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

by Joel Brinkley

  A few hours earlier, I had accompanied two uniformed policemen as they walked down a narrow dirt path behind a small neighborhood of one-room Cambodian homes on stilts. The path led down to a small stream where residents went to bathe. Just one mile from Pailin’s city center residents had no electricity or running water. Down a short rise they came to the stream, little more than a creek three feet across, not even two inches deep, littered with small empty shampoo and liquid-soap squeeze tubes.

  A low tree hung over the stream, and as soon as the police made a turn in the path they saw the first victim, forty-three-year-old Sorn Phalla, bare-chested, hanging from a rope tied to a low branch, his chin at his chest, eyes wide open, tongue sticking out. He was a muscular fellow with short-cropped black hair and faint blue tattoos all over his chest in a serpentine Asian design. Some Cambodians believed tattoos like that protect you from harm. They did not appear to have worked that day. His feet were bare and dangled a few inches from the ground. No stool or other object lay beside him, nothing he could have jumped from to hang himself. But then, he was not the only victim. Two yards away Ream Sokny, a women in her midthirties, lay dead on the ground, faceup, coils of heavy wire wrapped tight around her neck. Apparently, she’d been strangled. Her legs splayed wide open, and water dribbled around her bare feet in the stream. She wore a yellow sarong and bra but was otherwise bare-chested. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, her face expressionless. A large green and white bath towel lay beside her in a pile.

  Along the rise overlooking the scene a dozen townspeople crouched, watching silently. One policeman wandered among them taking statements while the other looked over the bodies. In short order the woman’s husband made his presence known. He wore a beige shirt that looked like it had once been white and black pants rolled up to his knees. Crouching on the ground just above his wife, he muttered loud enough so that everyone could hear him. “I was away at the Thai-Cambodian border,” he said to no one in particular. The border was fewer than twenty miles away. “I drive a bulldozer. I come home just once or twice a month.” He gazed at the scene with a sour, pursed-lip expression. “I just received an award for good work on the road project, and I didn’t even get to tell her.”

  An older man in a sleeveless white T-shirt wandered around the scene, his face etched with hostility. He, too, spoke to no one in particular, but his manner was angry, pugnacious. “I share a fence with her, so we are like brother and sister. And this man killed her!” he declared, pointing urgently at the dead man hanging from the tree.

  A policeman pulled the dead man’s shorts down and examined his genitals with a gloved hand, looking for evidence of recent sex. When he finished he left the shorts pulled down so that the dead man presented an even more inelegant image, if that were possible. The officer then found a scythe and cut the dead man down. The body was stiff as a pole and simply fell back into a crook in the tree.

  The husband said, “He has tattoos, and she is scared of tattoos. He’s not handsome; he does not look like a movie star. I don’t think my wife had an affair with this man.” Just then the pugnacious older neighbor marched over to the tree, positioned himself behind the dead man, and gave his back a strong kick, knocking the body forward so it fell to the ground with a loud and sickening thud that raised a cloud of dust and stilled the crowd.

  Everyone watched intently until the dust finally settled and they could see him facedown in the dirt, his naked butt looking up to the sky. Within a few minutes ants were crawling over the body. The husband roused himself and walked over to his wife, the wire still coiled around her neck. He picked up the big green bath towel and covered her.

  Up the hill, in the little neighborhood where the couple had lived, another policeman was questioning a young girl who was sitting in the doorway of the dead woman’s small home—one room with wooden walls and a tin roof. A car battery powered a single fluorescent light. The couple had an actual bed, an unusual luxury in a Cambodian home—a straw mat on wooden slats. The woman had hung red, lacy curtains around it. On faded posters tacked to the walls Chinese models posed in fashions from ten or fifteen years before. A small photo album from their wedding sat precariously on one of the rafters. Inside, the victim, a pretty young woman, stood smiling in front of statues and pagodas. Her new husband was not shown; he must have been taking the pictures.

  The young girl said she sometimes stayed in the house when the husband was away and told the police that the dead man knew the woman and occasionally came over for dinner. “But they talked in a normal way,” suggesting that she had not seen any improper behavior.

  At the Adhoc office later that day, Chhoun Makkara, looking at his photos from the scene of the crime, said police told him that “they found sperm on both people. There was no trail in the grass, no crushed plants, so in my opinion, they were killed while they were getting ready to take a bath. They brought a towel. She’s only in a bra. He’s in shorts. But it’s hard to draw a conclusion.” Obvious questions, he admitted, included: How did it happen that the husband, who seldom came home, happened to be there that day? Did he catch the two of them in the act and, in a fit of rage, kill them?

  That evening, Chhoun Makkara said a friend at the police station told him that the police would likely charge the husband with the crime. A few days later, however, the police rendered a different, farfetched judgment. The young man killed the woman and then hung himself, raising the obvious question: Did the husband pay off the police?

  Just outside the Pursat town center one summer afternoon a week or so after the hanging and murder in Pailin, police were manning a traffic checkpoint on the main east-west highway. They’d placed a metal fence in the road so that it blocked the east lane of traffic. There, a policeman wearing an orange emergency vest stood under an umbrella, waving tractor-trailer trucks to the curb with an orange truncheon. Cars and small trucks were allowed to pass unhindered. Another officer stood behind another fence doing the same thing with traffic heading west, and at any given moment two or three trucks were idling beside the road in each direction.

  The officers said nothing to the trucks’ drivers. They didn’t have to. One by one, each driver hopped down from the truck cab with a handful of bills in his hand. He trotted over to the side of the road where three other officers stood behind their patrol car. Wordlessly, each of the drivers plopped the bills onto the squad car’s trunk as the officers watched, then ran back to his truck and drove away. One driver, stopped and questioned a short distance up the road, said he had paid 5,000 riel, or about $1.20.

  Capt. Sim Rath was standing under an umbrella behind the squad car, collecting the cash as the drivers dropped it off. He said nothing to the drivers as they paid their bribes; they exchanged not a word or even a glance. The captain looked both nervous and defiant as I approached. I asked him, “Why are you taking their money?”

  “They don’t have drivers’ licenses, or their trucks are too heavy,” he said without pause.

  “How do you know the trucks are too heavy if you don’t have a scale?”

  “I can tell. Some of these trucks were inspected before.” He pointed to his ticket book, folded open to one page that was filled out with a notice of infraction. But then, none of the drivers were leaving with tickets in their hands. Was the ticket book for show? Was it a threat? Give me some money, or I’ll give you a ticket that costs more?

  “We give them a receipt,” the captain insisted. Just then another driver trotted up, dropped 10,000 riel on the trunk without a word, turned around, and jogged back to his truck. The for-show ticket remained in the book.

  “What did he do wrong?”

  Capt. Sim Rath paused for a moment, considering, then said, “He already knows what he did wrong.”

  Later that day, around lunchtime, the fences and umbrellas still sat by the road, but the officers were gone—taking a break from their labors. Checkpoints like that one dotted the highways nationwide. At another in Kandal Province, ten policemen ignored all the ca
rs and motorbikes and small trucks. They stopped only big trucks loaded with goods. Truck drivers got out, trotted over to the table, just as they had at Capt. Sim Rath’s checkpoint in Pursat Province, left some money, and then got back in their trucks and drove off. But at exactly 5:00 p.m., the police gave the table and chairs they’d been using back to the businesses they had requisitioned them from. They took off their helmets and police shirts and walked across the street to their cars carrying briefcases, one of which held the money they had just purloined.10

  Government officials were not unanimous in their disapproval of this practice. Chhay Sareth, the Pursat council chief, called it “a big issue for me; I hate it.” Prach Chann, governor of Battambang Province, acknowledged that police checkpoints dotted his roads but called them “a small thing. Not a big deal.”

  Police generally targeted fully loaded tractor-trailer trucks because the drivers, carrying rice or corn or cassava, knew they would have to pay bribes to get their produce to market, so they came with cash in their pockets.

  Ma Buth was a produce broker. His trucks picked up corn from farmers in western provinces and drove it across the country for sale in Vietnam. “On the way, at all the checkpoints,” he explained matter-of-factly, “we will have to pay the police a total of about $50 and then at the border another $50. Each way. We make about $300 on the truckload, minus the bribes. So really it’s $200. It’s getting worse. Hun Sen said they shouldn’t do it anymore. But nothing has changed. In fact it’s getting worse. It’s a big problem. They extort money from us, and so we cannot pay as high a price for the product, meaning the poor farmer is the one who suffers.” In his line of work, from every direction, he said, someone was trying to cheat him. “I’ve been at this since 1985. Corruption in previous years was not as serious. Now it gets worse and worse. They see me doing business, so they want to make some profit from me.” In 2008 the United Nations, quoting a recent survey, said, “89 percent of encounters with the traffic police resulted in a bribe.”

  While police and the courts took money to let criminals go free, judges also readily accepted orders from above. In fact, they usually didn’t need orders. When Hun Sen or some other senior member of his government filed charges against someone, the judges knew they had to find that person guilty—if they wanted to keep their jobs. For a few judges, failure to do so had resulted in immediate dismissal. So it was for Moeung Sonn, president of the Khmer Civilization Foundation, dedicated to protecting and promoting the nation’s cultural heritage. In 2009 the government started putting up lights at Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century temple that remained the symbol of Cambodia’s former glory. The Cambodian flag featured a line drawing of Angkor Wat. The idea was to begin a nighttime show for tourists.

  Moeung Sonn said he was concerned that putting up the lights might damage the temple. Right away, the government sued him for disinformation and incitement. He fled to France. Meantime, Dave Perkes, a Phnom Penh Post writer, had a look at the walls where the lights had been mounted and found “regular, oblong holes about 10 cm long” that had been cut in the walls above “the cornices opposite the bas reliefs.” Exercising the extreme caution that journalists had to display, so as not to attract their own lawsuits, Perkes concluded his short column saying, “I cannot say for certain whether additional holes had been cut” to put up the lights, “but I can see how people get the impression that serious damage had been done.”

  A court convicted Moeung Sonn in absentia. Judge Chhay Kong said, “We find that the accused damaged the government’s reputation and caused anarchy and disorder in society.” He sentenced the defendant to two years in prison. Moeung Sonn remained in France. This was just one in a spate of similar lawsuits against opposition politicians, journalists, and other assorted government antagonists. Among them, once again, Sam Rainsy found himself caught in this trap.

  In the fall of 2009, Vietnam put up several posts that were intended to demarcate a portion of Cambodia’s disputed border with Vietnam. This was still a volatile issue for Cambodians, as many still did not recognize Vietnam’s claim to the Mekong Delta region in southern Vietnam. In response, Sam Rainsy pulled off a perfect politician’s publicity stunt. With reporters in tow, he yanked six of these border posts out of the ground and made a show of lambasting the government for “enforcing a Vietnamese government order.” Hun Sen immediately slapped him with a lawsuit. But first he had to strip Rainsy of his parliamentary immunity, which his parliament promptly did, for the third time in the previous few years—during a closed assembly session.

  Rainsy had often promised to stop provoking Hun Sen. In 2000 he told interviewers, “I will soften my stance. I realize that my aggression seems to create confrontation, which is not productive.” Ron Abney, his longtime friend and adviser, said he often told Rainsy: “You’ve got only one issue, pal, and that’s Hun Sen. That’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is now.”

  A few weeks before his border show, Rainsy told me, “We need to go back to what we should have been doing. Telling how we will address the concerns of the everyday people. Land issues, education. How we will put people back to work. We will concentrate more on issues, not on persons. We’ll talk less about Hun Sen.”

  That resolve didn’t last long, and after the assembly acted against him, Rainsy took off, to plead for support from his friends in the bleachers. He was in France when a court sentenced him to two years in prison for “racial discrimination and damaging public property.” In a televised address to his followers a few days later, Rainsy put on a pitiable expression and vowed to remain in (comfortable) exile in his Paris home “until all people jailed in land disputes are set free and their land returned.”

  In the meantime, he promised to do what he liked best: complain about Hun Sen to sympathetic foreigners. “Now,” he said, “is the time for diplomatic and political approaches to friendly nations and international organizations.” Hun Sen responded by filing new charges against him, for “using fake border documents”—the maps Rainsy had proffered to show where the “actual” border was. Meantime, two villagers who had helped Rainsy rip out the border posts had been convicted at the same time as Rainsy. Now, while Rainsy plotted in his Paris palais, they were serving their long prison sentences. One was reported to be seriously ill. In September 2010 a court sentenced Rainsy in absentia to another ten years on charges of “spreading false information.” Hun Sen said he had no intention of intervening in Rainsy’s court case. For the moment, at least, Cambodia was effectively a one-party state.

  Across the board, all of these cases ended badly. Leang Saroeun’s killer was never punished. A few weeks after the crime, the colonel who set him on fire moved to Vietnam. Top Chan Sereyvudth remained the undisputed chief prosecutor of Pursat Province. No one was prosecuted for hanging and strangling the victims in Pailin. Moeung Sonn and Sam Rainsy remained in exile. As Youk Chhang put it, “Everywhere you turn around, there is no justice today.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When a society is sick, then even the institutions that are intended to make people well are infected. Ask Cambodians what their government does for them, and they still cite roads, bridges, and reservoirs—the public works of the Angkorian kings. But sometimes, just sometimes now, they also cite health care.

  For some people Cambodia’s hospitals and health clinics are a lifesaving godsend in a nation that had no modern health care until just a few decades ago. Naturally, that applies only if they’re among the lucky few who can afford it. Health care is supposed to be free for everyone. But then, this is Cambodia. And so for many people hospitals are the source of nothing but pain, sorrow, and untimely death.

  Erin Soto, head of USAID’s office in Cambodia, had a meeting one day with the deputy minister of finance. They were going to discuss problems in the nation’s health clinics, “how people have to sit in a clinic for hours and hours to see a nurse—while the people who pay something up front get served right away,” she recounted. “And he told us: ‘It’s
just like a restaurant. You have to tip to get good service.’ It made me realize we have a long way to go. They just thought” that paying bribes “was the way it was supposed to work.”

  That was the way it worked for Let Ting. Her charred husband had been shuttled from a small regional hospital to a bigger one until finally he wound up at Preah Kossamak Hospital, a large facility in downtown Phnom Penh. At the smaller so-called “referral” hospitals, doctors and nurses had given Leang Saroeun intravenous fluids and salve for the burns. That’s all. “We arrived at Kossamak Hospital at midnight,” Let Ting related. “They, too, gave him an IV and an injection and then walked away. Several hours later, a doctor came in. He told us the burn was very serious, and he needed to clean the wounds. But we would have to pay him $100. He told this to my grandmother. She is old, and she had just lost a leg to a land mine. Through the evening, the price increased to $150. I was crying. I told the doctor I didn’t have $150. The doctor said, ‘Well, I guess we don’t need to clean the wounds.’ He took off his gloves and walked away.” That was the last they saw of him. Leang Saroeun, the victim, “was crying through this,” she went on. “He was in a lot of pain, saying, ‘I’m too hot, I’m too hot.’ He just laid there until the next day. Nothing but an IV. By now his body was starting to swell. So we packed him up and took him home. We had no options. All they were doing was giving him IVs. And he was swelling up, very, very big.” The next day he died.