The Bamboo Wall or the K5 Plan in Cambodia in the 1980s

December 25, 1998

HUN SEN MUST BE PROSECUTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Current Cambodian strongman Hun Sen is more and more beleaguered on the international arena. The US Senate is expected to pass a resolution in January 1999, as the US House of Representatives did on October 2, 1998, supporting judicial proceedings against the former Khmer Rouge officer and present dictator for serious violations of international laws on human rights since 1979.

The investigation of Hun Sen's past should lead to examination of a relatively little-known period in Cambodian history: the time just after the Pol Pot regime, the Vietnamese occupation and the People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989).

Although overshadowed by the great genocide which took place between 1975 and 1978 under Pol Pot, the subsequent period also brought genocide of the same form, though of lesser scope. It was perpetrated by Pol Pot's successors and former colleagues, among them Hun Sen.

From 1984 to 1988 the pro-Vietnamese authorities implemented a deadly plan called "K5". This more recent bloody chapter of the history of Cambodia is opened in doctor Esmeralda Luciolli's book "Le Mur de Bambou - Le Cambodge après Pol Pot" (The Bamboo Wall: Cambodia after Pol Pot) published in 1988 by Regine Deforges Edition - Medecins sans Frontières (Distributed by Albin Michel).

The K5 plan killed tens or hundreds of thousands of victims. Cambodians sent into forced labor died of starvation, exhaustion, disease (particularly malaria) and lost their limbs and lives to the antipersonnel mines scattered on the sites where they were sent. Many of these laborers were executed for trying to escape.

During that period Hun Sen was a member of the central committee of the communist party and was promoted from Minister of Foreign Affairs to Prime Minister. As one of the main leaders he must bear responsibility for the massacre. 

There are still thousands of families in Cambodia whose missing father, husband or son reminds them of the K5 plan, and there are thousands of handicapped people whose missing eye, hand or leg reminds them of the K5 plan. Will justice be rendered one day to these victims?

We have translated the most significant excerpts from "The Bamboo Wall" in the following paragraphs.

THE BAMBOO WALL

The decision to build what would be soon called the "bamboo wall" was never publicly announced. In July 1984, mysterious rumors some bits of which reached us circulated among the Cambodians. From now on each one must go to the border for several months a year, in regions mined and highly infected by malaria, to build some new sort of Chinese Wall between Cambodia and Thailand. The idea looked so foolish that many foreigners thought they were seeing only an example of the Khmers' supposed tendency to exaggerate. After a few weeks, they had to accept the facts: departures began and these labors soon became an obsessive fear of all Cambodians.

The Vietnamese army had started to enlist Khmer civilians to do strategic work since 1979. Early on, in the autumn of 1982, the population was made to participate in "socialist service". This work consisted of building dams, roads and earthworks near their dwellings and proved to be useful to the inhabitants. But very quickly, this task took a strategic turn and the peasants were ordered to clear the surrounding forests and build protective barriers around the most important dwelling centers. Starting in 1983, the population was made to create fences out of two or three rows of prickly shrubs or bamboo, sometimes lined by mine fields, around the villages. The people were also forced to set up defensive barriers along the railroads, around the bridges and at strategic points of the highways. (...) However, the first chores lasted only a short time and did not require any displacement of the population.