Ungoverned landscapes: analyzing post-conflict resettlement in Sdao commune in northwest Cambodia

Abstract

Purpose

When Cambodia's long civil war ended in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines in the northwest was officially closed for resettlement. However, spontaneous resettlement occurred as land was informally claimed by demobilized soldiers, returnees from refugee camps and the landless poor. These areas were often heavily littered with the explosive remnants of war, and landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) wounded and killed numerous post-war settlers.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based upon data collected in 2009 in three villages in Sdao commune in Battambang province. Ethnographic research methods were used to conduct the research, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and demographic mapping.

Findings

The article illustrates how the desire to farm and the prospect of acquiring land rights drove resettlement into a hazardous place. The study demonstrates that this resettlement occurred when the Cambodian state and the international humanitarian sector failed to provide durable policy solutions for vulnerable post-war populations. An ethnographic example is provided of a woman attempting to live in precarious terrain. Her family and others expressed a need to risk occupancy in order to secure land, food and futures for their children.

Originality/value

These findings may assist policymakers working on the complex disasters posed by conflicts in recognizing the polyvalent and overlapping vulnerabilities of populations needing resettlement.

Citation

Arensen, L. (2024), "Ungoverned landscapes: analyzing post-conflict resettlement in Sdao commune in northwest Cambodia", Southeast Asia: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 198-207. https://doi.org/10.1108/SEAMJ-02-2024-0023

Introduction

I met Mome in the dark on the village road to the western hills. I had been told of her story several weeks earlier, and I asked if we could arrange an interview for the ethnographic research I was conducting. She acquiesced readily, and she stretched out her arm and bid me to press my fingers down and feel the hard metal floating beneath her flesh, shrapnel from the landmine accident that had killed her first husband.

Mome and her family lived as landless tenant farmers in a village in Sdao commune. Mome’s history was by no means the only one punctuated with violent death in the village, but hers was certainly one of the most intimate – she had lost her husband, her mother, a sister and a brother to mines and, like an amputee, she possessed embodied traces of her encounter with a mine. She hosted the shrapnel in her body, bore the scars and continued to be seized by fierce headaches. Despite extensive demining efforts by state actors, humanitarian organizations and civilians, portions of Cambodia’s terrain remain littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), although this area was reduced to 7,392 suspected areas totaling 618 square kilometers by the end of 2022 (Landmine Monitor Report, 2022). The district which contains Sdao commune, Ratanak Mondul, had one of the highest rates of civilian casualties in Cambodia from mine and UXO-related injuries between 1999 and 2007 and remained on the list of districts with the highest casualties in 2014 (CMAC, 2014; Landmine Monitor Report, 2007).

Post-conflict resettlement is a complex affair, and resettlement in the war-altered landscapes of Cambodia involved a plethora of actors and policies. I will demonstrate that the population who resettled the former frontlines of Sdao commune did so largely because of a need to forage and farm. This case study illustrates that when the Cambodian state and the international humanitarian sector failed to provide durable policy solutions for vulnerable post-war populations, some families sought their own solutions by attempting to resettle and convert precarious terrain.

I will first present the history of the area through the lens of the repeated displacement and resettlement of its residents. This section will highlight the gaps in resettlement policies which contributed to the spontaneous resettlement of mined areas. I will then focus on the microhistory of resettlement in the absence of civilian governance. In Sdao commune, the apparatus of government followed the settlers rather than preceded them. My use of the term ungoverned refers to this period of resettlement, undertaken without the support of the state or the humanitarian community. The post-war settlers entered an area officially closed for occupancy, a place where acquiring land was reliant upon a potent mix of skill, courage, endurance and luck. Lastly, a woman’s history will be described that illustrates the overlapping layers of vulnerability faced by individuals in this post-conflict setting.

Methods

The data drawn upon for this article were documented through ethnographic research I conducted in 2009 in three villages in Sdao commune in Battambang province. My methods included participant observation, oral history interviews, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and basic demographic mapping. In total, 67 individuals were interviewed in interviews of one to two hours in length, some more than once. Informal conversations and observations were recorded in ethnographic field notes. Thematic data analysis was carried out with Atlas–TI software. All identifying data have been anonymized to protect the privacy of participants.

Shifting ground: histories of displacement and resettlement

The villages where I conducted my research were situated on the frontlines of the war between the Khmer Rouge fighters and the Vietnamese-supported Cambodian state in the 1980s and 1990s. The hills ringing the villages to the west and the once-cultivated orchards and farms were heavily mined by both sides. Resettlement began in 1996, after the surrender of Khmer Rouge forces in the region (Fleisher, 2005). In 2009, area residents could be roughly separated into four camps: former soldiers and their kin, former district residents until the civil war intensified in 1989, returnees who returned from the border or refugee camps under the auspices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) between 1991 and 1993 and more recent internal migrants.

Civilian residents of the commune had experienced decades of displacement, beginning during the first civil war of 1970–1975. During Democratic Kampuchea [1], all residents were displaced into forced labor cooperatives. Even those residents who were classified as Base People, supporters of the revolution before its victory, were relocated, their former villages dismantled or destroyed (Becker, 1986). In addition, large numbers of urbanites were sent to Battambang Province following the forced evacuation of the cities, doubling its population to over one million residents (Davies, 1994). The province and its neighbor were renamed the northwest zone and enormous pressure was placed upon its leadership to produce large amounts of rice from its fertile soils. However, the zone’s population never produced enough rice to satisfy the center or even feed its own population. Starvation claimed many of the residents of the Northwest Zone between 1975 and 1979 (Kiernan, 1996).

When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and ousted the Khmer Rouge regime, residents again moved on a massive scale. In the weeks and months that followed the invasion, all of Cambodia experienced an unparalleled scale of displacement (Van Acker, 1999). Some were civilians forced or fleeing west with the Khmer Rouge [2]. Others were survivors seeking food and refuge in refugee camps across the border in Thailand. Most were people released from their cooperatives, walking across Cambodia looking for family members and villages abandoned up to a decade before. With the threat of famine looming, the fledgling Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) Government ordered the populace to settle down. In its decade of rule, controlling the movement of the populace would be one of the PRK’s major ongoing struggles, particularly movement back and forth across the Thai border. Various armed factions operated from within Thailand and throughout the border areas in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to actual combatants, unspecified numbers of family members and aligned civilians also lived in the bases strung out along the border. At varying points in the ongoing conflict between the PRK and these various factions, large numbers of these border dwellers moved in and out of various refugee camps (Shawcross, 1984).

Despite the threat of conscription and forced labor, Davies has argued that for the remaining or returned residents of Ratanak Mondul, the period between 1980 and 1989 was “essentially one of recovery and reconstruction” (1994, p. 44) [3]. Yet skirmishes between resistance forces and the state continued, and international pressure mounted on Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. In 1989, the conflict began to intensify again in Battambang. As the Vietnamese armed forces began to withdraw following peace accords, the Khmer Rouge advanced from their mountain strongholds and engaged the newly weakened national forces. Civil war began again in earnest, directly across the farms and fields of the district. Residents of Sdao commune who had returned home by 1989 took part in a nationwide redistribution of land, carried out by district and commune-level authorities (Boreak, 2000; Williams, 1999). Tragically, the resumption of hostilities led to wide-scale contamination by landmines and ordnance, circumscribing access to this land.

In 1994, the district leader estimated that half of all cultivatable land had become unusable due to this contamination (Davies, 1994). Practically all arable land free of landmines was already owned by the time the United Nations began to organize repatriation efforts of the refugees in Thailand (Davies, 1994), and it is to this second wave of returnees that I now turn. The repatriation of displaced Cambodians in time to participate in national elections scheduled for May 1993 was one of the terms of the October 1991 Paris Peace Agreements (Arnvig, 1994). At the time of their signing, roughly 360,000 Cambodians were living in camps near or over the Thai border, and 180,000 others were located in displaced persons’ sites in Cambodia (Arnvig, 1994). How were people persuaded to return to Cambodia, particularly given that conditions in the country were far from stable? A very large carrot was necessary, and the UNHCR found it in the form of land, promising “two hectares of land for each family, a free choice of where to settle…grants for housing materials, food supplies and other short-term support” (Arnvig, 1994, p. 91).

These terms were accepted with alacrity by a staggering 90% of the camp populations, who agreed to the repatriation process. However, as soon as surveys were carried out to find out where the refugees wished to resettle, trouble began. Three-fourths of the refugees wanted to settle in the provinces of Battambang and Banteay Meanchey. These two northwest provinces had seen the brunt of the fighting between the various factions in the 1980s and 1990s – and skirmishes were ongoing. The district of Rattanak Mondul was one of the destinations many desired. In a survey conducted in February 1992, 26,000 refugees stated their desire to return to Rattanak Mondul district, where Sdao commune is located (Davies, 1994). However, the UNHCR declared the district closed for returnees on the basis of security problems and the heavy landmine presence [4].

The UNHCR was to prove unable to keep its promise of a freely chosen plot as well as land for farming for the overwhelming majority of the returnees. There were no vast tracts of “mine-free, fertile and available land” adequate for a refugee population numbering in the hundreds of thousands (Arnvig, 1994, p. 91). Under UNHCR pressure, district authorities designated seven resettlement sites, but all of the sites were in mine-contaminated areas (Robinson, 2000). Land in Cambodia was being intensely speculated over by this juncture and local authorities, some of whom considered returnees traitors, were not inclined to distribute village land to them. In some places where the UNHCR attempted to provide titles, this land was seized by local residents and authorities as soon as the institution ended its oversight (Van Acker, 1999; Williams, 1999).

An information campaign and counseling sessions in reception centers in 1992 were implemented to discourage returnees from making their way to areas officially closed for resettlement (Geiger, 1994). Nevertheless, in the beginning of 1993, about 40,000 returnees continued to express a desire to settle in southern Battambang, and an unspecified but large percentage of that number left their resettlement locations and made their way to Rattanak Mondul district (Davies, 1994). These secondary migrations took the UNHCR by surprise (Geiger, 1994). It had been assumed that returnees would stay put at their resettlement sites. Those who returned to Sdao commune in this manner by and large settled on mined land, the only land available to them (Davies, 1994).

Soldiers and returnees: a microhistory of resettlement

In Sdao commune, soldiers, their kin and residents of the nearby resettlement sites comprised most of the first settler population. When military demobilization began, a significant proportion of former soldiers in Cambodia found themselves landless (Bartu & Wilford, 2009). In Sdao commune, where soldiers had been stationed up until the ceasefires, the military was the first to claim and portion out land. One former soldier claimed that the commanders in the area had flown over the landscape in a helicopter to survey it, then took a map and divided the land into sections. Each commander then allotted plots to the junior soldiers under their command at their discretion. Within these unofficial sections, only the most prime-looking tracts of land were claimed. The soldiers who were allotted land informed their family and friends that there was plenty of remaining free land.

This first wave of soldier-settlers, who had fought in the area, carried out unofficial mine clearance on the land they claimed, using their war-time skills to enable their transition from fighters to farmers (see Arensen, 2022). Many of these men left their wives and children elsewhere in the early months of resettlement and came with other members of their units to do the hazardous work of clearing vegetation and mines from the overgrown fields and farms. Knowledge of mine-laying tactics was employed along with landmine and UXO clearance.

In all three villages of my field site, according to settlers’ accounts, land was cultivated first, with houses developing more slowly over time. Farms were cleared carefully, one plot at a time, and mines and UXO were removed if they posed a danger to the civilian or animal population, although in a very piecemeal fashion (see Uk, 2007; Bottomley, 2003). Where one mine was observed, settlers assumed there were others nearby, as mines were often laid in lines or triangles. Mines and ordnance were removed in reportedly large quantities to be sold to scrap metal recyclers. Areas that were established as heavily mined were avoided by residents, and this information was shared between settlers.

Nearly all the families I knew who had previously lived in the area had returned to Cambodia to find their pre-war land holdings had been redistributed to others. Many initially settled at the resettlement site of Bung Ampil in Sdao commune [5]. Around 50 families were permitted to settle on pagoda land in Sdao, one elder told me. He spoke of resentment toward the returnees. “People would not meet our eyes,” he said, and “they kicked over our water buckets at the communal well”. A lack of farmland drove waves of foraging in the area before the Khmer Rouge lay down arms, as another elder’s account describes:

I took wood from many places... We went anywhere where there were no landmines, and asked people who came before us, and they told us, ‘Child, child, go straight, but don't go over there, turn left and right,’ so I went like they told me and filled my cart with wood... We followed our network—if we didn't know, we didn't go. Death! [He laughs.] ...We went, asking others who had gone before us. Village by village went out to make a living cutting wood. We couldn't grow rice. The old residents from Bung Ampil farmed rice... [But we] transported wood, made charcoal. …People told us the safe place to go and to just follow the trail people drive their oxcarts along... If the forest was as nice as its original state, full of trees, they didn’t want us to enter. It looked nice and full of trees but was full of landmines too. So we just followed other people, no matter whether the wood was big or small, we just took whatever we could. …We didn’t get good wood because we were at the back... I struggled from Cambodia up to Thailand. None of my children were lost. Then we came back, and we expected to be full, to be delicious.

The returnees’ means of earning a living were severely limited by their lack of access to agricultural land – they were, as the elder presented it, facing conditions that were neither full nor delicious. He emphasized asking and following the instructions of others, yet the hazards of the period permeate his account – some went forth successfully, but others did not. When soldiers began resettling the commune, some of these returnee families left Bung Ampil and followed the soldiers into the interior.

Accounts of land allotment during this first wave of resettlement ranged from detailed stories to vague invocations of military control. Some were cautious to speak of having purchased land from soldiers – “don’t say we bought it,” one man urged me, “bought is too weighty a word.” When he arrived, one Buddhist lay elder recounted that he was permitted to allot land along the main road in 50-m widths. He explained that the soldiers wanted civilian settlement, so that the area would eventually be reinstated as a village by the government. He summoned various relatives and friends to the area, around 18 families in all, and organized a lottery. The portions of available land were assigned a number, and a member of each family drew a numbered slip. He drew slip three, a plot of land that turned out to be heavily mined.

These post-war settlers preceded the re-establishment of an administrative state presence. Many of the acting village chiefs, who were operating before the villages were officially reclassified by the Ministry of Interior, were former soldiers (Arensen, 2016). Even as state control re-emerged, it followed the people repopulating the terrain. One of my elderly respondents was a former PRK official. He stated that he and his son-in-law were asked circa 1997 to be part of a working group of men who would help formally reestablish villages. What stood out in his account was the tentativeness of the process as the men entered the area on motorbikes, following the narrow, established track along the still-mined road. They waited on the road near the settlers’ charcoal kilns until men emerged from the forested interior with wood. When men turned up, he encouraged them to settle along the road where the pre-war villages had stood rather than in the forest where their farm plots were located.

“Like testing fate”: discourse on risk and danger

In the first waves of resettlement in Sdao, returnees and soldiers alike knew that they were coming to claim or buy land that potentially contained military waste (Henig, 2012). Villagers interchangeably used the terms psong breng, i.e. “to venture, risk, hazard” (Headley, Chhor, Lim, Kheang, & Chun, 1977, p. 623), or brathoi, i.e. “to take a chance, to gamble or risk (something)” (p. 577), to describe behaviors in the war-altered landscape. The settlers deliberately undertook risks, such as clearing minefields, in order to create farmland [6]. However, landmines were perceived as only one risk among other dangers of resettlement, such as malaria and venomous snakes (cf. Arensen, 2012). Villagers discursively described risk as a necessary component of their quest for survival and economic betterment (cf. Uk, 2007). I was told countless times over the course of my fieldwork that the poor must take risks. Our lives are a gamble, poor families often stated. Residents said that, afraid or unafraid, one just has to do it, about cultivating mined land. Moreover, many settlers argued that staying in resettlement sites and not reclaiming the former frontlines was untenable, that the sites had no livelihood opportunities and inadequate food rations.

It is perhaps illustrative of this philosophy of risk that the settlers did not prevent each other from entering mined areas, although many emphasized consulting and warning each other.

As one early settler put it, “when newcomers came, we told them, oooi, walking in that area is not possible. Be careful of an explosion; you will die and throw away your wife.” A former informal village chief relayed the following account:

Behind the school is a minefield. People entered, there were explosions. Others entered, there were explosions. I don't know how many people lost legs.

How many? [7]

Many. They came from Bung Ampil ... came riding oxcarts to cut wood, there was beautiful wood there. I said, don't enter, it is a place of mines! I forbade them. I forbade them, but they kept their own counsel. They went in, and there were explosions. We took them to the hospital ... I told them, I was the one protecting [the area], but... I told them, they still entered, what could I have done? They drove oxcarts in.

Why didn't they listen?

They were destitute. They took young trees to sell.

Keeping in mind the lack of official governance at this point in time, it may well have been impossible or dangerous to try and prohibit anyone’s behavior. Yet the chief’s comment about the woodcutters’ destitution echoed the widely shared view that people’s need to secure livelihoods overrode the avoidance of danger. This lack of prohibition reflected a state of affairs that was ongoing in 2009. Government deminers had set up concrete markers around demined sites and staked out warning plaques at others, and many residents knew which parts of the villages remained mined. Yet people were free to go where they wished – the landscape was crossed at one’s own risk, following one’s own needs and desires.

To illustrate the overlapping vulnerabilities experienced by area settlers, I turn now to Mome’s story. In 2009, Mome resided in Sdao commune, but she previously lived in a neighboring commune, Chisang. In her attempts to secure a livelihood for herself and her kin, Mome had repeatedly moved between land that was by turns, or sometimes simultaneously, cultivated, forested and mined. During Mome’s childhood, her family repeatedly fled their home when fighting was nearby. Shortly after the war ended, her father died of illness, and her mother arranged for her to marry a soldier 16 years her senior. The soldier, a violent man with a drinking problem, expected Mome to break off relations with her family after her marriage. However, she refused and endured repeated beatings as she cared for her mother until her untimely death. Her stark description of her mother's death was framed by the view of risk as a necessary gamble:

My mother died before me. My father died of sickness first. When my mother died from the mine, I am the one who brought her from the forest.

You brought your mother's body back yourself?

Parents don't have heaviness. I brought her myself, I didn't feel her weight. I screamed for others to help. When I got there, she hadn't lost her breath yet. I ran, but she died near the village. She lost her wind. She didn't instruct her children or grandchildren. The explosion destroyed everything here [she touches her chest], where she was hit. She was bending down and harvesting [grass for thatching]. Her knife triggered a string-mine. Mined areas—if you don't go into them, you remain destitute...

The precarity that landmines brought to her life was matched by the difficulty and danger of a marriage to an unstable and violent husband. When her sister was also killed in a landmine accident, Mome took the orphaned children into her care, seven in all, against her husband's wishes. The soldier often abandoned her for months on end, returning intermittently to demand money or to attempt reconciliation. In her attempts to secure a livelihood, Mome repeatedly moved between various forested areas. Eventually, Mome came with the children to the western hills in Sdao commune to attempt a new livelihood as itinerant laborers cutting bamboo.

The forest bosses, as they were colloquially known, were a husband and a wife who transported timber and bamboo out of forested areas to the provincial capital. Several years after the end of the war, they recruited Mome and around 15 other inhabitants from Chisang to cut bamboo in Sdao. The laborers were paid by the pole. They built small huts in the forest in an area cleared of landmines by informal village deminers, about 50 square feet in size. The trail that the transport truck took to the clearing was also demined. Beyond the trail and the living quarters, where the bamboo grew, no mine clearance was undertaken.

“Searching for the bamboo,” Mome explained, “you went taking your chances. If you died, you died. If you lived, you lived. It was like testing fate.” Some of the laborers also gathered and tampered with ordnance to sell to scrap metal recyclers. Mome said she feared this activity.

Mome said that, during those years, people thought she was nearly crazy. She carried the children on her back when she walked to the market, ten kilometers away. She was thin, dressed in cast-off clothing, and her hair was an unkempt, curly cloud around her head. It was difficult in the forest. The children were still small, and there was no one to watch them, so she took them with her into the bamboo: “I had the children follow me. I was afraid they would walk around carelessly. I made them sit, didn't let them walk around, they had to sit in one place. Don't walk, sit there and watch the little ones!” She told me that the forest bosses offered to take some of the children and raise them, but she had refused, fearing that the children would be treated as servants.

During one of her husband’s infrequent visits, he chased her drunkenly through the forest with a gun, demanding money. “I didn't know if the forest had mines. I just ran,” she said. “If I hadn't evaded him, I would have been shot.” On his last visit, they worked side by side for two weeks, until he detonated a mine. She had warned him not to enter the place where he died, because she saw many shell casings on the forest floor and knew it had been a Khmer Rouge base camp. He dismissed her concerns and went in to cut bamboo:

We had cut halfway, and the mines were there. Ph’ung! My husband was cutting there, I was maybe [6 m away]. The mine hit me also, it exploded and went up spinning. I didn't know I had been hit. ...I was spun around by the wind of it. When I looked for my husband, I saw he had fallen over, he was already lost. I went and saw. He was wounded in these places. [She touches her own body as she speaks.] Leg. Arm. His knife flew and landed near me. I was wounded in this place [she touches her forehead], and arm, thigh.

So many workers were injured by mines that the forest bosses grew, who were afraid and would no longer leave the demined clearing. The laborers had to bring the bamboo poles to the clearing in order for them to load the trucks. “If we didn't bring it, they wouldn't enter for it, so we carried it in on our heads,” Mome said.

“Didn’t people flee as the accidents continued?” I asked. “Those who were afraid returned,” she said. “Those who weren't afraid, kept on cutting, like me. If I went back to Chisang, I didn't know how to make a living. I just had to live there.” Mome reported that seven or eight bamboo cutters were injured or killed within a few months of starting the work, which was half their number. But Mome expressed no resentment for her former employers. They pitied me, she said (for a conceptualization of this term (anut-meta, in Khmer) in other post-war social relations, see DeAngelo, 2021). But she grew sick, to the point of having seizures while walking along the road into the village, and finally, a village chief intervened. He said she could not live in the forest without a husband and told her to move onto the grounds of the Buddhist wat. While recuperating there, she met a monk, and they began living together. She lived in a shack, preparing food for the monks, but eventually left with the children and her second husband to set up a household as tenant farmers, tending others’ land and working as day laborers. In 2009, her situation remained tenuous. She farmed village land but had no claim to any of its ground. She told me that if the owners took their land back someday, her household would move once again into the forest where she had once cut bamboo.

Mome’s story illustrates the overlapping risks and vulnerabilities that area residents faced in their efforts to make a living at the end of the war. Foraging on mined land led to the deaths of multiple family members. Her mother’s attempt to find her security through marriage to a soldier tragically created even more insecurity and danger for Mome. Her relocation to Sdao offered yet another livelihood opportunity to work on dangerous ground. When I met Mome, even though she had left the forest and had a stable family life and livelihood, she was cognizant that her fortunes could still turn again. The forest, despite its past perils and the terrible toll its mines had wrought, remained the only place where Mome could envision a future for her landless family if she was once again uprooted and unhoused.

I do not wish to either romanticize or downplay agency in these matters. The post-war settlers of Sdao commune voluntarily resettled dangerous ground, yet their choices must be considered as an exercise of agency within constraining structures and difficult circumstances (Carnegie, 2024). In contrast to the resettlement sites, the potentially dangerous war-altered terrain of Sdao commune was indeterminate (Kim, 2016). The settlers argued that risks were undertaken and dangers faced for the possibility of a better future. Risk-taking in this place, therefore, was framed as simultaneously hazardous and productive (cf. Henig, 2019; Kiengkay & Andriesse, 2018; Schwenkel, 2013). On a policy level, this case illustrates the importance of locating the nexus of need and desire for post-war populations. Arable land in the former battlefields of the northwest was desperately desired. The failure of the Cambodian state and the UNHCR to fulfill this desire was a motivating factor in the spontaneous resettlement of Sdao commune. The felt need for land was so strong among post-war settlers that they risked danger, death and injury in order to secure a future for themselves and their children. Perhaps a clearer understanding of this need and the overlapping vulnerabilities such families possessed could have led to a more tightly woven web of responses to this complex disaster scenario.

Notes

1. Democratic Kampuchea is the formal name of the regime installed by the Khmer Rouge.

2. One official estimated that when the Vietnamese forces reached Battambang in January 1979, around one third of the population was forcibly relocated by the Khmer Rouge in their retreat to the mountainous regions along the Thai border (Davies, 1994).

3. Rattanak Mondul district was formerly named Pailin district and was split and renamed in 1997.

4. Davies records an initial attempt to allow some resettlement in one of its communes, Plau Meas, in May of 1992 that was quickly canceled due to high casualty rates (1994).

5. Bung Ampil was a large resettlement site for both returnee refugees and internally displaced people from ongoing fighting further west.

6. This is not to suggest that residents did not employ techniques to manage and minimize the dangers they faced.

7. Italicized comments indicate my own remarks.