Cambodians struggle with refugee life amid end of war with Thailand | Border Conflict Issues

Preah Vihear/Siem Reap Provinces – When asked how she spends her day, 11-year-old Sokna rattles off a list of chores.

First they fetch water, then wash the dishes and sweep the leaves and dust around the blue cloth tent, which their family now calls home, in the courtyard of a Buddhist religious site in northwestern Cambodia.

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Sokna and her sister have stopped going to school, their mother Puth Reen said, since they moved to this camp for people displaced by recent wars between Thailand and Cambodia.

The two sisters are among more than 34,440 people left in Cambodia’s refugee camps – 11,355 of them children – as of this month, according to the country’s Interior Ministry.

“I tried to tell them to go to school, but they don’t go,” Puth Reen told Al Jazeera, describing how life has been dangerous since he returned to live in Cambodia after fleeing neighboring Thailand, where he worked for many years, when the war broke out.

Like Puth Reen and her family, the future looks bleak for the thousands of Cambodians – including many school children – who remain in refugee camps, their lives torn apart months after the last conflict between Thailand and Cambodia.

Forced to flee their homes in areas where the local military is now vigilant and alert, or in areas where Thai forces are fighting, Cambodian refugees are said to be surviving on handouts, while those who are lucky are moving from emergency camps to wooden houses provided by the Cambodian government.

But the tension that is still evident between the leadership in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, the ceasefire on the Thai-Cambodian border means that life cannot return to normal.

Some areas along the Cambodian border, such as the villages of Chouk Chey and Prey Chan in Banteay Meanchey province, have become rallying points for nationalists who write on social media about the Thai takeover of Cambodian territory. Their anger is directed at the huge shipping lines and barbed wire that the Thai military used to block access to Cambodian villages during the war.

Containers installed by the Thai military now form a new border between the two countries.

The Cambodian military has also prevented people, such as local farmer Sun Reth, 67, from returning to their homes in the frontline areas, which are still war zones, with soldiers ready for any new fighting.

“Now the Cambodian army is near (my house),” said Sun Reth, adding that he is not allowed by the authorities to sleep in his comfortable house or pick cashew nuts from his farm to sell for a small income.

Cambodian children were obsessed with ‘rumours’ of war

The long-running border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia began a two-year conflict last year, lasting five days in July and nearly three weeks in December.

Many are said to have been killed on both sides, and thousands of civilians fled their homes as soldiers from both countries fired bombs, stones, and in Thailand, rioted inside Cambodia. Thailand has a modern military, a military that is unmatched by its smaller neighbor.

Cambodian and Thai officials reached a ceasefire on December 27, but the situation remains tense five months on.

For families who fled the fighting, school continues for many children in refugee camps, but parents say education is fragmented while their lives remain unstable.

Women in the Wat Bak Kam refugee camp in Preah Vihear district told Al Jazeera that primary school students can attend classes at the local school, but high school students have to walk every day to the district headquarters, about 15km (9 miles) away.

Now the high price of gasoline, due to the US-Israel war in Iran, has made it more difficult for young students, who have motorcycles, to go to school.

Kinmai Phum, the technical director of the WorldVision education program, which is providing support to the camps, said the number of school dropouts and skipping classes has increased among students from the border who have fled.

Kinmai Phum said that this situation is the main problem: Refugee families are forced to move around to find a place to live, schools and temporary education centers have no space, and some students have mental problems because of the conflict.

“Local officials (are worried) that many children will not return to school if the displacement and financial crisis continue,” Kinmai Phum said.

Yuon Phally, a mother of two, said she saw the effect of the war on her daughter and son, who are in the first and third year of primary school.

When he comes home from school, Yuon Phally said, he tells her about the rumors he heard that Cambodia and Thailand are fighting again.

He said: “Their thoughts are not really in school, but they are thinking too much about these rumours.

His children’s country was greatly affected by the war because their father is a soldier who lives in Mai Bei’s community on the border.

During the fight that took place in December, Mr. Yuon Phally said that he could not force his children to go to school because they were all waiting to see if their father would call from the front.

He said: “I couldn’t stop my tears, and this increased the pressure on my children.

He asked me about his father and how he is now, then he told me to eat rice.

He said that his children’s attitude towards their education only improved after their father returned from the war where he is living, to rest and recover from the illness and injuries he suffered during the war.

‘Who doesn’t want to have peace?’

Soeum Sokhem, the village’s deputy chief, told Al Jazeera how his house is a “dangerous place” on the border, but he is forced to return every few days to see his house, plant crops, sleep occasionally, and visit with other neighbors who are doing the same.

“I can’t just stay here”, he said about life in the camp.

“I have to go back.”

When asked how he felt about the border war, Soeum Sokhem said that he had experienced so many wars in Cambodia that he did not know how to express “his inner feelings as I want”.

He then listed all the conflicts he had faced in Cambodia since the 1960s: The spillover into Cambodia from the US war in neighboring Vietnam; the US bombing campaign in Cambodia; The genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and the civil war that followed Vietnam’s intervention to overthrow dictator Pol Pot in 1979, continued into the mid-1990s.

Then in the 2000s, border skirmishes with Thailand began, he said.

Cambodia’s modern history has not been a peaceful one, which may explain why the Cambodian government is talking about peace. Government buildings and billboards announce the government’s unofficial motto: “Thank you for peace.”

“But who doesn’t want to have peace?” Soeum Sokhem said, after recording his life and the many conflicts he lived through.

Now the 67-year-old said he hears gunshots every now and then when he goes back to see his home on the front line.

He said: “Before, when I used to walk there, it was strange.

“But these days, I walk with fear when I go back there.”