Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land
Page 41
Vickery, Michael
Victim outreach program
Video conferencing system
Vietnam
and boat people
and Cambodia, withdrawal from
change in
and China
and economic renovation
education in
and foreign aid
and Khmer Rouge
occupation of
refugees in
rice cultivation in
road building in
and Thailand
and United Nations
and United States
Vietnam War
Vietnamese boat people
Viey Savet
Village life
Violence. See Brutality/violence
Voting
War (1997)
The Warrior Heritage (Seanglim Bit)
Wealth
Weelen, Paul
Welfare
Westmoreland, William
WHO. See World Health Organization
Who Killed Chea Vichea? (film)
Widyono, Benny
Wiedemann, Kent
and baby trade
and donor community
and election (2002)
and human rights
and Khmer Rouge tribunal
and land seizures
and Rainsy
Women. See also Domestic violence; Rape
World Bank
and corruption
and deforestation
and education
and forest concessions
and land seizures
World economic crisis (2008)
World Food Program
World Health Organization (WHO)
Xu Dunxin
Yang Saing Koma
Yash Ghai
Yeng Virak
Yim Chay Lin
Yim Choy
Yoeun Chantho
Yorn Than
Youk Chhang
Zepp, Ray
Zhou Daguan
Zhou Enlai
Zoellick, Robert
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University, a position he took in 2006 after a twenty-three-year career with the New York Times. There he served as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1979.
At Stanford, Brinkley writes an op-ed column on foreign policy that appears in dozens of newspapers and Web sites in the United States and around the world each week, syndicated by Tribune Media Services.
He is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal before joining the Times in 1983.
At the New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent, and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than ten years in editing positions, including political editor in New York. In Washington he served as foreign editor, projects editor, and investigations editor following the September 11 attacks. He also served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003 and as foreign affairs writer in Washington.
Over the past thirty years Brinkley has reported from forty-six states and more than fifty foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006. He is the author of five books and lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife, Sabra, and two children, Charlotte and Veronica.
Jay Mather has been a working photojournalist since 1972. He accompanied Brinkley to Cambodia in 1979 and shared the Pulitzer Prize.
His interest in documentary photography began while he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia. That led to jobs at newspapers in Denver, Louisville, and Sacramento.
During his career he has covered a wide range of subjects and people from the rich and famous to the poor and nameless. Mather received the Robert F. Kennedy Photojournalism Award and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1991 for his project on the centennial of Yosemite National Park. He was the photographer for the Sacramento Bee’s 1992 project “The Sierra in Peril” that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Mather also worked extensively with the Sacramento Ballet as their production photographer and documented the company’s first international tour to China in 2007. He now lives with his wife, Diane, in Sisters, Oregon, where he volunteers his photographic work for the Sisters Folk Festival, among other organizations and events.
PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
I. F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
1
In pursuit of this and related questions, Foreign Affairs hired me to write an article. Portions of this book first appeared in Foreign Affairs.
2
In 2010, Porter said he had been waiting many years for someone to ask him, for publication, about his early views of the Khmer Rouge. “I’ve been well aware for many years that I was guilty of intellectual arrogance,” he said. “I was right about the bloodbath in Vietnam, so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia.”
3
Soon after, a Cambodian friend showed Cindy Coleman that many of her former clients were on the lists of people killed at Tuol Sleng—many but not all, she quickly noted. She kept looking.
4
A few academics did maintain an interest in the Cambodian people, but they were interested only in the dead. In the few years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, some people who styled themselves as Cambodia experts tried to estimate the Khmer Rouge death count. Of course, nobody had counted, and Cambodia had not taken a census since 1962. These people, academics mostly, included some early admirers of the Khmer Rouge. They got into heated arguments about whether some of the dead were victims of the Khmer Rouge—or the American bombing campaign. Several of them finally derived a variety of estimates, ranging from about 1.7 to almost 3 million. Journalists and writers then settled on the safest way to portray these estimates by writing “at least 1.7 million.” That became the accepted number. In fact, research for the Khmer Rouge trial in more recent times put the number at about 2 million.
5
That was just the first of several untruths he proffered, and Abney noted that “he’s done it to me two or three times, too.” In fact, foreigners with long experience in Cambodia find
that lying is all too common. Cambodians, like most Asians, need first of all to save face, avoid shame and embarrassment. Cambodians also choose to shun conflict and confrontation. So if brash Westerners ask embarrassing or hostile questions, “they should not be surprised when they are told lies,” wrote Philip Short, author of Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. Abney noted, “I had people look me in the eye and say, ‘No I never said that.’ And then I would tell them: ‘Well, I’m the one you said it to.’”
6
Aung San Suu Kyi was the Burmese opposition leader who had spent much of her life under house arrest.
7
When an American journalist produced a film named Who Killed Chea Vichea? in the spring of 2010, he showed it at the Cannes Film Festival, but the Cambodian government banned the showing of the film. When union members tried to show it in Phnom Penh, police stormed in and tore down the screen. The film concluded that highly placed members of the Cambodian government had to know about the killing.
8
Eyeglasses were another indication of wealth. In the provinces, no one wore them, no matter how poor their eyesight might be. No one could afford them. In fact, optometry was not a profession commonly pursued.
9
Funcinpec actually expelled Ranariddh in 2006 after he was found to have left the country, whereupon he sold the party headquarters to a developer and pocketed the proceeds. Later, the courts charged the prince with fraud, convicted him in absentia, and sentenced him to eighteen months in prison. But Cambodian court sentences are malleable. Hun Sen forgave him, so he returned to Cambodia and left politics.
10
It seemed odd that police were extremely reluctant to use new radar devices, donated by an NGO, to catch speeders or Breathalyzers to catch drunk drivers. Wouldn’t this equipment provide new opportunities to demand cash payments from drivers? But even after extensive training and public announcements that warned drivers, police simply refused to use the new devices. In Channy, the president of Acleda Bank, explained, “Cars are hard to recognize. Sometimes army officers or senior government officials will get caught,” and then the police would get in serious trouble. Better not to use the equipment at all.
11
Once in modern times, Cambodians did unite as one in fervent agreement on an issue. In July 2008 UNESCO listed Preah Vihear, a small, disputed nine hundred–year-old temple on the Thai-Cambodian border, as a World Heritage Site. Predictably, that led to an angry argument between Bangkok and Phnom Penh. The two states had argued over ownership of that temple for decades, and in short order both sides sent troops to the border. Though this did not exactly spawn a shooting war, a few soldiers died in short firefights. More interesting, the Cambodian people seemed to rally around their leader in support of this military standoff with their longtime foe, the Siamese. “For the first time in living memory, the entire Cambodian population was unanimously and fiercely united on a single issue,” wrote Michael Hayes, editor of the Phnom Penh Post.
Copyright © 2011 by Joel Brinkley.
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group.
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All photographs are copyright © 2011 by Jay Mather, with the exception of the three photographs on page 1 (Hun Sen with Ranariddh, Sam Rainsy, and Prince Norodom Sihanouk), which are © 2011 by Getty Images.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-1-610-39001-9
1. Cambodia—History—1979–2. Cambodia—Politics and government—
1979–3. Democracy—Cambodia. 4. Social change—Cambodia.
5. Cambodia—Social conditions—21st century. 6. Pol Pot—Influence. I. Title.
DS554.8.B75 2011
959.604—dc22 2010044806