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Cambodia hospitals face dry season flood.
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By ELIZABETH PISANI
672 words
15 February 1996
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Asia Times
English
(c) 1996 Chamber World Network International Ltd

Cambodia's military hospitals, braced for the annual dry-season parade of amputees and war-wounded, are desperately short of just about everything - despite a donation by the the nation's businessmen.

Aware that casualties would start pouring in as soon as his government's troops began their annual dry season offensive against the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen recently appealed to Cambodia's business community for funding for the nation's five military hospitals.

A senior doctor who works with hospital finance said he understood that businessmen had come up with a large donation. But where the money was, nobody seemed to know.

"I haven't heard a thing about it," said Dr Srey Vantha, a surgeon at Phnom Penh's military hospital.

It is certainly not in evidence in the urine-soaked corridors of the hospital, where flies settle on the bandaged stumps of limbs recently blown off by land mines and soldiers tend to their own wounds.

"We need just about everything. Little things, everyday things, like bandages and tape and antibiotics which make operations successful," the surgeon said.

With a growing proportion of the armed forces thought to be infected with the HIV virus, doctors are particularly worried about the lack of sterilizing equipment and surgical gloves used to prevent the spread of the virus.

Some accuse the government of neglecting to care for the victims of its civil war. "In my opinion, the Ministry of Defense has the money to buy medicines. I don't know what they do with it, but they clearly have other priorities," said the medical director of an international aid organization.

The non-government organizations that fly the flags of poverty as they swarm the streets of Cambodia in their four-wheel-drive vehicles contribute substantially to the country's health sector, but refuse to help military hospitals, which are funded by the defense ministry.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is religious in its political neutrality, gives basic supplies when things get too bad, but it too has other priorities. The ICRC said its most recent donation to military hospitals was US$10,000 worth of bandages and antibiotics, made just before the annual hostilities began in mid-January.

In the first three weeks of the fighting season, some 120 soldiers wounded on the northwestern front lines have made it to hospital, more than half of them with limbs blown apart by land mines.

If last year's pattern is anything to go by - and these things tend to repeat themselves in Cambodia - the number of victims will rise above 400 a month between now and April. Of the total, 1,500 will be injured by land mines.

"We just have too many patients," said Srey Vantha, "and most of them are here with their families. They all need to be fed, and they contribute very much to the hygiene problems." Much of the hospital - built by the French in the 1930s - has no running water.

One suggestion is to house family members in a separate block, which could be funded and run by the NGOs that refuse to help out with military victims. Another is to move people through the hospital more quickly, although rehabilitation centers are already packed and some patients do not have the money to go back to their home villages.

Bou Bim lost his leg to a land mine just days ago. Lying in a corridor surrounded by naked children, Bou Bim indicated his tattooed chest and arms. "I had this done, three days of pain, to protect my body before I became a soldier," he said.

But the protection only works in conjunction with the prayers of a mentor. Bou Bim's mentor, who was also his military commander, was transferred. "So the protection was broken. And now this," he said, waving at what remained of his right leg.

Copyright 1996 Asia Times.

(c) 1996 Chamber World Network International Ltd.

 

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