Cambodia’s refugee repatriation: hostage to a precarious peace
Dylan Hendrickson (November 1998)
The treatment of refugees was a central concern of the Paris agreements and the repatriation of some 350,000 refugees in 1992 and 1993 became one of UNTAC’s landmark accomplishments. Cambodian refugees did not, however, return to a working peace plan, let alone peace: many returned to areas of substantial insecurity and open conflict. Repatriation was a gamble that would only pay off if the groundwork for a durable peace was successfully established during UNTAC’s 18-month mission.
Uprooted again
By March 1994, barely three months after UNTAC’s mission ended, that gamble had not paid off; 25,000 Cambodians were forced to flee into Thailand following renewed fighting between government forces and the Khmer Rouge. Many other Cambodians would be displaced over the next three years, most of whom had been repatriated from Thailand during 1992-93. Just months before the 1998 elections, following fighting between forces loyal to the two Prime Ministers, some 60,000 Cambodians were still sheltering on Thai territory. At least as many again — predominantly women and children — were internally displaced inside Cambodia.
Political priorities hold sway
The post-1994 population displacements in Cambodia should not mask the fact that the UNTAC-led repatriation effort had been carried out with extreme technical proficiency, and in safety. Repatriation was an integral part of the overall peacekeeping mission and its humanitarian objectives — closing the squalid border camps and fulfiling the overwhelming desire of the refugees to go home — closely matched three political objectives at that time:
First, in terms of ending the war, repatriation would allow the border refugee camps, from which the three resistance factions had drawn the bulk of their soldiers and provisions, to be closed.
Second, repatriation would help set the stage for the 1993 elections by giving the right to vote to the maximum possible number of Cambodians. Finally, repatriation would relieve the massive burdens placed on Thailand which had generously hosted the Cambodian refugees for over a decade.
However, the Paris agreements fell short of spelling out the conditions under which the return of Cambodian refugees could be deemed safe and the contingencies under which it was not. In particular, the agreements tied the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to UNTAC’s demanding timetable, since it was central to the agreements that repatriation be completed before the May 1993 elections. Slowing down or halting the repatriation would deal a crippling blow to the credibility, even the viability, of the elections and the UN mission itself. Consequently, crucial questions of reintegration and ensuring the protection of returnees once they were home received less attention than they should have done.
Persisting vulnerability
Until a new government was formed, UNTAC would be the key guarantor of the safety of repatriated refugees. However, it could ultimately do little to curb the violence which plagued Cambodia’s rural areas. Moreover, in the absence of adequate information, many refugees ended up returning to places which were already unstable and which the UNHCR itself had designated ‘no go areas’. Certain districts in Battambang province, for instance, Cambodia’s ‘bread-basket’ and the favoured destination of refugees, were heavily mined and lacked sufficient farmland to resettle all who came.
The repatriation’s general success, moreover, did not preclude the possibility of future population displacements. The renewed refugee movements into Thailand in 1994 were initially pushed back by the authorities, though the Thais would be more accommodating in later incidents. By 1994, the UNHCR itself had largely ceased providing support to returnees and had reduced its presence in Cambodia. It had no official mandate to deal with those people subsequently displaced internally, many of them the so-called ‘old refugees’ repatriated in 1993, simply because they had not crossed Cambodia’s borders
Cambodia’s repatriation was therefore ambitious, with little margin for error. Its humanitarian concerns were in many ways held hostage to its avowedly political aims. Even though the repatriation, like the 1993 elections, was a tangible technical success, its sustainability would ultimately depend on the success of the political transition underway in Cambodia at the time. In the absence of a durable peace, the ‘privilege’ of returning home has meant, for many Cambodian refugees, little more than a sentence to increased vulnerability.