And on paper that was true. The United Nations had been in Cambodia for more than a year, with a force of twenty-two thousand military and civilian personnel and with $2.5 billion to spend. The trouble was that with all those people and all that money, the UN had not managed to accomplish what the Paris Agreements had defined as the first step in the peace process: to disarm the combatants. The Khmer Rouge had categorically refused to lay down their arms. They carried on ambushing and killing, while their formal chief, Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s number two, the man who had rationalized genocide, went on living in Phnom Penh and meeting UN representatives and Western ambassadors who all shook his hand and called him “Your Excellency.”
But the international community could not accept defeat. The object of the whole exercise was the elections. Let there be elections then! Even if all the premises were lacking. The important thing, said the diplomats, was to get the economy started again, to begin the peace process. Surely the Khmer Rouge would join in sooner or later.
The “international community”—a motley crowd of people of all colors, sizes and languages—seemed to have only one common interest: to receive their daily expenses of $150, what an average Cambodian earned in a year. My impression was that they all wanted to stay in Cambodia at the cost of any compromise. The fate of the Cambodians was not the great priority. For the UN it was to bring their intervention in Cambodia to a satisfactory conclusion so they could go and repeat the operation somewhere else.
But the United Nations, who were they? To judge by the news on the portable radio which I always have with me, the whole world was now in the hands of this omnipresent, wise and just government. The United Nations were in Cambodia, the United Nations had something to say about Iraq, they were going to intervene in the former Yugoslavia and in Africa. They were the first item in every news bulletin.
Then I went outside, onto the streets of Phnom Penh, and the United Nations were Indonesian soldiers (those responsible for the massacre of Dili on the island of Timor) and Thai soldiers (those who had shot at unarmed crowds in the center of Bangkok) and policemen from various African dictatorships. All of them with blue berets on their heads, bearers of democracy and respect for human rights.
There was one thing the United Nations had achieved: their presence had restored business confidence. House prices in Phnom Penh were as high as in New York, and everywhere new hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and brothels were opening. The peace process had reintroduced that logic of the market economy which knows no principle but that of profit. In the course of a few months Cambodia had become a center for speculators, mostly Chinese from Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Thanks to the widespread corruption in the local administrative apparatus, they had laid hands on the country’s natural resources and its shadiest traffic, from expired medicines to smuggled cars and precious stones. One businessman—an American this time—was trying to bury in Cambodia the nuclear waste that no other country would touch.
Everywhere big new billboards had appeared: “Angkor: The Pride of the Nation.” An invitation to visit the temples? Not at all! A new beer. The brewery that made it was financed by the only foreign investment in the industrial sector. Perhaps beer was not what the Cambodians needed most at that juncture, but the economy had its own logic. Like nature. After years and years of wars and massacres, life was returning to triumph over death, but it was doing so in the cruelest and most primitive way: the law of the jungle.
On the pavements of Phnom Penh bands of dirty, famished women and children went about begging. On the increase, too, were the numbers of shiny brand-new Mercedeses, with smoked-glass windows at which those wretches vainly tapped with their bony fingers. Peace was rapidly re-creating two Cambodias: that of the rich few and that of the poor many; that of the cities and that of the countryside. The situation of the past, the situation that Pol Pot had exploited, was repeating itself. His theory was that the city is corrupt, rotten, and cannot be saved. The only solution is to abandon it and start again from scratch, to return, as he said, to “the purity of the grain of rice.” According to Pol Pot everything that had come from abroad had bastardized and weakened the Khmers, the true Cambodians. To return to the greatness of Angkor meant cutting all links with the outside world and expunging any foreign presence. Hence the decision to blow up the central bank, leaving wads of dollars fluttering about in the wind; hence the demolition, stone by stone, of the Catholic cathedral; hence the evacuation of cities, symbols of the modernity so detested by the Khmer Rouge.
And now just look at Phnom Penh! Alive and corrupt, risen from the ashes. Seen from the peasants’ huts, still infested with mosquitoes and malaria, the city again seemed something to be eliminated, purged; and there were already those, especially among the young, who wanted Pol Pot to return. What was this but madness?
But was it not equally mad of the United Nations to think they could solve the whole Cambodian problem at a stroke with some elections? And were not these officials mad who imagined that with their computers, with new laws and new programs and plenty of goodwill, they could, almost like Pol Pot, remake Cambodia?
If the international community had wanted to do something for the Cambodian people, it should have put them under a bell jar for a generation and protected them from their hostile neighbors, the Thais and the Vietnamese, and from the rapacious businessmen who had descended on the country like locusts. It should have helped them first and foremost to live in peace, to rediscover themselves. And then, perhaps, it might have asked them if they preferred a monarchy or a republic, if they preferred the Party of the Cow or the Party of the Snake. Instead of sending experts in constitutional law, economics and communications, the UN should have sent a team of psychoanalysts and psychologists to deal with the ghastly trauma which this people has suffered.
There was a psychiatrist-anthropologist in Phnom Penh, but he was there in a private capacity, with a grant from his university and a video recorder. Maurice Eisenbruch, Australian, forty-three years of age, was convinced, as I was, that the UN, with their massive foreign presence and their logic, were sweeping away what little Khmer culture had miraculously survived the American carpet bombing and Pol Pot’s massacres.
The task that Maurice had set himself was to gather the last remaining traces of that world on its way to extinction. One of the ways of handing down the Khmer tradition was through the kru, or wizards, the village healers, and for months he had been traveling around Cambodia, seeking out the few survivors and putting together a sort of manual of their wisdom.
“According to the krus,” said Maurice, “most illnesses are the work of spirits. A newborn infant thrashes around in its cradle? That’s because its mother in its previous life is trying to enter its body and carry it away. For the Cambodians spirits are real in the way viruses are for us. Which of us has ever seen the AIDS virus? And yet we believe in it. The truth is that neither we nor they can determine our lives. They call it fate, we call it genetics. But what difference does it make?”
Maurice, speaking as a psychiatrist, would say the Cambodians were victims of a mass trauma. They were still frightened, and they did not know what of. “Since time doesn’t exist for them, they fear the death of years gone by when they saw so many people disappear, and they fear the life of today in which they see themselves as dead people.” According to Maurice, not one UN official asked himself what might be the deep-down consequences of the policies being adopted. What would all the election propaganda mean to the Khmers? “The Khmers are sick,” he said. “But what doctor has ever prescribed democracy as a cure for the ills of the soul?”
According to Maurice, the tragedy of the UN intervention was that the Khmers would never become modern democratic capitalists: the only ones to profit from the situation would be the Cambodians of Chinese origin. In the countryside, populated by the pure Cambodians, progress would come only in the form of greater exploitation. “With every new hotel, with every new supermarket that’s opened, the Khmers are
being pushed another step further from their own civilization.”
I felt that instead of all those blue berets, all those development technicians, the UN would have done better to have sent Cambodia a few experts on ghosts in order to exorcise the ones that made the air so heavy and the nights so sleepless.
The only way of finding Hoc was to go and see him early in the morning. He had a house near the Olympic Market, where his wife ran a little rice shop.
Hoc was a journalist. He had a motorbike, and whenever I went to Phnom Penh he was my taxi driver and interpreter—not only of the language, but also of the politics. Especially the politics. I had a great affection for him: to survive he had had to perform all the somersaults of recent Cambodian history, but in his heart he had remained undefiled.
He was born under Prince Sihanouk, when it was obligatory to be a monarchist; he had studied law at the time when one had to declare oneself republican; he had escaped the killing fields of Pol Pot by pretending to be a Marxist-Leninist peasant. In 1979, when the Vietnamese intervened to put an end to Pol Pot’s regime, Hoc had become a pro-Soviet Communist, and had been sent to study in Hanoi and in various Eastern European countries. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of the United Nations and all those other international bodies, Hoc, like so many of his colleagues, could have made another tack, could have changed his spots again and found a well-paid job. But no. He remained a member of the party, but free of mind. He kept away from the ever-widening circles of corruption, and for a small salary ran a political weekly.
I found him in his spacious cement room that opened on to the street, and asked him to help me with the story of the election and to find me the best fortune-teller in town. This time I was interested not so much in my own fate—I had already collected enough versions of that—as in the answer to a question that had been spinning in my head since the start of the year: if it is really possible to predict the future, if man does in fact carry inside him the seeds of what lies in wait for him, then Cambodia was the place to prove it. In the course of four years, one person in three had died in this country, most of them violently. Had the fortune-tellers predicted it? Had there been someone somewhere to warn Cambodia of the coming bloodbath? If the palm of one’s hand bears a sign that denotes an illness at the age of eighteen and the possibility of a heart attack at fifty-two, what must there have been in the hands of the millions of Cambodians who filled the country’s mass graves? If no one had known how to read their future, it meant that whoever claimed to do so was an imposter, that the future was not written in anyone’s hand, it was not in the stars. It meant that fate did not exist.
Hoc knew of a fortune-teller behind the Doeun Thkol market whom his wife consulted regularly. We went there in the late afternoon. His house was raised on wooden piles, in a street that was all potholes and mud. We climbed some steep stairs, took off our shoes and sat down to wait on a wide table-bed on the porch.
The fortune-teller was in a dark room lit only by one oil lamp. Written in chalk over the door was: “Carnal passion, jealousy, violence, drunkenness, intransigence, ambition: if you cannot rid yourself of even one of these ills, you will never be at peace.” It struck me once again that here, as almost always around such people, there was a magnificent peace.
The man was attending to a whole family, and I was intrigued by the respectful way in which Hoc behaved in that house, making the appropriate gestures to the woman who brought us water to drink. He was a Communist, but he was still a Khmer, and to him the fortune-teller was a priest. Like all the Khmers, Hoc believed in the power of amulets. He had a very powerful one himself: a Buddha his mother had given him in 1979, which had protected him in the years of the war against the remains of Pol Pot’s army. The taboo this amulet carried was that Hoc must not eat dog meat. Once, out of courtesy toward the Vietnamese military advisers, he had had to taste a bit of their dog stew, and at that very moment the Khmer Rouge attacked the village he was in. It was a miracle that he survived.
I showed him my Buddha, and he asked me how long it was since it had been recharged. Recharged? Yes, amulets lose their force with time and must be recharged. My Buddha had gone without being recharged for over twenty years. According to Hoc it must have “expired” by now. He knew of a monk in a pagoda not far from the airport who was very good at restoring the force to amulets. “He’s an odd monk. Sometimes he appears as an old man, at other times as a young one.”
The family that had been consulting the fortune-teller came out. It was now the turn of a woman who had come with her daughter, and we sat on the floor behind them. The woman wanted to sell a plot of land, and asked advice on how to proceed. The fortune-teller told her that within five days two women would come and ask her the price, but that it would be hard to conclude the deal because the property had no easy access. That was true enough, the woman said. Most properties have problems of access, I thought.
The woman wanted to know what to expect for the very young daughter kneeling at her side. The man said that for this they would have to return the following week: it is not easy to predict the fate of so young a girl. That struck me as fair: the less past one has, the harder it is to predict one’s future. There are no signs; the face is without any history, and the fortune-teller, who is often nothing more than an instinctive psychologist, has little to go by.
Hoc whispered his translation in that delightful Indochinese-French patois of his, full of verbs in the infinitive and with much monsieur and madame instead of “he” and “she.” I noticed how interested he was in the whole process. It was the first time he had been there, and the fact that the fortune-teller was the one his wife consulted did much to arouse his curiosity.
The fortune-teller was about sixty. He had managed to escape death by leading the Khmer Rouge to believe he was a rickshaw driver. Sitting in the lotus position against a wall, he asked the date of my birth and which day of the week that was. He wrote down some numbers on a sheet of paper, arranging them in the form of a pyramid, and then, referring to them continually, he began:
“In the march of your life you should already have died several times. Until the age of twenty-one you had great difficulties both with money and with your health …” and so on, all the things I knew so well by now, partly true and partly false. Nothing interesting, nothing new, except that this year I would be the victim of a theft: I would lose something very dear to me. Not wanting to offend him, I let him continue.
Then I interrupted to ask him the question I had on my mind: had he ever predicted that Pol Pot would come to power and that so many people would be murdered?
The fortune-teller was surprised. He thought he had misunderstood my question, and Hoc had to translate it for him a second time.
“No. But nobody back then asked me about anything of the kind.” That struck me as ridiculous. “Anyway, it was already all written in the prophecy of Buddha. The Khmers knew it. And it all came true,” he added.
As we were leaving, the fortune-teller asked Hoc how his wife was. Hoc was stunned. He had given him no more than a couple of snippets of information about himself, if that, and the man had immediately realized who he was. Easy, I said to myself, in a small community, for someone with an eye for detail and the talents of a psychologist to identify various local characters. The rub comes with someone like me, an outsider of a different culture, with different ways of expressing myself and different questions.
“What is this prophecy of Buddha?” I asked Hoc as we put our shoes back on.
“A thing everyone knows, in verses. I can’t recall it all that well,” he said. I insisted, and Hoc began to recite with some difficulty, as if he had to dig deep into his memory:
“There are houses,
but none live there.
There are roads,
but no travelers.
There are stairs,
but no one climbs them.
The black crows seem unarmed,
but within the fruit
> the worms are there.
Only at Angkor there is feasting,
but of humanity none remain,
save those who stand where lies
the shade of a rain tree.”
Extraordinary! There it all was: the evacuation of Phnom Penh, with the houses and roads left deserted; the Khmer Rouge in their black pajamas, ostensibly bearing the fruits of peace, but in fact unleashing the massacre; Angkor, the only place not touched by the revolution; and at the end so few survivors that they could all stand in the shade of a large tree.
How far did these verses date back? Hoc had no idea. Before Pol Pot? He did not remember, and I had a nagging suspicion that they were quite recent, composed a posteriori to explain the past.
It was already dark. In nearby houses we could see small fires on which people were preparing supper. We saw some joggers, sweating profusely as they jumped over the puddles: UNTAC officials out for their evening exercise, they passed right under the house of the Khmer fortune-teller. Two worlds, I thought, that will never meet, however they may run.
There was only one person who could give me an authoritative answer to the question of Buddha’s prophecy: Olivier de Vernon, a scholar from the École Française de l’Extrême-Orient, an expert on the Khmer language and on Buddhism. Olivier had been living in Cambodia for a number of years, and had taken a mission upon himself: to reconstruct the religious memory of the Khmers, which Pol Pot had tried to destroy. He traveled around the country, especially to the pagodas, collecting every banana leaf with writing on it, every old manuscript that had survived the bonfires of the Khmer Rouge. He photographed them and transcribed them on a computer. On the strength of these scraps found here and there, he was reassembling the classics of the tradition. He distributed copies to libraries, pagodas and the Buddhist schools that were reopening.
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