More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. “He was our best worker,” said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written
Kill them all
over lists of nine-year-olds.
Such black ironies are still much too common everywhere you turn in this bleeding, often broken country where every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself in a labyrinth of sorts, every path leading to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. In 1998 Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as “the Butcher,” was captured in March, and now (alone among them) awaits trial. For the first time in more than a generation, there are no Cambodians in refugee camps across the border in Thailand, and the Khmer Rouge, held responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during their four years in power alone, are silent.
Yet every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows, and justice itself seems a rusty chain that will only bloody anyone who tries to touch it. To try the Khmer Rouge chieftains would be, in a sense, to prosecute the whole country: almost everyone around—from the exiled King Sihanouk to the one-eyed prime minister to the man next door—has some connection to the Khmer Rouge killers. And even those who don’t have come to strange accommodations: the local lawyer who agreed to represent Ta Mok lost his own wife and twelve-year-old daughter to his client’s comrades. “So many people killed many people,” says a young Cambodian in the western town of Siem Reap. “Even my uncle, he killed many people. That is how my father was safe. So we say, ‘If you kill Khmer Rouge, you must kill everyone.’ ”
To pursue the old men who committed their worst crimes twenty years ago is to risk setting new furies into motion, the government protests, and to perpetuate the cycle of violence when already forty thousand Cambodians are limbless and more than 50 percent of the country’s children are stunted. Yet to turn over a new page and let bygones be bygones is to leave justice itself as broken and legless as the Buddhas in the National Museum. Almost certainly, the government will try to stage enough of a trial to satisfy the international community, on which it depends for funds, while disrupting as little as possible.
Even the sudden death of Pol Pot left a hollowness in many Cambodian hearts: the man who obliterated the country, its society, and its fields, died, without explanation, just as there was hope of trying him. “I don’t want to think more about Khmer Rouge,” says Keo Lundi, a gaunt, sad-eyed thirty-nine-year-old who shows visitors around the blood-stained floors of Tuol Sleng. “I don’t want to know that Duch dies.” He bangs his hand against a rusted post. “They killed my brother. They pulled down my life. They took my education—everything—to zero. I want peace.”
The prospects for that are better now than they have been for many years: the main war visible in Phnom Penh is between five rival “hand-phone” companies fighting for the loyalties of ubiquitous cell-phone addicts, and a few weeks ago the country was finally admitted to the Southeast Asian economic community, ASEAN. Women who would otherwise be pushed towards prostitution are now employed in huge numbers—135,000 of them in all—in 165 government factories, and tourists, for the first time in thirty years, can fly directly to the great temples of Angkor, bringing money to the country’s empty coffers. Yet the suspicion remains that peace can be acquired only at the expense of
Kill them all
over lists of nine-year-olds.
Such black ironies are still much too common everywhere you turn in this bleeding, often broken country where every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself in a labyrinth of sorts, every path leading to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. In 1998 Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as “the Butcher,” was captured in March, and now (alone among them) awaits trial. For the first time in more than a generation, there are no Cambodians in refugee camps across the border in Thailand, and the Khmer Rouge, held responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during their four years in power alone, are silent.
Yet every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows, and justice itself seems a rusty chain that will only bloody anyone who tries to touch it. To try the Khmer Rouge chieftains would be, in a sense, to prosecute the whole country: almost everyone around—from the exiled King Sihanouk to the one-eyed prime minister to the man next door—has some connection to the Khmer Rouge killers. And even those who don’t have come to strange accommodations: the local lawyer who agreed to represent Ta Mok lost his own wife and twelve-year-old daughter to his client’s comrades. “So many people killed many people,” says a young Cambodian in the western town of Siem Reap. “Even my uncle, he killed many people. That is how my father was safe. So we say, ‘If you kill Khmer Rouge, you must kill everyone.’ ”
To pursue the old men who committed their worst crimes twenty years ago is to risk setting new furies into motion, the government protests, and to perpetuate the cycle of violence when already forty thousand Cambodians are limbless and more than 50 percent of the country’s children are stunted. Yet to turn over a new page and let bygones be bygones is to leave justice itself as broken and legless as the Buddhas in the National Museum. Almost certainly, the government will try to stage enough of a trial to satisfy the international community, on which it depends for funds, while disrupting as little as possible.
Even the sudden death of Pol Pot left a hollowness in many Cambodian hearts: the man who obliterated the country, its society, and its fields, died, without explanation, just as there was hope of trying him. “I don’t want to think more about Khmer Rouge,” says Keo Lundi, a gaunt, sad-eyed thirty-nine-year-old who shows visitors around the blood-stained floors of Tuol Sleng. “I don’t want to know that Duch dies.” He bangs his hand against a rusted post. “They killed my brother. They pulled down my life. They took my education—everything—to zero. I want peace.”
The prospects for that are better now than they have been for many years: the main war visible in Phnom Penh is between five rival “hand-phone” companies fighting for the loyalties of ubiquitous cell-phone addicts, and a few weeks ago the country was finally admitted to the Southeast Asian economic community, ASEAN. Women who would otherwise be pushed towards prostitution are now employed in huge numbers—135,000 of them in all—in 165 government factories, and tourists, for the first time in thirty years, can fly directly to the great temples of Angkor, bringing money to the country’s empty coffers. Yet the suspicion remains that peace can be acquired only at the expense of
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