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

by Joel Brinkley

  One afternoon in the summer of 2009 he was not home, but his son was there: Meas Savuth, thirty-four. He adored his father and pointed to a wooden shrine of sorts he had built for his dad on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. It looked vaguely like a gallows. “I had been separated from my father since I was six years old,” said Meas Savuth, a handsome, rugged-looking young man wearing flowered shorts and no shirt, eating lychee nuts, and throwing the shells on the ground. He was born in 1974 and during the Khmer Rouge years lived with his mother and father, the military commander.

  He was five years old when Vietnam invaded. While most Cambodians rejoiced, his parents fled. “Everyone ran off in all directions,” he recalled. “My mother went one way, my father disappeared. They left me with my aunt. She was killed by the Vietnamese. I had foster parents. I lost track of my father.” Along the way he never went to school. He remained illiterate. “But then in 2002 I heard he was here. I came here in 2002 and saw my older brother. But he did not trust me. Did not believe it was me. He said the rumor was that I had been killed by the Vietnamese. He wouldn’t believe me, so I went away.” Later, “I went to a fortune teller who told me to look for my father. She told me, ‘You cannot see your father until your daughter is a teenager.’ So when my daughter turned thirteen, I came back.” That was in 2007. “This time they accepted me.”

  Down the road, Sit You Sous, a sixty-one-year-old blacksmith, grew excited when asked about Meas Muth, his neighbor. He had been twenty-eight years old when the Khmer Rouge took power, and he had been certain then that he would die. He’d been thrown into a rice field to work, he said, though he had never spent a day as a farmer. “Other people from my village surrounded me in the field, hid me, and chanted that I could make knives, axes, and machetes,” he recalled, sitting shirtless in his front yard. His grandchildren, giggling, crawled in and out of a small wooden box lying in the dirt. “A Khmer Rouge soldier heard that and pulled me out. I was very frightened. I thought they would kill me. But they brought me some tools and asked me to make something. I did, and that is what they had me do for the rest of the war.” Even now, he had a blacksmith shop around the back of his house with a foot-powered bellows.

  Across the road one of his daughters was doing laundry in a little stream. She wet clothes then laid each one on a board resting in a tub of soapy water and scrubbed it with a brush. Sit You Sous said he didn’t know what to do about Meas Muth now. “I don’t know how to feel angry because this is the system here. But that regime was too brutal. I will let the government take care of it. I depend on the government. That’s its function.” He sprang up from his chair all of a sudden, saying he wanted to get something out of the house.

  He brought back some papers on U.S. State Department letterhead. “I applied to go to America because I want my children to see the developed world. I dream that they can go to a better school in the modern world, then come back to help this country.” The letter showed that he had applied for a residency permit in early 2006. The department sent back that letter simply acknowledging receipt and informing Sit You Sous that the application would expire if further documentation was not supplied by June 1, 2007—two years earlier. “I have been holding on to this,” he explained, waving the papers, “waiting for someone to come by who could read it to me.”

  As soon as word about prosecuting additional suspects began leaking out of the court, Hun Sen went on the offensive. He had already said anyone criticizing the trial’s Cambodian judges “are not human; they are animals,” who “even want to seduce their own parents.” As for the additional defendants, he insisted, “This will not happen on my watch. The UN and the countries that supported Pol Pot to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN from 1979 to 1991 should be tried first. They should be sentenced more heavily than Pol Pot.”

  Then later that year he took up a new, illogical argument. “If you want a tribunal, but you don’t want to consider peace and reconciliation and war breaks out again, killing 200,000 or 300,000 people, who will be responsible?” he asked. “Finally, I have got peace in this country, so I will not let someone destroy it. The people and the nation will not be destroyed by someone trying to lead the country into instability.”

  During the early debate over the trial ten years earlier, Wiedemann said, several senior government officials, including Sihanouk, had openly worried that calling for a trial would spook Khmer Rouge officers and their men still living in Pailin, prompting them to leave the jungle and “make trouble again.” But Hun Sen, Wiedemann added, never voiced that concern back then. Now, the prime minister never explained exactly how or why the unrest he predicted would come about, given that the Khmer Rouge movement was dead. Most Cambodians had ignored the Duch trial; there’d been no known incident of unrest. Another time he lashed out against the idea of more prosecutions. “I would rather see the court fail than let the country fall into war.”

  Even so, in the court’s offices sat more than a dozen legal investigators, foreigners on the UN payroll who were researching new suspects and couldn’t care less what Hun Sen had to say about it. And in the fall of 2009 the court did announce that it intended to charge additional suspects. Though the judges did not name them, speculation centered on Meas Muth and a few others.

  On July 26, 2010, the court convicted Duch of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to thirty-five years in prison—by almost every reaction an exceedingly light sentence for a man who oversaw the torture and deaths of 15,000 people. But he will not serve even thirty-five years. After subtracting his time already spent in jail, more for cooperation and good behavior, and more still for a period of illegal detention in a military jail, the court left him with nineteen years to serve. When the judge sentenced Duch, he was sixty-seven years old, meaning he could conceivably walk out of prison a free man one day.

  This was the first time in recorded Cambodian history that a former senior government official was actually sentenced to prison for a human-rights violation. And as best as anyone can tell, this was also the only trial ever conducted in Cambodia under true international standards of justice. Still, many surviving victims were distraught. “This is a slap in the face,” said Bou Meng, who had testified against Duch. Shouting at the crowd in the muddy yard outside the courtroom, Chum Mey, another survivor, complained, “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again. His prison is comfortable with air conditioning, food three times a day, fans and everything!” So limited was Chum Mey’s existence, like those of most Cambodians, that a life in prison seemed preferable.

  Most people involved with the court wondered if that would be the last trial. After all, Duch had been the youngest of the defendants. His trial took three years—and he was cooperative; he readily admitted his guilt. All of the others were in full denial. In fact, Ieng Thirith threatened that anyone who accused her of murder “will be cursed to the seventh circle of hell.” Ieng Sary was eighty-four, and since he was put in jail he’d been hospitalized several times for heart problems and blood in the urine. He could barely walk. Khieu Samphan and his wife were both in their seventies and in frail health. Nuon Chea was in his eighties and no better off. Which of them would still be alive in three years?

  But there was more. Everyone involved with holding the trial was by now battered and weary. Every step along the way had involved brutal fights with Hun Sen and Sok An, constant threats, and manipulation. Most reporting on the trial focused on corruption, political manipulation, and money shortages. No one spoke any longer of their dreams that the trial would strike a blow to impunity and injustice. In fact, the trial had offered new demonstrations of impunity and injustice. Already donors had given more than $100 million to the court, knowing that some was lost to corruption. Now the court was asking for another $93 million for just the next two years—not enough time, more than likely, to complete another trial.

  But then in the fall of 2010 the court surprised everyone by issuing indictments for the four remaining defendants at t
he same time, charging them with crimes against humanity, genocide, murder, and religious persecution. Mindful of their ages and health, the court planned to try them together. All of them were members of the government that ordered the killing. But unlike Duch, these people probably did not actually kill anyone themselves.

  The United Nations and other assorted international organizations that followed the trial were pleased. But, as usual, Cambodians were barely aware. Various surveys and anecdotal evidence—I asked every Cambodian I met about the trial—showed that most people simply weren’t paying attention. They didn’t have a television, or they couldn’t get the station that aired the trial, some said. Others shrugged and professed to have little interest. They were too busy. The trial was on during the day, when they were at work in the rice paddies. If they had time to watch TV, they wanted to be entertained.

  The trials might finally bring some Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. But so many other hopes had also been attached to it. The trials would wake up the Cambodian people. They would demand an end to impunity and use the Khmer Rouge trials as an example for reforming the state’s dysfunctional court system. None of that came to pass.

  The government and United Nations did finally agree on the selection of a corruption monitor. They chose Uth Chhorn, Cambodia’s auditor general, a seemingly independent official. But then no one in Cambodia’s government was truly independent. In the end, after more than a year of argument and debate, the UN seemed simply to have given up.

  Uth Chhorn had been running the National Audit Authority whose job was to review the finances of government agencies. Of course, honest reports on that subject were certain to be toxic, so the authority was years behind in issuing its findings. When Uth Chhorn did issue a report, the government forbade him to publish it, though the law required that the authority’s work be made public. If Uth Chhorn had fought back against any of this, there was no public record of it. Now he was to be the court’s corruption monitor, someone victims could trust to take their reports and complaints in confidence. But he was given no investigative authority or mandate, and a few weeks after his appointment, Uth Chhorn betrayed his true intent. He told reporters it was not his job to resolve corruption charges. Instead, he said he would simply pass complaints to senior UN officers—and to Sok An, the deputy prime minister, as well as other Cambodian officials, the very people the complaints were likely to be about. Just like the Office for Reports on Corruption in downtown Phnom Penh.

  Only four people came to see him in the first six months. And in 2010 donors to the trial wondered why he deserved a $140,394 salary, given that all he did was make a few phone calls and hold an occasional meeting. Uth Chhorn’s salary was cut to $32,000, recognizing his role as a cipher in the courtroom—nowhere near the robust and independent corruption investigator the UN had wanted.

  Hun Sen had beaten the United Nations once again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Serge Thion, a French sociologist, said it best: “Explaining Cambodia is typically a foreigner’s business,” he wrote. “For about one century, foreigners have been providing explanations.”

  In downtown Phnom Penh, a few doors away from the World Bank’s offices, not far from the U.S. Embassy, Monument Books offered shelf after shelf of books about the Khmer Rouge era and other periods of Cambodian history, all written in English or French, all by Western historians, journalists, or other chroniclers. Books written by Cambodians were rare, and in almost every case those authors were expats educated in the West who had written memoirs, typically about their experiences under the Khmer Rouge.

  Part of the explanation was education. For all of time, until the French occupation of Cambodia, the nation had virtually no books, just short scribbles on palm leaves. Until the 1960s few Cambodians could read or write. Even in the twenty-first century, illiteracy was widespread. And of the few people who were capable of writing a book about Cambodian society, most probably considered it too dangerous. When Tieng Narith, a political-science professor at Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University in Phnom Penh, wrote a book about modern-day Cambodian society in 2007—unpublished, only for use in his classroom—he was immediately arrested. A judge convicted him of “printing false documents” and sent him to prison for two and a half years. But this isn’t the only explanation, either.

  For decades, foreign authors have tried to puzzle their way to an understanding of the paradox that is the Cambodian personality. It may seem a broad generality to refer to it this way, but every state has certain common personality characteristics, even if not every citizen displays them.

  While trying to understand Cambodia, foreign writers sometimes fall into glib stereotypes and generalizations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French writers routinely characterized the people as “obedient and lazy.” These people liked to note that Cambodians would plant just enough rice to feed their families and then go home. If fertilizer or a hybrid rice seed allowed them to double the size of their crop, they would grow only half as much. Philip Short, the British author, made the same point, concluding that “the perception of indolence has become part of the country’s self image, an explanation for its failure to keep up with its neighbors.”

  Michael Coe, author of a book about Cambodia’s Angkor period, recounted a legend that he offered as a parable for the Cambodian people. In 1594 the Thai army attacked the town of Lovek, he wrote. The city was “surrounded by a fence of bamboo hedges. The invaders fired a cannon containing silver coins at the fortifications. The Khmer cut the bamboo to the ground to get the money” and “left themselves defenseless.” Soon after, the city fell.

  David Chandler, the dean of Cambodian historians, offered his own assessment of other writers, while offering his own analysis of the Cambodian personality: “The inherent stability of Cambodia, often the subject of absurd romanticism among colonial writers, has rested throughout nearly all of Cambodian history on the acceptance of the status quo as defined by those in power. Because the people in the countryside have never been asked to play a part in any government, they saw few short-term rewards in resisting those in power.”

  Michael Vickery, another academic and author, served as a schoolteacher in Cambodia in the early 1960s, under a U.S. government aid program. He learned Khmer and made study of the nation his passion. In one of his books he told of his visit to a remote Cambodian village in 1962, where he saw “wild looking boys” carrying “dead lizards strung on sticks like freshly caught fish” they were taking home for dinner. Their village, in a remote corner of Banteay Meanchey Province, was home to people Vickery found “strangely hostile.” These villagers made it clear “they did not like city people.” But Vickery also noted that they had a “valuable cottage industry. The villagers made beautiful silk.” He offered to buy some, but the villagers steadfastly refused, saying it was only for their own use. Vickery’s money, no matter how much he offered, was of no value because “there was nothing in the market they wanted.” Just like the farmers the historians had described. Of what use was that extra rice? Vickery concluded that “for reason of climate, inaccessibility and incompatibility,” these villagers, like so many others around the country, “had evolved a nearly autonomous, autarkic lifestyle, wanting only to be left alone.”

  And so it remains. In 2006 and 2007 Jeffery Sonis, a physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted a survey on the prevalence of PTSD among Cambodians and sent teams of surveyors across the nation to ask questions. Though he originally intended to ask the subjects to sign forms, he had to abandon that plan. Cambodians, he found, were too suspicious of outsiders. “In Khmer Rouge times, they ask you to sign a form, and then they kill you,” Sonis said he learned. “Now, unscrupulous businessmen ask you to sign a form, and then they take away your land.” The people trusted no one. They just wanted to be left alone.

  Cambodians themselves are the first to tell you that they hold no real national identity. They seldom feel “Cambodian.” Th
at has been true through the ages. But the Khmer Rouge era hardened this trait. “The survival instinct has taken over,” said Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs. “Surviving doesn’t mean giving help to others. If you help others, you may be betrayed. A lot of people did a lot of bad things to survive. So people are more individualistic. They think only of themselves. They think first of survival. They don’t think of society at all.”

  Beat Richner, the hospital director, saw the results of this firsthand. His maternity-ward doctors refused to talk to their patients. “After the Khmer Rouge, no one is talking to anyone. They don’t want to be in interrogations.” Even now, “older docs still keep to themselves. They do not talk to others”—including their patients. Yet this underlying personality trait existed long before the Khmer Rouge ruled. Sihanouk used to call it “individualism” and once described that as “a national failing.”11

  Still today, “in this society there is no one else you can count on,” said Chandler, the historian. “They don’t think a society really exists.” That tendency proved useful for most of Cambodia’s history, as the nation lived through successive wars with its neighbors. Most Cambodians focused only on family and village life. These were their only havens as foreign troops ranged over the nation and government leaders schemed and connived for their own accounts. Egoism was of undeniable value during the Khmer Rouge era. To survive Cambodians had to behave as Kok Chuum, the Dang Run village chief, did. “I ate wild potatoes I found in the woods,” he said. “I did it secretly. I told no one.” Presumably, back then, others near him were starving to death, as workers did all over the nation.