By May Titthara & Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 27, 2010

KAMPONG THOM PROVINCE–IN the cafes of Stoung district, yesterday’s verdict in the case of Kaing Guek Eev, alias Duch, proved a hard sell. At one cavernous establishment on National Road 6, a broadcast of the proceedings vied for attention with a cheaply made Chinese action film. As soon as the music swelled and the credits began to roll, the mostly young crowd thinned, leaving a handful of elderly patrons to watch the Khmer Rouge tribunal on a second small screen in the back. And by the time the wiry Tuol Sleng commandant stood to attention and the verdict was read out, the room was empty save for two waitresses, who ferried away empty plates and glasses.

Interest was greater, though, in nearby Chaoyot village, especially among those who knew the prison chief when he was a schoolboy. Although most village elders did not watch the verdict – choosing instead to attend ceremonies marking Buddhist lent at Svay Romeat pagoda, where Duch studied as a child – the outcome provoked spirited discussion. Among one group of old women, dressed in flowing black gowns and white blouses, reactions to the verdict ranged from cold anger to forgiveness to pity for the convicted jailer.

Hi Hor, 72, who has lived in Duch’s village since she was born, said she was livid at the length of the sentence, which she said did not match the crimes he committed. “I will kill him and eat his meat if I meet him,” she said as she sat on a woven mat in the pagoda’s flag-draped dining hall. “The court should have sentenced him to his whole life in prison.”

At Kdey Doeum pagoda, located close to Chaoyot, village elders also gathered to mark the three-month lenten period, sitting on the floor of a half-constructed dining hall on the temple grounds. Pich Doeun, a 73-year-old layman, described his own experience under Democratic Kampuchea, when he was sent to a remote part of Stoung district to toil in communal rice paddies and construct irrigation dams. When asked if the verdict against Duch was fair, Pich Doeun expressed ambivalence. On one hand, 30 years was a just sentence, he said, but part of him wanted to see Duch executed and cremated, his bones placed in a stupa and never again removed. “I survived until today because of fate,” he said. “From my point of view, the court should kill him and bring his bones back and lock them up.”

Others, however, were able to separate their anger with the Khmer Rouge from their positive memories of the young Duch. “Even though I was tortured and did not get enough food to eat during that time, I pardon him. Everything passed over 30 years ago,” said 71-year-old Chhum Oeun, sitting at Svay Romeat pagoda.

Despite the evidence presented against him at trial, she said she would always remember Duch as “good and intelligent”, not the cruel ideologue convicted of overseeing the deaths of as many as 16,000 people at Tuol Sleng. Some of Duch’s relatives, too, said they did not view Duch as a monster, and condemned the court for a sentence they said was too strict. “I really pity my nephew,” said one 71-year-old who claimed to be Duch’s aunt, and who gave her name only as Tob. “The court should have charged him for a shorter time because he is too old, and let him live together with his family in his old age. “I don’t know what happened to him to make him become a Khmer Rouge during that time because his parents were good people,” she added.

A few hundred metres down the muddy village road, Brak Chlam, 67, one of Duch’s cousins, said he hoped to see the prison chief again. “I don’t care about the court charging him. What I care about is his life – I want to see him survive,” he said. Brak Chlam said he planned to visit Duch in prison if he could find the money. “I always see his face on TV. I want to see his real face,” he said. “I was so happy when I got news that he survived, because I wanted him to survive. I don’t know what he did in Phnom Penh. I only know that he was a good and intelligent boy.”

While the verdict divided opinion among those old enough to have detailed memories of the regime, younger observers seemed more or less indifferent to the verdict handed down yesterday. At another roadside cafe, the patrons were focused instead on playing chequers and watching kickboxing. Meas Rith, 41, who sat among a group of men watching the fight, said he had not been following the tribunal closely, but that he did not think it fair that Duch could potentially die in prison.

“The court should have sentenced him to about 10 years to give him some chance to spend time in the pagoda in his old age,” he said, before turning his attention back to the television. A cry went up as the two combatants pummelled each other onscreen.

“The people in the rural areas are not as interested about what has happened in the past as people in the city,” said Chai Lign, the owner of the café. The sinewy 29-year-old said he had heard of Duch but knew little of life under the Khmer Rouge, and that many his age were the same way. “They don’t want to know about the pain,” he said. “Some people don’t even know Duch’s face, what he looks like.”

As Cambodia and the United States celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties, the Post looks back at a  relationship that has moved from alliance to alienation and back

By Sebastian Strangio & Neth Pheaktra

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 16, 2010

Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique fete Jacqueline Kennedy at Chamkarmon Palace during her visit to Cambodia in November 1967. (Photo: Private collection of Ambassador Julio A. Jeldres)

WHEN the United States and Cambodia celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties next week, they will look back on a relationship that has seen its fair share of ups and downs. Launched at the beginning of the cold war in 1950, the relationship has been fraught with ideological passions, experiencing periods of intimacy, violent disagreement and chilly silence.

It remains young: Less than two decades have passed since diplomatic ties were re-established at the end of the cold war, and barely 10 years since the end of the ensuing civil war. For 20 years out of 60, there was little or no relationship at all. Observers and officials from both countries, however, say the current bond – which they describe as built on solid foundations and enduring mutual interests – anticipates a long-term US presence in Cambodia.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said this week that since the re-establishment of relations in November 1991, the two countries had rebuilt strong political, commercial and military ties. “Our diplomatic relations are developing, and we hope that after the 60th anniversary, Cambodia-USA relations will progress again,” he said.

The administration of US President Barack Obama has identified Southeast Asia as a focal point of a foreign policy that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech last year, described as “neither impulsive nor ideological”. Instead, that policy was geared towards creating “dynamic and productive partnerships that can address both the challenge and the promise of this new century”.

US Ambassador Carol Rodley said last week that since 1950, Phnom Penh and Washington have oscillated between close cooperation and periods in which they “were seriously at odds” with each other. “For some significant amount of time”, she said, “we looked past each other or we saw each other through lenses that confused rather than clarified the picture for both sides.”

Rodley, who first served in Cambodia as US deputy head of mission between 1997 and 2000, said that “dramatic” changes during her first posting, including the end of the decade-long civil war and Cambodia’s entry into ASEAN, had fostered a more lasting relationship. “We’ve come to a more mature relationship and a more mature understanding of each other, which I think is a good thing,” she said.

Past troubles

At the time Ambassador Donald Heath, a career foreign serviceman, presented his credentials to then-King Norodom Sihanouk on July 11, 1950, US policymakers saw Cambodia as both a potential ally and a potential threat. A bastion of Western influence, the country – like the remaining French territories in Indochina – was also seen as a domino teetering on the edge of a red abyss. Sihanouk, who skillfully courted all sides of the growing Indochina conflagration from 1955 until his overthrow 15 years later, was perhaps the prime embodiment of this relationship. In the mid-1960s, he broke off and then restored diplomatic relations with the US as part of his delicate dance between the cold war superpowers.

On March 18, 1970, it became clear, however, that Sihanouk had overplayed his hand. Amid increasing anger over what many viewed as the prince’s tacit approval of Vietcong encroachments into Cambodian territory, he was overthrown by a US-supported general and close adviser, Lon Nol, in a right-wing coup d’etat. For the next five years US-Cambodia relations during the Cold War era reached their high-water mark.

This period of cooperation was premised on a relationship of patronage with the US government, which provided military, economic and political support to the government. But this relationship also came at a steep price. As it poured military and economic aid into the country in a bid to stave off a communist victory, the US also executed a bombing campaign that some historians say aided the Khmer Rouge in their rise from a ragtag jungle insurgency to the country’s iron-fisted rulers.

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Occasionally, a copy of the New Light of Myanmar — the Burmese government’s official mouthpiece — winds up in our office and gets passed around for laughs. The paper on March 25, commemorating Armed Forces Day, which marks the start of the Burmese army’s resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1945, was particularly amusing. In addition to the usual “news” about senior government officials “felicitating” foreign diplomats, March 25 contained in-depth coverage of role of the tatmadaw (Burmese military) in promoting national unity and foiling all manner of sinister neocolonial plots. Of particular interest was this cartoon (below), printed alongside a long article and “poem” extolling the tatmadaw. Both the style and substance call to mind Chick tracts, the radical Christian evangelist comics that turn up in one’s mailbox from time to time.

Laughable though it is, none of this bodes well for the election scheduled to be held in Burma later this year. With such a central role in preventing the “enslavement of the nation”, the military has reserved itself a quarter of the seats in each of the proposed national and regional legislatures and given military-backed parties a significant head-start. During Saturday’s Armed Forces Day parade in Naypyidaw, Senior General Than Shwe also warned against “divisive” and “slanderous” election campaigning. Meanwhile, opposition groups and ethnic nationalists are divided on whether to take part, and if they do, whether to join junta-backed parties or establish independent parties with little chance of success. Positive change, if it does result from the election, will likely be a long time coming. Below, another grab from March 25′s edition of the New Light, highlighting just what the government expects to achieve on this year’s Armed Forces Day. Nothing too ambitious, naturally.