Hot Press Special Report: Cambodia

Okay, I’m predictable, but you have to forgive an old punk having The Dead Kennedys’ ‘Holiday In Cambodia’ blasting on the iPod as he lands at Phnom Penh International Airport following a minus-frills flight down from Bangkok, which almost makes you forgive Michael O’Leary.

Jello Biafra’s barked, ‘You’ll work harder /With a gun in your back /For a bowl of rice a day /Slave for soldiers /Till you starve /Then your head is skewered on a stake’ came five years after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had embarked on their genocidal campaign to turn the newly renamed Democratic Kampuchea into a self-sufficient, peasant-led agrarian communist utopia – their words not anyone else’s apart from, perhaps, the Chinese’s who as part of their twin anti-American and Russian obsessions propped up arguably the most aggressively destructive regime since the Nazis in Germany.
Operating under the mantra of, “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss”, Pol Pot on April 17, 1975 ordered the turning of clocks back to the Year Zero. Money and conventional education were abolished; undesirables who included Buddhist monks, Christians, Muslims, disabled people, lawyers, teachers, professors, English-speakers, ethnic minorities and anyone else deemed to be an intellectual were mass executed and cities forcibly evacuated so that the “duck’s arses with chicken’s heads” living in them could be given a rural work camp re-education.
By the time the Vietnamese toppled him in 1979, Pol Pot had presided over an estimated two million deaths – a grotesque “purifying of the population”, which still impacts on all areas of Cambodian life. Unfortunately the Vietnamese only half did the job with Pol Pot evading capture and mounting a rear-guard action that only ended in 1991 after 12 years of civil war.
As in the North of Ireland the peace and reconciliation process has thrown up such anomalies as a former Khmer Rouge soldier being elevated to Prime Minister while four of his revolutionary comrades face mass-murder charges.
“It’s the Cambodian way,” a fortysomething Phnom Penh businessman tells me almost the moment we start talking in our hotel. I think about launching into my Fianna Fáil tirade, but it probably wouldn’t translate.
I’m on field-trip duty for the week with Concern who entered Cambodia in 1990, but had been working with Cambodian refugees forced to flee across the border to Thailand since 1979.
For once it’s a good news story, with their various programmes developing to the point where in June they’ll be handed over to their local partners. From food security and disaster risk reduction to Credit Union-style community banking and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), their work in Cambodia over the past 23 years has made a profound and sustainable difference to hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.
We’re travelling up-country tomorrow to Pursat province to see those and other projects being carried out at community level. Today though it’s history lesson time as we visit the notorious Toul Slaeng Prison where 20,000 civilians were tortured before being bussed to Boeung Eik, one of the 300 Pol Pot-era ‘killing fields’, which are still littered with their victims’ teeth, bone fragments and clothing.
Accompanying us to both is Tan Bunleng, one of Concern’s senior programme managers who driving away from the profoundly depressing Boeung Eik casually suggests that, “If we have time tomorrow I’ll tell you my story.”
Bunleng is all smiles the following afternoon as we find a quiet corner to have our chat. He’s brought a photo album with him to help illustrate what is a heartbreaking but all too common Cambodian tale.
“This is my family before Pol Pot,” he says pointing to the sort of ‘Mum, Dad ‘n’ the kids’ snap you’d find on any mantlepiece. “Under him everybody apart from me and my sister’s husband died. I was 13 the day the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh. We welcomed them with food and water because we thought that was the end of the fighting. We went to bed that night happy. The next day we woke up to find out that they were ordering the evacuation of the city. I was forced to join a youth group and sent into the countryside to dig canals. At first we worked from four o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night. Then they put lights in and made us work until ten o’clock. This was seven days a week with just two small bowls of rice a day and a little water. We had to eat worms and slugs and anything else we could find in the ground to survive. This was considered an insult to Pol Pot by the guards who beat you with their fists or rifles if you were seen. It was a nightmare we thought we’d only escape from by dying.”
While Bunleng toiled for 16-hours-a-day in the fields, the rest of the Tan family were suffering an even worse fate.
“My brother, two of my sisters and my father died from starvation; they had no muscle, only skin and bone like a skeleton,” he resumes. “My grandmother died from dysentery. My other sister, my younger brother and my mother survived until 1979 when – with the Vietnamese soldiers advancing – they were forced by the Khmer Rouge to go into the mountains with them. When they got there they were killed with an axe.”
Bunleng’s stoicism in telling his story is typical of the Cambodian preference for looking to the future rather than dwelling on the past. How did he discover they’d been killed?
“A lady who knew my mother was hit with an axe too; she fell to the ground but it didn’t kill her. She managed to escape and told me what had happened. My mother’s sister also had 10 in her family; only one survived.
“My father sold pork in the market,” Bunleng continues with a wistful shake of the head. “He wasn’t rich or an intellectual, but because we lived in Phnom Penh we were considered pro-American and enemies of the revolution.”
Knowing nothing of the world beyond the perimeter fence, it wasn’t until the camp guards ran away one morning that the now 17-year-old Bunleng realised Pol Pot was about to be toppled.
“I walked to Battambang [in northern Cambodia] and spent a month there before deciding to go to Thailand. Crossing the border I was stopped by Cambodian resistance soldiers who because I’m half-Chinese and looked different to them accused me of being a spy. I persuaded them I wasn’t and they let me join them. There were 60 of us living in the forest fighting the Vietnamese; it was good because we got food. They made me a medic and taught me how to give injections. Eventually I reached the refugee camp where I asked the man in charge, ‘Can I help?’ and they introduced me to the American Refugee Commission who gave me a job. I became a tuberculosis specialist and met a nurse working there who became my wife. Concern were also in the camp building latrines and doing other sanitation work. I got to know their staff and after returning to Cambodia in 1993 got a job with them.”
Those Concern staff included Breda Gahan who in 1990 became one of the first westerners to enter Phnom Penh since the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
“It was like going into North Korea now – probably worse,” she reflects. “There was no running water or electricity, no motorised vehicles, no schools, no phones, no health service… everything was in ruins because of the failed policies of Pol Pot who really was the Hitler of Asia.
“There were people suffering from cerebral malaria lying unconscious in the street and horrific injuries from the literally millions of landmines both sides had planted. We saw 20 – 25 victims per day in our makeshift hospital, and that was only the survivors. There was one man I’ll never forget – he’d been out de-mining a few hours after his wife had given birth, and lost both of his arms and both of his eyes. I’ve a slide of his injuries, which is pornography in the truest sense of the word. Cambodian people de-mined Cambodia with their limbs. It was so bad that having one arm or one leg missing was normal. You had to be a double or triple amputee to be considered disabled.
“There was still fighting in the countryside, with the battle lines constantly changing so that an area could be Khmer Rouge-controlled one day and part of the Vietnamese zone the next.”
It’s easy to paint the Cambodian Civil War as a simple case of Good Vs. Evil but as Gahan points out: “A lot of the people fighting for the Khmer Rouge were doing so under duress. They were taken forcibly from their villages and told: ‘Fight or be killed.’ Family members not picked up by Pol Pot’s people were forced to fight for the other side, so you had Brother Vs. Brother and Father Vs. Son. I was at a tuberculosis inoculation session one day and there were two identical twins standing there in different uniforms, laughing and joking away even though they were at war with each other.”
Experienced aid worker or not, Breda admits to being “shocked beyond belief” at how little of Cambodia’s infrastructure had survived Pol Pot and his goons.
“My initial reaction was, ‘How the hell are we going to put this all back together again?’” she reflects. “Then I started talking to the locals – many of whom had never encountered foreigners before – and realised the Cambodian spirit is strong enough to survive anything you throw at it.”
Something that’s born out by Phnom Penh’s post-civil war transformation from ghost city to boom town awash with Japanese, Korean, Singaporean and, perhaps most significantly, Chinese investment. One of Cambodia’s hottest political potatoes is how much Beijing wants in return for such generosity as building 500kms of new roads a year. The fear among the opposition, such as it is, is that the government, democratic in name only, has granted their benefactors oil and mineral rights that vastly exceed the value of the infrastructure being provided.
“‘What exactly are the Chinese getting out of this?’ is a perfectly reasonable question, which Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodia People’s Party have been reluctant to answer,” proffers Kevin Doyle, the Glasnevin-born editor of the influential Cambodia Times. “As we’re seeing in Africa, China isn’t adverse to assert-stripping developing countries who are willing to risk their long-term future for short-term gain.”
The story dominating the headlines when we arrive in Phnom Penh is the security forces savagely baton-charging villagers who’ve taken a dim view to being evicted from their lakeshore homes.
“Land rights is perhaps the biggest issue in Cambodia at the moment,” Doyle resumes. “The Boeung Kak protests have arisen from a company owned by a Cambodian People’s Party senator being given the rights to develop the area around the lake, and in the process displacing over 4,000 families. In May 2012, 13 female protestors were jailed for up to two-and-a-half years, which led to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Hillary Clinton getting involved. Adding to people’s sense of injustice is the fact that the government are willing to rent out the police and army to companies involved in land grab protests.”
Crash course in high-level Cambodian corruption completed, we head 150 miles north to Bakmek where one of the 450 Village Associations set up by Concern in conjunction with their local non-government partners is having its weekly meetings. The idea is to identify the poorest people in the community and help improve their financial situations. This is done through a series of association grants and loans, which are repaid at a monthly interest rate of 1% to 2% – a far better deal than the 20% a month previously demanded by local moneylenders.
The success stories include a family who bought a pair of breeding pigs with their loan and within 18 months had reared and sold enough piglets to be able to double the size of their house and buy a van. A portion of the loan interest paid by association members goes into an emergency fund to help destitute villagers who are ignored by a government that despite imprisoning people for non-payment of income tax doesn’t believe in social security, unemployment benefit and pensions for anyone except their own cronies.
Concern have also helped to provide new access roads, latrines, wells, a rodent and bird-proof rice bank and a water pump, which means that instead of just the single rainy season rice crop, Bakmek farmers are now harvesting twice, sometimes three times a year.
“We used to suffer food shortages, but not anymore,” Village Association Chairperson Hern Sieng says as she proudly shows us one of their pump-irrigated paddy fields. Along the way I become involved in a tense stand-off with a 400lb-plus water buffalo who’s displeased that I’m standing on what he reckons is his tasty grass. Much snorting of nose, stamping of feet and brandishing of horns ensues before I decide I really shouldn’t be doing that in public, and let my bovine adversary, who resembles Liam Gallagher circa 1995, stuff his face.
Like most of her neighbours, Sieng isn’t from Bakmek but settled there after being forced out of her own village by the Khmer Rouge.
“The Pol Pot and civil war years were tough for us, but life is better now,” she notes.
It’s impressive work, which will be continued by Concern’s local partners when they complete their phased withdrawal from Cambodia in June. Among these is the Support Organisation For Rural Farmers (SORF) whose permasmiling director Mr. Soun is one of the numerous former Concern Cambodia staff members who’ve gone on to set up their own agencies.
“That, in terms of the legacy we’re leaving behind, is one of the things I’m most proud of,” enthuses Country Director Janardhan Rao whose next posting will be to Kabul. “Many of our staff, past and present, became involved with Concern in the refugee camps and working for us have learned civil society and capacity building skills that will benefit their country for generations to come.”
A beaming Mr. Soun is among the welcoming committee when we arrive in Samroung for our second Village Association meeting. Driving there we spot a Buddhist pagoda, a mosque and a church all within two miles of each other – a sign of the religious tolerance, which sadly doesn’t exist in neighbouring Thailand where 4,700 people have died over the past decade as the result of interfaith tensions.
Mr. Soun tells us that thanks to Concern they’re currently working with 1,584 households in 28 villages where 70% of the population is considered to be below the poverty line. Along with their food security and livelihood improvement work, SORF are introducing new child welfare, women’s issues and domestic violence programmes to further enhance the quality of rural lives.
The villagers we get to meet today include Choun Thon who’s used his Village Association grant to set up a fish farming business. A veritable MacGyver, he’s hung a greased sheet over the pond, which lit up at night acts as a magnet to insects who stick to this improvised fly-paper. Come the morning Thon scrapes off the trapped bugs and, voilà, the splashing residents below get a free breakfast.
The profits he’s made from the pond have allowed him to add chicken rearing and palm oil, sugar and wine production to his expanding business empire. Recognising a fellow connoisseur when he sees one, Thon offers me a generous slug of palm wine, which despite being dispensed from an old Lenor bottle, is rather moreish.
Given all the earlier talk about corruption, it’s worth noting that Concern have always remained financially independent of the Cambodian government, whose only involvement in its programmes has been to grant the occasional permissions.
“From our accounts being a matter of public record to the complaints boxes we have in villages, there’s full transparency and accountability,” Janardhan Rao says quoting the Concern mantra.
Our Pursat province field trip ends on a bit of a I’m A Celebrity… ‘Bush Tucker Challenge’ note when Bunleng and his Concern colleague Kim Miratori take me to one of their favourite Khmer restaurants and suggest we order the stir-fried sliced cow’s penis with ant eggs. I’m expecting the other Ant and his mate Dec to burst through the door laughing but, nope, he’s serious. Not feeling the penis, so to speak, I negotiate the switch to a less contentious cow part. The ant eggs remain and are quite good in an odd, squishy sort of way. Whatever about the mind, travel certainly broadens the palette!
It’s easy when talking about a people to slip into cliché, but Cambodians really do have a resilience and glass half-full – usually of palm wine! – mentality that you feel will eventually steer them to where they want to go.
“We’re grateful to Concern for all they’ve done for Cambodia,” concludes Tan Bunleng. “Now it’s up to us to take it to the next level.”

See concern.net