cambodia still has more than 34,440 people living in displacement camps months after the latest fighting with Thailand. The Ministry of Interior said 11,355 of them are children, while some families are still in tents, under restrictions near the border, or waiting to return home.
Puth Reen is among the displaced in northwestern Cambodia. Her daughter Sokna, 11, has stopped going to school, and Puth Reen said, “I tried to tell them to go to school, but they don’t go.”
Puth Reen in northwestern Cambodia
Puth Reen said she came back to Cambodia after fleeing neighbouring Thailand, where she had worked for many years, when the fighting started. Her family now lives in a blue tarpaulin tent on the grounds of a Buddhist pagoda, a setup that leaves school routines, privacy, and normal household life suspended.
Some displaced Cambodians are surviving off aid donations, while some families are moving from emergency tents into wooden stilted houses provided by the Cambodian government. That split shows how the response has started to take shape, but it has not reached everyone in the same way.
Sun Reth near the border
Sun Reth, 67, said authorities would not let her sleep in her house or pick cashew nuts from her farm. She said, “Now the Cambodian military base is just next to [my house].”
Her case shows the same border pressure from another angle: some people are not only displaced, but also blocked from using land they still own or lived on before the fighting. Thai forces used shipping containers and barbed wire to block access to villages once inhabited by Cambodians, and the Cambodian military has prevented some people from returning to front-line areas.
December 27 ceasefire
The Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire was reached on December 27 after two rounds of conflict last year, one lasting five days in July and another lasting almost three weeks in December. Dozens were reported killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes during the fighting.
Five months after the ceasefire, the border remains tense, and the people still living in camps are the ones carrying that unfinished conflict into daily life. For families like Puth Reen’s, the immediate task is not diplomacy but keeping children in school, securing food, and finding a place that can be used as home again.
