By Sebastian Strangio & May Titthara

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 26, 2010

KAMPONG THOM PROVINCE–THESE days, life in Chaoyot village, a collection of stilt houses nestled along the banks of the Stoung river, proceeds in much the same way it did 68 years ago, when Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, was born to parents of Khmer-Chinese extraction. It was here, in a small concrete home shaded by bamboo groves and mango trees, that Duch spent his childhood years, cycling each day the short distance to the local primary school.

The rustling palms and rutted village track are worlds away from Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the secret Khmer Rouge facility that Duch moulded into an efficient machine of interrogation, torture and death. As head of the prison, Duch is thought to have overseen the torture and killing of as many as 16,000 people, creating a nihilistic whirlwind from which only 14 or so emerged alive.

Kong Suon, 85, the oldest resident of Chaoyot village, was enraged when Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, asked to be set free. (Photo: Sebastian Strangio)

As the Khmer Rouge tribunal prepares to deliver its verdict against the 68-year old today – perhaps the only one it will ever issue – the proceedings have not gone unnoticed in Chaoyot. But the desire to see justice served means different things to different residents; whereas some are unsure how to relate Duch’s crimes to the abuses they personally endured during the regime, others seem to feel their effects acutely.

More than six decades since his birth, Duch has left only a faint trace in Chaoyot. His neat family home, currently occupied by his nephew Kim Luon, still stands, surrounded by a well-tended yard that abuts the road. Dy Thy, 63, one of Duch’s old neighbours, said she heard nothing from him during the 1975-1979 rule of the Khmer Rouge, and that she found it hard to square the quiet young student she remembers with the horrors of Tuol Sleng.

“I supposed that the Khmer Rouge were people from abroad,” she said. “I didn’t know they were Cambodian people – especially not a person born in this village.”

An exceptional student

Duch lived in Chaoyot until about the age of 14. Residents recall that from his earliest years, the boy who went by the nickname “Kiev” stood out as an exceptional student. Sem Thuon, now 69, regularly shared a table with Duch at Wat Svay Romeat primary school between the first and third grades. “I always copied from him during the exams, and he allowed me to copy,” she said. “I never thought that he would become a strong Khmer Rouge leader.”

In many ways, however, Duch’s intellectual journey epitomised that of the Cambodian communist movement. Like other regime leaders, he was a beneficiary of the sweeping educational reforms Prince Norodom Sihanouk introduced in the late 1950s. Intended to modernise the country and expand opportunities in the countryside, the reforms instead created a class of educated but underemployed young men and women who helped pry apart the country’s centuries-old system of patronage. As the 1960s wore on, Sihanouk – the God-King himself – came under stronger attack from the growing ranks of the left.

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Today marks 40 years since the Vietnamese communists rolled into Saigon, forcing the US to beat a hasy retreat from their embattled South Vietnamese client state. The occasion threw up its fair share of iconic images (see right), including the extraordinary sight of a North Vietnamese T-54 tank smashing open the gates of the city’s Presidential Palace, its tracks chewing up the ornamental lawn. Two weeks earlier, on the 17th, Phnom Penh also fell to a communist army, the Khmer Rouge, who unexpectedly beat their former Vietnamese comrades to the prize by an entire fortnight — evidence, they believed, 0f the inherent purity of the Cambodian revolution.

To coincide with the fateful anniversary of Phnom Penh’s fall, a group of reporters and photographers gathered in Cambodia this month for a long-awaited reunion organised by Chhang Song, the last Information Minister of the Lon Nol regime. (I spoke with him in February for my recent piece about the ill-fated Khmer Republic). My colleagues at the Phnom Penh Post have posted a series of video interviews with veteran correspondents Elizabeth Becker, Tim Page and Kurt Volkert, which are well worth checking out. The three speak about their experiences in Indochina in the early 1970s, Becker recalling her meeting with Pol Pot in 1978.

Click here to view the videos.

Inside the bizarre world of Asia’s North Korean restaurant chain

By Sebastian Strangio

A North Korean waitress at Pyongyang restaurant in Phnom Penh.

Published in Slate magazine, March 22, 2010

PACKED for dinner each night, the Pyongyang restaurant in the heart of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, is as famous for its kimchi as for its troupe of talented Korean waitresses, who perform an elaborate floor show for patrons. But Pyongyang is no ordinary Korean mess hall. The operation is run by the North Korean government, part of a chain of dozens of eateries—stretching from northern China to Thailand—that funnels much-needed foreign exchange into the state coffers in Pyongyang. While a visit to the reclusive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is next to impossible for most, Pyongyang offers casual diners a window into Kingdom Kim, an elaborate combination of food and culture from north of the 38th parallel.

Visitors to the restaurant are ushered into an air-conditioned, flood-lit hall filled with dozens of glass-topped tables. Unlike North Korea proper, which is wracked by economic sanctions and constant famines, the food here is fresh and abundant. The menu features specialties such as Pyongyang “cold noodle” (served encrusted with ice), barbecued cuttlefish, stringy dangogi (dog meat) soup, and countless variations on the kimchi theme, all served with glutinous white rice. Also available for sale are a series of North Korean products, including ginseng wine and some nameless bear “product” promised to increase sexual virility. All carry hefty price tags in U.S. dollars, since the  Cambodian riel is not convertible outside the country.

In addition to the food, the main attraction is the group of pretty North Korean-born waitresses, who perform music and dance routines complete with tightly synchronized choreography reminiscent of North Korea’s annual Mass Games. Donning traditional chima jogoiri dresses and pasted-on smiles, the pretty young women serenade diners with violins, guitars, synthesized karaoke, and Korean pansori music. The predominantly South Korean clientele claps and cheers, requesting reverb-drenched renditions of Korean pop classics.

Aside from small North Korean flags pinned to the waitresses’ blouses, the restaurant is surprisingly free from overt propagandizing. Instead of paeans to the Great Leader and his revolutionary juche ideology, the walls are adorned with a series of monumental landscape paintings. One crashing seascape, rendered in an apocalyptic palette of blues, greens, and reds, recalls the painting used as a backdrop to the official photo of Kim Jong-il and Bill Clinton that was taken during Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang in August. The cold flood-lighting and no-camera policy (often violated on the sly by curious Western expats) also lend an Orwellian tinge to an evening at Pyongyang, though the authoritarian mood is often broken by the sound of drunken South Korean businessmen warbling their way through the restaurant’s thick karaoke catalog.

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Prior to my going to intern at the Phnom Penh Post in March, I’ve assembled a long list of Cambodia-related reading material, covering politics, history, language, anthropology and travel writing. The first cab off the rank was Khmers Stand Up! by Justin Corfield, a history of the right-wing Khmer Republic that lasted from the deposition of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 to its ignominious disintegration under Khmer Rouge attack in April 1975. I’ve always wanted to learn more about this period, hoping to discern some further explanation for the cataclysms that Cambodia endured under Pol Pot.

Khmers Stand Up! is basically a published version of Corfield’s PhD thesis (completed at Monash University in 1989) and, like all good academic studies, is thoroughly researched: Corfield follows the arcana of National Assembly meetings and the ebb of factional politics with precision, eventually losing the lay reader in the profusion of unfamiliar names and the long passages describing (amongst other obscurities) the gestation of the republic’s 1972 constitution. But in its preference for dry accuracy over style, it suffers the flaws of much scholarly work. The author’s prose is leaden and clunky, utterly immune to rhetorical flourishes of any kind, and a good copy editor could have a field-day with some of the more laborious sections of the text. But Khmers Stand Up! tells a fascinating story. Even Corfield’s awkward writing style can’t dispel the ancient drama of imperial decline-and-fall, transported to an infant Southeast Asian republic, ringed by enemies, manned by a rotating cast of superstitious generals and grasping politicians.

Prince Sihanouk (centre) in Beijing, with Mao Zedong (left) and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (right).

The men who overthrew Sihanouk in March 1970, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirikmatak, attempted a bold experiment in Khmer democracy — and what turned out to be a rather incongruous one, given that the administration was helmed by self-serving strongmen for the five years of its existence. But compared to the iron-fisted traditionalism of Sihanouk’s rule (1953-70) and the well-known horrors of what came later under Pol Pot, the Khmer Republic almost seems a period of calm.

Nearly from the moment of its inception, however, the Republic started coming apart at the seams. Sihanouk, abroad at the time of the coup, raged against its traitorous architects and plotted his return. He received no succour from the Soviets, but found a comfortable exile in Beijing, where he allied with his erstwhile enemies in the maquis – the radical Khmer Rouge, still yoked to their ‘fraternal’ Vietnamese minders. Despite a reckless ultimatum from Lon Nol, the Vietnamese communists refused to withdraw from their sanctuaries on Cambodian territory. President Richard Nixon, seized by delusions of victory in Vietnam, sent US troops over the border in April 1970 to capture the NLF ‘headquarters’ that was assumed to be directing the Viet Cong insurgency from inside Cambodia. The battle-lines of this new proxy war quickly settled into place: as Lon Nol threw in his lot with the Americans, sucking up economic and military aid, the NLF and its Cambodian apprentices turned their fire on the new government.

As part of the communist propaganda drive against Lon Nol, Sihanouk returned to Cambodia’s ‘liberated zones’ in March 1973, traveling from Hanoi by land to Angkor Wat, where he posed for photos wearing the iconic black pyjama and checked neck-scarf uniform of the Khmer Rouge. In the pictures released to publicise the event, Sihanouk and his wife Monique wear pasted-on smiles, posing in temple doorways and shaking hands awkwardly with Khieu Samphan and other communist leaders, driven into hiding by his own security forces in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the new government struggled with student protests, constitutional legitimacy and the steadily approaching maelstrom of civil war. Corruption was especially rife in the army, which, under US largesse, expanded from a modest force of 20,000 into a bloated legion of nearly 250,000. A common practice amongst commanders was to over-report the number of troops in their units, thus siphoning these phantoms’ pay into their own pockets. Others, bent on self-enrichment, also sold arms directly to the enemy. Unsurprisingly, the battlefield effectiveness of the army was questionable and, despite the reported bravery of its rank-and-file, it wilted under the assault of insurgent attacks during 1971 and 1972. Only a few effective units, and the indiscriminate US bombing of communist base areas, prevented the republic’s premature fall. But this had its own tragic aspect: just a week before the US Congress ordered a bombing halt in August 1973, an American B-52 accidentally dropped its pay-load on the Mekong ferry town of Neak Loung, killing some 200 civilians. In a surreal scene described in William Shawcross’ Sideshow, US ambassador Emory Swank arrived on the scene in sleek consular limo, dispensing US$100 bills to the grieving relatives of the deceased — that then being the going rate for a Cambodian life. (The pilot was fined $700).

Corfield’s telling of the story becomes more engaging as it hurtles towards its dramatic denouement. President Lon Nol, half-paralysed by illness and prey to creeping superstitions, eventually lost touch with the realities of government, preferring the seclusion of his home at Kompong Som (Sihanoukville). But few other men had the skill to unite their rivals and gather the threads of the fraying republic. There were strongmen like Lon Nol’s brother Lon Non, adept at intimidation and graft; In Tam, the leader of the National Assembly and therefore distrusted within the army; and Prince Sirikmatak, beloved of the US embassy but increasingly isolated after the 1970 coup. By early 1975, republican leaders were willing to countenance the return of Sihanouk; but the prince’s devil-pact with the Khmer Rouge had already been sealed, and he was to spend the next five years as their prisoner, confined to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh.

The end, when it came, was swift and unrelenting. The communist army that marched into the capital on 17 April 1975 was freed of its Vietnamese masters, and armed with a militantly xenophobic form of Maoism. The city was emptied. Symbols of the old regime, like the new Central Bank, were dynamited. The story of what came next is all too familiar. Corfield’s book is a reminder — and a timely one, given the US position in Iraq — that the road to political hell is often paved with the noblest of intentions.