Photo Essay : A Cambodian Refugee, Haunted by Life

Chan Peov, returning home to Cambodia from refugee camps, was standing with his two young daughters, hat in hand, begging for money. The former resistance fighter, who lost a leg to a land mine during Cambodia’s civil war, couldn’t bring himself to say much and tried not to look into the eyes of those walking through the market.

But then, he recalls: “I saw people I knew from the border, and all I could do was hide. We all had these big dreams of what we would do back in Cambodia. I was ashamed to have people see what has become of me.”

It was a humbling moment for the once-fierce guerrilla of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, who had left a U.N. camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in the spring of 1992 after spending nearly six years as a wounded refugee.

Unable to bear begging any longer, Peov decided to move on with his daughters. They made their way mainly on foot from Siem Reap to Battambang to Sisophon in northwest Cambodia.

In Sisophon, Peov used $50 borrowed from a friend to buy a small bamboo hut a few meters from the train station. If he is lucky, he can earn the equivalent of 20 to 30 cents, enough to buy a little rice, for a couple of hours of work unloading boxes of soft drinks, noodles and sugar from the train that pulls in each morning.

Still, in a town bustling with markets and motorcycles and in a nation looking forward to free elections later this month, Peov, 31, hopes one day to be able to make it on his own and support his daughters.

Chan Peov and his family have fallen through the cracks of the massive repatriation operation by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The effort was declared finished in late April, with 352,111 refugees having returned from camps in Thailand. Taken in bus convoys to reception centers, they were given choices that included land for rice farming, housing kits, food for a year and cash.

But Peov, like 21,300 others classified as “spontaneous returnees,” came back on his own. Now, his daily routine consists of looking for work, fetching water from a small reservoir, boiling rice for two meals and cooling off by washing clothes and bathing in a stream along with his younger daughter, Nuch, 6. His older daughter, Nak, 11, is being cared for by relatives after contracting a skin disease from a polluted pond.

Peov’s wife is also gone. In the spring of 1992, when he returned to camp one day after treatment for depression, he found his hut burned and his daughters with a neighbor. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. My wife had left with a new man. Our family book (which carried his identity papers) was gone,” he recalls.

It was to search for his wife that Peov left the Site B camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, not waiting for a U.N. refugee agency bus. He and his daughters embarked on a harrowing journey through mine fields to Siem Reap. But there, his wife, who preferred life with her new able-bodied man, rebuffed him. Once gone, he was not allowed to return to the camps and was left to make it on his own.

Peov’s future is uncertain. He talks of wanting to be a rice farmer. But he admits that it might be difficult with only one good leg. Motorcycle maintenance might be an option when a new vocational training center for the handicapped opens in Sisophon next month.

There is one solid piece of good news: A refugee agency officer is arranging to register Peov and his daughters to receive one year’s ration of food.