Tuel Karo, a country carpenter from the Cambodian hinterlands, has played a part in every chapter of the twisted, bloody history of modern Cambodia.
His role is victim.
When Cambodia descended into chaos after a 1970 coup, Tuel fled to the jungle for two years with his parents to escape the fighting.
Under the despotic 1975-79 rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who turned Cambodia into the notorious “killing fields,” Tuel, like his family and most of the nation, was forced from his home to a brutal farming commune. When Tuel’s uncle accidentally broke a water buffalo harness and Tuel’s brother was discovered to be an intellectual–a college student–Khmer Rouge authorities took each man away. Tuel assumes they were beaten to death.
Then came the decade-long guerrilla war in which Tuel’s village was controlled by Vietnamese occupiers, followed by the 1993 United Nations peace plan that eventually failed but gave Tuel a chance to vote in free elections.
Now Cambodia is under siege again, and so is Tuel’s world.
Tuel, along with his wife and six of their nine children, pass their days in a crowded refugee camp just inside Thai territory at Kab Cheng. With them are more than 20,000 other Cambodians who had fled across the border last week after rival factions trying to settle July’s violent coup began to bomb and shoot up their villages in Cambodia’s latest installment of civil war.
He has lost his house, his carpentry shop and his equipment. He is worried about the three children who remain in Cambodia with relatives. And, while sitting quietly in the shade of a large tent he constructed from tree limbs and blue plastic sheeting, he has too much idle time–time to think about what his country has done to him.
“I feel sorry for myself,” Tuel said. “I had a chance to learn when I was young and I hoped to use my knowledge to build up my future. But I haven’t had the chance. My normal life was running away from war.
“After the UN elections, things were better. Some people made money, including our family. But then war came again, and I’m back to the same old life,” Tuel said.
There is no pain in Tuel’s voice. The most remarkable feature of the refugee camp built by Thai authorities at Kab Cheng last week is that there is no crying. Cambodians seem broken. They accept their fate as citizens of a failed nation.
The other day under his tent, Tuel, along with his wife, a daughter, a son and an old friend, lounged on some of the smart wooden folding chairs that Tuel had built in his shop. They got into a brief, lively debate about when were the happiest times in their lives.
Tuel gave the answer.
“We’ve never really had a happy moment,” he said.
The great tragedy about Cambodia is that it mainly destroyed itself. The anarchy of the last 25 years killed more than 1 million of the country’s 7 million people. The fanatical Marxist Pol Pot may have murdered at least 600,000 people.
The odds seem pretty good that every family has been victimized. That makes Tuel’s story a common one.
Tuel was never politically active. Nor did he bring attention to himself. He spent years avoiding newspapers and the radio in an attempt to blot out the turmoil surrounding him. Today, he has no great passion to tell his story and sees no great lesson to be learned from his life, except that it has been ruined.
Tuel figures that he is about 50 years old, meaning he has been running from war more than half his life. He is a wiry man, and his arms and chest carry the tattoos worn by many Khmer men. They are considered a sign of toughness, and protection from bad luck.
His first war, he said, was the destabilizing 1970 coup led by Gen. Lon Nol, who ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk and drew Cambodia into the Vietnam War, which led to the rise of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge insurgency. Events were accentuated by the intense bombing campaign by U.S. warplanes.
Tuel isn’t certain whose plane was seen first in the sky over his town of Samrong, but residents fled to a semi-permanent jungle camp in time to avoid an air attack on a neighboring village. “Hundreds of people were killed,” he said. “I had never seen real violence before.”
He dismisses his two years hiding in the jungle by looking around the sprawling Thai refugee camp and saying, “There was more space between the tents in the jungle.”
When the Khmer Rouge seized power and forced radical socialism on the country, Tuel was again uprooted. He wasn’t allowed to live at home. The village became a commune working day and night in the fields. The Khmer killed with impunity but wouldn’t allow agriculture workers to strike a disobedient water buffalo. Tuel never understood that rule.
“My brother and uncle disappeared,” he said. “My uncle made a mistake in the rice paddies. He accidentally broke an ox harness and was taken away. My younger brother was an intellectual–he went to college in Battanbong. When he came back to the village he was arrested.”
Tuel said he knew the Khmer Rouge despised and mistrusted the educated. He had gone to high school and learned to read. In the confusion of the commune system he was able to pretend to be illiterate.
After Vietnam invaded and the Khmer Rouge fell, Cambodia was wracked by guerrilla warfare for more than a decade. Tuel’s village was controlled by the Vietnamese-backed forces of former Khmer Rouge commander Hun Sen. The village changed hands at least once, but Hun Sen’s troops also brought a measure of stability, eventually leading to the UN-brokered peace plan and election.
Tuel voted for Prince Norodom Ranariddh–Sihanouk’s son–who won the election but ruled through an uneasy coalition with Hun Sen. When Ranariddh tried to re-establish an old alliance with remnants of the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen apparently felt threatened and overthrew the prince in early July.
Fighting between Hun Sen’s troops and royalists spread through the country, and when the bombs began dropping on Samrong, Tuel and his family fled to the nearby village of O’Smach, where Tuel had his workshop.
They brought a cart filled with clothes, Tuel’s motorbike, a few of his chairs and the family puppy.
Calm did not last. Hun Sen has the royalists on the run, and last Sunday, the prince’s forces took up their last stand–in O’Smach.
Cambodian refugees appear to be settling in for a long stay in the camp. They have transformed the camp’s main dirt paths into an elaborate marketplace, selling vegetables, cold drinks, eggs and used clothing to one another. Chickens roam. Tuel Karo keeps busy by building a large bed from sticks found in the forest.
“I can’t think for myself right now,” he said. “It’s up to the leaders of the country. But if you ask me what I want, I want to go home.”
