Repatriated refugees at Sre Ampil
Postcards from the Peaceful Children’s Home established by former Prime Minister Son Sann at Sre Ampil, Kien Svay, initially for the families and children repatriated from the border camps during UNTAC (Oct. 1991 Paris Peace Accords to 1993), now mostly for orphans and vulnerable children.
The repatriated refugees—denied entry to a third country, e.g. Australia/NZ, Canada, France, US, after risking their lives escaping Cambodia and languishing for years at these violent, squalid camps—were given 2 options: LAND (2 hectares per family) or MONEY ($50 per parent, $25 per child).
A family (e.g. of 2 parents and 2 children) who chose money ($150) over land would quickly found themselves destitute without land or money because they had spent that money on medicine and other health costs. Many of these returning refugees were sick.
Those who chose land were mostly consolidated in Battambang as a matter of policy from Hanoi-controlled Phnom Penh:
(1) to keep track of who’s who for the upcoming UNTAC-sponsored elections;
(2) the northeastern provinces, particularly Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri, were off limits. Now, in light of the massive deforestation and the Vietnamese military occupation of hundreds of hectares of land in Ratanakiri (that we know of (!), thanks to the Cambodia Daily cover story a year or two ago), we have a clearer reason for the prohibition. As well as thousands of hectares of land concessions to Vietnamese companies where the local people and the few who have accessed these publicly off-limit land concessions fear that Vietnamese villages and settlements have been built and continue to be built and expand in these once-jungle-of-hundred-old-trees border provinces.
Already under the shroud of secrecy and military diktats, now even more forgotten as our attention is diverted to Chinese presence and economic takeover.
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