Dangrek Incident

The Dangrek Incident, also known as the Preah Vihear pushback, was a border incident that took place along the Dangrek Mountain Range on the Cambodia–Thailand border in 1979.

In early 1979, Vietnamese forces overthrew the Democratic Kampuchea regime in neighboring Cambodia. The Vietnamese soldiers swept through the country and reached the armed camp of the Khmer Rouge in the Dangrek Mountains on the Thai-Cambodian border.^[1] Tired of war and starved by famine after three years of rule by the Khmer Rouge, many Cambodians of the northwest wanted to avoid forced conscription or retaliation by seeking asylum in neighboring Thailand.

The Dega people who had been leading the Montagnard resistance against the Hanoi Communist regime also used the opportunity in hope of reaching out to the West, but many were caught by the Khmer Rouge soldiers under Son Sen, who forced them to fight back against the Vietnamese as their "common enemy". In an attempt to impede them from escaping, mines were planted all around the camps where the Dega people were detained, killing and wounding many of them.^[1]

Approximately 140,000 Khmer refugees sought asylum in Thailand between the spring and early fall of 1979. The number of refugee-seekers in Thailand reached one percent of its total population.^[2]

In March of 1979, Thailand anticipated an influx of Cambodian refugees and thus laid land mines and then closed its borders in trepidation. This led to refugees gathering in camps dotting the Cambodian side.^[3] Thailand's approach to Cambodian refugees was harder than to Hmong, Lao, Vietnamese, and Sino-Vietnamese due to a perception that "millions" could arrive.^[4] Thai officials developed a policy of "humane deterrence" in order to reduce of the number of Indochinese refugees in those camps. Those arriving by land were no longer referred to as refugees but as illegal immigrants. The camps were provided only with the bare necessities and interviews with international representatives for possible third-country resettlement were banned for new refugees.^[2]

110 buses arrived at Nong Chan in the morning hours of Friday June 8th, 1979, then continued to Wat Koh and nearby Cambodian refugee sites. By June 15th, between 43,000 and 45,000 Cambodian refugees would ultimately be driven to Preah Vihear and forced down a cliff at gunpoint by Thai soldiers.^[4][5][3][6]

A Thai military official explained the move as a response to the West's perceived failure to accept Cambodian refugees swiftly enough to lessen what Thailand views as a security-risk. The head also said the chosen location presented the best chance for survival, then also acknowledged there would be fatalities from "mines and booby traps".^[7] For three days, Thai soldiers forced the refugees of Nong Chan onto buses, falsely claiming they would be relocated to Bangkok for resettlement. Some refugees who believed this were happy to leave, while others were fearful.^[8][9] As Thai authorities moved to empty the Wat Koh area, many of the refugees' anguished family members who’d learned after four silent years that their relatives survived were now told they’d be forced back. Some contacted their embassies and the UN refugee agency while others arrived at the border to nothing. The US Embassy compiled some 25,000 names and, along with the Australian and French embassies, provided Thai officials with multiple lists of refugees to be resettled in a frantic rescue-attempt. There were translation issues as the names were read off, and several refugees refused to come forward fearing they’d be bussed back to Cambodia. After only 1,500 refugees were loaded onto 20 buses to resettlement camps, the Thai military refused to allow any more and forced the foreigners out before blocking off the area. The majority of the 25,000 refugees listed were forced back to Cambodia.^[10][7] When more buses arrived, Thai officials falsely told the refugees they would also be transferred to a transit camp. Several unconvinced refugees were beaten by soldiers to force them, frightened, onto the bus. The remaining refugees complied out of fear.^[11]

Children and women greatly exceeded the number of men among the passengers.^[7] Thai soldiers stripped the refugees of personal belongings and money, and also said that Thai money would not be valid in Kampuchea and asked the refugees to make a “voluntary contribution” to the army.^[12][13] From there they were forced to walk down the "Dangrek escarpment, a mountainous and thickly forested ridge" with no way to safely cross the minefield below.^[3] Some refugees combined their items of value into buckets and held a white flag while returning back towards Thai soldiers, who took both buckets before bombarding the group with bullets.^[14] Among the refugees were many vulnerable families with children, including Mengly Jandy Quach, Teeda Butt Mam, and Kassie Neou, Khmer refugees who described their ordeal in autobiographies or publications.^[15][16][17] Most of the refugees were ethnic Chinese.^[7]

In To Bear Any Burden: the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians, Cambodian refugee Kassie Neou describes a widowed mother with a baby pleading with Thai soldiers who then shot her dead. He witnessed the baby "crawling around" and the soldiers demanding that someone "take him out", and later saw the baby dead on some rocks below. In the minefield at the bottom, he witnessed the bodies of an entire family he described as "all dead".^[18] In her book To Destroy You is No Loss : the Odyssey of A Cambodian Family, Cambodian refugee Teeda Butt Mam describes witnessing the patriarch of a Chinese-Cambodian family offer a Thai soldier their bucket of pooled Thai baht in exchange for freedom. She says the soldier accepted the money before shooting the entire family to death, writing that "they fell like dominoes." She writes that Thai soldiers killed "any that didn't walk or move forward on command." She further describes how families were forced to leave behind those physically unable to descend the cliff, saying, "Many were shot, others were left to die slowly. None were spared. None." When two boys attempted to make their way back up the mountain, she wrote that one was "shot between the eyes" and the "second child's head was blown off."^[19]

It took three days for survivors to traverse the minefield alone.^[20] For more than a week some 10,000 Cambodian refugees, petrified of moving through the mine fields, remained huddled beneath the Preah Vihear cliff where they survived on rain water and any food found in the forest. Others had food they had purchased from Thai border soldiers, or passed along by Vietnamese soldiers via de-mined paths. Several died from illnesses, others from exposure or land mines, and still others were shot by Thai soldiers for trying to cross the border.^[21] The 1991 publication Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward's War by Human Rights Watch & Physicians for Human Rights said thousands died at Preah Vihear, the majority from dehydration, land mines, and diarrhea.^[3] In her 1992 book Disposable People?: The Plight of Refugees, former Chairwoman of the Women's Refugee Commission and academic Judy A Mayotte^[22][23] noted an official death count did not exist and said that 10,000 refugees dead from shootings and mines alone "is considered a conservative estimate."^[24] A UNHCR report said a minimum of 3,000 Cambodians died at Preah Vihear from "being shot by the soldiers, falling down cliffs, or stepping on landmines on the Cambodia side."^[25]

The news of these tragic events in the Dangrek mountains stirred public opinion and caused international outrage. In order to address the tragedy faced by Indochinese refugees, a meeting was held on 23 July 1979 at United Nations Human Rights Council headquarters at Geneva, convened by the World Council of Churches, under the chairmanship of the Deputy High Commissioner, which was attended by representatives of more than 60 nations.^[26] Thai Foreign Minister Uppadis Pachariyangkun was accused of using this humanitarian crisis to obtain a political victory by forcing the Vietnamese to retreat, which the latter refused to discuss.^[27]

In October 1979 Thai Prime Minister Kriangsak Chamanan visited the border and was visibly shaken by the misery he witnessed.^[28]

Sa Kaeo Refugee Camp was set up "almost overnight" in October 1979. Rosalynn Carter visited the camp in November 1979.^[29] In November 1979, the largest camp, Khao-I-Dang, was opened. More Khmer refugees came fleeing the K5 Plan run by the Vietnamese occupation army which forced conscription on Khmer men in an attempt to build a "bamboo wall" as a Southeast Asian version of the Iron Curtain to protect Cambodia from Thai invasion.

However, after elections changed the government in Thailand, the open border policy was overturned and the Thai border was closed again by new Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda in January 1980, citing fear that the Khmer Rouge would infiltrate Thailand that way.^[30] In fact, out of all the refugee camps, five of them, including Site 8, were dominated by the Khmer Rouge.^[31] The Thai government created a new word, evacuees, in order to signify that the refugees would only be welcomed temporarily and that they had to be relocated elsewhere as soon as possible.^[32]

Because tens of thousands of Khmers had been forced by famine to find refuge in Thailand, the violent response by the Thai authorities left a mark on the modern conscience.^[33] More specifically, the inhumane treatment of Khmer refugees has fuelled anti-Siamese sentiment in Cambodia. The anti-Thai riots of 2003 in Cambodia were filled with the memory of the violence inflicted on the refugees in Dangrek mountains.^[34] The Dangrek events fuelled not only anti-Siamese sentiment but also anti-Vietnamese as the Khmer Rouge used the atrocities in Dongrek as a platform for lobbying against the Vietnamese occupation.^[35]

Thai authorities said the location in the Dangrek mountains near Preah Vihear offered the best chance for survival, despite the presence of landmines and other traps.^[7] According to the 1904 treaty which followed the 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis, the border in this area of the Dangrek mountain range followed the watershed.^[36]

In the aftermath of war, it has taken decades to take out the landmines left behind by the Khmer Rouge, Thai and Vietnamese soldiers in the Dangrek mountain range, and more generally across Cambodia.

• Van, Ly; Ly, Van Aggadipo (2010). O! Maha Mount Dangrek: Poetry of Cambodian Refugee Experiences. Cambodian Expressions. ISBN 978-1-4507-0519-6.