Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land Page 4

  The same remains true today. In Bon Skol, that village about a hundred miles east of Phnom Penh, the village chief, Mou Neam, does not hesitate when asked what the government does for him now. “The roads, the bridges, the wells,” he said.

  About 680 people live in Bon Skol. Their homes are small abodes perched on poles a few feet above the ground, with thatched roofs and walls of bamboo matting. They cook their meals over open fires and set their earthen pots atop three rocks. Bathrooms are open pits back behind the homes. These latrines sit atop the water table. Dysentery is as commonplace in the 2000s as it was in the 1200s.

  Historians believe the Angkor empire began to decline in the fifteenth century. It had reigned longer than the Roman Empire. Though no one knows exactly why Angkor lost its way, theories abound. Most likely, the city outgrew its ability to sustain itself. Cambodians have always had large families; even today it’s not unusual for the most desperately poor couples to have as many as eight or ten children. It seems probable that Angkor’s population swelled beyond the natural environment’s ability to sustain it. Add to that periods of drought and the evolution of the Asian economy into the era of trade and international commerce during the 1600s.

  Responding to mounting threats to the Angkorian way of life, over time the people began to leave. That was easy. They could dismantle their simple homes, load them onto oxcarts, and move someplace else in the Khmer kingdom where they could grow rice, pick fruit, and catch fish.

  Yet as the Angkor empire died, Cambodia lost its soul. Until just five hundred years ago, it had been a great nation-state—strong, confident, powerful, respected, and feared. But as the state declined, its kings became helpless, even pathetic, vassals of their neighbors.

  Cambodia’s neighbors were quick to seize upon this weakness. The Siamese to the west and Vietnamese to the east began taking bites out of the state, beginning in the 1500s and 1600s. Meantime, the Vietnamese migrated southward until they outnumbered Cambodians in the southern delta region. Over time, they became the de facto rulers. Siamese military forays made inroads from the west.

  Over the years a series of kings and their family members allied themselves with either Thai or Vietnamese rulers, whichever they thought could serve as protectors against the other neighbor’s aggression. Hoping to outmaneuver the king, dissident members of the royal family would sometimes make secret alliances with different neighboring states. Through all of this intrigue, Cambodia continuously suffered invasions and civil wars.

  For the first time Cambodian leaders acquired a new character trait: an overwhelming sense of dependency. For solutions to their problems, they had to look beyond themselves. They searched for saviors outside their borders—a far cry from the great medieval kings who held a vast, glittering empire together with cunning and military might.

  The Thai and Vietnamese had little respect for the Cambodian people after the fall of Angkor. Their views were scathing. Writing in 1834 Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang called Cambodia a barbarian state because “the people do not know how to grow food.” They used picks and hoes in the rice paddies, wielding them by hand; they didn’t know even how to use oxen, the emperor complained. The sophisticated irrigation schemes the Angkorian kings devised had long since fallen into decay, and in other parts of the country no one even thought to irrigate their fields. “They grow enough rice to eat two meals a day” and saw no value in growing anything more, Emperor Minh Mang wrote. Without irrigation, Cambodians were wholly dependent on the rains to water their crops. At best they could grow one rice crop a year, and then only when the rains fell as expected—a pitiable state compared to the farmers who lived when the kings of Angkor ruled.

  A few years later the Vietnamese emperor assigned his best general, Troung Minh Giang, to civilize the Cambodians. But in short order, the general gave up. “After studying the situation,” he reported, “we have decided that Cambodian officials only know how to bribe and be bribed. Offices are sold. Nobody carries out orders; everyone works for his own account.”

  Centuries before, the kings of Angkor had set up an economic model that relied on patronage. The king sold government positions to his mandarins. Once ensconced, these aides would be awarded the right to collect rice from the farmers who lived in their respective territories and keep part of it—generally one-tenth of the crop. Over time, this model naturally evolved into full-throated corruption.

  Through the Angkor empire and into the twentieth century, Cambodia had not a single school. Only monks in village pagodas who taught young boys scripture and perhaps how to read. Girls received no education whatsoever. As a result, the men who bought their positions in the royal court had no training or knowledge in government administration. Most were illiterate. The very idea of working on behalf of the people to improve their lot was a foreign concept. These officers looked out only for themselves; their sole occupation was accruing personal wealth. This state of affairs had continued uninterrupted for centuries, and there was no reason to question it.

  Cambodia’s peasantry viewed the government with suspicion, even fear. Men were liable for military conscription at any time. The only other interaction families had with the government came when an official showed up to collect “taxes”—10 percent of each harvest. It’s no wonder that the Khmer verb to govern literally means “to eat the kingdom.”

  It’s also not surprising that most Cambodians lack ambition or any hope for a better life. Their religion, Theravadist Buddhism, taught them to shun status and eschew material possessions because “contentment is wealth,” as the monks still say. In the pagoda schools, monks preached that children should be pleased with the lives they had and not aspire for more.

  Theravadist Buddhism swept the country and much of the region in the fourteenth century, possibly because its credo fit so neatly with the Cambodian reality. As nearly every Cambodian recognized, social advancement of any kind was impossible. Material wealth was unattainable. Theravadist monks advised the people to be content with the status quo, and having no other option, they complied.

  Centuries later the Vietnamese viewed this Cambodian personality trait with contempt. Emperor Minh Mang complained that the people’s shortcomings, as he saw them, “stem from the laziness of the Cambodian people”—an unfortunate epithet that grew to be commonplace among foreigners.

  The Thai practiced Theravadist Buddhism as well, but they also characterized the Cambodians as indolent and dumb. Chaophyraya Bodin, a Thai military commander, complained in the nineteenth century that “all the Khmer leaders and nobles, all the district chiefs and all the common people are ignorant, stupid, foolish and gullible. They have no idea what is true and what is false.”

  Into the mid-nineteenth century the Thai and the Vietnamese battled each other for dominance over Cambodia, and had events played out without interference, in time the two states would have divided up the whole of Cambodia and annexed their shares. That is how weak and hapless the Cambodian state had become. But in the mid-1800s King Norodom, who had spent his youth as a hostage in the Thai royal court, changed the course of Cambodian history.

  The king signed a treaty with France in 1863, offering timber and mining rights in exchange for protection from Cambodia’s neighbors. The French could easily deal with the Vietnamese threat, as they had recently occupied Vietnam, too. The Thai were a more difficult problem.

  For the first few years the French were benign guardians, asking only for taxes and fees in return for their protection. But by the mid-1870s they began demanding change in Cambodia’s ossified government. At their urging King Norodom promised to abolish slavery and end the monarchy’s insistence that all land belonged to the crown. He also pledged to reform “tax collection,” which had grown into a system of runaway thievery. But then Norodom employed a passive-aggressive tactic that would remain commonplace, even into the modern era. He signed orders for all of these reforms—but then declined to enforce them.

  This didn’t escape French notice. Over the f
ollowing decades the French grew ever more frustrated with the Cambodian people. Just as the Thai and Vietnamese before them, the French viewed the populace as ignorant and torpid. As for the government bureaucracy, one French administrator described it as “worm-eaten debris,” historian John Tully wrote. As ever, the government’s legal and administrative officials were dedicated only to enriching themselves. The French calculated that they pocketed about 40 percent of the nation’s revenue.

  King Norodom was another problem altogether. The French complained frequently about his vast harem, which included four to five hundred women plus another thousand relatives and children. Tully wrote that a French report in 1894 caustically noted that the king’s concubine city cost the government 160,000 francs a year—a very considerable sum one hundred years ago. The French also chafed at his addiction to opium and deep affection for alcohol.

  When Norodom died in 1904, his successor, King Sisowath, worked with the French to at last evict the Thai from western Cambodia. Otherwise, he was a compliant king. Soon after he took office he really did abolish slavery, as Norodom had promised forty years earlier. He realized he had to give up something if he wanted the French to free his state from his hated enemy.

  Having secured Cambodia’s territorial integrity, through the midtwentieth century the French imposed onerous taxes and fees, but they offered little in return. Only in 1935 did they build the nation’s first high school, in Phnom Penh. Even so, they used it primarily to educate members of the royal family and train mandarin children to work in the French administration.

  In midcentury the French began sending a few dozen talented students to Paris to study, hoping they could educate a few of them to do serious work in the colonial government. These were young people, generally in their early twenties, who had no experience with the world outside their villages or perhaps Phnom Penh. They had never seen a television and perhaps not even a radio. Cambodia had little in the way of newspapers, and so they knew almost nothing of the world outside.

  These young students arrived in Paris and found a society they had no idea existed. Most shocking for them were the French people, quite wealthy by Cambodian standards, who were free to do pretty much what they wanted. For many Cambodians this was transformative. Suddenly they questioned every founding principle of the Khmer state. Who said they could not aspire to more—to a life like these Frenchmen lived? Why should they be satisfied with the stunted lives Cambodians were indoctrinated to accept without question?

  One of these students made this view plain in an article published in a Khmer student magazine. The author wrote, “The King is absolute. He attempts to destroy the people’s interest when the people are in a position of weakness.” The “absolute king uses nice words, but his heart remains wicked.” The author of these words was a twenty-seven-year-old student named Saloth Sar. The world would know him later by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot.

  Communism was fashionable in Europe at the time. Saloth Sar and some of the other Cambodians embraced it and then brought the movement home. After returning to Cambodia they would find common cause with Vietnamese rebels who were fighting the French for their own freedom.

  Yet at a young age Saloth Sar was by no means ideologically pure. His older sister, Saloth Roeung, was the favorite concubine of the next king, Sisowath Monivong. As a young boy Saloth Sar liked to visit her at the palace—probably because giggling concubines would gather around him and, with their hands, offer sexual favors.

  When King Sisowath Monivong died in 1941, Saloth Roeung sat at his bedside. The French chose Sisowath’s nephew Norodom Sihanouk as the new king. He was nineteen years old, and, once again, the French assumed he would be compliant. But in fact, as king, he would be responsible for winning freedom from the French in 1953, a year before the Vietnamese won their own freedom at Dien Bien Phu.

  Sihanouk was a complex man, a clever, vain, and dedicated narcissist who ruled Cambodia for twenty-nine years and wielded great influence for decades longer. He was responsible for significant social change—and also great damage. He talked the talk of limited democracy but was brutal and merciless with his political opponents. Hundreds simply disappeared. In spite of his democratic overtures, he wanted to be the political leader of his country, not just a monarch perched upon a throne. So in 1955 he resigned as king and formed a political party. He ruled as Prince Sihanouk, chief of state, for the next fifteen years.

  He built schools and universities—primarily for bragging rights at international meetings—even though he had no educated faculty to staff them. He held Cambodia’s first-ever democratic elections for parliament in 1946. But when he disapproved of the outcome, he and his allies staged a coup.

  Prince Sihanouk’s changes aside, Cambodian culture continued as it had for a millennium. Under Sihanouk, as historian Michael Vickery put it, government officials “grew wealthy while the books showed red,” and the economy “was a continuation of the traditional practice of officials extracting a percentage of what they collected for the state; and no one of the elite was ever severely called to account or forced to repay what he had collected from the public till.” After a thousand years, nothing had changed.

  For almost a century, the French had served as Cambodia’s patrons. Soon after independence, the United States stepped in to fill that role and began supplying copious quantities of foreign aid—so much money, Sihanouk said, that Cambodia was succumbing to the “dollar god.” His mandarins were ladling vast personal fortunes from the foreign-aid accounts.

  Sihanouk liked to inveigh against corruption but then lived a lifestyle of almost unimaginable extravagance. His wealth’s source remained obscure. Years later, in the early 1990s, Secretary of State James Baker visited Sihanouk in Paris at the Cambodian ambassador’s residence. With Baker was John Bolton, then an assistant secretary of state. “It was 10 a.m., and he was serving champagne,” Bolton remembered with obvious disgust. “He reached down and poured a glass for his dog. It was like Louis XIV.”

  In 1963 Sihanouk told the United States he wanted no more aid money. Until that point the United States had supplied millions upon millions. The money, he complained, was “a corrupting influence,” but he was also straining to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War. Distancing himself from Washington, be believed, would help ensure that. Still, this act, more than anything else, proved to be his undoing. Where would all his mandarins purloin their incomes now?

  In 1965 Sihanouk cut off diplomatic relations with the United States altogether and threw his lot in with China, whose leaders courted and flattered him. That set his aides to plotting. After all, the Chinese were not nearly as generous as the Americans had been.

  All of this occurred as several of those Cambodian students who had studied in France began building an underground Communist Party based in Phnom Penh. Party members tried to remain covert, but they couldn’t hide from Sihanouk. He regarded the growth of the communist movement with great alarm and warned in 1961, during a tour of the provinces, that a Communist regime in Cambodia would “deprive the individual of all that is dear to him—basic freedoms and the joys of family life—and turn him into a producing machine which over time has all the human values sucked out of it.” Over the next decade he arrested anyone he caught who appeared to be associated with the movement and generally treated its members with ruthless repression.

  In the mid-1960s, the movement’s leaders fled Phnom Penh, set up headquarters in the countryside, and, in 1967, began a national military uprising. The four Communist Party standing committee members who made that decision were Saloth Sar, who later changed his name to Pol Pot; Ieng Sary, who became the Khmer Rouge foreign minister; Nuon Chea, known as “Brother Number Two”; and So Phim, who was commander of the Communist Party’s Eastern Zone.

  By the beginning of 1970 the Khmer Communists controlled not quite 20 percent of Cambodia’s territory—principally the rural areas around their headquarters. Their future appeared uncertain at best.

  In Mar
ch 1970, however, everything changed. A military coup forced Sihanouk out of office while he was on vacation in Paris. The new head of government was Lon Nol, the nation’s richly corrupt prime minister. Before leaving for Paris, Sihanouk often remarked that Lon Nol and his compatriots were “more patriots of the dollar than patriots of Cambodia.”

  Phnom Penh officialdom cheered the news. Lon Nol was close to the United States. Restored relations with Washington would allow the mandarins to dip back into the till. Car dealers and building contractors jubilated. But these people, the economic elite of Phnom Penh, represented but a minuscule portion of Cambodian society. At least 90 percent of the population lived in the provinces, and these people were stunned and ashamed. They adored Sihanouk. To them he was just short of a god. How could anyone overthrow the God-king?

  All over the country people demonstrated against the coup. Hundreds of villagers marched on Phnom Penh. In 1970 Lon Nol ordered his troops to open fire on them. They scattered, ran back into the jungle. Later, several of them told reporters they were so angry about that episode that they rushed to join the Khmer Rouge.

  Fury, of course, consumed Sihanouk. He flew to Beijing to seek advice. And when he heard that the new regime was vilifying him on Cambodian radio, he declared that he wanted “justice”—in other words, revenge. While this poisonous state of mind consumed him, his friend Pham Van Dong, the premier of North Vietnam, asked him if now he was willing to work with the Khmer Rouge to overthrow Lon Nol, journalist Philip Short wrote in his biography, Pol Pot. Sihanouk said yes, and the North Vietnamese passed word along to Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.