Stuart Clark reports from Cambodia

HP's Stuart Clark is currently in Cambodia with Concern to see how their projects are progressing, and to take the pulse of one of Asia's most exciting countries. Here's his first report...

"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-lead 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 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 reeducation.

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 tells me almost the moment we start talking in our hotel. I think about launching into my Fianna Fail 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 a few months time 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 was history lesson time as we visited 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.

To be honest, I’m still in a state of shock and bereft of the words to describe how disturbing both are. That many of those party to the atrocities are now walking the corridors of power must be a hard pill for families of the dead to swallow.

The Cambodian spirit is strong though, as witnessed by Phnom Penh’s post-civil war transformation from ghost city to boom town awash with Japanese, Korean and Singaporean investment. Tonight we’re going to dive right in and see what delights – legal ones, we hasten to add – it has to offer…"