Near the end of 2009, I was describing my research site in northwest Cambodia to the staff of a tourism agency in Siem Reap. The driver for the agency said suddenly to me, startled, ‘I used to remove mines up there at the end of the war’. At which point one of the tour guides, a man who had been conscripted by the Khmer Rouge in his adolescence, said, ‘Ho! I planted those mines’. In Ratanak Mondul district in northwest Battambang,Footnote 1 many male residents are former soldiers who fought on one or more sides during the war years, laying the landmines that they later struggled to remove.Footnote 2 The aftermath of a war encompasses the past actions and affiliations of that war's participants, which constitute a particular kind of debris that its survivors must address. Studies of Cambodia's recent past have often centred upon the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). However, destruction and devastation also ensued during the years of war that preceded and followed the totalitarian regime — the scope of these civil wars meant that many Cambodians both experienced and had a hand in such destruction.
This article examines one village's efforts to resettle and to reconstruct a sense of belonging in a war-altered landscape. This study contributes to the debates on recovery via sociality and social cohesion that pervade current scholarship on Cambodia. There is an ongoing debate about the degree to which communal relations and social institutions have been restored in the aftermath of years of conflict and the Khmer Rouge revolution.Footnote 3 On a broader scale, a great deal of ethnographic attention has been paid in the past few decades to the human condition during war and violence and to experiences of flight, displacement and exile.Footnote 4 Various anthropologists have also focused upon the aftermath of violent upheaval, exploring efforts to rebuild and reconfigure meaning and sociality. This work has focused on arenas for recounting trauma, issues of voice and narration, ways of remembering and forgetting, and efforts to rebuild relationships, a sense of meaning and normality or the ‘everyday’.Footnote 5 However, academic explorations of recovery and the ramifications of violence have often focused upon the intersubjective and the cognitive, neglecting people's engagement with material realities.Footnote 6
Examining the resettlement of war-altered landscapes, as this study does, brings issues of material engagement sharply into view.Footnote 7 Armed conflict not only alters and destroys lives, relationships and social structures, but can also massively impact physical landscapes.Footnote 8 Cambodia's landscape remains heavily littered with both landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), with estimates for the two combined categories ranging from four to six million items.Footnote 9 In 2007, Rattanak Mondul district continued to report one of the highest rates of civilian casualties in Cambodia from mine and UXO-related injuries.Footnote 10 This article contends that the material exigencies of resettlement were a critical component in reconstructing shared identity and social relations in the study village. The hardships and hazards post-war settlers endured enabled the discursive construction of a sense of communal belonging.
The first portion of the article describes the study village and the research methods employed. The following section illustrates villagers' complex temporal orientation towards the past and discusses the nuances in how people narrated or elided local histories. The next two sections recount local narratives of conditions in the area during the late war years and the resettlement period. Villagers' motivations for resettling land known to be hazardous are then explored, and the clearance techniques employed by post-war settlers are described. The following section explores how the post-war settlers discursively framed their resettlement efforts. The article concludes by illustrating that the struggle to reclaim the forest for agriculture was also used to recreate a locus of belonging and solidarity by the post-war settlers.
Background of the study
The village of Reaksmei Songha is located around 42 km from the provincial capital of Battambang, and had a population of 353 families as of July 2008. This study draws upon ethnographic research I conducted in the village in 2009. During this period, I lived in the home of the village chief and gathered my research data primarily via participant observation, oral history interviews, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and demographic mapping.Footnote 11
Reaksmei Songha was abandoned during the Khmer Rouge's rise to power in the 1970s and situated on the frontline of the fighting in the 1980s and 1990s. After the surrender of the Ieng Sary faction in 1996, demobilised soldiers, residents of nearby resettlement sites (a mixture of internally displaced people and returnees from the refugee camps along the Thai border), landless migrants, and former Khmer Rouge families began the hazardous process of resettling the forested and heavily mined terrain. In order to allow for cultivation and settlement, the post-war settlers had to clear the land of foliage and remove the explosive remnants of war.
Various studies have shown how mined terrain inhibits residence, constrains movement, and affects the reconstruction of agricultural livelihoods around the globe.Footnote 12 In Ratanak Mondul district, post-war settlers were determined to reclaim the forested battlefields for agriculture. Ruth Bottomley has contended that the habitation of mined terrain by civilians in northwest Cambodia was motivated by a combination of vulnerability and ability — people were desperate for immediate access to land-based resources for subsistence purposes, and there were a substantial number of people, generally former combatants, who possessed the knowledge and capacity to carry out demining.Footnote 13
The ability to clear landmines was indeed vital for successfully resettling Reaksmei Songha. The post-war settlers did not interact with mines in a vacuum, but rather through an assemblage of material elements, including soil, vegetation and rain. Ascertaining the location of mines required dealing with this assemblage — many mines were buried below the surface of the ground, and others were often masked by vegetation such as bushes or tree roots. Landmines and unexploded ordnance that had been immersed in the physical environment for years were sometimes rotten, sometimes inert, and sometimes live. Both the condition and location of mines and ordnance were affected by the weather, particularly by water. In the flood season when the water table rose, mines sometimes tilted, shifted, or rose to the surface of the rain-soaked soil.
Residents repeatedly described their resettlement efforts in terms of clearance, using the phrase, tveu aui srolah. This phrase combines a compound verb, tveu aui, ‘to make or to cause’, with the adjective srolah, meaning ‘spacious, clear, open (space)’.Footnote 14 The settlers sought to clear the landscape of the things that hindered them, both organic and inorganic. Such clearance was a hazardous and complex project. The residents of Reaksmei Songha repeatedly invoked the terminology of struggle to describe their efforts to inhabit and alter their surroundings.
By 2009, after a decade of resettlement efforts, it was evident that village residents had in many respects achieved their goal of recreating an agricultural landscape. The overgrown forest that residents said had blanketed the landscape at the end of the war was largely gone. Fields stretched across the village and farming dominated the lives of most residents. However, landmines remained, and demining operations continued. In 2009, the two main parties involved in demining in the village were the state deminers of the Cambodian Mine Action Committee (CMAC) and village deminers.Footnote 15 The CMAC platoons were a ubiquitous presence in the community — flat-bed trucks and pickup trucks full of deminers shunted past on their way to their work sites every morning and every evening. A long-term CMAC camp had been established on the east side of the road that led to National Route 57, and small kiosks had sprung up around it. During working hours, the deminers were easily identified by their lace-up boots and their distinctive pale blue hats and jackets. Outside of working hours, they moved among us — shopping in the morning at the market, filling their water truck each afternoon from the local spring, and attending the occasional party at local homes. CMAC has been operating in Ratanak Mondul district for over a decade now. The clearance priorities of the formal mine action sector in Cambodia are focused upon public land (such as roads, schools, clinics, wats), and residential land.Footnote 16 In addition, village chiefs in the district annually presented prioritised clearance requests to the mine action sector, which included portions of agricultural land. But the majority of the land needed and used for livelihood purposes, agricultural land and forested areas, was not slated for clearance. The desire to clear agricultural land was the primary driving force behind hiring village deminers or carrying out individual clearance activities.
Narrating the troubled past
Resettling an abandoned village on the former frontlines entailed physically settling over the sediments and traces of a fractured and violent past — a past in which fields had belonged to others, the bodies of the exhausted dead were laid in trenches, mines were planted across the landscape, and soldiers fought and died in the forest. The settlers living side-by-side in Reaksmei Songha had often fought on different sides during different periods in the country's long decades of conflict. How were such divisive allegiances invoked or denied, remembered or forgotten?
Recent anthropological scholarship has produced a plethora of ethnographic studies on how people construct, forget, and employ notions of the past.Footnote 17 The long-term residents of Reaksmei Songha exhibited a complex orientation towards the past. Villagers repeatedly invoked the past state of the landscape. I was told on numerous occasions that the area was known for its former agricultural bounty, its soil famed for its pre-war fertility. Reaksmei Songha and its neighbouring villages were part of a region once renowned for its orchards and plantations, and many post-war residents said that the ‘famous ground’ had drawn them to the area to claim land. Village elders knowledgeable about the post-war era claimed that the area was settled by lowland Khmer in the 1950s. The motivation for this pre-war settlement was invariably expressed in terms of access to spacious and fertile land. Elders' districts of origin were described as being cramped, with insufficient farm land. Forest land was described as tomne, ‘free for the taking’, and the elders stated that there had been no need to purchase or title land claimed in the forests in that period. ‘Anyone who wanted it could claim however much [they wanted], you claimed [land] following your heart,’ one elderly woman explained. Others commented upon the rich soil of the area. It was ground where ‘whatever you planted began to grow’. However, this remembered landscape was usually invoked in general rather than specific terms.
Moreover, village residents repeatedly told me most residents were newcomers to the area. In my early months of fieldwork, I took these statements largely at face value. As the months went by, I began to realise that considerably more villagers had past links to the area than I had been first informed. I spent considerable time gathering oral histories from those who had lived or fought in the region before its resettlement in the late 1990s. When conducted in residents' homes and with the promise of anonymity, many spoke at length about events and allegiances from the civil war that led to the defeat of the Khmer Republic and the advent of Democratic Kampuchea (DK).
Elders' accounts of life during DK were more selective, fragmented and partial in nature; autobiographies were perilous things during those years, as amply demonstrated by other scholars.Footnote 18 One could pay with one's life for the past affiliations the cadre avidly sought to uncover and document. In addition to its other upheavals, the DK era created a particular orientation to the past, one in which silence, denial and erasure played important roles. This became enshrined in the DK era expression: ‘If you want to live, plant a kapok tree’.Footnote 19 The Khmer term for kapok, koh, is a homonym for the term for muteness — survival, as the expression so concisely states, necessitated the nurturing of silence. Subterfuge and secrecy were ongoing themes of the regime itself.Footnote 20 The silence once necessary to survive the regime continues to affect both those who suffered under it and those who were supported by it.
Despite the presence of a variety of elderly residents who had lived in Sdao commune before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, these autobiographical memories were kept separate from the more collective or social realm of memory. Those portions of the past that were embroiled in destruction, war and chaos were seldom discussed in their specificities in the public sphere. One day Ta Sabai, a Buddhist elder who had lived 3 km up the road from Reaksmei Songha during the 1960s and 1970s, earnestly explained that area residents, himself included, were ‘all newcomers now’.Footnote 21 This study contends that villagers' identities were not established by drawing upon their specific histories in the tumultuous past. Instead, as the article will illustrate, the post-war settlers' construction of communal belonging and social solidarity drew upon accounts of the resettlement period.
Fighting and foraging in the forest: The late war years and the resettlement period
In April of 1979, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge regime. At this juncture, it is estimated that around one-third of Ratanak Mondul district's population either fled with or was forcibly relocated by the Khmer Rouge in their retreat to the mountainous region along the Thai border.Footnote 22 Throughout the 1980s, skirmishes continued between various opposition forces and the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the Cambodian government installed and supported by the Vietnamese, and international pressure mounted on Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. In 1989, as Cambodian peace negotiations began in Paris, the conflict began to intensify in the northwest. As the Vietnamese armed forces began to withdraw, the Khmer Rouge advanced from their western strongholds and engaged the weakened national forces of the State of Cambodia.Footnote 23 Civil war began again in earnest, directly across the district's farms and fields.
The abandoned village of Reaksmei Songha was on the frontline during the 1980s and 1990s. It was a war fought in a forest, a war of stealth, as one former soldier described it. Numerous former soldiers lived in Sdao commune, and all of my interlocutors reported that the state soldiers had suffered heavy losses during the fighting. Most were young and conscripted by force. Many of them had never entered the forests before their postings. One such conscript had been stationed in Sneung.Footnote 24 Every day, he said, two cars filled with the wounded and the dead would drive from Sdao back to Battambang — largely casualties of gunfire and string-triggered mines.
The forest war was described as a deadly game of hide-and-seek between the two sides. Both sides used scouts, but all agreed that the Khmer Rouge fighters had the upper hand — they knew the terrain and they used ‘forest tactics’. They had no tanks, another young state conscript stated, but the Khmer Rouge fighters had better abilities. He went on:
They were used to living in the forest, so they knew all the places. They had a lot of experience — sometimes they waited in hiding and shot one person at a time. … They liked to hide. They would have four or five men, we would have thirty men, and they would kill us all. … Since they lived in the forest they knew everything, like this pool holds water, so they would place mines close by. And sometimes they climbed trees far away and shot at us, when we went down to the water. Their knowledge of the terrain was strong in the forest. We went and many died.
Caves were used by the Khmer Rouge as ammunition and weapon storehouses, and the laying of mines by both sides followed tactical goals — water sources were mined, the hills both sides coveted were ringed with mines, and large trees where soldiers might sit seeking shade or duck behind when shooting began were often targeted. Paths and roads were diligently avoided. The Khmer Rouge had artillery guns posted on many of the hills in the area, so exposure could be fatal.
In these accounts the Khmer Rouge fighters were strongly affiliated with the wilderness. The forest was seen as the domain of the Khmer Rouge, long known as t'hoap prei, ‘forest troops’.Footnote 25 The ease and skill ascribed to the Khmer Rouge in the forest realm, a domain traditionally regarded as dangerous and potent, surely added to their mystique.Footnote 26 Some elders related incredible tales of Khmer Rouge exploits. In one such tale, the invading Vietnamese commanders made their Khmer escorts sleep in a ring around them while they took refuge in the limbs of a tree. In the morning, the teller continued, the Khmer soldiers awoke to find the tree full of the limp bodies of the dead commanders. The Khmer Rouge had slipped through their sleeping ranks in the night, executed every commander, and left without raising a single alarm.
In the 1990s, while the conflict was ongoing, civilians began to forage in the forested landscape. The struggle to farm in Sdao commune during this period was racked with disruption. Residents of the area were forced to choose whether to enter unpredictable and often dangerous areas to make a living. In effect, this was less a matter of choice than of degree — families farmed and grazed their cattle close to the national highway, but timber, fruit in abandoned orchards and other forest resources lay beyond the areas secured by state soldiers. Beyond the perimeter of the towns lay the wilderness, where mobile Khmer Rouge patrols came and went at will, and were often encountered by those who dared to forage and cut wood in the forest. Many of the foragers in this period were residents of resettlement sites,Footnote 27 very few of whom had been allotted land for farming.
Residents foraged for timber, bamboo and thatch-grass, activities fraught with danger in the densely mined landscape.Footnote 28 As described by one elderly woman:
I always went to Bung Prae. It was full of mines. We went to cut and transport firewood. There were iron spike-jacks,Footnote 29 the people sold them all to scrap metal recyclers. And improvised mines … We went between them, one here, one there, we went to pick edible leaves … We just had to walk … We cut grass and detoured around the mines. … We kept the carts in one place and walked out to cut thatch-grass and carried it back. … If we saw a string-triggered mine, we removed them, one path at a time. And we drove the oxcarts along those paths. We had driven the oxcarts that route for one or two years, but there was an anti-tank mine. We transported something heavy, like rice, and ktuh! The person went up, the cow went up, the cart, the rice. … They died! They went up and fell down. The cart was blown to pieces, there was nothing left. And the rice was all gone …
References to the Khmer Rouge still present in the area appeared in many of these foraging accounts. Yet if I pressed my interlocutors for more information, the Khmer Rouge would recede from the stories and the very landscape itself. Despite repeated mention of their assistance and knowledge of the mined terrain, they remained on the very edges of the narratives, moving like ghosts in and out of view among the trees, as in the following forager's quote:
We don't know where the Khmer Rouge houses were but they used to walk here. … If you didn't know them, you stepped on mines. If you knew them, you could just ask them. … We asked, Brother, if I follow this path, where does it go? If we saw them walking, we asked them about moving around. They said, this area has mines up to here and there … it has string-triggered mines, that place has mines. They told us, truly, walk the space between these two edges here, this side, this side — over there, there is nothing dangerous.
The most concrete story of such an encounter was narrated to me by a former village chief. The first time he slept in the forest in the overgrown village bordering Reaksmei Songha, he saw rucksacks and a pot lying by a spring. The objects lay there for three days, and then three Khmer Rouge soldiers appeared at night. They came near his fire and called out to him to identify himself and his purposes. He said that he was transporting wood for charcoal. They left, carrying their guns, and returned before dawn, at which point they asked him for food. They ate, told him to be careful for the area above the reservoir was heavily mined, and left. He never saw them again.
The reconciliation between the remaining Khmer Rouge factions and the Cambodian state was a staggered process, but the 1996 surrender of the Khmer Rouge faction based in Pailin effectively ended the fighting in Ratanak Mondul. When demobilisation began, a significant proportion of former soldiers in Cambodia found themselves landless. In Sdao commune, where soldiers had been stationed up until the reconciliation, the military was the first to claim and portion out land. The commanders in the area, one former soldier claimed, had flown over the area in a military helicopter and surveyed it, then divvied it up in sections upon a map. Commanders were then free to allot plots to the junior soldiers under their command. Only prime-looking tracts of land were claimed. The soldiers who were allotted land informed kin and friends that there was plenty of remaining land to be had. Soldiers, their kin and residents of the nearby resettlement sites comprised most of the first settler population. As the news of the land distribution travelled, a small wave of settlers began to stream into the commune to try their luck. Nearly the entire first wave of settlers, returnees and soldiers alike, knew that they were coming to claim or buy land that potentially contained landmines.Footnote 30
The settlers preceded the re-formation of an administrative state presence in the area. There were acting village chiefs before the villages were officially reclassified by the Ministry of Interior, many of them former soldiers. The re-emergence of state control was gradual and followed the people repopulating the terrain. One former PRK official and his son-in-law were asked circa 1997 to be part of a ‘working group’ of men who would help formally re-establish villages. This official said that some of the former Khmer Rouge still lived in the area at the time of resettlement. He navigated the mined terrain with their assistance, he claimed:
When I entered I made contact with those Pol Pot ones. At that time when they clasped hands [reconciled], some of the Pol Pot number were here — some had gone to Pailin, some had remained. I entered and met their leaders, they knew the places they had laid mines. They went in front, and we walked behind, following in their footsteps.
Reaksmei Songha slowly re-emerged where the pre-war village had stood, clustering along the major road traversing the village and around the homes of those settlers who had arrived early enough to be allotted central housing land. The demining authorities' efforts began along this road and the adjacent housing land, and slowly radiated out into outlying areas as the years passed. The core institutions of village life, the market and the wat, were resurrected along the main road. Houses developed over time; cultivating farms was of more urgency. In 1998 and 1999, many more settlers began to arrive. As the population grew, some poor families sold their allotted land and relocated farther into the forested interior, up into the valleys between the hills, where landmines remained in greater quantity.
As these accounts make clear, a diverse mix of state soldiers, Khmer Rouge fighters, and resettlement site residents used and inhabited the landscape throughout the war years and during the first wave of village resettlement. In addition to the accounts of heavy fighting in the area, stories were also told of the Khmer Rouge offering aid and assistance to civilian foragers and post-war settlers. However, considerable stigma was attached to being associated with the Khmer Rouge after 1979, and these stories were downplayed. Instead, as the following sections demonstrate, resettlement accounts focused primarily upon the hardships of life in the forest and the dangers posed by landmines and unexploded ordnance.
‘The poor flee into the forest’: Resettling a forested domain
I asked a recent incomer one day why he had moved to the area. He was an amputee living with his brother, and clearly unhappy about his prospects. ‘I am in the forest with the others because I am poor’, he retorted, adding: ‘The poor enter the forest and chase out the ghosts’. I was puzzled and asked what this comment meant. His brother, laughing, recited the old expression in its entirety:
The forest is not a desirable site, the incomer's use of the adage implied — rather, the poor dwell there because they have been forced out of other sites. Forests have a long-standing set of associations in Cambodia, representing ‘illness, danger, and fearsome spiritual power’.Footnote 31 The post-war settlers were not only resettling former battlefields, but also entering a landscape they classified as forest, which was thought to contain a multitude of natural and spiritual dangers.Footnote 32
Soldiers who had fought in the area had emphasised the presence of great tall trees. By the time the settlers arrived most of these great trees were gone. Woodcutters had cut the luxury hardwoods in the last years of the war. Despite this, the post-war settlers described the area they entered as utterly covered in forest. Settlers described the vegetation as a mixture of trees, thorny shrubs, brakes of bamboo, long sharp grass which stretched over a person's head, winding vines, and shorter grasses like those used for thatching huts. The lack of routes and roads was stressed. Paths had to be cut or made ‘one footstep at a time’. These descriptions of density were accompanied by an emphasis on darkness — the forest was so thick that one could not see the sky, settlers stressed, and so dark that one had to tell the time by the watch on one's arm.
The settlers stressed a triad of dangers associated with the forest: mines, malaria and wild beasts. Of these, malaria had claimed the most lives.Footnote 33 The darkness and density of the forest was associated with sheltering mosquitoes — in the dark forests, residents assured me, malarial mosquitoes bit during the day as well as in the night. People described themselves as turning blue or yellow-skinned from malaria and vividly evoked the terrible strength of malarial convulsions. The threat of malaria affected settlement choices. One early settler stated that he had settled along the main road because the malaria was more intense for those living further in the forested interior. Every day in those first years, he said, wagons bearing the sick rolled past his door on the long journey to the nearest clinic. Others arrived and then left because of the severity of the malaria, and whole families were said to have sickened and died. Children were considered particularly vulnerable. Clearing the forest was considered the dominant factor in reducing the levels of malaria in the area.
Settlers often arrived in small groups. Families acquainted from living together in the resettlement sites comprised one such group. The units of demobilised soldiers who had been allotted land in the area were another such group. Other former soldiers banded together independently and returned to claim land where they had fought. Families often came with extended kin or summoned kin to join them after their arrival. Landless or land-hungry neighbours from other parts of Cambodia also joined forces. The original settlers of the western end of Reaksmei Songha had moved from another district in Battambang in 2001. Ten families, seven of them kin, followed a neighbour, a former soldier, to the area. When the families first entered, they all slept together on the floor of the original settler's home for months until their own land was cleared. The women described taking a single route down to the mined spring to bathe and procure water, carefully following the tracks their feet had left on previous forays.
The remoteness of the area was also emphasised, a feature enhanced by the difficulty of access. The presence of mines and the deteriorated state of the roads made entering and exiting the area dangerous and difficult, and travel was largely limited to necessity. The nearest market was in the district town of Sdao along the national highway, and families carried in stores of rations meant to last for months. Many spoke of the meagreness of these supplies and the need to forage. The isolation of those early days was also commonly discussed. The place was sngat, settlers said repeatedly, meaning it lacked human noise and activity. Whereas I disliked the nearly incessant din of living near the market, my Khmer companions appreciated the noise and bustle of a settlement full of people and machines. From their perspective, it took people in numbers to hold the terrain. When there were few humans, the things of the forest had come in close — settlers spoke of tigers, large snakes, forest spirits bent on malice, and ghosts, who threw pebbles, haunted people out at night, and visited sickness upon people walking alone in the woods. Not all settlers stayed. People without enough food could not persevere, a former village chief said, and people who feared the mines left. In the first five years of resettlement, people simply abandoned their allotments and went elsewhere. Very few villagers mentioned the settlers who abandoned their claims; their departures were covered over, as it were, by those who took their places.
Clearing the remnants of war
The first wave of post-war settlers freely acknowledged that they had come to live in a dangerous place. However, their decision to settle the area was presented as a necessary gamble to secure land and livelihoods. Dangerous undertakings were presented as inextricably linked to poverty — village residents contended that the poor had to risk their lives to secure a future. The poor ‘have no paths to choose’ one settler explained, and must ‘force their hearts’ to face danger. Varying levels of courage were acknowledged when it came to cultivating mined land — people acted, villagers explained, according to what their hearts dared. But if ‘you sit in fear’, one former soldier stressed, mined land remains uncleared — so people ‘had to risk with their hearts’.
Whereas some residents described risk-taking as simple necessity, others framed it as a gamble for a better future. One farmer, for example, fully acknowledged the risks he took as being a matter of choice: ‘Clearing farms here and cutting wood are risky ventures [psong breng]. Growing rice wasn't hazardous, but it had low profits and meant a miserable life’. In addition, a few interlocutors discussed the role of curiosity, experimentation, and notions of daring in relation to handling landmines.Footnote 34
Some villagers argued that not coming to the area would have meant certain death, whereas resettlement held the possibility of death or success. Many of the post-war settlers came from resettlement sites with insufficient food supplies and a lack of livelihood opportunities. The untenable circumstances of the displaced prompted such families to come and risk life in the forest. The settlers presented themselves first and foremost as destitute, not as reckless or ignorant of the dangers involved. The risks they undertook were not downplayed, but rather justified by their necessity. For the area's residents, the initial risks involved were considered valid because of their ultimate purpose — to feed their children, provide for their families, and secure land for their children's future. One former soldier living on a mined farm at the foot of the hills in 2009 described his perspective in the following words:
Living on the farms one by one, every day we rest when night falls and look at the faces of our children, the face of our wives, and we consider that one day something bad may befall us, because we who are those who earn a living in the forest, who walk in the forest. And we pity them, the wife, the child. And we feel pity and then fear, that they would have empty intestines and have nothing to eat. So we leave all together, we go out risking … We want to have a livelihood that gives safety like others have. At the markets they sit easily, but we don't have that ability, we don't have large bundles of money to buy things like they do.
The settler population was at first almost exclusively men. Women and children came months and sometimes years later, after the initial clearance of the family's housing plot and farm. This can in part be ascribed to the soldiering skills needed to identify and clear the detritus of war as well as gender norms. However, a few women were involved in clearing land for agriculture from early on. The following account by one settler pair, Vanny and Lem, contains a typical description of clearance practices. As Vanny explained:
My husband chanced it and removed the mines himself. He knew how, he used to soldier. I don't know how and never dared to go and watch. I stayed at the house. He would burn them. … When night came, we burned the mines. We went to the village and came back the next day when they had detonated. … And where the watermelon is planted now was full of iron stakes. … We gathered them up and sold them to metal collectors. … We cut the forest, found and collected [the detritus], and dug, on and on until we made a field. … But some mines are planted very deeply, anti-tank mines, we don't know [if there are any]. We plow with a cow or a motor-drawn plow. … We have had only good fortune, we haven't seen any mines [on the cleared land]. It was a long time ago already, 10 years ago.
This area, Lem interjected, originally had many mines. He listed the various types of mines and ordnance he had found when he had demined the 7 ha of land that comprised their farm. CMAC was already at work when they arrived, the couple noted, but they were only demining the main roads in and out of the area. Lem described the process of gently lifting string-triggered mines and placing them in holes that he filled with firewood to burn the mines en masse. The couple's farm had been a site of defensive perimeters placed to protect artillery guns, and therefore contained a huge amount of ordnance. They burned and detonated any fused and explosive-filled ordnance, then gathered up the scraps for the recyclers. The ordnance they gathered up to sell filled an entire oxcart, Vanny said.
Settlers regarded finding and removing mines as a specialised skill. Soldiering was considered as an important prerequisite for successfully removing mines, and former soldiers comprised a significant portion of the original settler community. In some cases, soldiers instructed other incoming settlers on demining techniques. As one early settler explained, the soldiers told them how to ‘take a stick, sharpen it, and probe’. After they had probed with such a stick or a knife, they cut back the vegetation and continued clearing. Destruction of mines and ordnance, on the other hand, was not treated as a specialised skill, but discussed as a normal practice. Nearly all of the settlers had used fire to burn off the undergrowth of their roughly cleared fields and to detonate any live mines or ordnance in the area. The fecundity of the vegetation led to an ongoing cycle of cutting and firing farmland, but the early firing was considered crucial for clearing ordnance. Fire was considered both a destroyer of mines in its own right and an aid to manual clearance. After firing the undergrowth, remaining ordnance was often more visible and could be manually cleared.Footnote 35
Gathering up and selling ordnance to scrap metal recyclers was another common method of dealing with the remnants found on one's land. This first cash crop of metal enabled many families to purchase the seeds for their first small crops. In fact, the Khmer term kroap is used for seeds, bullets, mines and other types of ordnance. This linguistic doubling reflected the material transition from war to peace: cultivation required removing the seeds planted by war in order to safely plant organic ones.
Struggle and solidarity: Discursively framing resettlement
The post-war settlers stated that they had resettled the war-altered landscape because they were poor and lacked alternatives. The term tasu, ‘to struggle’, was used repeatedly to describe life in Reaksmei Songha. A military term in origin, it was employed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1960s and ‘70s. The revolutionaries were repeatedly exhorted to struggle against the enemy, and the term itself became nearly akin to a revolutionary identity: those who had joined the Khmer Rouge before the fall of Lon Nol's republic were often referred to as neak tasu, ‘those who struggled’. As one Khmer Rouge document stated: ‘When you are eating roots, you must struggle, and you must struggle [even] when you have noodle-soup and roast chicken to eat. You must struggle all the time…’.Footnote 36 During the DK years, the term was employed to refer to communal agricultural production.Footnote 37 The populace was instructed to struggle against the elements and to exert mastery over nature.Footnote 38 During the resettlement period discussed here, it was repeatedly used by the settlers to refer to the struggle to survive the dangers of the forest and to convert the wilderness into cultivated ground.
Resettlement was rendered particularly hazardous because of the presence of landmines and other explosive remnants of war. Yet the settlers could not have easily transformed the landscape from forest to farmland even without those specific dangers. In addition to the techniques of mine clearance, cultivation involved a slow and painstaking process of chopping down trees, uprooting foliage, burning the remaining vegetation, breaking and turning roughly cleared soil, and planting seed. Until very recently these activities were done entirely through manual labour.
The discursive emphasis on struggle also strengthened residents' claims to land tenure. To keep land distributed or claimed in the resettlement period required its active use and cultivation. Land that was left unworked was redistributed to other incomers. This state of affairs was ratified under the 2001 Land Law, which stated that Cambodian citizens could pursue titles for land under continuous and undisputed residence or cultivation for three years.Footnote 39
Moreover, the struggle to survive and transform the forested battlefields offered common ground to the post-war settlers. Despite the recognised isolation and difficulty of early clearance activities, the period was most often described in terms of the solidarity of the settlers. One manifestation of this lay in kinship claims. The settlers had both called kin to the area and established kinship relations with each other. In her classic ethnography, May Ebihara wrote, ‘It is not uncommon for many or most of the residents of a Khmer village to be related to one another, whether by blood or marriage …’.Footnote 40 Khmer villagers, she argued, were generally very suspicious of unknown places and people, avoiding distant travel and, if forced to do so, establishing t'hoa relations, a form of fictive kinship generally involving a parent-and-child like relationship, with people in the new place as rapidly as possible.Footnote 41 In Reaksmei Songha village, the basic kinship structures described by Ebihara remained — kinship is bilateral in nature, uxorilocality common, and nuclear families formed the primary kin unit — but many long-term settlers had established new kinds of kinship ties. In more recent research, Erik Davis has stressed the flexibility of Khmer family boundaries and commonplace nature of various forms of fictive kinship.Footnote 42
The early post-war settlers often referred to each other as kin. At first I assumed that the settlers meant biological kin, but I came to realise that kin terminology was also ascribed to others, particularly those who had known each other for a long period. To call someone kin was strengthened by references to having repeatedly eaten together.Footnote 43 I was frequently told, ‘we are kin’, followed by the comment, ‘we eat together’. When kin claims emerged, people often responded by questioning one's level of commensalism — I was her adopted child, my host mother would say, and be immediately questioned whether I ate with my host family and if I actually consumed Khmer food. Many of the early post-war settlers spoke of sharing and eating their limited stores of food together. Accounts of food sharing also referenced pre-war descriptions of the ‘forest era’ in Cambodia, where morality was primarily indexed by storytellers through the sharing of food (particularly wild meat). The process of kin-making, then, contained continuities with the past even as it served to erase or elide certain past associations by creating new bonds between settlers. This struggle was framed as necessary for survival, and it was through this common struggle that the early settlers became like kin.
In their emphasis on solidarity and interdependence, resettlement narratives possibly resonated with peoples' remembered experiences of the period. They also may have indexed desired ideals of village and communal relations. A comparison can be drawn here with the emphasis on moral solidarity in Eve Zucker's study of a Khmer village with a well-known past of Khmer Rouge-era betrayals and killings.Footnote 44 Despite fissures and ongoing strains in relations from this contentious past, villagers in her study emphasised that their community was a place where ‘people loved each other’, signifying their communal ideals rather than their present reality.
Virtually my only interlocutor willing to describe the resettlement period in terms of its political tensions was the former PRK official who had settled in the area in 1998. The district authorities permitted him to keep a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and three assault rifles in his hut just in case of trouble, he said, adding this trenchant description of area relations:
This region wasn't so easy with each other. It had reconciled but some opinions were not yet good, sometimes you could have secret shootings, secret killings of each other. They call that kumneun [acts of revenge based on grudges].
Decisions made by the district governors of the time were carefully aimed at preventing conflict from flaring up again, he explained. Their concern was the large number of discarded weapons still present among the populace after the recent cessation of conflict.Footnote 45
In light of these more tense descriptions of conditions, creating solidarity must have required a great deal of work. Alongside the emphasis upon solidarity in resettlement narratives were strongly expressed desires for the cessation of conflict. Vanny's description of the transition from war to peace is illustrative:
I could speak of my past history for one or two whole days, it is so miserable. Now my living is easy. We can find things to eat easily. We have a house, rice, a farm. My children work and we have food every day. Before we died or lived like grass, by which I mean that we had no hope, we were halfway between — we didn't know if we'd die, we didn't know if we'd live … Now we know that we will live. … Before we fled to the west, we fled to the east. … The Khmer Rouge shelled from Pailin, they fought each other, later they reconciled, but they used to shell Sdao … Now you can visit Pailin, Samlaut,Footnote 46 now we are all relaxed, no more divisions, one group with happiness.
In Vanny's statement the uncertainty of survival during the years of war shifts to the hopes of peace-time. This peace and the end of displacement are dependent upon the end of the fighting and the factionalism. Vanny's hopes depend upon her closing words being true. However, the strength of antipathy towards the former Khmer Rouge mandates their removal from the scene — the integration Vanny speaks of takes place from a distance, as visits between people who have now settled in separate places.
Conclusion: Reconstructing a locus of belonging
In Reaksmei Songha, the post-war settlers' hopes and aspirations for their own land were dependent upon their successful engagement with the material remnants of war. In the first years of resettlement, living with landmines repeatedly pitted settlers' physical abilities against their physical vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, the dangers of resettlement were also instrumental in creating a sense of solidarity amongst the post-war population. The difficult conditions of resettlement acted as a resource in terms of the creation of a shared sense of belonging. The people who resettled the area — the returnees, the internally displaced, the state soldiers and their kin, and the elusive former Khmer Rouge — people from all sides of the conflict, now had something in common: their self-definition as poor and desperate for land, and their struggle to survive in the forest and the former battlefields.
The forested nature of the landscape offered the post-war settlers an opportunity to claim the identity of a poor community struggling together in the wilderness. Yet in order for this discourse of solidarity to work, another strong association needed to be overcome, namely that of the forest as the refuge and domain of the Khmer Rouge. The post-war settlers actively distanced themselves from the threat of this association. The Khmer Rouge described in the foraging narratives of many of the first settlers were the ‘forest troops’ of the last years of the war. The forest was their hiding place, their lair, its dangers intimately known and partly wrought by their own hands in the placement of the mines. This intimate knowledge was unknown to those who resettled the area. Part of the significance of narratives of forest soldiers passing information along to the foragers is the unspoken assertion of ignorance as innocence. The foragers did not know how to safely navigate their way through the forest because they were not Khmer Rouge themselves.
It is at the point of resettlement or soon after that the Khmer Rouge began to disappear from the discursive landscape. Some villagers acknowledged that there were a few Khmer Rouge families living in the area at the time of resettlement, but there was a standard narrative about their eventual departure. The presence of the former Khmer Rouge was readily visible in residents' foraging accounts — walking, advising, and physically leading the way through the mined terrain. However, it was their absence that was most often emphasised. Villagers repeatedly stated the Khmer Rouge were ‘all gone now’. This was not meant to simply indicate that their political movement had died, but also signified their physical absence. After the reconciliation, the Khmer Rouge had moved back to their former home districts, long-term village residents said. It was only on certain occasions and by certain people that anything else was acknowledged. In truth, a number of former Khmer Rouge families lived in the village. Yet more recent arrivals to the village often knew little of the past political affiliations of some of its inhabitants.
The geographic location of Sdao commune also enabled this distancing and disavowal. Unlike certain areas of Cambodia that are clearly geopolitically bounded as being bases and zones of the former Khmer Rouge, such as Pailin to the west and Samlaut to the south, Ratanak Mondul district fell into the disputed area directly between the two sides. The district had belonged, at different times, to both sides, and thus could be claimed by either.
In Reaksmei Songha village, clearance was both a material act and a social construct. The post-war settlers were active in their selection of tropes — seizing upon one conceptual trope, that the forest is the refuge of the poor, and distancing themselves from another, that the forest is the refuge of the Khmer Rouge. Parallels can be drawn between the material clearance of the forest and the detritus of war buried within it with the clearance of the Khmer Rouge from public narratives of village resettlement. The concept of struggle, once a marker of divided political affiliation, was reinterpreted to describe the shared experience of the post-war settlers. The difficult conditions of the forested landscape provided an alternative locus of belonging, one in which solidarity and interdependence could be emphasised instead of the destructive fissures of the past. Rather than focusing upon past divisions and allegiances, even pre-war residents like Ta Sabai proclaimed that all were newcomers now.
