‘Policies and Practices of the Recent Past’
ON THE FIRST anniversary of the signing of the Paris agreement, the UN organised a parade in front of the Royal Palace. On the lawn, overlooking the river, I watched as UN soldiers swept the area for landmines before the fanfare commenced. All the contingents were represented. The peacekeepers stood to attention in freshly pressed uniforms, guns gleaming in the mid-morning heat. A large UN flag held by an American guard flowed above the crowd. Citing security concerns, the entire area had been sealed off and ordinary Cambodians were kept away, while the UN celebrated the peace as the world’s cameras looked on.
A crowd of dignitaries that included diplomats and other UN personnel had been invited to watch. After the speeches, the soldiers were inspected by Prince Sihanouk and Lt.Col. Sanderson, the UN force commander, together with the head of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi. The VIPs sat there, quietly cooking, sweat stains gradually spreading across their suits. A zealous Ghanaian band master presented himself and, to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, they marched, saluted and marched again despite the fact that Cambodia was Buddhist. Moments later a series of UN helicopters and planes rumbled low over Phnom Penh’s rooftops and paratroopers glided down and landed among the troops, UN flags rippling beneath their feet.
I scanned the crowd of VIPs. There was Hun Sen, the Prime Minister of the Phnom Penh regime, the British ambassador, the US ambassador, the heads of the various UN agencies and an assortment of diplomats and dignitaries. And there, among them all, in a gleaming cream suit, a white-haired Cambodian sat smiling and clapping just as he had done the world over. It was Khieu Samphan of the Khmer Rouge.
This was the same Khieu Samphan who had watched the exodus from Phnom Penh and later taken over as head of state. Since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he had spent much time flying around the world, smiling and waving, treated with the courtesy and privilege accorded all international diplomats. He had visited Sihanouk in France, where they enjoyed fine French cuisine, presenting the world and the Khmer Rouge paymasters with an image of the acceptable face of the Khmer Rouge. However, on several occasions since the fall of his regime, Khieu Samphan had been confronted by the barbarous record of the regime. When Cambodia scholar Stephen Heder confronted him about the killings he replied, ‘There was no mistake.’ All those who had been ‘smashed’ had been ‘enemies’, he said. But he did concede that perhaps one old man had been falsely accused.
Son Sen was nowhere to be seen. As Duch’s former boss and one of the Khmer Rouge leaders known to be directly associated with the killings, perhaps his presence would have muddied that most cherished UN virtue: impartiality.
Curious Cambodians, trying to get a glimpse of all this, were held back by Indonesian soldiers and UN police.
As part of the Paris agreement, seventy per cent of each faction’s army, including the government forces, were to disarm. Out of approximately 200,000 soldiers expected to hand over their weapons, a mere 12,000 had shown up. The Khmer Rouge had refused altogether.
Because of the delay in the UN’s deployment, the Khmer Rouge had greatly extended their zones of influence, hidden arms and moved troops to penetrate deeper and deeper into Cambodian territory. Even before the first UN soldier had set foot in the country there had been clashes. Out in the countryside there was shelling in Kompong Thom and Kompong Cham and Kompong Chhnang, in Banteay Meanchay, Siem Reap and Battambang provinces. Stoung, Duch’s hometown, was subjected to a nightlong barrage by Khmer Rouge artillery. At first, the fighting was far from the urban centres, but just sharp and fast enough to keep people from feeling too secure. The normality was deceptive. This unpredictable violence could break out anywhere, at any time. Gradually, as it became clear the UN would not react, the violence escalated.
Less than a year later, and in spite of the presence of thousands of peacekeepers, the ceasefire began to completely disintegrate. Such was the scale of the fighting that the front stretched several kilometres along the western part of the country.
It could have been a scene plucked from the Middle Ages. Sitting on the edge of the slope I watched as children ran into the murky water that stretched out as far as the scrub-jungle on the other side. Women, indifferent to the children’s splashing and peals of laughter, scrubbed away at their piles of laundry. Further on, two bullock carts filled with slender poles of recently felled timber were ambling their way through the shallows of the lake.
But this wasn’t a lake. It was a dam built by the Khmer Rouge at the cost of thousands of people’s lives as they toiled day and night in the fierce tropical heat. I imagined lines of regimented workers in black transporting loads of earth by hand under the flapping blood-red flags of Democratic Kampuchea. All over the country at that time hundreds of irrigation projects had been initiated, sometimes with no discernible purpose. Uneducated cadres, who had perhaps been courageous fighters during the war, had been rewarded with position and rank and given charge of these work sites. In some cases, with the arrogance of latter-day Canutes, there were even attempts to get water to flow uphill. Very often engineers would be working as manual labourers on the same sites that the untutored cadres had designed as they tried desperately to conceal their identities in case they should be found out and taken away. In the revolutionary world of the Khmer Rouge, ignorance was a virtue, and knowledge a threat.
The dam had long since been abandoned. It was now so overgrown that it seemed natural until one looked at the straight shoreline and contrasted it with the other side. Further along the road that ran along the top of the dyke there were concrete sluice gates from which young teenage boys jumped and twirled through the air, hitting the water in white explosions.
Above all the screams of the children and the noise from a ghetto blaster, the sound of heavy thunder echoed across the water. It was a constant rumble that sometimes grew in its intensity, like waves crashing on a shore. But it was the dry season and there was no storm. It was the sound of one of the fiercest offensives by the government on Khmer Rouge positions since the peace had begun nearly a year before.
The UN had begun to repatriate the refugees from their camps in Thailand in large fleets of buses. ‘When there is peace in Cambodia,’ read one poster in an office I saw, ‘UNHCR will return you back to your homes in safety and with dignity.’ These convoys were colourful affairs with inevitable UN logos plastered on the sides; perfect news-photo material ensuring the international public could be given the reassuring line that at last something was being done for the refugees of the border.
While the repatriation grabbed the headlines, there were already more than 200,000 refugees inside the country. These refugees, or ‘internally displaced persons’ in NGO-speak, had been there for several years and were not considered a story. The refugees from the border received vastly preferential treatment both in materials and the attention of the UN’s publicity machine.
Many of those from the border ended up joining the internal refugees and I spent much time taking pictures in these encampments. The ubiquitous plastic sheeting given to them was all around and the stencils of the aid organisations were everywhere. Nothing seemed to escape the branding of the aid world. With pressure from donor governments, the aim of the UNHCR’s repatriation was clear: to get the border refugees back in time for the election. The plight of these internal refugees wasn’t as fashionable, nor was it as lucrative. With the refugees back the UN in Phnom Penh could claim their success. For the many who ended up in these camps all the UN had done was shift the border. One refugee told an aid worker he was happy to be back, ‘Because at least here we can run from the fighting.’
The Khmer Rouge had stepped up their campaign of terror, particularly against the Vietnamese. The attacks became more frequent and more vicious. In one hour-long orgy of terror, the Khmer Rouge attacked a village, dashed the head of a week-old baby, split open the head of a seven-year-old girl, disembowelled a man and executed five others.
They refused to disarm, repeatedly refused UN access to their zones of control and stopped the head of the UN mission going beyond their checkpoints. They opened fire on helicopters and kidnapped UN soldiers. In response Akashi, the UN mission head, threatened to report the Khmer Rouge to the UN security council, and the UN military commander sent what he called ‘a very strong’ letter to the Khmer Rouge, saying that the attacks would have serious consequences for the guerrillas. Eager to play down the threat posed by this degeneration, the UN pushed on with the plan, hoping the situation would improve. One UN official declared that, although the resolution of the situation depended on the Khmer Rouge, ‘things were going quite well’.
Things, however, were not going well and the resolve of the UN was put to the test once again.
In March 1993, on the Tonle Sap lake near Siem Reap the single worst massacre of the UN period occurred. The attack had been expected for a month and the UN had been informed. The local police had fled and the villagers, disarmed by the UN, were virtually defenceless. The people were ethnic Vietnamese fishermen who had lived on the lake for generations. When the Khmer Rouge attack eventually came, thirty-three men, women and children were murdered and a further twenty-four wounded. A UN naval observer stationed nearby said that the Bangladeshi troops were not in a position to do anything since they were there to protect him and his men.
As a result of this massacre and an unwillingness to move against the Khmer Rouge, 400 Vietnamese families fled down the Mekong to seek refuge in Vietnam. The UN provided the flotilla with an escort. UN chief Yasushi Akashi called on the Khmer Rouge to halt, as he put it, ‘the hideous practice of ethnic cleansing’. The use of the word ‘genocide’ would have obliged the UN to act and protect the people and arrest those responsible. Instead, Akashi believed in ‘patient diplomacy’ and in doing things ‘the Asian way’ – by gentle persuasion, as if Asians adhered to a different set of UN principles. As the days went by, and the attacks continued, it was clear that this approach wasn’t working.
Many UN soldiers I talked to were frustrated by the bureaucratic nature of their body. It was a language they found difficult to comprehend, with its talk of ‘implementation’, ‘peacekeeping’ and – instead of ‘genocide’ – ‘the policies and practices of the recent past’. Faced with so much provocation, it was humiliating for soldiers to be bound by the red tape of non-intervention. On several occasions I was mistakenly identified as a UN official and accosted by angry Cambodian troops who complained to me that the UN were doing nothing to stop the Khmer Rouge.
Not everyone in the UN believed the Khmer Rouge deserved a second chance. Nearly a year before this massacre, the deputy commander of UNTAC, General Loridon, was removed from the mission. Frustrated by the lack of will to respond to the Khmer Rouge belligerence, he left disgusted. ‘Here was our chance to deal with the Khmer Rouge,’ he lamented. ‘One may lose 200 men – and that could include myself – but the Khmer Rouge problem would be solved for good.’
As the Khmer Rouge continued to harass, intimidate and kill, crime reached new levels. It became increasingly dangerous to travel through the streets of Phnom Penh at night. On several occasions the capital was the scene of firefights. Owning a motorbike, especially the coveted Honda ‘Dream’, was a liability. Owners were shot by thieves, who sold the bikes to cross-border traders. Theft from offices of NGOs and the UN itself was becoming commonplace. The UN LandCruisers, at a cost of US $35,000 each, were being stolen at a rate of three to four a day. One LandCruiser made its way into the hands of Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge commander known as ‘the butcher’.
‘This all makes me sick,’ one UN bureaucrat told the Phnom Penh Post. ‘We write reports, security does an investigation, maybe they even find the driver who copied the keys, and then – nothing.’
By now, the UN-sponsored elections – which the Khmer Rouge had vowed to disrupt – were less than two months away.
Just before the election, I found myself in a minefield near Siem Reap, not far from the fabled temples of Angkor. I stood there in the baking heat, shivering with fever, watching as Cambodian soldiers were trained to clear minefields, supervised by UN soldiers. I made my excuses and headed to the nearest hospital, which was run by the Indian army contingent. I just wanted some medicine but the doctor in charge insisted that I stay. The UN had requisitioned a building that had been used for party meetings in another age. The paint was peeling, patches of the ceiling had begun to collapse and doors were hanging on hinges. Sparing no expense, the UN had organised the delivery of air-conditioned cubicles for their offices outside and the car park was lined with rows of pristine white LandCruisers.
Within an hour I was in the hospital, dressed in a pair of blue-and-white-striped pyjamas. I was shown a bed in the cool dark interior of what had been the building’s main meeting hall. I remember how comforting the clean sheets felt against my skin as I slipped down into the warmth of my fever. Grateful for the privileges that my UN press pass entitled me to, and at the insistence of the doctor, I ended up staying there for several days. Every morning I awakened to toast with a thick layer of jam and a cup of milky sweet Indian tea served by smiling Indian soldiers.
The following day I awoke to the roar of helicopter rotors. I tottered over and opened the door, and was temporarily blinded by a cloud of white dust. A UN helicopter had arrived and two Indian soldiers, bent over with a stretcher, ran to where the helicopter was landing. I could see them lift out a wounded man, a drip held above their heads. They then trotted past me and into the makeshift operating theatre that looked a little like a giant air-conditioned balloon. As they passed me I guessed that he was in his late forties and, judging by his injuries, the victim of a landmine.
I discharged myself from the hospital and went to visit Siem Reap provincial hospital to photograph the wounded. There I saw the bloody consequences of the reports I had been hearing. Entire families sat nursing their wounded in the corridors. Many were victims of mines. Others had been shot or peppered with shrapnel.
I came across a farmer lying motionless on a mat. His bullock cart had driven over a mine, forcing shrapnel into his feet and legs. I began taking photographs. Then he moved, the wound opened up and began to haemorrhage, thick, dark blood spreading across the mat. I stood there and watched helplessly as a doctor took charge and stuck his finger in the hole of the old man’s foot to stem the flow. I had to leave.
There was something different about Siem Reap. The road seemed unusually busy. And there was this intermittent pounding. When I reached the market, scores of heavily armed Cambodian soldiers suddenly appeared. A UN Land-Rover sped past me and screeched to a halt. Pakistani UN troops wearing oversized flak jackets and carrying AK-47 automatic rifles jumped down and fanned out among the stalls. I asked a tense-looking Pakistani officer what was going on. The Cambodian soldiers had just been paid for the first time in months, he told me, and had gone to the market to buy gold, where they were told that the Cambodian riel had devalued. One of them had shot and killed a money dealer.
The thudding I had heard earlier had been growing louder and closer. Hundreds of people had clambered up on to buildings around the market, all looking in the opposite direction. I climbed up to see what was going on, and at last saw the source of the sound; large plumes of smoke appeared in the distance followed by a thud; it was shelling less than two kilometres away.
Credible rumours were now circulating that the Khmer Rouge were about to attack Siem Reap. If they wanted to discredit the UN, Siem Reap – the town next to the ancient centre of the Khmer empire and the metaphorical heart of the nation – was the ideal target.
Concerned about being cut off by the fighting, I decided to leave for Battambang, Cambodia’s second city and a place that had become my temporary home. Getting there by car was difficult. Bandits made it dangerous to travel after nightfall, although ironically this had not been the case before the UN arrived. Now, together with the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian soldiers, were resorting to random violence. Demobbed as part of the Paris agreement, many had been sent home, often without pay and, with little hope of finding new jobs, many turned to banditry to feed their families. I went to Siem Reap’s deserted airport and hitched a ride in a UN helicopter to Battambang. That night in Battambang, I sat chatting with a friend on a veranda. It felt good to be somewhere I knew and felt safe in, far from the paranoia of Siem Reap. Then a couple of shots rang out. It was common enough to hear gunfire at night and so we paid no attention. Then the sky lit up with bursts of tracer fire and the thunderous racket of AK-47s. We rushed to turn off the lights and threw ourselves on the floor. I could see tracer zip past the house of an aid worker I knew. After about ten minutes it died down and the sound of the night crickets returned.
The assault on Siem Reap came a week later. Three hundred Khmer Rouge launched a pre-dawn attack from three directions and came into town, firing their weapons. Within four hours the attack was over. Two civilians, four Khmer Rouge and one Cambodian soldier were dead. The Khmer Rouge had made no attempt to occupy the town. The message had been sent: the UN were no longer in control and the Khmer Rouge could do what they wanted.
Then the Khmer Rouge began to target the UN directly. Bulgarian UN soldiers, who had been friendly with the local Khmer Rouge, invited them to join them for dinner. After the meal and without warning the Khmer Rouge shot and killed the three Bulgarians in cold blood.
But the violence was not restricted to the Khmer Rouge. The Phnom Penh government of Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party began their campaign of intimidation against other parties. To be a party representative was becoming a dangerous occupation. Grenade attacks on party offices became more frequent and harassment increased. People were beaten, shot, assassinated and generally terrorised. Voter intimidation was widespread. It seemed light years away from the ‘politically neutral environment’ that the UN had promised. The UN mission was being held hostage by both the Khmer Rouge and the Phnom Penh regime of Hun Sen.
A month before polling began the Khmer Rouge withdrew completely from the process, closing their offices in Phnom Penh and returning to their zones of control. The peace had now become war.
Between 23 and 28 May 1993, in spite of the violence, the election went ahead as planned. In defiance of the men with guns, a staggering ninety-six per cent of registered voters cast their ballots. The Royalist Party, led by Sihanouk’s son Prince Ranariddh, won a clear victory over the Phnom Penh government of Hun Sen. Hun Sen then forced his way into an uneasy power-sharing alliance, with Rannariddh as ‘First Prime Minister’ and Hun Sen as ‘Second Prime Minister’. Sihanouk was restored as a constitutional monarch. The UN then announced its mission a success and began to withdraw its peacekeepers.
The UN had deliberately kept the goals and language of their mission vague. With a lack of political will they were powerless to do anything. The whole experience, despite the positive by-products of the beginnings of a local civil society, the repatriation and a new government, was little more than an expensive public-relations exercise to enable China to extract itself from the Khmer Rouge. If the plan didn’t work, then the Security Council and the powers behind it could turn around and blame Cambodians for their inherent inability to live in peace. What was supposed to have been a test case for Cambodia was a test case for the sincerity of the international community – the people had voted for the party that they believed would bring a peace that the UN had failed to deliver.