by John Pilger
These days, the Khmer Rouge would not object to such a raw show of capitalism. After all, they now advocate a ‘liberal capitalist line’. Neither are they insincere, according to the historian Michael Vickery. ‘They consider it [free-market capitalism],’ he wrote, ‘the fastest route to the type of destabilisation which will most favour their return to power.’176
As for Sihanouk, now astride the Trojan Horse, he is seventy-one years old; if necessary the Khmer Rouge will wait for him to die on his throne, or dispose of him quietly. They are not rushed. Everything is going to plan. Pol Pot has told his commanders to ‘remain in the jungle’ until they ‘control all the country’. And then they will be ready.177
All of this was preventable. Had the great powers kept their distance following the defeat of Pol Pot in 1978, there is little doubt that a solution could have been found in the region. In 1980 the Indonesian and Malaysian Governments – fearful of Pol Pot’s chief backer, China – acknowledged that the Vietnamese had ‘legitimate concerns’ about the return of Pol Pot and the threat from China. In 1985 Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Hayden was told by Hun Sen, ‘We are ready to make concessions to Prince Sihanouk and other people if they agree to join with us to eliminate Pol Pot.’178 Four years later, reported The Economist from Paris, a Sihanouk-Hun Sen alliance against the Khmer Rouge was ‘torpedoed’ by the US State Department.179
Perhaps the most alluring promise of peace came when Thailand’s elected prime minister, Chatichai Choonhaven, invited Hun Sen to Bangkok, and Thai officials secretly visited Phnom Penh with offers of development aid and trade. Defying their own generals, the reformist Thais proposed a regional conference that would exclude the great powers. Prime Minister Chatichai’s son and chief policy adviser, Kraisak Choonhaven, told me in 1990, ‘We want to see the Khmer Rouge kicked out of their bases on Thai soil.’ He called on ‘all Western powers and China to stop arming the Cambodian guerrillas’.180
This represented an extraordinary about-turn for America’s most reliable client in South-east Asia. In response, Washington warned the Chatichai Government that if it persisted with its new policy it would ‘have to pay a price’ and threatened to withdraw Thailand’s trade privileges under the Generalised Special Preferences.181 The regional conference never took place. In March 1991 the Chatichai Government was overthrown and the new military strongman in Bangkok, Suchinda Krapayoon, described Pol Pot as a ‘nice guy’, who should be treated ‘fairly’.182 (It was Suchinda who turned the army on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok, killing hundreds. He was forced to resign.)
At the same time Japan proposed that the United Nations exclude from a settlement any group that violated a ceasefire. Japan also proposed the establishment of a special commission to investigate the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.183 US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon rejected the proposals as ‘likely to introduce confusion in international peace efforts’.184
‘Listen,’ said David Munro as we drove into Phnom Penh in June 1980, the year after the end of the holocaust. The tinkling of bells on hundreds of pony traps carrying people and food and goods was a new, rich sound. Compared with the emptiness of the year before, Phnom Penh was a city transformed. There were two bus routes, restaurants, raucous markets, reopened pagodas, telephones, a jazz band, a football team and currency. And there were freedoms, uncoerced labour, freedom of movement and freedom of worship. I had never seen so many weddings, neither had I ever received as many wedding invitations – four in one day. Marriage had become a mark of resilience, of freedom restored, and was celebrated with as much extravagance as was possible in the circumstances, with long skirts and brocade tops and hair piled high with flowers, and the men bearing gifts of precious food arranged on leaves, their necks craning from unaccustomed collars and ties. There were electricity and reopened factories – some of them paid for by the British viewers of our film Year Zero. An estimated 900,000 children had been enrolled in rudimentary schools and 19,000 new teachers given a two-month crash course: an historic achievement.
The tenuous nature of this ‘normality’ was demonstrated to me during a ‘disco night’ I attended one Saturday at the Monorom Hotel. The women and children sat on one side of the room, palais-style, the men on the other. It was a lot of fun, especially when a competing jazz band next door struck up with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’. But when a cassette of the much-loved Khmer singer, Sin Sisamouth, was played, people stopped dancing and walked to the windows and wept. He had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem, which is about blood and death. After that, he was beaten to death. It brought home to me that the efforts of the Cambodian people to recover from their nightmare of bombs and genocide ought to be the object of our lasting admiration; at the very least the willingness of our representatives to help them, not hurt them.
By any standards the efforts of the regime led by 42-year-old Hun Sen were remarkable. It attempted to secure and reconstruct a country without the basic means and skills which in Britain would be considered essential to run a local council. In the late 1980s the nation was self-sufficient in rice, and the riel, the currency, was stabilised by basing its worth on a national resource: the cotton that makes the scarves everyone wears. In its relationship with Vietnam, the Hun Sen Government was not unlike the West German Government after the Second World War. Just as the Federal Republic outgrew the tutelage by the Allies, Phnom Penh shed its subservience to Hanoi. Although described as communist, it was a government of Khmer nationalists: of survivors. Despite disinformation that sought to smear them as ‘Pol Potists’, only a minority were defectors from the Khmer Rouge and these came mostly from a dissident group that bore comparison with the 1944 Movement in the German Army that sought to overthrow Hitler.185
However, the isolation and privations had their effect. Corruption became a cancer, especially during the time of uncertainty and precarious transition. While Hun Sen was forced to disband the 200,000 militia because there was no public money to pay their wages, a number of his top officials grew wealthy by selling public properties to foreigners. The issue caused anger and dismay among people who were prepared to go into the streets and stand up to the Khmer Rouge. Having failed for a decade to overthrow the Hun Sen Government by force, its enemies now pinned their hopes on the United Nations to dismantle it and on intolerable internal pressures to destroy it.
August 1979 to April 1994
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fn1 The limb programme is run by the Indo-China Project, an offshoot of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Donations can be sent to Suite 740, 2001 ‘S’ Street NW, Washington DC 20009, USA. Phone: (202) 483 9222.
fn2 In June 1992 an international conference in Tokyo ‘pledged’ $880 million towards reconstruction of Cambodia. The largest pledge of $200 million came from Japan.
fn3 After seeing Ratanak’s death in our film, Cambodia Year Ten, Brian McConaghy, a forensics expert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, established a network of health centres throughout Cambodia. He called it ‘The Ratanak Project’.
KING SIHANOUK’S DEMOCRACY
I RETURNED TO Cambodia in October 1992, in time for Ron Podlaski’s wedding. After the monks had left and everyone had been garlanded in jasmine, Ron and Bo Pha, his Khmer bride, stood in the narrow street most of the day and night, clasping hands with hundreds of people. Many were guests; many were street people. All were invited. I shall not easily forget them.
At a table of honour were six young men, none of them more than twenty-one years old, who had lost one or both legs in Cambodia’s minefields. Recognising each other, we raised our beers in a boisterous toast; I had met them a few days earlier at Kien Khlang, on the banks of the Mekong, where Ron runs the Vietnam Project’s Limb Centre. One of them, a cherubic boy of eighteen, had strapped on to his uneven stumps two new legs, made from beaten tin and rubber, and heaved himself on to the parallel bars. He walked for the first time since a small ‘anti-personnel’ mine had left him a ble
eding ruin.
He walked at his first try, with the other amputees encouraging him in the soft, tonal lilt of the Khmer language. The next day he set off without the aid of the bars. ‘Didn’t you fall down at all?’ I asked him at the wedding. ‘No, not once,’ he said; and when I asked him why he and his friends had not worn their new legs, he said, ‘Tonight we intend to drink a lot of beer. Legs aren’t necessary for that; they get in the way.’ The interpreter could barely tell me this over their laughter. They had come from Kien Khlang on a fleet of motorcycles, riding pillion, each with bouquets of gifts for Ron and Bo Pha.
To walk the streets of Phnom Penh now was to run a gauntlet of limbless people, phantoms they seemed at night, some of them in threadbare uniforms, many of them children. One night a teenager without hands came at me from a doorway. He had touched a mine.
It is this that makes the work of Ron Podlaski and the other American Vietnam veterans who run the limb centre such an important counterweight, however small, to the foreign forces that still beleaguer this nation. At the very least they provide a glimpse of the human resources, both Khmer and foreign, that could begin to restore Cambodia. There is another connection. Cambodia is, according to some of Washington’s ideologues, ‘the last battle of America’s war in Vietnam’. Ron Podlaski, Dave Evans, Bobby Muller and Ed Miles see themselves on the other side of this battle – ‘this time on the right side’, says Ron.
Ron is a big, rumbustious man in his forties who was hauled before a judge in New York in 1968 and told he was a ‘menace to civilisation’. ‘I had hit a cop on the head,’ he said. ‘This was normal behaviour where I grew up. The judge said, “I’ll give you a choice: Vietnam or jail.” I said, “Where’s Vietnam?” He said, “Across the George Washington bridge.”’
Ron joined the Special Forces, running secret missions into Laos and Cambodia. ‘We were told to use amphetamines to keep from falling asleep,’ he said, ‘because we couldn’t trust the local people not to kill us in our beds. These were the people we were meant to be fighting for. They hated us. I learned quickly.’
Like many veterans, Ron came home an addict and angry, believing he had been conned. I didn’t meet him at the Lincoln Memorial in 1971 when he and other veterans threw back their medals; but I think I remember his larger-than-life presence. I certainly remember Bobby Muller at the Republican Party’s convention in Miami the following year. I remember his booming eloquence reaching the candidate, Richard Nixon, over the cat-calls of the faithful. He shouted to Nixon that he was lying when he promised ‘peace with honour’ to Indo-China. For that, he was thrown out in his wheelchair.
Bobby was a marine who had been shot in the spine, losing the use of his legs. He and Ron and Ed Miles and others formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, bringing to America a political awareness that could not be ignored; for they were ordained American heroes. Ed Miles is a double amputee who stepped on a mine during an ambush. Years later he went back to the Vietnamese village where he fell and did not recognise it. A woman, however, recognised him: not his face, just as the young American who had lost his legs. She remembered, because the next day other Americans came and razed the village.
On their return home these veterans spoke about atrocities that were not reported. They described how half of those who had carried America’s battle colours were now unemployed or beset by drugs and alcohol. As many servicemen, they said, had come home and killed themselves as had died in the war. They proposed that such an adventure never happen again, anywhere.
In 1978, they formed the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and have since devoted themselves to preventing a repeat of such an adventure. They have funded a curriculum for schools and colleges on the Vietnam war, seeking to end the ‘historical amnesia’ that has allowed the same people in Washington to pursue ‘other Vietnams’. They have initiated projects in Vietnam for children orphaned by the war. In Cambodia they have produced their most remarkable achievement.
At their prosthetics centre at Kien Khlang they use the ‘Jaipur limb’, a simple aluminium leg with a latex foot that requires no high-tech components. The foot moves almost naturally from side to side and using the limb requires minimal training, because of the confidence it gives.
The prosthetist is Dave Evans who went to Vietnam at the age of eighteen and lost both his legs before his nineteenth birthday. Back home, he retrained as a nurse and went to El Salvador where he became the director of a prosthetics programme helping the Frente Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional, the FMLN. ‘When I came to Indo-China as a US marine,’ he said, ‘we were told we were “ambassadors in green”. I believed that junk. I guess I was determined to come back as another kind of ambassador; and here I am.’ He walks and runs like a very fit man. The centre employs three Indian trainers from the Jaipur centre and soon Khmer trainers, most of them amputees, will begin to take over. They fit some 150 limbs a month.
The United Nations now deployed seven military units to train Khmers to clear mines. In one area of Kompong Thom province, fewer than 52 out of 4,000 mines were cleared in six months. In Battambang province not a single mine was cleared. Instead, the people were clearing the mines: farmers with spades, children with sling shots; and by stepping on them. ‘We have done virtually nothing,’ a UN Dutch army mine clearer told me. ‘What are we here for?’
At Ron Podlaski’s wedding, the Khmer band played rock’n’ roll; and the Indian trainers from the limb centre – Roddy, Than and Abdul – danced to the sitar; and Bo Pha wore several magnificent dresses of incandescent brightness. Like most Khmers who knew the Pol Pot era, her eyes have a wistfulness, a distance and a deep sadness. Bo Pha’s father, two brothers and brother-in-law were all murdered by the Khmer Rouge. ‘I have a boat and weapons ready,’ said Ron, ‘if they look like coming back. We’ll get everybody out that we have to . . .’
The day after the wedding Ron, Dave, Bobby and Ed were at Phnom Penh airport, on their way to Vietnam where they plan another limbs centre. It is one of their many current projects, including a worldwide campaign to ban the use and production of land mines. Watching the four of them cross the tarmac to the aircraft – only one of them, Ron, has the use of his legs – I recalled Martha Gellhorn’s tribute to that ‘life-saving minority of Americans who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful conscience and can be counted upon . . . they are always there.’186
A month later Ron was captured by Khmer Rouge troops while on a river journey to a new project in the north-east. They discussed in front of him whether or not to kill him, deciding finally to let him go. ‘We’ll kill you next time,’ they told him.
I had not been to Cambodia for two years and was not prepared for the astonishing transformation. Two years earlier the sun had beaten down on a languid Phnom Penh decaying after fifteen years of international isolation. There was no ‘peace process’ then; there were no UN blue berets and white vehicles. This was a city of gentle anarchy, of bicycles and mopeds and silhouettes strolling at night down the centre of a road, backlit by a single headlight.
Now the streets were a cataract of white vehicles, jeeps with flashing lights, Mercedes with brocade seat covers, Suzukis with whores on call, bicycles with filing cabinets on delivery, elephants announcing Cambodia’s first takeaway pizza and, at the margin, the limbless like crabs awaiting their chance.
Watching them reminded me of the dream-like quality of Cambodia, a society whose very fabric was torn apart and never repaired, whose trauma endures just beneath the surface. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the traffic swelled like an engulfing wave, spilling on to the pavement, a clutch of motorcycles and Toyotas abreast, sweeping aside pedestrians and vendors. One of the human crabs was struck by a bicycle and raised his only fist. Someone screamed. Open in their sorrow, the Cambodian people are often oblique in their fear; it is this internal bleeding that foreigners cannot see.
On my first day back, I walked to the Khmer Rouge compound, just behind the Roya
l Palace. Surrounded by a high wall, it had air-conditioned flats and offices, including a boardroom with comfortable sofas where UN officials, diplomats and journalists waited their turn to see Pol Pot’s men. I met a man called Chhorn Hay, who had a fixed smile and opaque eyes and spoke perfect English. Lining up with others, I found myself shaking hands and regretting it. ‘So nice to see you again,’ he said to us all. ‘Yes, of course, we shall consider your request for an interview. Please leave your hotel room number in the visitors’ book . . . thank you so much for coming to see us.’ As we left, their grey Mercedes was being dusted down. Chhorn Hay called out, ‘Be careful. You may need an umbrella. Bye, bye, bonsoir!’
Did this happen? Were the Khmer Rouge really here, wearing suits and saying ‘Bye, bye, bonsoir’? For me, standing at their gates, all the disingenuous semantic games and the contortions of intellect and morality that have tried to give them respectability and make the ‘peace process’ appear to work took on a vivid obscenity. I realised I had walked down this road on the day I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1979, in the aftermath of the holocaust.
There is a grassy area in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where people gather on Sundays to look at the Mekong, have their photograph taken and watch their children play in safety. I have often come here to catch the breeze and enjoy the normality. When the UN chose to hold a military parade here, it did more than disturb the peace. Ordinary Cambodians were barred from attending: that is, until a UN official was reminded that some might be necessary for the purposes of public relations. ‘Get a few of those people over here,’ he said into the public address system. A few dozen were pushed to the edge of a crowd of foreigners in time to hear a Ghanaian band strike up ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Prince Sihanouk arrived with his North Korean bodyguards and was met by the Head of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi, and the UN military commander, General Sanderson. Beside them as a guest of honour stood a smiling Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s man.