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THE ROVING EYE
This is the way the killing
fields end
By Pepe Escobar
In this
series:
Year 28:
Cambodia gets ready to vote
Even the
Khmer Rouge loves democracy
Deadlock
in Cambodia
ANLONG VENG, Cambodia - Ashes to ashes, dust to
dust. There it is, at the end of a ghastly, bumpy,
partly inundated 140-kilometer road from Siem Reap
toward the Thai border, and then a path through the
jungle. There's a sort of funeral pyre covered by a
sheet of corrugated metal. A blue wooden sign says in
Khmer: "These are the remains of Pol Pot". Bits and
pieces of old car tires cover the "ashes". When he died
in 1998, Pol Pot - one of the great mass murderers of
the 20th century - left to the world a few flasks of
medicine, a few packets of vitamin C, a ragged shirt, a
shoe and his toilet bowl.
The Cambodia Mine
Action Center (CMAC), a German-backed non-governmental
organization (NGO), has completely demined the hills
around Pol Pot's grave - to the delight of Prime
Minister Hun Sen. So now the surrounding jungle is being
mercilessly devastated - for the benefit of Cambodian,
Chinese and Thai illegal loggers. By back-of-beyond
Southeast Asian standards, the nearby town of Anlong
Veng is relatively prosperous. It has schools and even a
hospital - allegedly built with Pol Pot funds.
The "sideshow" - the illegal US bombing of
Cambodia in the early 1970s, recommended by Henry
Kissinger and ordered by Richard Nixon - killed at least
600,000 Khmers. Pol Pot's killing fields - essential to
implement an agrarian utopia concocted by the Khmer
Rouge's Khieu Samphan at the Sorbonne in Paris - may
have exterminated up to 2 million Khmers. It all ends at
this shack - Desolation Row in the middle of nowhere.
Ta Mok, aka "the butcher" during the Khmer Rouge
era, is languishing in a Phnom Penh jail. He's still
very popular in Anlong Veng. The top surviving Khmer
Rouge members are either living in peace in Pailin, like
Nuon Chea, or collaborating with the Hun Sen government,
like Ieng Sary. Many in Anlong Veng remember that Prime
Minister Hun Sen - who rose to be a Khmer Rouge regiment
commander and then escaped to Vietnam in June 1977 -
used to live with Ta Mok.
Cambodia gets a total
of more than US$500 million a year from the World Bank,
the Asian Development Bank and the European Union. The
average per capita annual income is about $230 - much
less than the daily rate at the Grand Hotel d'Angkor, a
property of Raffles from Singapore. In a country that is
85 percent rural, almost 70 percent of Cambodians are
illiterate.
Corruption is still the name of the
game. University students in Phnom Penh give a good
example: the World Bank financed a much-talked-about
program to demobilize about half of Cambodia's armed
forces. After a few months, millions of dollars had
simply "disappeared". The program was supervised by Sok
An, a very close aide to Prime Minister Hun Sen. More
crucially, Sok An is the key Cambodian involved with the
upcoming joint United Nations-Cambodian Khmer Rouge
tribunal.
Even urban, educated voters for the
Sam Rainsy Party - which made huge gains in last
Sunday's elections - admit that Hun Sen is a shrewd
politician and master negotiator, although his formal
education stopped at the first year of secondary school.
He dictated the terms of the Khmer Rouge surrender. He
took credit for bringing peace to Cambodia - something
that his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) once again
hammered into voters' heads during the elections. He
negotiated the Khmer Rouge tribunal with the UN for no
less than five years, up to last June. He got everything
he wanted: the tribunal will answer to Cambodian law.
Hun Sen's former roommate Ta Mok is not losing any
sleep.
Apart from his negotiating skills and
blind eye to corruption, the other secret of Hun Sen's
survival is the way he plays agendas against each other.
Everybody has an interest in Cambodia - from China to
the United States, from France, the former colonial
power, to the EU as a whole, from hated neighbor Vietnam
to Japan, from Thailand to Australia. It's easy to
forget that Hun Sen has been perfecting his game in
power since 1985.
Urban, educated voters in
Phnom Penh repeatedly asked this correspondent how
Cambodia could be compared to Iraq. Saddam Hussein's
ghastly terror regime cannot possibly be compared with
the ultimate terror of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields.
The "autogenocide" perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge was
cut short by the Vietnamese invasion of late 1978 - not
a preemptive war, and not justified as such. The UN
inevitably condemned it - leading to the appallingly
surrealist spectacle of the Khmer Rouge holding a
legitimate chair at the UN Assembly.
What
followed in Cambodia was a Vietnamese puppet regime - of
which "puppet" Hun Sen was a vital part - so the civil
war lasted for most of the 1980s until the UN finally
made its move in 1990. In the UN-supervised 1993
elections - which capped an intervention that cost up to
$3 billion - the CPP lost. But - in a very Myanmar-junta
way - it refused to give up power. Hun Sen, the second
prime minister in a coalition with Prince Ranariddh, had
to wait until July 1997 finally to stage a coup and get
rid of Ranariddh. There was not a peep from the
"international community". From their point of view,
from the coup in 1997 up to last Sunday's elections,
Cambodia is "stable", peaceful and arguably more
democratic than Laos, Vietnam or Myanmar. Hun Sen has
become a friend of capitalism and has opened the country
to foreign investors hungry for cheap labor.
Apart from the obscene expense accounts enjoyed
by its officials, mostly spent on new Phnom Penh pizza
parlors, the UN indeed helped Cambodia to set up its
baby democracy. It's unlikely the US will allow the UN
to do the same in Iraq.
Hun Sen for his part has
been clever enough to know that distributing a measure
of water pumps, electricity, roads, bridges and a school
or two to scattered, far-flung villages is more than
enough to keep him and the CPP in power. Hun Sen may not
be representative of Cambodian democracy, but then
US-imposed, Gucci-approved Hamid Karzai is not
representative of Afghan democracy and the new
US-approved governing council is not representative of
Iraqi democracy.
There's a plan to build a golf
course in the Emerald Triangle - the common border among
Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. If developers can get rid
of all the landmines, of course. Pol Pot's grave will
inevitably be Disneyfied: Hun Sen himself wants to turn
it into a tourist attraction. This is the way the
killing fields end: not with a bang, but with a theme
park.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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