Cambodia's Curse (4 page)

The Vietnamese took to these changes. The Cambodians never did. Twenty years later Paul Mason was working in Cambodia as an agronomist on the Vietnam border. “On our side, the ground was all brown and cracked,” he recalled. “Over the border, just meters away, were these verdant green fields.” Today, more than 90 percent of Cambodia’s roads remain unpaved. Cambodian farmers grow a single rice crop per year—the only nation in Asia that does not grow more—and almost none of their farmland is irrigated.

Vietnamese embrace change. Cambodians tend to resist it. Even now, Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture cannot convince most farmers to adopt modern rice-cultivation strategies that would increase Cambodia’s yield—also the lowest of any major rice-growing nation. “It’s not possible to spread these concepts very fast,” said Kith Seng, a senior Agriculture Ministry official. “It depends on the people’s ability to understand in terms of their own environment, education, and economics.”

 

The Khmer Rouge fell from power in 1979. Remnants hung on through the following two decades, fighting a guerrilla war from the western jungle. But in 1999 the last Khmer Rouge guerrilla officer was captured, and Cambodia knew true peace nationwide for the first time in decades. Yes, the Khmer Rouge had returned the nation to “year zero.” Nearly every educated person was killed, and much of the infrastructure was destroyed or fell into disrepair. Since 1979, however, that infrastructure has been rebuilt. In truth, though, the nation was quite primitive on April 17, 1975, when Pol Pot’s army marched
into Phnom Penh. There were few schools, factories, hospitals, or other features of twentieth- or even nineteenth-century life to raze. The nation’s physical infrastructure is far more advanced today. Its people are another matter.

Chan Sophal is chairman of the Siem Reap Provincial Council, in one of the nation’s largest provinces. (Provinces are equivalent to American states.) He’s a serious man, intelligent and determined, and he holds an important senior position. But when he was eighteen years old the Khmer Rouge seized power and put him to work with hundreds of others digging an irrigation canal in Banteay Meanchey Province.

Asked about that experience thirty years later, as he relates the story his voice gradually rises while he fidgets and shifts in his seat. “The regime was trying to do something to empower themselves, but they did not want to empower us. We must work hard and achieve. Or die.” He leans forward in his chair and punctuates his remarks with his hands, jabbing at the air.

He looks up at the ceiling and sounds at once both desperate and sorrowful, shaking his hands over his head. “The hunger, the hunger, the sickness, the fright. Seeing the killing. Reading documents from
that period, it all comes back. And the torture. People around me dying of starvation.” Unprompted, he goes on and seems to slip into a detached state, more and more excited. Hand to his heart, he proclaims: “The way they arrest you in the open. They want to show us, intimidate us. Anyone who does the same thing will be treated the same.” Then suddenly he is still as he draws out his words in a deep, mournful tone—eyes wide, unblinking, staring into the middle distance. “I would like to inform you that I am very, very hungry. Very, very hungry. I cannot sleep because I am so hungry.”

Chairman Chan Sophal has vivid symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a serious mental condition afflicting people who have experienced severe trauma. He is not alone. Several research studies have demonstrated that one-third to one-half of all Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have PTSD, borne of their traumatic experiences then. Watching as young soldiers executed family members. Waking to find the person lying next to you dead from starvation. In one clinical study of Cambodian refugees who came to the United States in the early 1980s and now live in Long Beach, California, 62 percent were diagnosed with PTSD—twenty-five years after their trauma.

The illness brings with it major depression, insomnia, and dulled, passive behavior punctuated with violent outbursts that come when reminded of the trauma. It can impair social and occupational functioning and is particularly virulent among the poor and uneducated.

“I am Khmer; I know the Khmer,” Judge In Bopha of the Pursat Provincial Court said with a piercing look. “Cambodians have been poisoned by the struggle to survive.” Chhay Sareth agreed. “We are a broken society,” the longtime governor of Pursat Province averred.

Won’t the nation grow out of it? After all, nearly two-thirds of the population now is under thirty; they were born after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. But in fact, Cambodia is the only nation in the world where it has been demonstrated that symptoms of PTSD and related traumatic illnesses are being passed from one generation to
the next. “Why not?” asked Ing Kantha Phavi, minister of women’s affairs and a medical doctor. “It is well known that children who grow up in a home with domestic violence are likely to commit domestic violence themselves. The next generation will be the same.”

The Khmer Rouge legacy weighs heavily on the minds of even the young, though most of them may not realize that. It has altered the entire nation’s personality, changed the way people relate to one another. “When I was a boy,” recalled Muny Sothara, a middle-aged psychiatrist, “the view here was to be courageous. In school they taught us that the Cambodian personality was heroic. We had great kings, a big land. We were an important country.”

Seanglim Bit left the country in 1975 and watched with horror as the Khmer Rouge destroyed his nation. Fifteen years later he wrote a book, called
The Warrior Heritage
, about Cambodians’ view of themselves, as he remembered it from his youth. “To be Cambodian is to be a warrior, the creator and builder of Angkor Wat,” he wrote. “More accurately, to be a Cambodian is to be a descendant of a people that produced architectural masterpieces of the Angkor era which rival the achievements of any of the ancient nations.” Now, though, said Muny Sothara, “people are passive. The one who survives is the one who is skillful at being deaf and blind.”

Youk Chhang runs the Documentation Center of Cambodia. It gathers records of the Khmer Rouge regime. He has a slightly different theory for the change in his nation’s people. “I remember our whole village was called out to watch the execution of a couple” by the Khmer Rouge. “Nobody reacted. Everybody was passive. That is how you survived. You pretend to be deaf.” Then, after the war, “people were hiding their past behavior. To survive during the Khmer Rouge, you had to steal, cheat, lie, point fingers at others, even kill. And now you are ashamed.”

Hem Heng, the Cambodian ambassador to Washington, offered an example. His family, he said, was respected in their village, but in 1978 the Khmer Rouge ordered the family killed. Villagers made a deal with
the soldiers: Kill another family instead. And, sure enough, Hem Heng recalled, Khmer Rouge soldiers executed “a Chinese family in our place.” He frowned and looked at the floor, silent.

After the war, Youk Chhang said, many people felt guilty, ashamed. “So we act passively, like we’re deaf, to hide our past behavior. The problem is, now people don’t see this as a problem. Today it has become the norm for us. That’s what’s scary.”

This learned behavior is one reason most Cambodians do not react to their leaders’ misbehavior. They are silent when officials enrich themselves on public proceeds and live in mansions the size of small hotels. They say little when the government tramples on their rights and constitutional guarantees. They seem not to notice as their police and military commit larceny and barbarity that would be unconscionable almost anywhere else in the world. They are quiet when the government sells their property to wealthy businessmen and then soldiers forcibly evict them in the night.

But then these afflictions were prominent features of Khmer society in the time of the great kings of Angkor 1,000 years ago. The lineage of larceny is clear. Far more than almost any other state, modern Cambodia is a product of customs and practices set in stone a millennium ago.

D
ecades ago, when Prime Minister Hun Sen was only thirty-two years old, Cambodia’s king anointed him with a richly symbolic title:
samdech.
It means “of great nobility.” As he grew older, he picked up more and more ceremonial appellatives so that soon his full title stretched almost all the way across a printed page: Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Prime Minister Hun Sen. It means “The Noble, Supreme, Great, and All-Powerful Commander in Chief, Prime Minister Hun Sen.” Though he is the son of rural peasants and dropped out of school at a young age, he carries himself as if he is a direct descendant of Cambodia’s great kings. All that’s lacking are the elephants.

Unlike Hun Sen, the first kings of Angkor, the Khmer kingdom, knew how to use their elephants. Angkor was a full-fledged regional power dating back to the time of Jayavarman II, who first unified the Khmer kingdom in the ninth century AD. England then was not yet a nation, and the isles fell to Viking invaders. At the same time, Muslim armies occupied nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula that later would become Spain. France was just forming as a nation.

By the turn of the fourteenth century the seat of the throne (also called Angkor) was the largest city in the world. Its population
approached 1 million, populating a tract of land more than twice the size of Los Angeles. From 1296 to 1308 King Indravarman III, one of Jayavarman’s heirs, ruled a vast Asian empire stretching across most of Southeast Asia, including much of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Each time he ventured out of his palace, he put on a spectacular display of majesty.

The best surviving account of life there comes from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese chronicler who visited in 1295 and 1296. “All of his soldiers were gathered in front of him, with people bearing banners, musicians and drummers following behind,” he wrote. The next contingent “was made up of three to five hundred women of the palace” who carried huge candles, alight even though it was daylight. Following them came carts drawn by goats, deer, and horses, all of them decorated with gold.

Next in line, riding on elephants, were the ministers and officials and relatives of the king. “Their red parasols, too many to count, were visible from far away. Next came the king’s wives and concubines and their servants, some in litters and carts, others on horses or elephants, with well over a hundred gold-filigree parasols. Last came the King, standing on an elephant, the gold sword in his hand and tusks of his elephant encased in gold. He had more than twenty white parasols, their handles all made of gold. Surrounding him on all sides were elephants in very large numbers.”

These displays helped cement Indravarman’s image as the God-king. And like the kings who ruled before and after, he conscripted immense slave workforces to build temples and monuments to his gods. These palaces and shrines are all that remain of Angkor today—a vast monument to slave labor. Most famous among them is Angkor Wat, built in the early twelfth century. Though it was at first dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, as Cambodians gradually switched their allegiance to Buddhism from roughly the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, at one point they renovated Angkor Wat to make it a Buddhist temple.

The Hindu influence on Cambodia is both ancient and lasting. The people of Angkor emigrated from the Indian subcontinent centuries earlier. Archaeologists have found ceramic shards in a cave that
dated back to 4000 BC, the earliest known human population of the area. Carbon dating also places the earliest written artifact, a stone tablet in the Khmer language, at about AD 600. Other tablets from that era were in Sanskrit, the early Hindu language. Features of Hinduism—shrines and some religious practices, for example—are still part of Cambodian society today.

Each year nearly two million tourists visit the monumental architecture of Angkor Wat and the ancient city’s other remaining shrines, but the homes, shops, and everyday buildings of Angkor have long since turned to dust. In AD 245 the Chinese emperor sent a fact-finding mission to Cambodia, then known as Funan. The mission report found that “the people live in houses raised from the ground.” They were simple abodes, consisting of a single room mounted on poles, which kept the residents high above the annual floodwaters. Wealthier people had taller poles, giving rise to the expression, still current in parts of Cambodia today, “He lives in a high house.” Bamboo matting covered the walls, palm thatch the roofs. The people cooked over open fires using earthenware pots, Zhou observed. “For a stove they used three stones set into the ground.”

Several homes shared a ditch latrine. When the smell grew to be overpowering, they would cover up the ditch and dig a new one, Zhou wrote. These ditches lay amid or just above the city’s water table. Needless to say, dysentery was a common illness and often fatal.

Cambodia is hot and steamy year-round; the tropical sun feels like a torch. To cope, the men of Angkor wore loincloths, the women skirts. That’s all. Zhou, a prudish Chinaman, devoted significant attention to Cambodia’s bare-breasted women and the freewheeling sexual mores. Life held an uninhibited, earthy quality. The AD 245 Chinese fact-finding mission reported that the people are of a covetous nature. “Boys and girls follow their penchants without restraint.” For their part, Khmer kings kept vast harems, hundreds of women—until near the end of the twentieth century.