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Cambodia Must Start Attending to Those Minefields of the Mind
I would like to respond
to the Monday letter by UNDP Country Director Jo Scheuer, Jesuit
Refugee Services Country Director Sister Denise Coghlan, and
Norwegian People’s Aids Regional Program Manager Dr Rune Engset.
I am certainly delighted to see the good intentions of
the letter regarding eliminating unexploded ordnance from Cambodian
rice fields. I refute neither the good intention of the authors nor
the successes of demining organizations.
The letter reveals the focus of the authors on issues
facing Cambodia today, and a rather selective focus on the legacy of
the conflict that befell Cambodia more than 30 years ago.
I would like to encourage a more diversified,
history-oriented focus among international organizations on
post-conflict countries as a general policy guideline for
development, particularly, in this case, Cambodia.
If we look at the historical background surrounding
unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, the story is far more complicated
and there are a number of intertwined factors at play both before
and during the time when this UXO problem emerged.
Unexploded ordnance is not the only remnant of the past.
There are a number of socio-political and human rights legacies that
both the war in the 1970s and the subsequent Khmer Rouge genocide
created and they still remain obstacles for Cambodia’s development
today—for example, widespread mental health and mental
health-related illnesses. Therefore, human rights and special
legacies are of equal weight to the UXO legacy.
As well as studying the consequences of the past and
fixing the problems today, we should also study how these problems
came about and prevent them from happening again. I hope that UNDP
will consider working with the government to establish a national
mental health clinic for all the survivors of the Khmer Rouge
regime.
Kok-Thay Eng,
Deputy
Director/Research Director,
Documentation
Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh
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