Cambodia

Squabble settled with a hand grenade

Warning: the content of this article may be distressing to some readers.

The global trade in conventional weapons, or small arms, is dangerously unregulated. Oxfam Community Aid Abroad has joined Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms to call for control in the international trade in small weapons. The Control Arms campaign is calling for strict regulations in the supply and use of small arms. Nic Dunlop reports from Cambodia's Battambang province on the devastating effects of easily-available weapons.

Uch Hy holds up a photo of his wife Map. Photo: Nic Dunlop/OxfamAUS.

It was a hot evening and Uch Hy wasn't feeling well. The self-employed taxi driver in the town of Bovel, in north-west Cambodia, has to watch his health – if he can't work his family has no income. So he decided to go to bed early. He and his wife Map slept together with their three-yearold daughter, Phally. It had been raining earlier, so Hy had already closed the shutters of their one-storey house. But he didn't lock them all.

Details like that were haunting Hy when we met him just over a week later. At 2am that night he was woken by an enormous explosion – inside the bedroom. As the noise died away he turned to find Map lying dead in their bed, her blood everywhere. Next to her, bleeding from her head, was Phally, screaming. Hy escaped unscathed. His wife had taken the blast, saving both himself and his daughter. Hy collapsed over Map in despair. His parents had to carry him away from her body.

At the time of our visit, in July 2003, a small shrine had been set up beside the window from where the grenade had been dropped. "When I saw my wife dead I was terrified," said Hy. Around him are the shattered floor tiles from the explosion in his home; he was still visibly in shock. And still frightened.

Weapons available to all

This Chinese-made grenade costs only $7 in Cambodia's Battambang province. Photo: Nic Dunlop/OxfamAUS.

Grenade attacks like this are horribly common in Bovel and the rest of Battambang province, and just by reporting it to the authorities Hy leaves himself and Phally open to further violence. Many more victims of such attacks stay silent, afraid of reprisals. "Yes, I'm afraid," he said. "I'm very worried because they want to destroy me and my family."

Chinese-made grenades, so easily available for just a few dollars in Battambang, have become a way of solving business disputes in Cambodia. Hy is convinced that it was one of the taxi drivers at the market who dropped the weapon through his bedroom window. He says resentment at his successful business had been mounting, but he never thought that it could climax so brutally. Other drivers were jealous of his success, and of his popularity among clients, he says. "They accused me of stealing their business." He had already received indirect threats.

It's the legacy of 30 years of suffering and violence in Cambodia that leaves weapons so dangerously easy to obtain, and ordinary people so ready to use them. The work of ridding such a society of its weapons, and rebuilding trust in the systems of law and order, is a long one. Even the police are frightened of pursuing cases like these, though they are investigating Map's murder. Hy is sceptical about their efforts: "The law will not put an end to this," he says. His parents, fearing more reprisals, have begged him not to take matters into his own hands.

Doing that would be all too easy. In one Cambodian town's market we got quotes for an array of weapons: hand guns from $275, a semi-automatic AK-47 for $60, a grenade like the one that killed Map for just $7. After 30 years of open conflict there is "peace" and democracy in Cambodia now, but the left-over weapons constitute a lethal plague. From robberies to acts of vengeance, from political assassinations to domestic and business disputes, weapons have become a frighteningly common way to deal with society's problems.

Regulation a difficult task

For most of his 38 years Hy has lived in Bovel with his family. For many years the town was close to the frontline between the Khmer Rouge and government forces in Cambodia's vicious civil war which lasted in various forms or nearly 30 years. Shells often landed in the nearby fields, sending people fleeing for their lives. To the east, the road ran straight into no-man's land, the Khmer Rouge territory and then Thailand beyond. The long and porous Thai-Cambodian frontier still makes regulation of border crossings especially difficult and that includes policing the trade in small arms. For years, no-one with money has had trouble equipping a small army here.

And sometimes people try just that. A couple of years ago, two members of a Burmese guerrilla group made a trip to a former Khmer Rouge zone not far from Bovel. They thought that now that the Khmer Rouge had made peace with the government there would be plenty of weapons for sale which they needed for their war against the Burmese dictatorship. In the 1990s they would have been treated like valuable customers and all their needs supplied but Cambodia is now changing. They were sent to Phnom Penh, the capital, where they were promptly arrested. Several months later, they were released and returned to their base in the Burmese jungle, empty handed. However, the illicit trade in weapons in the region has not been dealt with adequately, and it will exist as long as there is demand and poverty in south-east Asia. The whole region was wracked by war in the 1960s and early 1970s, but in fact conflict has continued for most of the last century. Cambodia sits at the centre of the troubled region, bordering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, and is a natural hub for smuggling. The trade in drugs and weapons has long been made easy by mountainous borders. Cambodia's wars lasted such a long time because of the sheer number of weapons in the country – many of them supplied covertly by the United States and China during the late 1970s. The illegal export trade is also thought to stretch further a field, to countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Things are changing. In April 1999, Samdech Hun Sen, the Prime Minister of Cambodia, declared that Cambodia would become a weapon-free society. Since 1998 the Royal Cambodian Government has had notable success, in the face of enormous difficulties, in a weapons collection program. In June 2003 the 108,000th weapon was destroyed at a ceremony in Cambodia's Kampot province. However, there are at least 500,000 and perhaps as many as one million small arms and light weapons - chiefly hand-guns, semi-automatic rifles and grenades - still in the country. Much more needs to be done to remove the threat posed by them to Cambodia's 12 million people.

Since the death of his wife Hy has not worked. He says he believes his attackers will do anything to destroy him. Hy's daughter Phally has recovered from her superficial wounds and is back at home with her father.

Find out more about the Control Arms campaign at www.controlarms.org

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