© Anne Holmes

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I arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, after a six day tour of the wondrous relics left by the ancient Khmer kingdom of Angkor: massive, towering, epic feats of architecture and sculpture which left me tingling all over with excitement at the capacity for beauty of this ever so mysterious ancient civilization. I only intended to stay in Phnom Penh a day or two to visit the main sites. But after spending an afternoon at Tuol Sleng S-21, the notorious torture and detention center during the Khmers Rouges terror, I found myself unable to leave for my next destination: Bangkok. I suddenly felt as if each one of those faces staring back at me from the halls, of what is now a museum to the genocidal mania that seized Cambodia in 1975, was a member of my family for whom I needed time to mourn. They are the faces of infants, children, youths, men and women, peasants, teachers, military personnel, dignitaries, foreign journalists, all of whom were to die grizzly deaths at the hands of madmen. They number an estimated 16,000, just a fraction of the nearly 2 million human beings who perished as a result of the Khmers Rouges hysteria. I wanted some answers. Not that my reading thus far has yielded a sufficient response to my most pressing question: why? but perhaps I have some inkling as to how.

Cambodia to date is still very much in shambles. The public healthcare system is virtually non-existent, sanitation is a myth to the country’s majority rural population, much of the land has been left unfarmable as a result of mines laid during the 10 years of civil war following Khmer Rouge rule, and the countless amputees and orphans who roam the streets are a harrowing testament to their lingering presence. It’s all too easy to blame a relatively “primitive” society for having destroyed its own people by way of some unfathomable psychological cannibalism, leading it into a mayhem from which it has yet to emerge, for no apparent good reason other than that they belong to the “barbarous” category of the forgotten people of this world. This is probably the silent line members of the international community responsible for ushering them into hell repeat to themselves time and again when, if ever, they are reminded of their role in the theater of war and chaos that Cambodians have endured for the past 36 years.

Despite one hundred years of French colonialism (1864-1964) and centuries of fending off Vietnamese and Thai encroachments upon their underpopulated territory, Cambodians in 1970 enjoyed a relatively peaceful and harmonious life, that is, until the Americans began carpet bombing the northeastern portion of the country, plunging it into the depths of its anti-communist campaign against north Vietnam. What followed was four years of confusion, death, seizure of territory by the Vietnamese, and, plenty of reasons for the Khmers Rouges to amass willing combatants to fight a common foe: American colonialism and its South Vietnamese attaches. Villages were bombed, innocent people died, and the survivors joined the revolution. Even in the later years of Khmers Rouges rule, when the country had long been sealed off from the outside world, its population thoroughly brainwashed and literally enslaved, its embassies shut down, its currency abolished, its education system erased, and no one dared to interfere in the private affairs of Cambodia, the word CIA was tossed about at Tuol Sleng as the most certain accusation worthy of instant death. Such was the lingering hatred and mistrust of a people who had been duped, pawned and abandoned time and again by the US government in its bloody, unsuccessful mission to stop dominoes from falling.

The atrocities committed by American soldiers during the war years bear a striking resemblance to the brutal behavior of the Khmers Rouges. In fact, it is well documented that the revolutionaries who were most directly touched by the American war campaign, namely those of the northeast, treated their own people during Democratic Kampuchea with greater brutality than those in the south who were less victim to the Vietnamese/American conflict. Perhaps we taught them to destroy themselves since we could not seem to finish the job ourselves. It has certainly beefed up arguments to demonize those the U.S. tried to root out when they proved to then enslave their own people under an extreme Maoist communism never before seen, killing nearly a third of its own population. It also becomes more difficult to then explain the political and economic support the American government gave the Khmers Rouges after the Vietnamese took over.

In 1979 the Vietnamese “liberated” Cambodia from its filial madmen, pushing the Khmers Rouges into the far reaches of the jungle, in what would become ten years of communist occupation and civil war. During those ten years, the Soviets armed the Vietnamese. The Chinese, the Americans, the Thai, and countless others fed and armed the Khmers Rouges, and the people of Cambodia suffered a civil war that led to famine and untold deaths. Cambodia was a pawn in the intricate game of communism vs. capitalism. The Soviets funded the Vietnamese for the same reason they footed Cuba’s bill: each country happened to be strategically placed next to its two biggest foes, China and America respectively. The US, funded the Khmers Rouges as they represented the only thorn in the communist Vietnamese occupying force’s side simply because they could not stand the loss they had borne in their war with Vietnam. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died.

In 1989, with Soviet aid to Vietnam suddenly cut off, the Vietnamese were left with no other option than to retreat, leaving Cambodia in a state of utter disrepair. The international community flew in to save the day in the aim of creating peace accords between the various factions of Cambodia’s remaining ruling classes and their armies, and helping it to regain footing in the modern world. Instead, what followed was some of the most gross profiteering by United Nations peacekeeping forces and personnel, driving up the cost of living to what makes Cambodia today one of the more expensive countries to visit in Southeast Asia, and yet, nearly its poorest. A “fair and free election” was staged, surprisingly people voted with their hearts, apparently for the wrong guy, a coup followed, and then the peacekeeping forces left, wiping their hands in what appeared to most outside as a job well done. What it did succeed in doing was putting into power a former Khmer Rouge guerilla who is still to this day prime minister, and leaving Cambodians, ill equipped, untrained, uneducated, and flat-out unable to run their own country and care for its people.

Many of the former Khmers Rouges clan are currently part of the governing classes. Cambodians seem to have a superhuman capacity to let bygones be bygones, but I have a sneaking suspicion their reticence on the matter comes more from the fear they have been taught to live in for centuries. They are a population who has been pushed around, invaded, decimated, and not in the last 600 hundred years have they ever been equipped to defend themselves. In the 1970’s the population of Cambodia hovered around 7 million whereas in Vietnam it was more like 70 million.

After spending five months in India I did not imagine encountering a country with more troubles in this part of the world. Yet, with medical tourism on the rise, an IT market ready to explode, and a general ability for the country to handle its own problems (relative to its population of over 1 billion, that is), Cambodia makes India look as efficient as Sweden. My bus trip from the border of Thailand to Siem Reap alone was enough to convince me that Cambodians live in some of the most odious conditions on earth. It was impossible for me to bridge the divide between what my eyes saw in the rice fields and what I witnessed at Angkor. The temples remaining are indisputably among the great wonders of the world and they were fashioned by the hands of an astutely creative and sensitive people. They are sure to continue to attract visitors by the millions each year, provided the relative security of Cambodia prevails. It is fanciful, however, to imagine that mounting tourism will iron out the wrinkles of war, that things will sort themselves out in Cambodia once the money comes rolling in.

I am struck today by the similarities between the mess America made in Southeast Asia and the chaos it is breeding in the Middle East. History repeats itself, the Iraqis are killing eachother, civil war is brewing, it’s a losing battle for the Americans and at some point they will have to pull out in a well choreographed realpolitik ballet in order to save face. The Khmers Rouges don’t sound too different from the AlQaeda loonies another American war is giving birth to. We go to a country whose culture and language we don’t understand, we bomb them in the name of a fictitious freedom, killing and maiming their women and children, destroying their crops and their cities, and then we leave them to fend for themselves against extremist warring factions.