Cambodia's Curse (36 page)

Dr. Mam Bunheng, the minister of health, addressed the worsening statistics with a furrowed brow and a worried tone. “Yes, now we see more domestic violence,” he acknowledged. “We had it before but not as much. A big part of the problem today is that so many people like to drink.” But then he brightened. “Also look at how we inform people about this now, educate people.”

Given the bleak statistics, that didn’t seem to be helping. In fact, in late 2009 the Women’s Affairs Ministry conducted a nationwide survey and found that 70 percent of all respondents, male and female, said they believed physical violence against women was sometimes permissible. More surprising, 55 percent of the women surveyed said they deserved to be beaten if they questioned their husbands about spending habits or extramarital affairs. Isn’t that what the
Chbab Srey
, required reading in the schools until 2007, had been teaching Cambodia’s children for generations?

 

Pailin is a scruffy town near Cambodia’s western border with Thailand. It is distinguished by its role as the former Khmer Rouge “capital.” In Pailin, Chhoun Makkara represents the human-rights organization Adhoc, which pursues human-rights cases in court—often a fruitless endeavor, given the corruption endemic to the legal system.

One morning in the summer of 2009 Chhoun Makkara heard about a double murder in town, including a hanging—an extreme example of domestic violence, it appeared. He went to have a look, “because this kind of hanging is increasing,” he explained. Really, not much happened in Pailin, but this looked interesting. Now he was looking at grisly photos from the murder scene. A ceiling fan rotated slowly overhead—too slow to create a breeze. A fluorescent light hung from the ceiling just above the fan, creating a slow, eerie strobe effect. The room was bare, save for a desk, a table, and a couple of chairs. “I don’t think the police will drop this case,” he added, as if that were unusual. “They are doing an investigation.”

A few hours earlier, I had accompanied two uniformed policemen as they walked down a narrow dirt path behind a small neighborhood of one-room Cambodian homes on stilts. The path led down to a small stream where residents went to bathe. Just one mile from Pailin’s city center residents had no electricity or running water. Down a short rise they came to the stream, little more than a creek three feet across, not even two inches deep, littered with small empty shampoo and liquid-soap squeeze tubes.

A low tree hung over the stream, and as soon as the police made a turn in the path they saw the first victim, forty-three-year-old Sorn Phalla, bare-chested, hanging from a rope tied to a low branch, his chin at his chest, eyes wide open, tongue sticking out. He was a muscular fellow with short-cropped black hair and faint blue tattoos all over his chest in a serpentine Asian design. Some Cambodians believed tattoos like that protect you from harm. They did not appear to have worked that day. His feet were bare and dangled a few inches from the ground. No stool or other object lay beside him, nothing he could have jumped from to hang himself. But then, he was not the only victim. Two yards away Ream Sokny, a women in her midthirties, lay dead on the ground, faceup, coils of heavy wire wrapped tight around her neck. Apparently, she’d been strangled. Her legs splayed wide open, and water dribbled around her bare feet in the stream. She
wore a yellow sarong and bra but was otherwise bare-chested. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, her face expressionless. A large green and white bath towel lay beside her in a pile.

Along the rise overlooking the scene a dozen townspeople crouched, watching silently. One policeman wandered among them taking statements while the other looked over the bodies. In short order the woman’s husband made his presence known. He wore a beige shirt that looked like it had once been white and black pants rolled up to his knees. Crouching on the ground just above his wife, he muttered loud enough so that everyone could hear him. “I was away at the Thai-Cambodian border,” he said to no one in particular. The border was fewer than twenty miles away. “I drive a bulldozer. I come home just once or twice a month.” He gazed at the scene with a sour, pursed-lip expression. “I just received an award for good work on the road project, and I didn’t even get to tell her.”

An older man in a sleeveless white T-shirt wandered around the scene, his face etched with hostility. He, too, spoke to no one in particular, but his manner was angry, pugnacious. “I share a fence with her, so we are like brother and sister. And this man killed her!” he declared, pointing urgently at the dead man hanging from the tree.

A policeman pulled the dead man’s shorts down and examined his genitals with a gloved hand, looking for evidence of recent sex. When he finished he left the shorts pulled down so that the dead man presented an even more inelegant image, if that were possible. The officer then found a scythe and cut the dead man down. The body was stiff as a pole and simply fell back into a crook in the tree.

The husband said, “He has tattoos, and she is scared of tattoos. He’s not handsome; he does not look like a movie star. I don’t think my wife had an affair with this man.” Just then the pugnacious older neighbor marched over to the tree, positioned himself behind the dead man, and gave his back a strong kick, knocking the body forward so it fell to the ground with a loud and sickening thud that raised a cloud of dust and stilled the crowd.

Everyone watched intently until the dust finally settled and they could see him facedown in the dirt, his naked butt looking up to the sky. Within a few minutes ants were crawling over the body. The husband roused himself and walked over to his wife, the wire still coiled around her neck. He picked up the big green bath towel and covered her.

Up the hill, in the little neighborhood where the couple had lived, another policeman was questioning a young girl who was sitting in the doorway of the dead woman’s small home—one room with wooden walls and a tin roof. A car battery powered a single fluorescent light. The couple had an actual bed, an unusual luxury in a Cambodian home—a straw mat on wooden slats. The woman had hung red, lacy curtains around it. On faded posters tacked to the walls Chinese models posed in fashions from ten or fifteen years before. A small photo album from their wedding sat precariously on one of the rafters. Inside, the victim, a pretty young woman, stood smiling in front of statues and pagodas. Her new husband was not shown; he must have been taking the pictures.

The young girl said she sometimes stayed in the house when the husband was away and told the police that the dead man knew the woman and occasionally came over for dinner. “But they talked in a normal way,” suggesting that she had not seen any improper behavior.

At the Adhoc office later that day, Chhoun Makkara, looking at his photos from the scene of the crime, said police told him that “they found sperm on both people. There was no trail in the grass, no crushed plants, so in my opinion, they were killed while they were getting ready to take a bath. They brought a towel. She’s only in a bra. He’s in shorts. But it’s hard to draw a conclusion.” Obvious questions, he admitted, included: How did it happen that the husband, who seldom came home, happened to be there that day? Did he catch the two of them in the act and, in a fit of rage, kill them?

That evening, Chhoun Makkara said a friend at the police station told him that the police would likely charge the husband with the
crime. A few days later, however, the police rendered a different, farfetched judgment. The young man killed the woman and then hung himself, raising the obvious question: Did the husband pay off the police?

 

Just outside the Pursat town center one summer afternoon a week or so after the hanging and murder in Pailin, police were manning a traffic checkpoint on the main east-west highway. They’d placed a metal fence in the road so that it blocked the east lane of traffic. There, a policeman wearing an orange emergency vest stood under an umbrella, waving tractor-trailer trucks to the curb with an orange truncheon. Cars and small trucks were allowed to pass unhindered. Another officer stood behind another fence doing the same thing with traffic heading west, and at any given moment two or three trucks were idling beside the road in each direction.

The officers said nothing to the trucks’ drivers. They didn’t have to. One by one, each driver hopped down from the truck cab with a handful of bills in his hand. He trotted over to the side of the road where three other officers stood behind their patrol car. Wordlessly, each of the drivers plopped the bills onto the squad car’s trunk as the officers watched, then ran back to his truck and drove away. One driver, stopped and questioned a short distance up the road, said he had paid 5,000 riel, or about $1.20.

Capt. Sim Rath was standing under an umbrella behind the squad car, collecting the cash as the drivers dropped it off. He said nothing to the drivers as they paid their bribes; they exchanged not a word or even a glance. The captain looked both nervous and defiant as I approached. I asked him, “Why are you taking their money?”

“They don’t have drivers’ licenses, or their trucks are too heavy,” he said without pause.

“How do you know the trucks are too heavy if you don’t have a scale?”

“I can tell. Some of these trucks were inspected before.” He pointed to his ticket book, folded open to one page that was filled out with a
notice of infraction. But then, none of the drivers were leaving with tickets in their hands. Was the ticket book for show? Was it a threat? Give me some money, or I’ll give you a ticket that costs more?

“We give them a receipt,” the captain insisted. Just then another driver trotted up, dropped 10,000 riel on the trunk without a word, turned around, and jogged back to his truck. The for-show ticket remained in the book.

“What did he do wrong?”

Capt. Sim Rath paused for a moment, considering, then said, “He already knows what he did wrong.”

Later that day, around lunchtime, the fences and umbrellas still sat by the road, but the officers were gone—taking a break from their labors. Checkpoints like that one dotted the highways nationwide. At another in Kandal Province, ten policemen ignored all the cars and motorbikes and small trucks. They stopped only big trucks loaded with goods. Truck drivers got out, trotted over to the table, just as they had at Capt. Sim Rath’s checkpoint in Pursat Province, left some money, and then got back in their trucks and drove off. But at exactly 5:00 p.m., the police gave the table and chairs they’d been using back to the businesses they had requisitioned them from. They took off their helmets and police shirts and walked across the street to their cars carrying briefcases, one of which held the money they had just purloined.
¹⁰

Government officials were not unanimous in their disapproval of this practice. Chhay Sareth, the Pursat council chief, called it “a big
issue for me; I hate it.” Prach Chann, governor of Battambang Province, acknowledged that police checkpoints dotted his roads but called them “a small thing. Not a big deal.”

Police generally targeted fully loaded tractor-trailer trucks because the drivers, carrying rice or corn or cassava, knew they would have to pay bribes to get their produce to market, so they came with cash in their pockets.

Ma Buth was a produce broker. His trucks picked up corn from farmers in western provinces and drove it across the country for sale in Vietnam. “On the way, at all the checkpoints,” he explained matter-of-factly, “we will have to pay the police a total of about $50 and then at the border another $50. Each way. We make about $300 on the truckload, minus the bribes. So really it’s $200. It’s getting worse. Hun Sen said they shouldn’t do it anymore. But nothing has changed. In fact it’s getting worse. It’s a big problem. They extort money from us, and so we cannot pay as high a price for the product, meaning the poor farmer is the one who suffers.” In his line of work, from every direction, he said, someone was trying to cheat him. “I’ve been at this since 1985. Corruption in previous years was not as serious. Now it gets worse and worse. They see me doing business, so they want to make some profit from me.” In 2008 the United Nations, quoting a recent survey, said, “89 percent of encounters with the traffic police resulted in a bribe.”

 

While police and the courts took money to let criminals go free, judges also readily accepted orders from above. In fact, they usually didn’t need orders. When Hun Sen or some other senior member of his government filed charges against someone, the judges knew they had to find that person guilty—if they wanted to keep their jobs. For a few judges, failure to do so had resulted in immediate dismissal. So it was for Moeung Sonn, president of the Khmer Civilization Foundation, dedicated to protecting and promoting the nation’s cultural heritage. In 2009 the government started putting up lights at Angkor
Wat, the twelfth-century temple that remained the symbol of Cambodia’s former glory. The Cambodian flag featured a line drawing of Angkor Wat. The idea was to begin a nighttime show for tourists.

Moeung Sonn said he was concerned that putting up the lights might damage the temple. Right away, the government sued him for disinformation and incitement. He fled to France. Meantime, Dave Perkes, a
Phnom Penh Post
writer, had a look at the walls where the lights had been mounted and found “regular, oblong holes about 10 cm long” that had been cut in the walls above “the cornices opposite the bas reliefs.” Exercising the extreme caution that journalists had to display, so as not to attract their own lawsuits, Perkes concluded his short column saying, “I cannot say for certain whether additional holes had been cut” to put up the lights, “but I can see how people get the impression that serious damage had been done.”

A court convicted Moeung Sonn in absentia. Judge Chhay Kong said, “We find that the accused damaged the government’s reputation and caused anarchy and disorder in society.” He sentenced the defendant to two years in prison. Moeung Sonn remained in France. This was just one in a spate of similar lawsuits against opposition politicians, journalists, and other assorted government antagonists. Among them, once again, Sam Rainsy found himself caught in this trap.