Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  Not until late that evening did columns of armor—tanks and APCs—begin approaching the capital from the South, where Hun Sen maintained his country estate and military compound. A few of his tanks, scrambled in a rush, ran out of gas on the way. But by the second day, July 6, 1997, Hun Sen had brought all of his forces into a fierce battle.

  At the U.S. Embassy, “our building was shaking,” Quinn said. “We began burning all the files. There were tanks in the streets. We took out our own weapons. We were ready to destroy the communications equipment, the codes.”

  But by the end of the second day, the fighting was all but over. Hun Sen had prevailed. Funcinpec forces were on the run. Hun Sen’s soldiers captured and summarily executed dozens of Funcinpec officers. Funcinpec secretary-general Nhiek Bun Chhay said Hun Sen’s forces captured five of his bodyguards, gouged out their eyes, and then killed them. He also accused Hun Sen’s forces of executing thirty of his soldiers after they had surrendered and then burning their bodies.

  Hun Sen’s soldiers looted shops and businesses downtown while Funcinpec soldiers and officers began calling the U.S. Embassy, asking for refuge. Quinn now said he told his staff: If anyone comes to the embassy, let them in. Human-rights officials and others have long insisted, however, that the embassy actually turned these people away. But whatever happened at the embassy, Quinn did rent the ballroom of the Cambodiana Hotel and began sending people who needed refuge over there.

  By day three, the city was quiet. The war was over.

  Prince Ranariddh, mortally offended by his treatment by Hun Sen, had thought he could topple this peasant, this Communist, from power. He wanted to take his rightful place as Cambodia’s undisputed leader. It turned out, however, that the Khmer Rouge had not come to fight for either side. Hun Sen’s forces, despite Ranariddh’s surprise initial attack, came to the battle with more troops and superior intelligence. They turned the battle around and defeated Ranariddh’s troops.

  Even with Hun Sen’s long record of violent, perfidious behavior, Ranariddh was unquestionably the aggressor. But in Washington that same afternoon, the State Department spokesman, Nicholas Burns, read a statement condemning Hun Sen, saying the United States strongly opposed “the use of force to change the results of the 1993 election and the use of force by the forces of Hun Sen to effectively rupture the Paris accords of 1991.”

  Soon after, Washington announced it would end all foreign aid to Cambodia. “They never asked me,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “On day three, when the fighting was all over, Washington ordered the evacuation of all Americans and nonessential embassy personnel. They never asked me about that either. I had to send my family away. I felt terrible. It didn’t feel like we were respected, like we were being paid attention to.” But then, Quinn knew full well that most everyone in Washington hated Hun Sen. He’d seen hints that Ranariddh was planning something, “and I’d sent bits and pieces of that in cables. But some people in Washington didn’t necessarily want to believe that.”

  In Washington the issues were black-and-white. Hun Sen was the villain. Ranariddh and Rainsy were the heroes. But since he arrived in Phnom Penh, Quinn had been building a close working relationship with Hun Sen. He was the man in power. Wasn’t that how an ambassador could be most effective? They held frequent meetings and had dinner at each other’s homes. Quinn had even stood next to him when Hun Sen received an honorary degree from Iowa Wesleyan University, at a ceremony in Phnom Penh—bringing catcalls from across the city. What Quinn didn’t bargain on was the disrespect, even hatred, this strategy would bring him, from human-rights officials, members of Congress—even some in his own department. To them, Quinn was a quisling.

  This may explain why State Department officials paid so little mind to his cables suggesting that Ranariddh had started the battle. “He was boastful of his relations with Hun Sen,” Abney said, his voice laced with scorn. At a congressional hearing a few days after the fighting ended, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, demanded that “Ken Quinn, our ambassador in Phnom Penh, be immediately recalled from Cambodia to appear before this committee and to answer questions before this committee and to the American people about why there has been a less than forceful opposition to these horrible events we’re witnessing in Cambodia.”

  Eni F. H. Faleomavaega, who represented American Samoa, echoed Rohrabacher’s suspicions and went so far as to imply that Quinn might even have helped Hun Sen set off the attack. Rohrabacher’s statement “seems to collaborate some of the things that I have heard also through the rumor mill about the activities of our ambassador there. Has he been participating in the process, or is he staying on neutral grounds, or is he trying to do something that is not in conformance with our policies towards Cambodia?”

  When Abney testified, he piled on as well. The American Embassy “has continually refused to criticize Hun Sen and, in fact, has a relationship with him which frightens the outspoken critics of his strongarm government.”

  A State Department official testified that the government had full confidence in Quinn. Still, most every member of Congress, every diplomat, every journalist and commentator, had settled on Hun Sen as the villain. After years of vilifying him, from the days he ruled Cambodia as a puppet of Hanoi and a “Communist stooge,” this stance felt natural, even comfortable, for its certainty. Hun Sen had engineered a “coup” to depose Ranariddh, the senior prime minister. As that conviction took hold, the dislike of the man among most everyone who followed Cambodia thickened to detestation.

  Hun Sen was now responsible for the conclusion most everyone now drew: The grandest nation-building operation the world body had ever undertaken had collapsed. Democracy was dead. Hun Sen had squandered the $3 billion gift to the long-suffering Cambodian people. “The four-year-old experiment with democracy is in dire straits, and a tyrant has seized power through the force of arms, intimidation, terror, and summary executions,” said Representative Doug Bereuter, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. “This is altogether too familiar ground for the Cambodian people. Few people have experienced as much pain, suffering and terror as the people of Cambodia over the last 30 years.”

  Benny Widyono, who had just completed his term as the UN’s special representative in Cambodia, was one of just a few public officials to lay blame on another offending party. The United Nations “left the four parties intact and armed to the teeth,” he told the Washington Post. Funding for the UN operation had been so drastically cut that “we gambled on the election,” as if “that was the main thing in the agreement. We should have stayed longer in the post-conflict rebuilding process.”

  Brad Adams, a senior UN official in Cambodia, told a congressional committee, “It seems fair to ask why the international community would negotiate a peace treaty with strong provisions regarding human rights and democracy and then mount the largest, most expensive peacekeeping operation ever—involving 20,000 soldiers and an army of election and human rights monitors, all at a cost of over $2 billion—and then lose interest.”

  But Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, seemed to be living in a dream world. He continued to boast of the UN’s great achievement, even a few days after the fighting ended. “The UN operation was successful in helping establish national institutions which could lead to stability and economic development,” he averred.

  Quinn was the most disappointed of all. In 1974 he had delivered the world’s first warning about the coming Khmer Rouge horror. He had written his dissertation on the Khmer Rouge. As a deputy assistant secretary of state, he been an important player in the work to set up the UN occupation and election—the world’s effort to redeem the state and its people. And he had arrived as ambassador “with an idealized view, that if they could find a way for everybody to live together and share, there can be a better life for everyone.”

  Naive, perhaps, but now, he said, “The international community paid a ton of money to help them restore their country, but then they put in plac
e another game. All of them were trying to reshuffle the deck and climb back on top, push the others out of the way.” Quinn had come to understand that “Cambodians are capable of doing awful, destructive things to their own country for their own gain. You come away so dispirited by their efforts to manipulate you as part of their effort to destabilize the country for their own benefit. Now all the things we had worked for, all of this lay shattered, pieces on the floor. Like Humpty Dumpty. All the promise, it fell apart. It was over.”

  In Washington, some people were so angry that, through gritted teeth, they began calling for regime change.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For a people still reeling from the trauma of war, the continuing violence in the 1990s nourished the debilitating mental illnesses that still plagued so many Cambodians. During the street battles for control of the government, tens of thousands of people huddled in their homes, quivering, hearts racing.

  Even when there was no actual fighting, all too often visitors found residents of villages nationwide terrified to venture beyond their town’s perimeter, afraid a Khmer Rouge soldier might be behind any tree. At the same time, across the nation Cambodians routinely unearthed mass graves by accident. Each held dozens, or hundreds, of skeletal remains from Khmer Rouge execution grounds. Most often villagers piled the remains in barns or outbuildings the Khmer Rouge had once used. Even now, decades later, villagers say the skulls speak to them.

  Seth Mydans of the New York Times visited one of these villages in May 1996 and observed a haunted landscape:

  When the air grows still and heavy here in this pretty village far from any paved road, people say they sometimes hear the sun-bleached skulls of Cambodia’s holocaust, piled nearby in the ruins of a schoolhouse, talking to one another. “Sometimes we hear them crying,” said Sim Than, a farmer. “You can hear the voices of women and children and men, just as if they were alive.”

  People say they still hear the faint ring of a lunch bell, as they did more than 17 years ago when the schoolhouse served as a prison and sometimes as a torture chamber. The worst, they say, is when they hear again the moans that came to them from a thick stand of bamboo where prisoners were clubbed to death in the back of the neck. When the people here walk their cows past the schoolhouse to graze, or when their children wander through, picking small yellow berries, they sometimes stoop to replace the skulls that the cows have knocked from among the many hundreds that are piled here.

  Across Cambodia, at hundreds of former killing fields like this one, scattered bones and bits of clothing lie unburied and largely ignored. And in thousands of villages like this one, men and women who worked for the Khmer Rouge have returned to their formerly quiet lives, farming their fields and raising their children side by side with the families of people they abused and killed. Those anonymous bones and unpunished victimizers are part of the fabric of Cambodia today.

  Most of the nation’s Khmer Rouge survivors suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but through the 1990s no one in Cambodia recognized this or offered any treatment. No one paid any attention at all, allowing the illness to fester and, in some cases, worsen. For someone suffering from PTSD, most anything out of the ordinary could set off a heart-wrenching panic. For older people with heart trouble, these panics could trigger a heart attack.

  One day in the late 1990s technicians set off a planned explosion at the edge of Phnom Penh. “Some old mines were being detonated by the Cambodian Mine Action Center to get rid of them,” Quinn remembered. “This set off a major panic downtown because people heard the noise and thought it was 1975 again and that the city was about to be retaken by the Khmer Rouge. Markets closed, schools emptied, and people raced to find their families and get home to safety.”

  Devon Hinton, M.D., a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, studied this phenomenon for many years, primarily among Cambodian refugees in Lowell, Massachusetts. More than half of the Khmer Rouge survivors there had PTSD. As he saw it, this illness was just the tip of an iceberg sitting atop a distressingly diverse array of pernicious physical and mental illnesses—one complication that led to another and triggered another and then set off another still. Most of them suffered from one of several physical ailments that resulted from protracted trauma, including blurry vision, headaches, heart palpitations, constant buzzing in the ears, shortness of breath, and a painful neck and shoulders—mimicking the pain of carrying heavy buckets of dirt on a pole resting on the shoulder while working for the Khmer Rouge.

  More than half of these survivors frequently experienced intense, sometimes violent, angry outbursts against members of their own families. Normal household disputes triggered these incidents, including something as simple as children who they perceived had acted disrespectfully. The victim might scream at his child, throw things, or strike him, while at the same time he experienced heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, and chest pain characteristic of a panic attack. At the very same time, he might also experience flashbacks of the events that precipitated the mental illness. Typically, the victim would recall working as a slave for the Khmer Rouge while starving, being tortured, or “forced to stand with biting ants crawling over the body,” Hinton wrote in a study published in 2009.

  These symptoms played directly into Cambodian spirituality. Across Southeast Asia people believe that spirits inhabit most objects and people. The little templelike shrines you see on stands in the yards near businesses or homes have nothing directly to do with Buddhism. In these shrines people leave food and other offerings for the spirits. Cambodians believe the spirits within them are particularly powerful. Anger sets them off, and they begin to cause mayhem within the body—boiling blood that rises in the body, eventually reaching the brain. That superstitious fear, by itself, is terrifying. Coupled with debilitating PTSD, it is even worse.

  For these people there was no relief even when they went to sleep. Many Cambodians also suffered from sleep paralysis and an associated disorder known as “ghost sitting.” Sixty percent of the men and women Hinton studied who had PTSD suffered from these two afflictions. “Clinical experience suggests that sleep paralysis occurs at a very high rate in the Cambodian population,” he wrote in another published study. During sleep paralysis, “Cambodians frequently hallucinate certain supernatural beings,” including “a ghost sent by a sorcerer to kill the victim by putting objects into the body, a demon that wants to scare the soul from the body—or the ghost of someone who was killed during the Pol Pot period.” Others might hallucinate “near drowning experiences” or “having a plastic bag placed over the head,” both common Khmer Rouge torture or execution techniques. These events seem to occur during a state halfway between sleep and wakefulness. They could last for roughly five to thirty minutes, and through all of it the victim feels paralyzed; he cannot move or speak. Cambodians call this “the ghost pushing you down.”

  One victim profiled in Hinton’s study, a forty-one-year-old woman, said she repeatedly saw “the black shape of a man clutching a knife and walking toward her. With one hand he pointed the raised knife at her; with the other he grabbed her shirt front.” Another victim, a forty-eight-year-old woman, “initially became conscious of her inability to move. Next she saw three ghastly demons, creatures with fur and long fangs, approach her. One of the ogres came close to her head.” Another “held down her legs; yet another held her arms.” Then, “ogres tried to scare her to death.” Usually someone would hear her frightened murmuring and shake her fully awake. The woman, identified only as Chea, said she could not sleep the rest of the night. Instead, horrid images from the Khmer Rouge era came flooding back into her mind, including one when she saw soldiers leading three of her friends from her village, blindfolded, behind a stand of trees twenty yards away. “A minute later, Chea heard the sickening sound of a skull being cracked with a club.”

  Victims of sleep paralysis, ghost sitting, and related trauma wake up terrified, exhausted, and subject to panic attacks throughout the
day. Some grow so anxious that they become dizzy, afraid they might fall down. Not surprisingly, they suffer chronic insomnia. They are afraid to go to sleep, which only exacerbates the problems.

  Daryn Reicherter, M.D., a psychiatrist at Stanford University, discovered identical sleep paralysis and ghost-sitting symptoms among a different Cambodian refugee population, in San Jose, California. He also encountered the phenomenon of hysterical blindness. “The Khmer Rouge generally spared blind people,” he noted. “So people used that as a coping strategy. They pretended to be blind.” Now, “many of the Khmer Rouge victims’ coping strategies today are maladaptive,” or inappropriate. Some of his patients seem to go blind “when they are stressed.” He imitated a patient in his office bumping around with his arms stretched out. “You can’t really tell if it is fake or real. For him it might be real. It comes and goes, and it lingers to this day. I have seen some of this in Cambodia, too,” Reicherter added. “It’s at least the same there and probably worse.”

  These deeply troubled refugees in Massachusetts and California are largely dysfunctional. Numerous studies have shown that they can’t hold jobs. In one study, in Massachusetts, 90 percent of the PTSD patients were unemployed. Decades after moving to the United States these people still spoke no English. They lived tormented lives on government assistance.

  A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 looked at Cambodian refugees in Long Beach, California, who came to the United States in the early 1980s, just after the Khmer Rouge years. More than half suffered serious, debilitating depression. Two-thirds had PTSD. More than three-quarters of the adults had no education. Most were unemployed, desperately poor, and prone to irrational violence. More than one-quarter were disabled. They lived in slums and were emotionally incapable of interacting with others. In San Jose, too, “they are still monolingual, illiterate, unacculturated, drunk,” Reicherter said. “Most of these people cannot work. They are on disability still. They all have major depressive disorders.”