#70: Killing Fields & Fried Spiders:
Adventures in Poor Rich Cambodia
10 DEC 2002
Siem Reap & Angkor
Arrived in Siem Reap yesterday and staying at Room 66 of Popular Guesthouse. Spent today at the world-famous Angkor ruins today. An amazingly large site with numerous temples and monuments. No doubt the most spectacular sight in Southeast Asia. Will continue visiting different sites in the Angkor Archaelogical Park and elsewhere in the Province of Siem Reap, over the next 2 days. Will take a 12 hour bus to Bangkok on Friday.
Found two Singapore restaurants here in Siem Reap. If you are willing to pay US$350/night, you can stay in the best hotel in town, the Grand Hotel d’Angkor, one of the exclusive “grand old hotels” of the world, also Singapore-owned (Raffles Hotel Group).
11 DEC 2002
“As rich as Cambodia” is how Chou Ta-kuan, a 13th century Chinese traveller described Cambodia. Chou had, in his classical work, Customs of Cambodia, left humanity the earliest detailed description of life in Cambodia at the height of the old Khmer Empire. This is the only contemporary account of the Khmer Empire in its period of glory. Flourishing between the 9th and 14th centuries, the Khmer people of Cambodia built what was then the greatest empire of Mainland Southeast Asia. Also, the grand monuments of Angkor including Angkor Wat, the greatest religious building in the world ever, and in its environs, entire groups of temples and other religious buildings with elaborate sculptures and carvings.
Then, the Khmer Empire went into rapid decline, its lands conquered by neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand. Its glorious capital, Angkor, was partially abandoned and reclaimed by the tropical jungle. In the 20th century, the country was submerged in more than two decades of warfare. For a period of three years, it was ruled by the Khmer Rouge, one of the most murderous regimes in world history. The Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of two million Cambodians out of a total population of eight million. Today, Cambodia is one of the poorest nations. It is at peace though, and striving to find its place in this increasingly complicated world.
I entered Cambodia by boat from Vietnam along the Mekong. From Chau Doc, the Vietnamese border town, I visited a Cham village on the banks of the Mekong, on the day of Eid Adil Fitri, celebration of the end of Ramadan. The Chams are a Malay-Polynesian people who once built great Hindu temples on the southern coast of Vietnam. In the 15th century, their Champa Kingdom was totally wiped out by the Vietnamese, and they were forced to flee into the Mekong Delta and Cambodia. In their exile, they converted to Islam (though another group in Vietnam’s Central Highlands simply combined Islam and Hinduism into a hybrid faith). As I walked through their village with its narrow streets, the Imam called for prayers. In their brightly coloured batik and Malay-like songkok (prayer caps), I realised how much this whole landscape resembled a typical kampong scene in Malaysia or Indonesia.
Once I crossed the border into Cambodia, I joined a few backpackers in a dodgy speedboat. Under the soaring sun, we sped two hours towards Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Between 1973 and 1975, the final stages of the Cambodian Civil War between the Khmer Rouge and the American-backed Lon Nol regime, most of Cambodia, apart from Phnom Penh, had fallen to the communist Khmer Rouge. The only access to the outside world was along the Mekong to Saigon in South Vietnam. As cargo boats and barges braved their way to the besieged capital, artillery rained upon them. Unknown numbers perished in this highway of life and death.
I had other worries. Even in peace, Cambodia has long been the “Wild West” of Southeast Asia. Tales of banditery linger around for a long time. Tourists were being murdered. Our boatman wore a crash helmet and constantly stopped in the middle of nowhere to engage in mobile conversations. I remembered tales of robbery on the Amazon waters and wondered if a sudden misadventure on the Mekong would end my journey once and for all. The Cambodian countryside, unlike the crowded, overworked, multiple-functioned Vietnamese ricefields (also known as fish and duck farmm), was relatively underpopulated and under-worked. Nobody would know if we were sprayed with automatic machine guns. Fortunately, all we suffered was more than our deserved share of sunburn and eye-deafening engine scream.
We reached the ferry port of Neak Luang. In 1975, this was the site of atrocious American bombing to stop the Khmer Rouge advance on Phnom Penh. Thousands of civilians were killed. Between 1969 and 1975, the U.S. bombed large parts of Cambodia in an undeclared war against North Vietnamese infiltration, to stop the growing communist insurgency in Cambodia. Ironically, the U.S.-supported overthrow of the government of Prince Sihanouk and relentless bombing of the Cambodian countryside, only forced the Cambodian peasants to join the previously weak and unpopular Khmer Rouge. Whilst Mao Zedong’s China financed and armed the Khmer Rouge, it was the American bombs that supplied the Khmer Rouge with the hearts and minds of the masses.
Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia is a city with a wild reputation – pot-holed streets, muddy tracks, mountains of garbage, hired killers, deadly drugs, coup d’�tat, dodgy timber deals. This was once a slow-going, pleasant city with wide-shaded boulevards. Under the rule of king-then prince-and-once-again-King Sinhanouk, it was a Bohemian mini-Paris, with streets named after figures like Kim U Sung, Mao Zedong and Josip Tito. The king indulged in movie making, with films starring himself, state ministers and beautiful ladies in the Royal Cambodian Ballet Company. Those idyllic days lasted till 1970 when he was overthrown by the U.S. backed Lon Nol regime. Civil war began.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over and they ordered the city evacuated. In an attempt to create the new Cambodian Man, the educated were executed, mostly with their families, and all other urbanites forcibly moved to the countryside. To realise their bizarre vision of a new Cambodia, family units were disbanded and the whole nation organised into slave brigades to work on rice fields, leading to disastrous results. Two million, including most of the intelligentsia and urbanites, were either executed or died of famine and lack of medical care.
Cambodia was thrusted into the Stone Age. The Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1978, but Phnom Penh had become a ghost town. Starving refugees flooded into town, taking over the empty buildings whose owners were almost certainly dead, bringing along their cows and pigs. Phnom Penh, the Aix-en-Provence of Asia, became shantytown Calcutta.
Old Phnom Penh was once a city of three cultures – Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese. The Vietnamese, due to the historical difficulties with the Cambodians, are fairly low profile these days. In contrast, the Chinese-Cambodians, who were massacred by the Khmer Rouge due to their membership in the hated bourgeoise, are back again. (The Khmer Rouge, financed by the Chinese government, went on to kill most of the local ethnic Chinese). The Chinese run most of the businesses despite losing everything during those terrible days. Trilingual signboards (Khmer, English, Chinese) are displayed on numerous businesses and shops. They were joined by investors and businessmen from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The two largest hotels in town, including the famous Hotel, Le Royal, is Singapore owned. I hear that distinctive Singapore/Malaysian accent frequently on the streets of Phnom Penh.
I visited the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison, where Khmer Rouge tortured and interrogated prisoners before sending them to the killing fields. Torture instruments and photos of thousands of prisoners are on display. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge indulged in the bizarre habit of documenting in detail how they committed their crimes. The prison guards and interrogators of Tuol Sleng suffered the same fate as their prisoners. The Khmer Rouge went into several rounds of self-purge. As they say, Revolution tends to devour its own children.
I also dropped by the killing fields of Choeung Ek, where thousands were murdered using sharp blades made from the branches of the sugar palm, the straight lofty plants found across Cambodia. Bullets are too expensive for mass killing. Manual slaughter requires a lot more guts and cruelty. Above the many mass graves are incriptions like, “Children killed here after being flung against tree trunk,” or “More than one hundred headless bodies found here.” Incredible. Sad.
In 1978, having enough of Khmer Rouge’s trouble-making, Vietnam invaded and overthrew them in merely two weeks. The Vietnamese invasion, coupled with Vietnam’s decision to join the Soviet camp, was seen by the West as well as the rest of Southeast Asia, as another step towards Soviet domination in Southeast Asia. If the Vietnamese were not thrown out of Cambodia, they would soon march into Thailand, Malaysia and so on. In fact, observers once said, “The only thing that can stop the Vietnamese is the traffic jam of Bangkok.” So the West and ASEAN countries (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) began supporting the Khmer Rouge and non-communist factions in their decade-long fight against Vietnam and the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. Poor Cambodia continued to suffer for another one decade and more.
I had iced coffee on the terraces of the Foreign Correspondent Club along the banks of the Tonle Sap River. This timeless river, an auxiliary river to the Mekong, together with the Tonle Sap Lake at its western end, is the lifeline of Cambodia. In the dry season, the Tonle Sap Lake flows into the Mekong via the Tonle Sap River. In the wet season, so much water flows down the Mekong into the delta that water direction reverses back into the lake.
This unusual phenomena causes nutrients and fish to flow through the length of Cambodia, thus providing not only irrigation and fertility to the farmlands of Cambodia, but also passing fish and seventy percent of the protein intake of all Cambodians. On the banks of the river, lovers strolled around in orange sunset light, while barechested youth played football in a field near here. Hawkers sold anything ranging from deep-fried sparrows to crispy grasshoppers. I pondered about the arms and financial support that my own Singapore, among others, had provided to various factions in those years of conflict against Vietnam. How many Cambodians have died as their country became simply a pawn in that global chess game?
Simon is twenty-nine years old, half Chinese, half Khmer. His rough palms and tanned complexion betray uncountable hours spent toiling on fields under the burning sun of Cambodia. He was born in Phnom Penh, but grew up in a countryside orphanage after the Khmer Rouge killed his parents. He used to work in the fields in the provinces but he wanted “to see the world,” as he puts it. So he packed up to come to Phnom Penh to look for his aunt, who had survived the terrible years. He now helps out in a shop owned by his aunt, selling water and sweets to tourists. He might not have gone through formal education, but he speaks relatively good English and French. He reminded me of so many people I have met round the world – bright, intelligent individuals who would have gone far if born in a more developed country.
“There is no opportunity here,” he complained, “the government is too corrupt. Our one-eyed prime minister sees nothing but cash. He has forgotten his peasant roots.” He was referring to Hun Sen, the strongman and politician extraordinaire of Cambodia. Hun Sen, son of a farmer, joined the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s and later escaped to Vietnam, only to return to serve under the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. He became Foreign Minister at twenty-eight and a few years later, Prime Minister – the youngest in the world at that time.
His regime not only survived the Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia, but also outwitted the United Nations mandate to take over Cambodia and hold free and fair elections there. In 1997, he once again regained sole ultimate control of the nation after a coup d’�tat against the first prime minister, Prince Ranariddh. He has become the undisputed strongman. “The Prime Minister is a very wealthy man, and he’s more concerned with his own Swiss bank accounts and in naming schools after himself,” Simon said.
As the gecko ran over the shop ceiling and mosquitos made their evening run, I pondered about the future of Cambodia. Poor and devastated, a nation of corrupt and power-crazy barons. While land mines continue to plague the country, the destruction of the nation’s intelligentsia means that it will be a long time before the country can stand on its own feet. In the meantime, its leaders plunder its natural resources. Secret agreements with Thai military is leading to the depletion of rubbies in Pailin (an autonomous province inhabitated by ex-Khmer Rouge people) with little benefit to the national treasury.
The wholesale cutting down of the country’s timber resources leads to deforestation and silting of the Tone Sap, a major contributory factor to the reducing fish catch in the river and lake, thus endangering the nation’s food resources. Tourism is the most important source of national revenue right now. Yet, entrance fees to the country’s most important attraction, Angkor, at a princely sum of twenty U.S. dollars per day or forty dollars for three days is collected by an oil company owned by a close friend of the Prime Minister.
Angkor is one of the most spectacular monuments of the world and certainly the most magnificent one in Southeast Asia. Tall monuments with numerous enigmatic smiles of the Buddhist diety rise up above the jungle canopy, incredible sculptures of massive armies, ferocious battles, as well as scenes of peaceful everyday life in Angkor a millennium ago. On a motor-bike, I spent three days exploring the massive monuments of Angkor, as well as outlying sites across muddy tracks.
Ah Cai is a Singaporean who had abandoned a comfortable and safe lifestyle in the cosy island republic to come to the new “Wild East”, to set up a restaurant and guesthouse business. He’s the archtypical “heartlander”, the kind of less-educated Singaporean our elitist government has ignored and neglected. He speaks English and Mandarin with a thick Hokkien accent, the sort of tone regarded by some as embarassing to the “polite society”.
He has been in Cambodia for eight years, right from those days when walking on the main streets of Phnom Penh at night was regarded as dangerous and downright foolish. First, he opened a restaurant in Phnom Penh serving the large international community, and then Siem Reap, when he noticed the growing tourism industry in Cambodia. I watched this pot-bellied entrepreneur greeting his guests in Cambodian, English and Indonesian (to Dutch tourists, some of whom speak Indonesian).
I wondered about the notions of “cosmopolitan” and “heartlander” Singaporeans, a concept introudced by our prime minister. It isn’t very clear who belongs to which category – the (merely) bilingual engineer with a masters degree who doesn’t dare travel to a third world country, or a gung-ho, multi-lingual (four languages and five Chinese dialects), primary-school educated entrepreneur who sets up shop in a country where you have to persuade your clients to leave their pistols outside the restaurant.
After a wonderful time in Cambodia, I got onto a disintegrating bus across bumpy roads to the Cambodian-Thai border. You would imagine that the important Bangkok-Phnom Penh road, officially National Highway Six, to be a smooth paved ride. Instead, it’s mostly mud tracks. It is rumored that the Thai Bangkok Airways pays top Cambodian leaders coffee money to ensure that the roads will never threaten the highly profitable forty-five-minute flight between Bangkok and Siem Reap, which the airline has full monopoly of and charges tourists a princely sum of three hundred dollars for the short ride. It took a dusty five hours across that mere one hundred and fifty kilometers. It tells a lot about the current state of the old Khmer Empire.