Tower and Town, September 2018

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Aid - To Community or Individual?

I hope I [Nick Maurice, editor] can be forgiven for reproducing an article I wrote for the August 1980 edition of Tower and Town on my return from working as a nutritionist for four months with Oxfam’s emergency team in Kampuchea (Cambodia) following the overthrow of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who, during the five years of their appalling regime, had been responsible for the deaths of 2 million out of a total population of six million people in what became known as the “Killing Fields”. The issues raised in my article seem as relevant today as they were nearly 40 years ago particularly in the context of migration and the refugee crisis.

“When I left Kampuchea I ‘smuggled out’ letters from Khmer friends I had made, to their relatives in Australia, France, Canada and Britain and posted them on my arrival back in Marlborough. There is no mail service in Kampuchea, and attempts by Khmers to communicate with relatives outside the country are considered to be an indication of intent to flee to the West and are threatened with reprisal. Indeed Khmers who befriended us in the Oxfam team were threatened, and in one case thrown into prison.

The letters I brought out were the first news that relatives overseas had received for five years and, although signalling the survival of the writer, they also inevitably carried the news of the death from starvation, disease or brutal murder of close relatives and friends.

With each of the letters, I enclosed a short letter from myself, explaining that I had seen the writer, a sister, brother, mother, etc. in the preceding week or so and that they were in good health.

Ten days after posting these letters I received a telephone call from Sydney, Australia while sitting in the Marlborough surgery. Arun Hang told me she had left Cambodia in 1975 on a three month scholarship to Australia, leaving her five year old son and her husband behind. While she was out of the country, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge and all communication ceased. The letter I had sent was from her sister Rumani who had been my interpreter while I was working in Phnom Penh.

Over the phone to Sydney I told Arun Hang that there was no news of her husband and that it seemed likely he had died at the hands of the Pol Pot regime, but that I had seen her son, now aged ten, two weeks before and that although he had chickenpox he was recovering well.

I leave to the imagination the emotional content of that conversation across the world, telling a mother who has had no news of her son for five years and did not know whether he was alive or dead that I had seen him a few days before and that he was alive and well albeit with chickenpox and that almost certainly her husband was dead.

But I shall never forget her repeated demand ‘You must help me to get him out!’ and the reaction to my response that there was nothing I could do to help.

Attempts by aid agencies to help individuals flee from such a politically oppressive regime would, if discovered, totally jeopardise a humanitarian programme designed to improve the lives of the people living under that regime. One therefore sacrifices the individual for the good of the community – ironically applying the same principle as was applied by Pol Pot when he murdered the elite, the professional classes, the intellectuals, for the political ideal of ‘purifying’ Cambodian society and bringing everyone to the level of the peasant and the growing of rice.

The dilemma of individual versus community confronts us in almost everything we do. The phrase ‘we have to draw the line somewhere’ is on everyone’s lips.

Surely the ideal is that we, as individuals, ought to be working for the principle of erasing the line, rather than drawing it.

Nick Maurice (1980)