They are the continuing victims of a Cambodian holocaust that shocked the world--and they are all but forgotten. Seventeen years after the Khmer Rouge began killing more than one million of their countrymen, the tragedy continues for some 350,00 Khmer refugees trapped in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. Nowhere is the suffering more widespread that at Site 2, a dusty bamboo slum in the middle of nowhere. A place where even the strongest spirits can shatter.
Originally meant to be an emergency room way station, Site 2 has become the largest Cambodian city in the world outside of Phnom Penh. Its 200,000 residents--proud and resilient people--live behind barbed wire, kept alive on a diet of United Nations rations.
Site 2 is a place where enemy artillery shells can fall at any moment, a community where the crime is soaring. People are crammed into rows of small huts, and their children have little to do. Many of the residents have been at the camp since it was created in 1985 as a refuge from the Cambodian civil war, and they are desperate to return home.
Their fate is still uncertain. But somehow the people at Site 2 look to the future. They are trying to preserve Khmer culture and educate their young. they are learning medical and governmental skills to prepare for the day when they can finally go home.
Told in dramatic pictures and words, Beyond the Killing Fields is a reminder that the Cambodian nightmare still continues, and an eye-opening look at one of the most notorious refugee camps in the world today,
Kari Rene Hall, 33, has been a Los Angeles Times photographer since 1980. An award-winning photojournalist, Hall has traveled to Vietnam and Thailand on assignment for The Times and has taken a special interest in covering Cambodian, Vietnamese, Montagnard and Cham refugee communities in the United States. Hall's photographs from Cambodian refugee camps have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines around the U.S. and were part of the Force Out exhibit at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which is currently traveling internationally. Photographs of Cambodian Refugees at Site 2 won National Press Photographers Association's 1991 documentary project competition. In 1988, Hall was a judge in Arets Presse Foto annual Pictures of the Year competition in Odense, Denmark. A southern California native, Hall received a B.A. from California State University, Long Beach in 1980 with a special major in photography and radio/television with a minor in psychology.
John Getlin, 41, has been a Los Angeles Times reporter since 1979. He has made several reporting trips to Southeast Asia, covering stories on Cambodian refugee, the search for American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the repartition of Montagnard tribes men in the United States. He is currently a Times correspondent based in New York City, where he lives with his wife Heidi Evans, a reporter for the New York Daily News.
