In Cambodia, old soldiers just seem to limp away.
Land mines were the confetti of the country's recent wars, scattered with abandon through its forests and fields. Their crippled victims, if they lived, became instant outcasts, a burden and a rebuke to their nation.
In ghastly military hospitals without running water, they shared narrow cots, begging visitors for crutches.
Today they hop about the marketplaces in ragged bits of uniforms, homeless and jobless, holding out their military caps for coins.
People try not to notice them.
"We are lower than dogs," said Chu Dim, 48, who lost his right leg in the 1970s fighting for a long-forgotten government. "People feed their dogs."
Now a band of these unwanted men has come together, hardly noticed as always, in an effort to help themselves.
Led by a former Khmer Rouge soldier, Touch Seour Ly, 47, they have formed what they call the Association for the Relief of Disabled Cambodians, an almost unheard-of self-help initiative in this demoralized nation.
Without help from the government or from any of the many private aid groups, they have carved out a village of their own on a patch of barren land as unwanted as they are.
Deep in the woods 90km southwest of Phnom Penh, they have cleared the ground, dug wells, built tiny shacks and prepared the soil for planting.
Over the past two years, about 200 amputees have moved in with their families, each with a plot that is 50m wide and 300m deep, enough to support a small farm.
They are just a few of the 40,000 Cambodians who have lost limbs to land mines over the years -- one of every 250 people, said to be the highest ratio of amputees per capita in the world.
During the Khmer Rouge years in the 1970s, when 1.7 million people died of starvation and sickness as well as by execution, only the luckiest and fittest survived. The weak were left, sometimes with just a pot of water, to die on their own.
That attitude still darkens society today, and the amputees say people turn away from them as if they were ghosts.
"When we walk past, people don't even see us," said Touch Seour Ly, who lost his right leg in 1983. "Like we aren't there. Even our former officers won't look at us. Before, when we were useful to them, they cared about us."
Their new society survives through comradeship and mutual assistance.
For each ridge and furrow, legless and armless men have joined to lift and dig together. A few poor but uninjured men have been invited to live here in return for heavy labor.
The settlement, scattered across the hard, bare ground, does not look much like a village, and the small huts, empty of furnishings, do not look much like homes.
So far, their farms have produced little to feed their families, and nothing to sell. Some of the men have become scavengers, scouring the woods for edible leaves and tubers.
The amputees have not yet proved that they can succeed on their own. A few have already given up and returned to begging.
When Touch Seour Ly, their leader, describes their most urgent needs, his list could be summed up as: everything.
"We need a road," he said, "and we need a school and a clinic. We need tools to farm with, and we need food."
Several hundred children live here with their families, he said. Most spend the day at hard labor. Many are the arms and legs of their disabled fathers.
Nov San, 49, a government soldier who lost both arms just below the shoulder when he was clearing mines in 1997, directs his 15-year-old daughter as she makes charcoal and plants rice and tomatoes.
Seour Sou, 42, who lost both legs fighting for a previous government in 1985, pushes himself through his field on a board with wheels, chopping at the hard earth with a hoe.
How long the amputees can keep this up is not clear.
"We are all sick," Touch Seour Ly said. "If we walk a lot it hurts. We have to saw wood sitting on the ground."
Sou Kouk, 47, sat shirtless and kneaded the stump of his left leg, unable to work. Like many young men in the 1980s, he was seized from his village by the government, thrown into the front lines and crippled almost immediately by a mine.
"I think something's wrong with a nerve," he said. "I don't have any money for doctors. I've got no one to help me but my wife."
Even if one of his four children is sick, he said, he cannot afford to transport them to a town for medical care. "We just stay at home and try to help them," he said.
Nevertheless, life is better here than it ever was in the world outside. He has a house now and for the first time a small field to plant.
What means the most to him, he said, is that he feels like a man again. He is as good as anybody else here. When he hobbles past, no one shouts at him, "Hey, cripple, get a job."
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese