Cambodia Today: Still A Poignant Sideshow

PREY TOTONG, Cambodia, Jan. 14 (1971) — There is nothing to destroy here, because there is nothing left. Once it was a thriving provincial town of 6000 people, now 300 remain to wander in the rubble…

Catastrophe came to Prey Totong in mid-December. The town, located about 60 miles northeast of Phnom Penh on Highway 7, became the focus of one of the major battles of the 10-month-old Cambodian war. U.S. airstrikes were made in support of the ground operation….

The Background:

On what, by coincidence, turned out to be the date that 50 years ago Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk was ousted in a coup that led to a decade of horrific violence– March 18, 1969, I returned to Prey Totung. The long war in Cambodia was an extension of America’s decade of misadventures in Vietnam and Laos that continued well after the U.S. withdrew from the region.

In the early 1970s, I was a correspondent based in Saigon for The Washington Post. When I recently asked the Post library for help in researching my Cambodia stories, I was told there were 103 of them, which would indicate that I spent considerable time there.

This March, we came as tourists with a mission to understand, as nearly as possible, why this country endured such epic tragedy. Two million Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979, murdered by their own people, the warriors known as the Khmer Rouge.

The mostly still unresolved mystery is how this poor but viable land of peasants, pagodas and temples built more than a thousand years ago came to be known, to the extent it is known at all in the United States at all, as “The Killing Fields.”

I was accompanied on the trip by my wife Susan who I met in Saigon in 1970 where she was working with an NGO that supplied free legal assistance to GIs in disciplinary trouble. The Post’s office was next door to Susan’s in a small building in downtown Saigon at 203 Tu Do Street.

We were joined on our trip last month by our cousin, Scott Malkin, who proved a remarkable point about Cambodia today. He was able to conduct global business by phone and e-mail wherever we happened to be — including the back of tuk tuks (motorized cyclos that replaced what used to be bicycles) that are a standard form of transportation in Cambodia. He is also the co-owner of the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders and watched them lose (unfortunately) to the Montreal Canadians on his iPad at breakfast in Siem Reap.

Cambodia was identified as the sideshow to what Vietnamese call “The American War” from the 1960s to 1975 in the title of William Shawcross’s brilliant book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, published in the late 70s. This was the description of how for its own reasons, the U.S. was instrumental in turning Cambodia from a land of time-honored gentleness into “The Killing Fields” based on an Oscar-winning film that told the saga of a New York Times correspondent and his Cambodian interpreter, Dith Pran, who survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and escaped. (A bit more about Pran below).

Cambodia has to a large extent recovered. As much as half of the population of 17 million is 25 or younger. By the indicators that define crises elsewhere in the world, Cambodia has been largely spared. There is no military insurgency challenging the government any longer. There is no serious religious persecution of minorities (as in Myanmar, for instance). And there is no widespread health crisis like Ebola in Africa. While precise statistics are probably not entirely reliable, the economy has been growing, fueled by Chinese investments and the export of cheap clothing to the United States and Europe, with tariffs reduced in the latter by the EU’s “Everything But Arms” (EBA) agreements.

The country’s leader is Hun Sen, who came to power in 1985 after the Vietnamese had ousted the Khmer Rouge. He is authoritarian and has suppressed any meaningful political opposition. Human rights abuses are widespread, according to Human Rights Watch. The European Union recently sent representatives to Phnom Penh with warnings that Cambodia could lose its qualifications to be part of the EBA agreement if the political repression is not eased.

Cambodia’s regime, bad as it seems to be, is much like that of other countries in the region — Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines and China are all similarly autocratic, with their own national characteristics. Cambodia has no real democratic tradition either. It was a monarchy and once again has a figurehead king installed by Hun Sen. For 100 years before the war Cambodia was a French colony. There are the barest traces of that legacy. English is the lingua franca aside from Khmer and the dollar is a dominant currency even for Cambodians. The Chinese presence is vast and growing. Hordes of Chinese tourists flock the temples of Angkor (on subsidized package trips). Beijing has also invested heavily in infrastructure projects including the construction of high rises in Phnom Penh that have transformed the skyline and the opening of vast casinos.

The simplest way to summarize the situation we encountered is that Cambodia is, once again, largely itself. It is not an ideologically driven state as Vietnam is. There is a range of daily life that goes literally from tools of the Iron Age to modern technology that has arrived over the past decade or so. The smart phone is pervasive. It has a homogeneous racial population, a countryside populated largely by peasants and cities full of an urban class of young people who are much like their counterparts elsewhere, always attached to their devices, carrying backpacks and wearing tee-shirts with wry messages.

At our hotel in Phnom Penh, the Raffles Royal, the “Cambodian Women’s Entrepreneurial Association” was having a workshop on cyber issues in a large ballroom.

These observations by a visitor with an interest in the country but who is by no means expert are open to challenge by the small group of Westerners who have made Cambodia a focus of their life’s work. But mine is the perspective of a reporter who in the past and on this trip found Cambodians especially appealing and yet deeply disturbing. Looking past the placid present, it is impossible not to ask how a country as ostensibly peaceful as this one descended into so severe a spasm of violence and cruelty. By contrast, at the end of the war in Vietnam there were mass incarcerations in re-education camps but no genocide. In the Balkan wars of the 1990s, there were deep ethnic rivalries. In Rwanda the conflict was between Tutsis and Hutus. In Cambodia, it was Khmer on Khmer.

Tuol Sleng, a former school that was one of the places of gruesome torture in the 1970s has artifacts of suffering that are on a par with the Nazi concentration camps that I have seen. There are rooms full of methodically documented victim photos. Iron bedsteads where prisoners were shackled, and to an American, the uncomfortably recognizable, presence of waterboarding planks of the kind used in post-9/11 incarcerations of U.S. captives.

There are a variety of explanations for the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. An extremist fringe of communists believed that only by returning Cambodia to “Year Zero” could a truly egalitarian society be created. The Khmer Rouge also gathered support from a population terrified by air strikes sending them fleeing from their homes and Vietnamese-backed assaults on their villages. The Vietnamese were fighting a conflict of what the Hanoi regime relentlessly described as a patriotic war of unification. After the 1969 coup, Cambodia was led by a group of generals, behind Lon Nol, who were, in too many ways to list, incompetent. If there was a lasting vision in their leadership years, it is hard to fathom.

The actual number of civilian Cambodians killed during the U.S. backed phase of the war has been set at up to 500,000. One ongoing academically financed study that measures deaths site by site has the number as low as 50,000. But the consequences of what began as the “secret bombing” of North Vietnamese enclaves in Cambodia in 1969, the incursions of United States and Vietnamese forces into the country in May 1970 and the torrent of disruption that was unleashed were factors in fostering a tragedy — in which American responsibility was a cause, although not the only one.

It was Cambodians that did the killing and to this day, there is, to me at least, no satisfactory explanation for why that happened.

Prey Totung, Battambang and Angor Wat:

The road to Prey Totung is four lanes for most of the way and lined with countless shed-like kiosks selling household goods, food and simple services like beauty salons. The proprietors sit on small stools and the feel is very much the same as it was when the war began fifty years ago. Prey Totung is a bustling market town with no visible evidence of its tragic past. Cambodian pagodas are the colorful pride of all towns and behind one of them in Prey Totung, we sat with a family led by a 73-year-old widow, who shares her simple home built on stilts as is the custom (to protect against rainy seasons floods and improve ventilation) with her son (whose motorbike carried a police insignia), a daughter-in-law and grandson. She had six children of whom two survive and too many grandchildren to count, she said. She showed us her Chinese-made smart phone (they cost about $35 but, we were told, second-hand iPhones are a bigger status symbol). There was a fluorescent light but no plumbing. Chickens scratched in a small cage. She spent the war years barely managing to stay alive, she said, avoiding the Khmer Rouge and the air strikes, like those that had destroyed the town. Her rice crop failed this year because of a drought. We gave her a $20 bill as we left to partially offset her loss.

On the road we stopped at a particularly dilapidated shed where a woman was selling knock-off CDs and postcards and beauty products that had seen better days. She also showed us her cell phone but confided she really didn’t know how to use it. Her war years were spent moving from place to place under what seems to be Khmer Rouge control. While we were talking, a man on a motorbike pulled up nearby and she whispered that he was head of the commune, a local official. It was likely that when we pulled away she was asked by him who we were and why we were there. I should add that our interpreter that day was a Western academic who asked us not to use his name.

Across the road was a larger roadside shed serving as, a Cambodian “pub” with about forty men of varying ages spending their midday with beer or coffees and betting on televised cock fights on a large screen beamed from northern Thailand because the sport is technically banned in Cambodia. We ended the day back in Phnom Penh at the hotel bar where on the wall is displayed (and shown with pride by staff) of the 1973 official press card of Elizabeth Becker, who was the Post’s correspondent and has written the best book on the conflict’s aftermath “When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Revolution” (Revised edition) available from PublicAffairs.

Battambang is Cambodia’s third largest city with about 150,000 residents, a five- hour drive from Phnom Penh. There is a railway station but rarely trains. We drove from Phnom Penh in a hotel-chauffeured, air-conditioned BMW. That was notable because it was so resonant of the early war years when reporters would travel to battle scenes in cars previously used by tourists which gave them a perversely incorrect sense of safety, leading to journalists being killed in ambushes.

Today’s Battambang is charming because it hasn’t undergone the helter-skelter building surge in Phnom Penh and features colonial era architecture. It is one of those exotic Asian places that attracts younger Westerners who stay in inexpensive guest houses. We stayed in a boutique hotel called Bric-A-Brac owned by an Australian artist and his American partner and maintained with style and personal hospitality. We had a nostalgia-inducing mosquito net in our room which we decided was mainly for show because we had air conditioning and the window open to the street was shut.

Our local guide took us to a blacksmith’s shed where workers were making metal platforms for the tuk tuks with tools not unlike those used by their ancestors millennia ago. Next stop was to watch two young women molding rice paper for spring rolls over a small fire to be distributed to swank hotels like The Bamboo where we had lunch. That elegant place, owned by an ex-pat Irish man would not be out of place anywhere tourists in Asia gather.

Those three places on a morning’s tour are a measure of the scale of life in Cambodia, where time had stood still in so many ways and yet is also connected to the hip, virtual 21st century world.

The temples around Angkor Wat are world renowned and are in strikingly good shape. We had never seen them because during the war they were in Khmer Rouge hands. There is an internationally supported effort to maintain them. Surprisingly the Khmer Rouge did not damage the temples extensively when they occupied them. I suspected that, looking at the ancient statues of Gods and Demons, they decided not to take a chance on fate.

At Angkor Thom we encountered a young ticket-taker on a break, sitting in a nook and studying her phone. What was she looking at? Facebook, we were told. It is very popular and apparently not circumscribed by the regime. The temples are crowded with tourists from dawn to dusk. The Chinese, we were told, pay $300 per person and get flights, lodging and food with, we were told, all that money going to the Chinese travel companies rather than the Cambodians.

For an unforgettable experience, we arrived before dawn on March 21, the spring equinox, to see the sun rise above the tri-towered Angor Wat, Cambodia’s symbol on flags and stamps. There were thousands of people on hand with an almost equal number of smart phone cameras snapping away. The Chinese are partial to selfies, sometimes teetering on ancient rock. A cheer went up when the sun finally burst through the clouds over the temple. I decided that the experience at the temples was very, very cool to see and at the same time very, very hot, approaching 100 degrees around the clock in late March.

In Phnom Penh there is a large American embassy. We did not visit but did spend one another evening with a group of ex-pat Americans: a former newspaper editor, a professor at the university, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and an academic. We had dinner another night with a Canadian journalist who took us to a restaurant maintained by an NGO called Friends International which has been there since 1994 “building futures for children and young people who lack opportunities.” There are other international organization on the ground to support the Cambodians, but the repressive policies of the Hun Sen government seem to have discouraged the sense that outsiders can make a meaningful difference in Cambodia’s development, compared, say, to the Chinese. While we were there an obituary ran in one of the (tame) English-language dailies for Bernard Krisher, 87, a former Newsweek correspondent who founded a once robust newspaper called The Cambodia Daily. He also started an organization which helped build 500 schools and a hospital in Phnom Penh to supply medical care to the poor. He no longer lived in Cambodia and died in Tokyo.

A final note.

Dith Pran, the hero of “The Killing Fields” died in 2008. After his escape, he became a successful photographer for The New York Times. Pran is a symbol of Cambodian resilience. When the war started, Pran and his driver partner, Mouv, left their jobs in a hotel in Siem Reap and came to Phnom Penh where Peter A. Jay, a Post correspondent first retained them to help us when we were in the country. It was Pran who took me all those years ago to Prey Totung. When Sid Schanberg became the Times’s reporter in Cambodia, he hired Pran full time. (Here is a link to a piece I wrote when he died.)

Cambodia today is a land at peace. We were very glad we came on this trip and still very sad that the country had to suffer so greatly as a sideshow to a failed U.S. attempt to forestall communism in Southeast Asia, where in China and Vietnam it is flourishing. But not in Cambodia.