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Matthew Cook |
stronger than the mere
absence of light, night in the Cambodian countryside
has an unforgiving blackness that fights attempts to
illuminate. A motorcycle’s headlamp can grab no
more than a foot or two of red dirt road. A pothole
or a police officer is not visible until you are upon
them.
One night I drove down such a road, squinting into the
impenetrable spaces where the dark hid wooden-stilt
houses. In a house that had been pointed out to me earlier,
a man was waiting for me. He motioned me up the stairs,
his lined face soft in the glow of a handheld lantern,
to the room where they were hiding.
When I remember them now, my journalist’s eye
for detail fails. Their faces don’t take shape
in the shadows of my memory. I recall only the five
pairs of eyes that pierced the dark with the intensity
of their fear.
Four women and one man huddled in the tiny room. Ages
15 through 30, they were asylum seekers of the Jarai
ethnic minority from the mountainous Central Highlands
of Vietnam. Since 2001, hundreds of hill tribe members,
collectively known as Montagnards, have fled persecution
by the Vietnamese government. The increasingly draconian
measures used against the Montagnards have included
seizure of their ancestral homelands and suppression
of their predominantly Christian beliefs. Until recently,
the Cambodian government has hunted these people and
deported them.
Cambodian police have arrested and intimidated people
who aid the runaways. Despite the danger, the man in
the house, a Cambodian Jarai, agreed to shelter these
five when they became too sick to continue hiding in
the malaria-infested jungles on the border. As a reporter
for an English-language newspaper in Phnom Penh, I had
come to the province of Ratanakkiri to meet asylum seekers
who left their homes in search of freedom.
Later, with the story filed and the dust and sweat washed
out of my clothes, I thought about their journey, and
thought about what had compelled me to leave home.
Less than a year earlier, I was a novice reporter at
a weekly newspaper in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.,
a setting where Free Scoop Night at the local Baskin-Robbins
merited a front-page story and photo. Glancing at some
online job postings one day, I saw an advertisement
for The Cambodia Daily, founded in 1993 with
the aim of establishing a free press in the country’s
emerging democracy. With a reporting staff roughly split
between Cambodians and foreign expatriates, the paper’s
goal is to serve as a standard of integrity and accuracy
in a nation where many journalists are in the employ
of political parties, or are cowed into silence by overt
government threats.
I told bewildered friends, family members and co-workers
that I wanted the adventure of overseas journalism,
and that the idea of Cambodian dirt and heat would seem
a relief from the eye-watering slap of another icy Washington
winter. I felt more afraid of becoming complacent amid
the manicured lawns and tidy streets of Montgomery County,
Md., than I was of exploring Cambodia, where the Khmer
Rouge held parts of the country as recently as my freshman
year at Stanford. Within six weeks of the publisher’s
e-mailed job offer, I was on the plane, committed to
working a year in a country that I had only recently
learned to locate on a map. I had not counted on how
powerful the pain of leaving would be.
That night in Ratanakkiri, words seemed an inadequate
way to address the hardships these young people had
borne. Terrified, they scooted imperceptibly away from
me until a wide gap existed between us on the wooden
floor. I proffered a small package of peanuts, the only
food in my bag. One young woman devoured some nuts,
then turned away and quietly vomited.
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Matthew Cook |
The five had survived months in the jungle, evading
police and eating food foraged from the land or rice
smuggled to them by sympathetic Cambodian Jarai. Their
goal was to reach the offices of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees in Phnom Penh. From there,
they told me, they hoped to be resettled in the United
States, where hundreds of Montagnards have been relocated.
They all had relatives who had survived such a journey;
when I said the word “America” they nodded,
and smiles lightened what had been tense faces.
The Montagnards’ case has gained some international
attention. Many ethnic minorities collaborated with
the U.S. military during what is known in this part
of the world as the American War. That cooperation is
a factor in the Vietnamese government’s intolerance
of the hill tribes now. Many risk the dangerous and
hideously uncomfortable journey through the jungles
to reach the dream of resettlement in the U.S.—the
place many of my colleagues and I temporarily abandoned
in search of what we thought were better stories elsewhere.
There’s no denying the moments of professional
excitement—from the thrill of meeting a villager
who has put his safety on the line to tell his story,
to mundane details like the brilliant orange of a monk’s
robe against the gravel of the road. But those experiences
punctuate weeks of frustration and loneliness so acute
that I sometimes wonder if there’s an extra seat
on one of those UNHCR planes for me.
In August, the Cambodian government allowed the United
Nations to rescue some of those hiding in Ratanakkiri
and process their claims for asylum. Dozens have already
left for the United States. I don’t know if the
five I met are among them.
I hope so. I hope that the life they find is worth what
they risked to achieve it. And when their plane touches
down on the country that occupies my thoughts so often,
I hope that their eyes soften and their fear drains
away, replaced by a tiny glimmer of joy in what will
soon become home.
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