Cambodia: Back from the Dead?

The trip from Vietnam to Cambodia through the Bavet-Moc Bai border station is one best made healthy and rested. 

I was neither. Eager to get to Cambodia, I waved off sound advice to recover first in Ho Chi Minh City. Instead, I raced through 30 hours in Vietnam drinking Tiger beer, eating bacteria-laced seafood and staring at gruesome pictures of chemical Asian death. Now I was forcing the vomit up at a Cambodian customs shack and licking my wounded travel ego. Other people, weak people, package-tour people, get stomach bugs right off the plane. Not me.

The sickness came on the previous day after lunch, in front of the truth commission that doubles as the American War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The first queasy bubble rose in front of the mutant fetuses on display in the Agent Orange room. The twins' smooth green heads are severely deformed, as if dropped and smushed. They float there in a big jar, waist-high on a table, ready to be taken out and caressed, smacked onto the floor in anger or consumed like jalapenos. It's not clever young British art, but the legacy of a war in which defoliation was considered a legitimate strategy for the better part of a decade.

Or maybe the bug hit in the napalm room, where photographs of victims line the walls. Their eyes shoot out a jelly all their own, strong as the Dupont stuff that sticks hard, digs deep and burns long—that inoperable torture by elegant molecular design. Maybe it was there that the parasite introduced himself to my intestines. He had hidden in a bowl of street squid, and now the nausea was surging at the Bavet border cross.

I was traveling with Simon, whom I hadn't seen since we split Prague in opposite directions last winter. He lives in Ho Chi Minh City now and says he likes it, adding that Vietnam is still a strict and staid socialist republic, too much so for his taste. Bars close early. Foreigners are watched. Worst of all, his ancient pajama-clad landlord guards the staircase to his room in a hammock. No local girls are allowed upstairs. Not even Simon's main squeeze, Lu. Not even for some innocent karaoke.

So Simon makes regular runs northwest to Phnom Penh, where things are different. ------

Ten years ago, Cambodia was a famous leper nation. The Northwest was rebel territory, where a diehard Khmer Rouge cadre smuggled timber and jewels into Thailand, the profits fueling their hit-and-run resistance to the government of Hun Sen, the same general who forced the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in 1979. Throughout the 80s, the biggest news out of the country was the civil war and the hundreds of thousands of landmines planted by both sides like so much rice. As Thailand flowered into the world's tropical candy land, Pol Pot's legacy and Maoist guerrillas kept Cambodia's image on a short, rusty chain. Until recently, many people knew it only as a skull-ridden recipient of emergency aid and the subject of a Dead Kennedys song.

In the early 90s, the Khmer Rouge started to devour itself—a slow-motion suicide that dragged on until the death of Pol Pot in 1998. But the big snap came in 1993, when the United Nations entered to oversee the country's first free elections in memory—and fuel the country's prostitution trade with overpaid, HIV-positive peacekeeper sperm. These steps toward the facade of multi-party democracy drew the first curious outsiders to the country in generations. Not even a 1997 coup and eruption of fighting in the capital could stop the flow of visitors during the 90s. Cambodia was back on the map.

A rich lore soon developed around expatriate Phnom Penh. Stories filtered out describing a lawless Burroughsian interzone tinted by a permanent yellowish haze. As I heard it, Phnom Penh was a place where sweaty and stubbled hard-asses smoked opium all day out of AK-47 barrels with bandits, smugglers, mercenaries, pedophiles and assorted reptilians, occasionally taking breaks from their hammock highs to languidly screw teenage whores for the price of a candy bar. Phnom Penh's rep kept its tough sheen even as it began its inevitable blend into the regional tourist circuit, a process sped up by the opening of Vietnam in the mid-90s.

Whatever Phnom Penh was like eight or even five years ago, today the capital reflects a country at peace and eager to catch up with Thailand as a thumping tourist destination. According to some indicators, it's almost there. The lame but influential editors at Lonely Planet now give the entire country their green light with only a few perfunctory caveats, while New York magazine recently recommended the hyper-developed tourist enclave of Siem Reap as the perfect "edgy" family vacation spot. As the last traces of pre-mass-tourism Cambodia disappear, attempts to capture them have predictably accelerated the vanishing. In imperfect backpacker lingo, Cambodia is "over."

Over in a relative sense. Siem Reap resembles a Khmer Vegas—dotted with theme parks and five-star hotels—and the coast and islands are under development, but foreigners do occasionally disappear, later to be found floating facedown in rivers. The police blotter in the Phnom Penh Post still bursts with the vicious violence first noted by 19th-century French colonials. It also documents the heavy presence of junkie expats who routinely overdose on the brown local smack in the city's $2 rooms. The capital's bars continue to swarm with pubescent prostitutes and the Westerners who love them. You can still buy machine guns and grenades and launch them at grazing cattle on underground ranges for a few bucks. Phnom Penh may no longer be Naked Lunch, but it isn't yet Bangkok. ------

Cambodia will remain a darker place for a long time, despite the tourism boom. The land is just too rich in landmines and human bones to forget about or gloss over; even aggressively oblivious visitors can't escape the smell of Cambodia's modern history. Every Khmer tells stories of Pol Pot, who looms over the tourist like Mozart's ghost in Vienna.

The southern Polish town of Osweicem, home to Auschwitz-Birkenau, is probably the world's purest example of a town using its nightmare past for promotional purposes. Phnom Penh is a close second in a contest even New Yorkers can understand in the era of 9/11 t-shirts. Here Pol Pot is more than just a curiosity: Along with the Angkor Wat temple, he is one of the capital's two gift-shop patron saints. Books about Pot and the Khmer Rouge are hustled everywhere, as are t-shirts advertising Cambodia's landmine problem.

But the tension between remembrance and exploitation becomes academic when confronted with Phnom Penh's two main monuments to the Khmer Rouge: the killing fields at Choeng Ek and the Tuol Sleng prison museum, aka S-21.

The popular S-21 prison site in downtown Phnom Penh has given rise to a relatively posh road outside its gates, lined with leafy garden cafes and pleasant balconied guesthouses. At the entrance, amputees compete with street vendors selling books about the prison, where more than 17,000 Cambodians are believed to have died between 1975 and 1979. Before the Khmer Rouge came to power, Tuol Sleng was a high school, and the grounds still resemble an open California campus. The torture rooms on the first floor, unrenovated since 1979, are sun-splashed and bright. Walking through the palm-treed prison yard, my mind dug up the chorus of "Hotel California," at the time in heavy rotation on American radios. ("One word," said Simon, as we walked among second-floor prison cells: "Disco.")

The natural light flooding S-21 catches the subtleties of the faces on display. Thousands of interrogation photos line the walls of half a dozen rooms, row after row of bruised eyes fixed on the camera. Among them all, there is one teenage boy smirking at death. The rest wear faces of tired horror. For those not tortured and killed at S-21, it was the last stop before certain death at Choeng Ek, 10 miles to the south.

The dirt road out to the killing fields is a bad one, full of eight-inch potholes and small lakes left by the daily afternoon rains. Fittingly, I almost died on it when a tall truck loaded with rice bags went up on two wheels after a deep bounce and fell over with a booming thud five feet in front of my scooter.

The fields themselves are a former orchard now littered with mass graves. Three layers of defense were employed to protect the area between 1975 and 1979: Khmer Rouge soldiers, an electric fence and a crocodile-infested moat. Nobody got out alive. Today, the pits are marked by signs explaining who was killed and buried where. Here, boys 10 to 14; there, women 25 to 30. The Khmer Rouge was exacting about their deaths—and primitive. To conserve bullets and increase pain, traditional country tools were used: Throats were sliced open with scythes, heads crushed with axes and hammers. Thousands were bound and tortured, then drowned. Infants and small children were often gripped by their feet and swung hard against the trunks of trees, then tossed in a nearby ditch. Bits of bone today peek through the fields' dirt as the rains continue to exhume the graves.

Near the fields is the tall stupa, 17 shelves high, famously stuffed with more than 8000 victims' skulls. Unlike Auschwitz, where the hair and clothes sit behind walls of plexiglass, the skulls at Choeng Ek are exposed and open to touch. A native guide can identify the traditional farming tool used by the shape of the hole in the skull. At the bottom of the tower is a shelf reserved for the bones of foreign journalists; 17 of them were sent here after Khmer Rouge forces stormed and sealed the capital.

The killing fields at Choeng Ek are only the country's most famous. Similar death farms were set up around the country, in locations usually dictated by the natural environment, as in the case of the killing lake at Kamping Pouy and the killing caves at Phnom Sampeuo, both in the Northwest.

At the top of Phnom Sampeuo Mountain, near the northern capital city of Battambang, enemies of the state were bound, blindfolded and pushed through a hole. Their fall was broken after 100 feet by jagged rocks. A 50-foot drop was used for children. The damp caves are today maintained by monks who live nearby and collect tithes from visitors. At the bottom of the cave the monks have erected a large gilded Buddha statue. It sits right next to a chicken-wire cage full of skulls.

"If you look down there," explained a monk, pointing deep into the smaller cave, "you can see all little bones."

Sure enough, you could. ------

Look at enough smashed skulls and watch enough Khmers shrug off your stupid foreigner Why? questions, and the itch to read everything you can about modern Cambodian history gets strong. So you buy some of the cheap knock-off copies with 23 missing pages from a nine-year-old with Bambi eyes and start to read.

It's a tale that never quite adds up, but contours do develop, and trying to put it together is the most challenging part of visiting the country. The story is rich with cold superpower politics, old regional hatreds, mutant 20th-century ideologies and 1.7 million killed during the three years, eight months and 21 days of Pol Pot's psychotic governance.

The Khmer Rouge started as a subordinate splinter of the much larger Vietnamese communist party. Their first common enemy was France, later replaced by American puppet regimes in both Vietnam and Cambodia. By the late 60s, Pol Pot's rebels had, under Chinese patronage, developed their own strength apart from their Vietnamese tutors, but they remained a marginal force in Cambodia until the election of Richard Nixon.

Immediately following the 1968 U.S. election, American B-52s began bombing a long corridor of Cambodian territory along the Vietnamese border. William C. Westmoreland, America's top general in Vietnam, had been urging the bombing of these hamlets for years, but Lyndon Johnson had resisted widening the war to include neutral Cambodia. Nixon/Kissinger had no such qualms and shared the general's belief that America was only losing the war because of this string of guerrilla sanctuaries and their role as a supply route for communist rebels in South Vietnam. Cambodia's pro-American dictator, Lon Nol, tacitly approved the bombings, which ended only in 1973 at the height of Watergate.

The bombings didn't staunch the flow of supplies into South Vietnam, but they are believed to have killed anywhere between 100,000 and 500,000 Cambodians. It was a slaughter that fueled the growth of the Khmer Rouge in three ways: It discredited Lon Nol, converted the countryside to communist anti-Americanism and produced thousands of child-soldier recruits uprooted and orphaned by the bombing and consequent chaos. On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot and his young Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh and declared the creation of Democratic Kampuchea. Two weeks later, Saigon fell.

Whereas the newly created Socialist Republic of Vietnam merely sent its political enemies to re-education camps, their Cambodian counterparts immediately instituted more extreme measures. On entering the capital, Pol Pot gutted it. Phnom Penh, swollen with war refugees, was emptied in days, its million-plus inhabitants marched out of the city and forced into rural collectives. It was Pol Pot's declared goal to make Cambodia, on China's diseased and dying model, the world's purest example of agrarian communism. 1975 was declared Year Zero.

In a flashback to the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution of the late 60s, Buddhism was outlawed and traditional culture rejected. Schools were shut down and all transport links out of the country closed. Then the blood started to flow, as called for in Democratic Kampuchea's gruesome new national anthem. To ensure against the creeping back of capitalism, money and private property were abolished. (Upon realizing that the capital accumulation called for in its Four-Year Plan was impossible without money, the Khmer Rouge printed up new currency that was never used. The bills showed peasants wielding rocket launchers and tripod-mounted heavy machine guns).

In the new state, city dwellers and the educated classes were designated "new people" and beaten as they began isolated lives working 12-hour days in the collective fields. Peasants were held up as pure specimens of Cambodian communism and tagged "old people." But "new" and "old" people suffered together under Pol Pot's interpretations of Mao's theory of continuous revolution (nonstop party purges) and the economic ideas behind China's Great Leap Forward (extreme collectivization).

The purges included the arrest and murder of anyone who came near the galactic orbit of Pol Pot's paranoia. Brother Number One (as he was known in the party) thought everyone in Phnom Penh was a foreign agent, particularly CIA. The entire S-21 prison torture system was designed to collect confessions of collaboration. Detailed transcripts were made of every prisoner's oral life history, culminating in torture-induced fictions about how they came to be enemy agents.

Pol Pot eventually sealed his doom not by killing 1.7 million of his own people (of 7 million total) but rather by provoking the Vietnamese with cross-border raids on disputed territory. In late 1978, the Vietnamese had had enough and invaded Cambodia, drove the Khmer Rouge into the hinterlands and installed a young Khmer Rouge defector named Hun Sen in Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese maintained a large garrison in the liberated capital until 1989. ------

America's place in Cambodia's recent saga is not a proud one, starting with its supporting role in creating the conditions that allowed the Khmer Rouge to take power. Throughout Pol Pot's reign, Sen. George McGovern was a lonely and ignored American voice calling for condemnation and possible international action. Then, when the rice crops in both Cambodia and Vietnam were destroyed during the 1979 war that toppled Pol Pot, threatening famine in both countries, Jimmy Carter rejected calls for humanitarian aid by citing American suffering in the form of unresolved POW/MIA issues. (When some suggested that America had a moral debt to the region, Carter uttered the famous claim that "the destruction was mutual.") U.S. hatred of socialist Vietnam was so strong that it refused to officially recognize the Hanoi-backed regime of Hun Sen, instead allowing a coalition including the Khmer Rouge to occupy Cambodia's U.N. seat throughout the 80s.

With the Vietnamese invasion, the Khmer Rouge retreated into the northwestern jungles along the Thai border, establishing the provincial capital of Pailin as its urban stronghold. The perimeter around this territory was heavily mined by both sides, and will remain so until the end of the world. It takes just $3 to buy and lay a mine, but $1000 to locate and get rid of one. The dirt roads and fields around Pailin are peppered with bright-red skull-and-crossbones signs indicating mine danger. Many houses sit amidst a sea of these cardboard signs, with a narrow path cleared leading up to the entrances. "Don't rely on magic to avoid mines," implore illustrated billboards around the province. "Listen to the locals!"

Still, human stumps abound: twenty-eight thousand of them in total.

Pailin today is the personal fiefdom of a former Khmer Rouge general known simply as Echean, now a member of Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party. (With the end of the civil war, members of the Khmer Rouge, including party leaders, were granted de facto immunity and housing in the area around the city.) The biggest buildings in the center of town testify to Pailin's medieval power arrangement. First is Echean's private gated villa, then the police building, followed by the municipal building. In return for handing in his weapons and leading his soldiers back to the government, Echean was given political control of the area and ownership of its expansive fruit orchards. Power is shared among other ex-Rouge kingpins.

The ideologically driven murder of foreigners disappeared with the Khmer Rouge. The stares still harden around Pailin, but most travelers are in no more danger than anywhere else in the country. The last attempt to wrangle a piece of adventure writing out of Pailin resulted in a funny 1999 Outside magazine article by Patrick Symmes, who ended up dancing with hospitable ex-Khmer Rouge in a local dive.

The biggest industry around Pailin is gambling (the Khmer Rouge having smuggled out most of the area's precious jewels during the 80s). A few miles west of town is the border with Thailand, where gambling is illegal. Here you can find two giant warehouse casinos half-full of Thai businessmen and a few rich Cambodians.

The dirt road from Pailin to the border passes through a lush, rolling eight-mile stretch of fruit orchards. Then, after a short row of dingy markets, the giant blackjack complexes appear on either side. In front of the Pailin Casino, a dolphin fountain lamely sprinkles water into a little pool. Opposite, a sign carved into bright green bushes announces the Caesar International Casino. In happy Cambodian English it says: "Welcome Caesar." ------

Flying back to New York after a week of war tourism in Southeast Asia, all I wanted to do was pop my Cambodian-bought codeine and watch 20 hours of the stupidest movies I could find on the little screen in front of me. Japan Airlines did not disappoint: 2 Fast 2 Furious, The In-laws, Charlie's Angels 2, Terminator 3 and a bunch of smiley young adult romances.

Since they don't turn on the tv until the plane levels out, I picked up my copy of the International Herald Tribune, ready to read an article about the euro or something before trying the crossword. It was nice to be back in the bubble, I thought. No more orphan beggars drinking muddy water. No more Agent Orange monster babies. No more killing fields.

And there on the front page was the story. The Toledo Blade had just published a 15-page expose about a series of 36-year-old war crimes committed by a U.S. Army unit known as the Tiger Force. The Tigers, the article said, had gone on a six-month roving rampage in Central Vietnam, killing, torturing and raping everything that moved, stringing ears and scalps onto their dog tags. I put down the newspaper, popped another two codeine and took out my flask.

Forget the movies. I just wanted to sleep.