Distant Voices (63 page)

These days, the Khmer Rouge would not object to such a raw show of capitalism. After all, they now advocate a ‘liberal capitalist line'. Neither are they insincere, according to the historian Michael Vickery. ‘They consider it [free-market capitalism],' he wrote, ‘the fastest route to the type of destabilisation which will most favour their return to power.'
¹⁷⁶

As for Sihanouk, now astride the Trojan Horse, he is seventy-one years old; if necessary the Khmer Rouge will wait for him to die on his throne, or dispose of him quietly. They are not rushed. Everything is going to plan. Pol Pot has told his commanders to ‘remain in the jungle' until they ‘control all the country'. And then they will be ready.
¹⁷⁷

All of this was preventable. Had the great powers kept their distance following the defeat of Pol Pot in 1978, there is little doubt that a solution could have been found in the region. In 1980 the Indonesian and Malaysian Governments – fearful of Pol Pot's chief backer, China – acknowledged that the Vietnamese had ‘legitimate concerns' about the return of Pol Pot and the threat from China. In 1985 Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Hayden was told by Hun Sen, ‘We are ready to make concessions to Prince Sihanouk and other people if they agree to join with us to eliminate Pol Pot.'
¹⁷⁸
Four years later, reported
The Economist
from Paris, a Sihanouk-Hun Sen alliance against the Khmer Rouge was ‘torpedoed' by the US State Department.
¹⁷⁹

Perhaps the most alluring promise of peace came when Thailand's elected prime minister, Chatichai Choonhaven, invited Hun Sen to Bangkok, and Thai officials secretly visited Phnom Penh with offers of development aid and trade. Defying their own generals, the reformist Thais proposed a regional conference that would exclude the great powers. Prime Minister Chatichai's son and chief policy adviser,
Kraisak Choonhaven, told me in 1990, ‘We want to see the Khmer Rouge kicked out of their bases on Thai soil.' He called on ‘all Western powers and China to stop arming the Cambodian guerrillas'.
¹⁸⁰

This represented an extraordinary about-turn for America's most reliable client in South-east Asia. In response, Washington warned the Chatichai Government that if it persisted with its new policy it would ‘have to pay a price' and threatened to withdraw Thailand's trade privileges under the Generalised Special Preferences.
¹⁸¹
The regional conference never took place. In March 1991 the Chatichai Government was overthrown and the new military strongman in Bangkok, Suchinda Krapayoon, described Pol Pot as a ‘nice guy', who should be treated ‘fairly'.
¹⁸²
(It was Suchinda who turned the army on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok, killing hundreds. He was forced to resign.)

At the same time Japan proposed that the United Nations exclude from a settlement any group that violated a ceasefire. Japan also proposed the establishment of a special commission to investigate the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.
¹⁸³
US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon rejected the proposals as ‘likely to introduce confusion in international peace efforts'.
¹⁸⁴

‘Listen,' said David Munro as we drove into Phnom Penh in June 1980, the year after the end of the holocaust. The tinkling of bells on hundreds of pony traps carrying people and food and goods was a new, rich sound. Compared with the emptiness of the year before, Phnom Penh was a city transformed. There were two bus routes, restaurants, raucous markets, reopened pagodas, telephones, a jazz band, a football team and currency. And there were freedoms, uncoerced labour, freedom of movement and freedom of worship. I had never seen so many weddings, neither had I ever received as many wedding invitations – four in one day. Marriage had become a mark of resilience, of freedom restored, and was
celebrated with as much extravagance as was possible in the circumstances, with long skirts and brocade tops and hair piled high with flowers, and the men bearing gifts of precious food arranged on leaves, their necks craning from unaccustomed collars and ties. There were electricity and reopened factories – some of them paid for by the British viewers of our film
Year Zero.
An estimated 900,000 children had been enrolled in rudimentary schools and 19,000 new teachers given a two-month crash course: an historic achievement.

The tenuous nature of this ‘normality' was demonstrated to me during a ‘disco night' I attended one Saturday at the Monorom Hotel. The women and children sat on one side of the room,
palais
-style, the men on the other. It was a lot of fun, especially when a competing jazz band next door struck up with ‘Stompin' at the Savoy'. But when a cassette of the much-loved Khmer singer, Sin Sisamouth, was played, people stopped dancing and walked to the windows and wept. He had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem, which is about blood and death. After that, he was beaten to death. It brought home to me that the efforts of the Cambodian people to recover from their nightmare of bombs and genocide ought to be the object of our lasting admiration; at the very least the willingness of our representatives to help them, not hurt them.

By any standards the efforts of the regime led by 42-year-old Hun Sen were remarkable. It attempted to secure and reconstruct a country without the basic means and skills which in Britain would be considered essential to run a local council. In the late 1980s the nation was self-sufficient in rice, and the
riel
, the currency, was stabilised by basing its worth on a national resource: the cotton that makes the scarves everyone wears. In its relationship with Vietnam, the Hun Sen Government was not unlike the West German Government after the Second World War. Just as the Federal Republic outgrew the tutelage by the Allies, Phnom Penh shed its subservience to Hanoi. Although described as communist, it was a government of Khmer nationalists: of survivors. Despite disinformation that sought to smear them as
‘Pol Potists', only a minority were defectors from the Khmer Rouge and these came mostly from a dissident group that bore comparison with the 1944 Movement in the German Army that sought to overthrow Hitler.
¹⁸⁵

However, the isolation and privations had their effect. Corruption became a cancer, especially during the time of uncertainty and precarious transition. While Hun Sen was forced to disband the 200,000 militia because there was no public money to pay their wages, a number of his top officials grew wealthy by selling public properties to foreigners. The issue caused anger and dismay among people who were prepared to go into the streets and stand up to the Khmer Rouge. Having failed for a decade to overthrow the Hun Sen Government by force, its enemies now pinned their hopes on the United Nations to dismantle it and on intolerable internal pressures to destroy it.

August 1979 to April 1994

^fn1
The limb programme is run by the Indo-China Project, an offshoot of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Donations can be sent to Suite 740, 2001 ‘S' Street NW, Washington DC 20009, USA. Phone: (202) 483 9222.

^fn2
In June 1992 an international conference in Tokyo ‘pledged' $880 million towards reconstruction of Cambodia. The largest pledge of $200 million came from Japan.

^fn3
After seeing Ratanak's death in our film,
Cambodia Year Ten,
Brian McConaghy, a forensics expert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, established a network of health centres throughout Cambodia. He called it ‘The Ratanak Project'.

I RETURNED TO
Cambodia in October 1992, in time for Ron Podlaski's wedding. After the monks had left and everyone had been garlanded in jasmine, Ron and Bo Pha, his Khmer bride, stood in the narrow street most of the day and night, clasping hands with hundreds of people. Many were guests; many were street people. All were invited. I shall not easily forget them.

At a table of honour were six young men, none of them more than twenty-one years old, who had lost one or both legs in Cambodia's minefields. Recognising each other, we raised our beers in a boisterous toast; I had met them a few days earlier at Kien Khlang, on the banks of the Mekong, where Ron runs the Vietnam Project's Limb Centre. One of them, a cherubic boy of eighteen, had strapped on to his uneven stumps two new legs, made from beaten tin and rubber, and heaved himself on to the parallel bars. He walked for the first time since a small ‘anti-personnel' mine had left him a bleeding ruin.

He walked at his first try, with the other amputees encouraging him in the soft, tonal lilt of the Khmer language. The next day he set off without the aid of the bars. ‘Didn't you fall down at all?' I asked him at the wedding. ‘No, not once,' he said; and when I asked him why he and his friends had not worn their new legs, he said, ‘Tonight we intend to drink a lot of beer. Legs aren't necessary for that; they get in the way.' The interpreter could barely tell me this over their
laughter. They had come from Kien Khlang on a fleet of motorcycles, riding pillion, each with bouquets of gifts for Ron and Bo Pha.

To walk the streets of Phnom Penh now was to run a gauntlet of limbless people, phantoms they seemed at night, some of them in threadbare uniforms, many of them children. One night a teenager without hands came at me from a doorway. He had touched a mine.

It is this that makes the work of Ron Podlaski and the other American Vietnam veterans who run the limb centre such an important counterweight, however small, to the foreign forces that still beleaguer this nation. At the very least they provide a glimpse of the human resources, both Khmer and foreign, that could begin to restore Cambodia. There is another connection. Cambodia is, according to some of Washington's ideologues, ‘the last battle of America's war in Vietnam'. Ron Podlaski, Dave Evans, Bobby Muller and Ed Miles see themselves on the other side of this battle – ‘this time on the right side', says Ron.

Ron is a big, rumbustious man in his forties who was hauled before a judge in New York in 1968 and told he was a ‘menace to civilisation'. ‘I had hit a cop on the head,' he said. ‘This was normal behaviour where I grew up. The judge said, “I'll give you a choice: Vietnam or jail.” I said, “Where's Vietnam?” He said, “Across the George Washington bridge.”'

Ron joined the Special Forces, running secret missions into Laos and Cambodia. ‘We were told to use amphetamines to keep from falling asleep,' he said, ‘because we couldn't trust the local people not to kill us in our beds. These were the people we were meant to be fighting for. They hated us. I learned quickly.'

Like many veterans, Ron came home an addict and angry, believing he had been conned. I didn't meet him at the Lincoln Memorial in 1971 when he and other veterans threw back their medals; but I think I remember his larger-than-life presence. I certainly remember Bobby Muller at the Republican Party's convention in Miami the following year. I remember
his booming eloquence reaching the candidate, Richard Nixon, over the cat-calls of the faithful. He shouted to Nixon that he was lying when he promised ‘peace with honour' to Indo-China. For that, he was thrown out in his wheelchair.

Bobby was a marine who had been shot in the spine, losing the use of his legs. He and Ron and Ed Miles and others formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, bringing to America a political awareness that could not be ignored; for they were ordained American heroes. Ed Miles is a double amputee who stepped on a mine during an ambush. Years later he went back to the Vietnamese village where he fell and did not recognise it. A woman, however, recognised him: not his face, just as the young American who had lost his legs. She remembered, because the next day other Americans came and razed the village.

On their return home these veterans spoke about atrocities that were not reported. They described how half of those who had carried America's battle colours were now unemployed or beset by drugs and alcohol. As many servicemen, they said, had come home and killed themselves as had died in the war. They proposed that such an adventure never happen again, anywhere.

In 1978, they formed the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and have since devoted themselves to preventing a repeat of such an adventure. They have funded a curriculum for schools and colleges on the Vietnam war, seeking to end the ‘historical amnesia' that has allowed the same people in Washington to pursue ‘other Vietnams'. They have initiated projects in Vietnam for children orphaned by the war. In Cambodia they have produced their most remarkable achievement.

At their prosthetics centre at Kien Khlang they use the ‘Jaipur limb', a simple aluminium leg with a latex foot that requires no high-tech components. The foot moves almost naturally from side to side and using the limb requires minimal training, because of the confidence it gives.

The prosthetist is Dave Evans who went to Vietnam at the age of eighteen and lost both his legs before his nineteenth
birthday. Back home, he retrained as a nurse and went to El Salvador where he became the director of a prosthetics programme helping the
Frente Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional
, the FMLN. ‘When I came to Indo-China as a US marine,' he said, ‘we were told we were “ambassadors in green”. I believed that junk. I guess I was determined to come back as another kind of ambassador; and here I am.' He walks and runs like a very fit man. The centre employs three Indian trainers from the Jaipur centre and soon Khmer trainers, most of them amputees, will begin to take over. They fit some 150 limbs a month.

The United Nations now deployed seven military units to train Khmers to clear mines. In one area of Kompong Thom province, fewer than 52 out of 4,000 mines were cleared in six months. In Battambang province not a single mine was cleared. Instead, the people were clearing the mines: farmers with spades, children with sling shots; and by stepping on them. ‘We have done virtually nothing,' a UN Dutch army mine clearer told me. ‘What are we here for?'