The New York Times The New York Times International May 20, 2003


VEAL THOM JOURNAL
What War Wrought, Cambodia Can't Stand to See
By SETH MYDANS

VEAL THOM, Cambodia - In Cambodia, old soldiers just seem to limp
away.

Land mines were the confetti of the country's recent wars, scattered 
with abandon through its forests and fields. Their maimed victims, if 
they lived, became instant outcasts, a burden and a rebuke to their 
nation.

In ghastly military hospitals without running water, they shared
narrow cots, begging visitors for crutches.

Today they hop about the marketplaces in ragged bits of uniforms, 
homeless and jobless, holding out their military caps for coins.

People try not to notice them.

"We are lower than dogs," said Chu Dim, 48, who lost his
right leg in the 1970's fighting for a long forgotten government. "People feed their dogs."

Now a band of these unwanted men has come together, hardly noticed as 
always, in an effort to help themselves.

Led by a former Khmer Rouge soldier, Touch Seour Ly, 47, they have 
formed what they call the Association for the Relief of Disabled 
Cambodians, an almost unheard-of self-help initiative in this 
demoralized nation.

Without help from the government or from any of the many private aid 
groups, they have carved out a village of their own on a patch of
barren land as unwanted as they are.

Deep in the woods 60 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, they have cleared 
the ground, dug wells, built tiny shacks and prepared the soil for 
planting.

Over the past two years, about 200 amputees have moved in with their 
families, each with a plot that is 50 yards wide and 300 yards deep, 
enough to support a small farm.

They are just a few of the 40,000 Cambodians who have lost limbs to
land mines over the years - one of every 250 people, said to be the
highest ratio of amputees per capita in the world.

During the Khmer Rouge years in the 1970's, when 1.7 million people
died of starvation and sickness as well as by execution, only the luckiest and fittest survived. The weak were left, sometimes with just a pot of water, to die on their own.

That attitude still darkens society today, and the amputees say
people turn away from them as if they were ghosts.

"When we walk past, people don't even see us," said Mr.
Touch Seour Ly, who lost his right leg in 1983. "Like we aren't there. Even our former officers won't look at us. Before, when we were useful to them, they cared about us."

Their new society survives through comradeship and mutual assistance.

For each ridge and furrow, legless and armless men have joined to
lift and dig together. A few poor but uninjured men have been invited to live here in return for heavy labor.

The settlement, scattered across the hard, bare ground, does not look 
much like a village, and the small huts, empty of furnishings, do not 
look much like homes.

So far, their farms have produced little to feed their families, and 
nothing to sell. Some of the men have become scavengers, scouring the 
woods for edible leaves and tubers.

The amputees have not yet proved that they can succeed on their own.
A few have already given up and returned to begging.

When Mr. Touch Seour Ly, their leader, describes their most urgent 
needs, his list could be summed up as: everything.

"We need a road," he said, "and we need a school and a clinic. We need tools to farm with, and we need food."

Several hundred children live here with their families, he said. Most 
spend the day at hard labor. Many are the arms and legs of their 
disabled fathers.

Nov San, 49, a government soldier who lost both arms just below the 
shoulder when he was clearing mines in 1997, directs his 15-year-old 
daughter as she makes charcoal and plants rice and tomatoes.

Seour Sou, 42, who lost both legs fighting for a previous government
in 1985, pushes himself through his field on a board with wheels,
chopping at the hard earth with a hoe.

How long the amputees can keep this up is not clear.

"We are all sick," Mr. Touch Seour Ly said. "If we walk a lot it hurts. We have to saw wood sitting on the ground. Since we don't have oxen we have to pull the plows ourselves. If the problem isn't with ourbodies, it's with our artificial limbs."

Sou Kouk, 47, sat shirtless and kneaded the stump of his left leg, 
unable to work. Like many young men in the 1980's, he was seized from 
his village by the government, thrown into the front lines and
injured almost immediately by a mine.

"I think something's wrong with a nerve," he said. 

"The pain goes from my stump around my back and up to my other shoulder. I don't have any money for doctors. I've got no one to help me but my wife."

Even if one of his four children is sick, he said, he cannot afford
to transport them to a town for medical care. "We just stay at home
and try to help them," he said.

Nevertheless, life is better here than it ever was in the world
outside.
 
He has a house now and for the first time a small field to plant.

What means the most to him, he said, is that he feels like a man
again. He is as good as anybody else here. When he hobbles past, no one shouts at him, "Hey, cripple, get a job!"