The Media Mapper is an open source framework intended to be used as a starting point for building a web application geared towards exploring Media throughout time and space.
The project was dreamt up by Ennuri Jo as a way to explore the relationship between media and water. Funding for this project was provided by the University of Pennsylvania, Penn. The framework was developed by Ben Tyler and Lost Creek Designs.
Please see the GitHub repository for more information about how you can get started with the project!
ERM retraces the trajectories of various refugee groups in Cambodia during the 1970-1975 civil war between the Khmer Republic and the communist insurgency (‘Khmer Rouge’). The causes, routes, and logistics associated with these movements often overlapped with the displacements and military operations of the Cambodian republican army, South Vietnamese and American soldiers, and communist guerrillas (North Vietnamese, ‘Vietcong’, and Khmer Rouge troops). These dynamics illustrate what Asian American Studies scholar Yen Le Espiritu has described as ‘militarized refuge(e)’ in her book Body Counts (University of California Press, 2014).
The large-scale population movements between 1970 and 1975 marked the beginning of 25 years of forced migration for Cambodians within and beyond national borders, ending only with the United Nations-supervised repatriation efforts in the early 1990s. Yet, despite their significance, they have received limited scholarly attention. Throughout the conflict, journalists, humanitarian agencies, governmental officials, and military units documented the situation of the refugees, but the picture (numbers, locations, actors, processes, timelines, and conditions) remains impressionistic, and there has yet to be a critical discussion of these sources or their portrayal of refugees, government actions, and civil society responses.
ERM tries to take a step in this direction by tracing these intertwined trajectories with detailed historical data; locating the points of departure, transit, and arrival; and ‘re-materializing’ these movements through images, testimonies, press articles, and reports. As a work-in-progress, it aims to serve as a collaborative tool for reconstructing this overlooked history from multiple perspectives. In the absence of oral history projects, it seeks to recover voices that were barely recorded and not often heard (at least not without an institutional or journalistic mediation). It also aims to highlight the material and affective dimensions of refugeehood, including the way environment, landscapes, infrastructures, and ‘things’ shaped these mobilities.
The initial phase of media-mapping covers the “repatriation” of the ethnic Vietnamese minority from Cambodia to South Vietnam in 1970. This relocation of 200,000 to 250,000 civilians (out of a minority group of half a million) was prompted by Cambodia’s deeper involvement in the Vietnam War and growing anti-Vietnamese sentiments in the country. The term “repatriation” is misleading since many had lived in Cambodia for decades or were born there and had never been in South Vietnam.
The joint operation was carried out by a governmental delegation from Saigon and the Cambodian authorities, using river convoys composed of South Vietnamese Navy military vessels escorted by US gunboats. The ships went upstream the Mekong River for military operations, unloading troops and weapons for coordinated actions against the Vietnamese communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, and on the way back, they transported refugees. The latter generally passed through military bases and transit camps, but their fate upon arrival in South Vietnam could vary greatly. Those who came from there or had relatives there could be integrated more readily. The others were resettled through the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), a pacification program involving US and South Vietnamese civilian and military authorities with the aim to gain support for Saigom from the rural population.
ERM currently focuses on May-October 1970 (the main period of the “repatriation”) and the Phnom Penh area. Smaller-scale operations occurred later stages and/or elsewhere in Cambodia, but there is less documentation about them. For example, Vietnamese who lived in the border zones often escaped to South Vietnam on foot and in South Vietnamese military trucks. Records also show the presence of Vietnamese civilians in refugee camps in Battambang City until 1972. These regional variations will be integrated at a later stage (camps in provincial cities and rural areas) along with more information about military operations in Cambodia and the transit camps and relocation in South Vietnam. Finally, and depending on collected materials and testimonies, ERM will also try to follow the trajectories of people who fled South Vietnam in 1975 after the fall of Saigon to the Communists and relocated in third countries.
Research on the experiences of ethnic Vietnamese refugees from Cambodia during the 1970-1975 civil war is limited, possibly because it was tied to a wave of anti-Vietnamese violence in Cambodia as the country went to war against the Vietnamese Communists within its borders. Yet, it is critical to understanding the intertwined history of refugeehood and nation-building in Cambodia, and more broadly in the region as new alliances formed between Phnom Penh and Saigon. Moreover, the loss of many skilled workers, business owners, and other professionals had a deep impact on the Khmer Republic’s economy and everyday life. As well, the logistics of managing thousands of Vietnamese awaiting in camps their evacuation to South Vietnam gave the Cambodian authorities their first experience of handling mass displacement and related humanitarian issues. In this respect, it was for them the “blueprint” or what rapidly escalated into a “refugee crisis” with possibly half of Cambodia’s population displaced by war and fleeing to the relative safety of Phnom Penh. It was thus a pivotal moment for the country, from the sociopolitical, economic, institutional, and humanitarian perspectives.