Distant Voices (64 page)

At Ron Podlaski's wedding, the Khmer band played rock'n' roll; and the Indian trainers from the limb centre – Roddy, Than and Abdul – danced to the sitar; and Bo Pha wore several magnificent dresses of incandescent brightness. Like most Khmers who knew the Pol Pot era, her eyes have a wistfulness, a distance and a deep sadness. Bo Pha's father, two brothers and brother-in-law were all murdered by the Khmer Rouge. ‘I have a boat and weapons ready,' said Ron, ‘if they look like coming back. We'll get everybody out that we have to . . .'

The day after the wedding Ron, Dave, Bobby and Ed were at Phnom Penh airport, on their way to Vietnam where they plan another limbs centre. It is one of their many current projects, including a worldwide campaign to ban the use and production of land mines. Watching the four of them cross the tarmac to the aircraft – only one of them, Ron, has the use of his legs – I recalled Martha Gellhorn's tribute to that ‘life-saving minority of Americans who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful
conscience and can be counted upon . . . they are always there.'
¹⁸⁶

A month later Ron was captured by Khmer Rouge troops while on a river journey to a new project in the north-east. They discussed in front of him whether or not to kill him, deciding finally to let him go. ‘We'll kill you next time,' they told him.

I had not been to Cambodia for two years and was not prepared for the astonishing transformation. Two years earlier the sun had beaten down on a languid Phnom Penh decaying after fifteen years of international isolation. There was no ‘peace process' then; there were no UN blue berets and white vehicles. This was a city of gentle anarchy, of bicycles and mopeds and silhouettes strolling at night down the centre of a road, backlit by a single headlight.

Now the streets were a cataract of white vehicles, jeeps with flashing lights, Mercedes with brocade seat covers, Suzukis with whores on call, bicycles with filing cabinets on delivery, elephants announcing Cambodia's first takeaway pizza and, at the margin, the limbless like crabs awaiting their chance.

Watching them reminded me of the dream-like quality of Cambodia, a society whose very fabric was torn apart and never repaired, whose trauma endures just beneath the surface. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the traffic swelled like an engulfing wave, spilling on to the pavement, a clutch of motorcycles and Toyotas abreast, sweeping aside pedestrians and vendors. One of the human crabs was struck by a bicycle and raised his only fist. Someone screamed. Open in their sorrow, the Cambodian people are often oblique in their fear; it is this internal bleeding that foreigners cannot see.

On my first day back, I walked to the Khmer Rouge compound, just behind the Royal Palace. Surrounded by a high wall, it had air-conditioned flats and offices, including a boardroom with comfortable sofas where UN officials, diplomats and journalists waited their turn to see Pol Pot's men. I met a man called Chhorn Hay, who had a fixed smile and
opaque eyes and spoke perfect English. Lining up with others, I found myself shaking hands and regretting it. ‘So nice to see you again,' he said to us all. ‘Yes, of course, we shall consider your request for an interview. Please leave your hotel room number in the visitors' book . . . thank you so much for coming to see us.' As we left, their grey Mercedes was being dusted down. Chhorn Hay called out, ‘Be careful. You may need an umbrella. Bye, bye,
bonsoir
!'

Did this happen? Were the Khmer Rouge really here, wearing suits and saying ‘Bye, bye,
bonsoir
'? For me, standing at their gates, all the disingenuous semantic games and the contortions of intellect and morality that have tried to give them respectability and make the ‘peace process' appear to work took on a vivid obscenity. I realised I had walked down this road on the day I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1979, in the aftermath of the holocaust.

There is a grassy area in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where people gather on Sundays to look at the Mekong, have their photograph taken and watch their children play in safety. I have often come here to catch the breeze and enjoy the normality. When the UN chose to hold a military parade here, it did more than disturb the peace. Ordinary Cambodians were barred from attending: that is, until a UN official was reminded that some might be necessary for the purposes of public relations. ‘Get a few of those people over here,' he said into the public address system. A few dozen were pushed to the edge of a crowd of foreigners in time to hear a Ghanaian band strike up ‘Onward Christian Soldiers'. Prince Sihanouk arrived with his North Korean bodyguards and was met by the Head of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi, and the UN military commander, General Sanderson. Beside them as a guest of honour stood a smiling Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's man.

I had never seen him in the flesh and I was struck by his relaxed, almost jovial demeanour and by my own reaction. The sense of nightmare returned. Here was the Khmer Goebbels standing to attention as the ‘Christian soldiers' marched by: the British, the Australians, the Americans. Here he was
being feted by other ‘dignitaries'. A senior UN officer bowed his head to him. And when an international choir sang some mawkish rubbish about saving the world, he clapped, and he clapped. ‘Thank you all for coming,' said the voice on the public address: ‘and a reminder about the fun run tomorrow. The winner gets $200 in cash!'

The next day I interviewed General Sanderson and I asked him how he felt to be in such company. He replied that he was ‘neutral'. I asked him how you went about creating a ‘neutral political environment' when one of the ‘factions' was guilty of genocide. ‘They are
your
words,' he said. I quoted to him the report of the UN Special Rapporteur who described the Khmer Rouge as guilty of genocide ‘even under the most restricted definition'. I said, ‘General, he was speaking for the body you represent and he described them as genocidists.'

‘He may well have, but I'm not going to.'
¹⁸⁷

The UN spokesman, Eric Falt, a Frenchman, was more to the point. ‘The peace process', he told me, with a fixed smile, ‘was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge] to gain respectability.'
¹⁸⁸
UN officials were now reluctant to use the term ‘Khmer Rouge', preferring the acronym, NADK, for National Army of Democratic Kampuchea. On a visit to Pol Pot's heartland in the north-west, Australian foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans pinned a gold kangaroo on the uniform of a Khmer Rouge soldier. ‘Congratulations,' he said, shaking the incredulous man's hand. When asked about this, Evans said, ‘The young Khmer Rouge cannot be blamed for what happened in the mid-1970s.'
¹⁸⁹

The 21,000 UN troops and officials, their 8,000 vehicles, their villas and their camp followers gave me a sense of
déjà vu.
Was this the honky-tonk Phnom Penh of the early 1970s, just before the Khmer Rouge took power? According to a report by the UN Children's Fund, there were 20,000 child prostitutes, and 3,000 UN personnel had contracted sexually transmitted diseases.
¹⁹⁰
Before the UN arrived, Aids was unknown; now 14 per cent of prostitutes were believed to
be HIV-positive. A memo distributed to UN personnel said, ‘Please try not to park your Landcruiser outside brothels.'
¹⁹¹

UN personnel had their own generators and clean water, while nothing was done about the water supply, which was fed by the sewers and left tens of thousands of children dying from intestinal diseases. (Drugs are available, but only at a price, on the ‘free market'.) There was little work for people who could not serve foreigners. Young men were blinded with flash burns from welding iron gates for UN villas. They lay on bamboo mats in agony, with damp rags on their faces, until their next shift.

Every UN ‘peacekeeper' received a ‘hardship fee' of $145 a day on top of salary and perks. This was more than most Cambodians earned in a year and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian risking his life to clear the landmines that many UN personnel would not touch. Such was the process of recolonisation, which was evident even among the voluntary aid agencies. I visited an aid official in his air-conditioned office, which was cold and obsessively tidy; the only sound was that of his computer printer. We could have been in London or Los Angeles; and I was struck by the distance between him and the precarious life outside the tinted windows. He spoke about ‘data', ‘mechanisms' and ‘impacting' and used the sanitising terms that are a lingua franca among foreigners. The Khmer Rouge, to him, were now a ‘faction' with political and moral equity with the other ‘factions'.

At the Cambodiana Hotel, a ‘luxurious' monstrosity on the banks of the Mekong, opened since I was last there, this distancing was complete. Ordinary Cambodians were not allowed in. The Austrian manager was fastidious; no beer cans on the table, please. There were photographs of dignitaries in the foyer, including Lord Caithness, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office and promoter of the Khmer Rouge's place in the ‘peace process'. A man from the International Monetary Fund had set up an office in one of the rooms. True to its skills, the IMF had unearthed a ‘debt' of $65 million incurred by the Lon Nol regime in 1971. Interest had apparently been ticking over for twenty-two years. A
foreign ‘consortium' would pay this off, I was assured unofficially, in return for the ‘appropriate trade concessions'. At a cocktail party, overlooking the pool, the talk was about the corruption that is ‘a way of life here'. No irony was noted.

At a special UN conference in Tokyo in 1992 the world community pledged $880 million to ‘rehabilitate services' in Cambodia. This was hailed as the ‘foundation' of the ‘peace process'. The aid would be delivered as an ‘emergency'. Flicking on his air conditioner with a remote control, the Phnom Penh representative of the UN Development Fund, Edouard Wattez, assured me, ‘The money is coming in quite significantly.' I asked him which government had given the most. ‘The United States,' he said. ‘They have pledged $60 million.' I asked him how much of this had arrived. ‘Two million,' he winced, ‘for road repair.' And this ‘road repair' has, in fact, restored a network of strategic highways from Thailand into Cambodia along which the Khmer Rouge mount checkpoints and move ammunition and supplies.

The Cambodia specialist Raoul Jennar has described the commitment of UN resources to Cambodia as a deception, ‘a real myth'. The real figure was not $880 million, he says, but $660 million, of which most is not ‘new money' and only 20 per cent will be distributed in the foreseeable future.
¹⁹²

Although the United Nations operation was given an international face in Cambodia, only those who adhered to ‘Western' (i.e. American) policy were given key positions. The UN financial adviser, Roger Lawrence, a US official, ran the Central Bank of Cambodia and ‘represented' Cambodia at meetings of the Washington-dominated World Bank and the IMF. Thus, Cambodia was being eased into the world of ‘structural adjustment programmes' (SAPS), which would ensure that it had a deregulated, low wage ‘growth' economy favouring foreign investors, such as the Thais, Singaporeans and, of course, Japanese, who were already ‘investing' in the country with the finesse of pirates falling on buried treasure.

The UN ‘information and education department' in Phnom Penh was given to Timothy Carney, described by his friend
William Shawcross as ‘a dedicated and skilled American diplomat'.
¹⁹³
Indeed Carney was an important official in the US embassy in Phnom Penh in the 1970s when his government was devastating Cambodia. He is the author of books that mention the bombing only in passing; like most from that era, he has never expressed public regret for his service to an administration that killed and maimed perhaps 500,000 Cambodians. Carney went on to become Asia Director of the National Security Council, America's top policy-making body, based in the White House. He was one of those largely responsible for US insistence that the Khmer Rouge be part of the ‘peace process'. Not surprisingly, he then turned up in a top UN job in Cambodia, effectively running propaganda.

Stephen Heder was appointed Carney's deputy. Heder is an American researcher who used to sympathise with the Khmer Rouge.
¹⁹⁴
In 1979 he went to work for the US State Department in Thailand – an unexplained switch of loyalties. In his UN job, he produced a number of reports damning the Hun Sen Government which were publicised, but nothing on the Khmer Rouge infiltration of the US-backed royalists.

According to the Cambodian writer Chanthou Boua, who lost all her family in the holocaust, UN Khmer staff were used to investigate the family backgrounds of the Hun Sen leadership, looking for Vietnamese antecedents. The aim of this ‘was to appease the Khmer Rouge'. UN staff, she said, were also being directed ‘to comb the villages looking for ethnic Vietnamese. Those subject to allegations of illegal immigration which are proved “correct” are deported within 24 hours. Ethnic cleansing is not mentioned in the Paris Agreement.'
¹⁹⁵
The UN also made public the names of three former Vietnamese soldiers. This was picked up by the media as ‘evidence' that Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia – a long discredited claim that the Khmer Rouge have used as effective propaganda. One of the Vietnamese turned out to be an ethnic Khmer from southern Vietnam; the others were demobilised veterans who had married local women. Pol Pot would have approved this tactic. ‘We must focus
attention on the Vietnamese,' he told his cadres in 1988, ‘and divert attention from our past mistakes.'
¹⁹⁶

Media propaganda played a vital part in imposing the essentially American ‘peace process'. In the run-up to the elections in early 1993 the UN was generally depicted as an oasis of order in a country where mass killing was somehow unique to and congenital in the Cambodian race. ‘Imagine a country where people have been killing each other without mercy for 20 years and more . . .' wrote Robert McCrum in the
Guardian
magazine.
¹⁹⁷
Imagine ‘a country that does not have a national will for peace' (the
Independent
).
¹⁹⁸
‘You see,' Yasushi Akashi, UN chief in Cambodia, told the BBC, ‘violence is deep-rooted in the Cambodian tradition'. And this from a Japanese!