THE FIGHTING HAD sent more than 60,000 refugees fleeing into Thailand. In one camp I visited on the northern border, I passed a Khmer Rouge soldier in the cramped market and greeted him with a broad smile. He glared back at me. On sale were stacks of Khmer Rouge uniforms and Mao caps, next to soap and clothing donated by the relief agencies. Ban Ma Muang, the camp that Duch had fled to, was populated by Khmer Rouge from Samlaut. It was here, once again, that Duch put his skills as a leader into practice.
As an aid worker, Tess Prombuth had worked with Cambodians for almost twenty years. She had arrived on the border just after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by the Vietnamese. In 1998, just after Hun Sen’s coup, she worked briefly with the American Refugee Committee (ARC) in Ban Ma Muang camp, helping to set up a community health programme. The border camp, which housed a population of 12,000, was located beneath ragged green mountains and was run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Before Prombuth began work, she searched among the refugees for an assistant. One ARC doctor suggested a former teacher who spoke French, English and Thai. It was Duch. As Hang Pin, he seemed the logical choice to be Community Health Supervisor. He received a small stipend and a UN food allowance.
Duch’s youngest sister, Hang Kim Hoeung, also began working with ARC. She had trained as a midwife under the Khmer Rouge and had worked in the same hospital as Duch’s wife. After the Vietnamese invasion she too had fled to the Thai border. There she worked as a nurse with a Thai Catholic relief agency in Borai camp while her brother taught in the school.
In Ban Ma Muang, it was important to work as quickly as possible since the rains were coming, and with them, the risk of diseases from water-born parasites and malaria. Working closely with the various leaders, Prombuth and Duch began to train teams of community health workers. Much time was spent explaining to the people the importance of sanitation and effective irrigation. At the end of each month, Prombuth and Duch sat down together to assess the progress before setting themselves new objectives for the following month. The camp hospital was run by ARC. Duch also coordinated different departments, following up on discharged patients. He worked hard, often staying up late into the night reading medical books.
Prombuth and Duch got along well. Every morning when she arrived in the camp Duch greeted her with a ‘Lord!’. In the camp all the refugees knew and respected him, she said. He listened intently to people’s difficulties, and often came up with his own solutions to problems. When he wasn’t working with Prombuth directly, he acted as a translator for a Senegalese doctor. They often talked about matters of faith since the doctor was also a Baptist (unlike Prombuth, who was a Catholic).
When the fighting subsided and some normality returned to the country, the UNHCR had made plans to return the refugees. ‘So now I’m going back to Cambodia,’ Duch said, mentioning his eldest sister and the rest of the family in Kompong Thom. Prombuth thanked him for all his hard work. According to an ARC official, Duch had been instrumental in stemming a typhoid outbreak in the camp, saving countless lives in the process. ‘Oh thank you,’ he beamed. He told her how happy he was to have worked with her and that he had learned a lot. Before she left, she gave him a prayer book. Then he said, ‘When I go back I really don’t know what will happen with my life.’ She suggested, with his experience and educational background, that perhaps he could find work with the Christian aid agency World Vision.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I will try.’
Years later when I met Prombuth in Battambang, where she was working for another aid agency, I asked if she had any photographs of Duch. She only had one. There were more, she said, but the American Refugee Committee probably had them. The picture showed an ARC meeting inside a makeshift tent in the camp. Duch is sitting with his back to the camera on a plastic garden chair that swallowed his small frame. He is wearing glasses and, from his demeanour, I could tell that he was immersed in the mass of papers on the table. The others around seemed distracted by something out of frame. Duch seemed not to pay any attention.
In late 1998, Duch returned to Cambodia with the other refugees. Fighting continued in the forested north. At Anlong Veng the last of the Khmer Rouge battled for their survival. Meanwhile, the news reached Phnom Penh that Son Sen, Duch’s former boss, had been executed with his wife and ten members of his family, including children. A truck had been used to crush the bodies after they were killed. The order had been given by Pol Pot, who was promptly placed under house arrest by Ta Mok, ‘the butcher’, who assumed control. Pol Pot was then put on trial by ‘the People’s Tribunal of Anlong Veng’. Journalist Nate Thayer and two cameramen were invited to witness. It was the first time the elusive leader had been seen for twenty years. The Khmer Rouge had begun to implode.
By June 1998, Anlong Veng had come over to the government and I went to witness the remnants of Pol Pot’s army at a reintegration ceremony at their jungle headquarters.
Early in the morning we sat in the shade of the car near the runway of Phnom Penh’s airbase. Ahead was an aged Russian MI-26 transport helicopter; large enough to play badminton in its belly. Just looking at it filled me with dread. These old Soviet helicopters had a reputation for being less than reliable.
Now that the Khmer Rouge had declared their allegiance to the government the press were invited, along with an assortment of officials, diplomats and soldiers, to attend the official reintegration ceremony of the remainder of their guerrillas. More cars of journalists arrived armed with invitations embossed with the Cambodian royal coat of arms. Then a friend told me that Reuters in Bangkok had said that Ta Mok, the renegade Khmer Rouge leader, was planning to attack the ceremony we were going to witness.
Eventually the Russian pilots arrived. At first we watched those with invitations queue up in an orderly fashion as the rotors began to swing and strain, eventually reaching an even pitch as the great prehistoric insect came to life. As the last of the invited crowd climbed the steps into its bowels there was a frenzied scramble of elbows and jabs to get inside. I found myself being carried by pressing bodies into the darkness. Suddenly there was a jerk and we all lurched backward as it thudded into the sky.
Inside we stood in the heat and noise, awaiting our final destination, unable to talk in the din of the engines. The officials were given plastic garden chairs to sit on. I found a space on the floor and sat with the barrel of a soldier’s AK-47 pointing at my buttocks. Next to me was Ieng Vuth, the son of the former Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, Ieng Sary. Like the Khmer Rouge we were going to see now, he had defected with his father several years before. After forty minutes we were in sight of the Thai border and Anlong Veng. Through the scratched bubble window I could see the Dangrek mountain range. The helicopter then swerved and banked and I caught a glimpse of pristine forest below. Then we began a circular motion and I sat back down as the helicopter descended in the usual corkscrew fashion. Eventually the door was opened and we all scrambled out into the light.
It was like stepping into a forgotten world. Anlong Veng was a collection of wooden houses spread out over an area of semi-denuded forest. There was only one concrete building, beside a reservoir of dead trees that pierced the blue waters like a bed of nails. The photographers and cameramen fanned out to take pictures of Khmer Rouge soldiers who stood nearby, many of them amputees. Ahead was a Chinese battle tank, its turret gun pointing towards the forest. Looking on with evident disdain were members of a Médecins Sans Frontières team who had arrived days before.
Further ahead Khmer Rouge soldiers had lined up under some trees. They looked tough and undernourished in their ill-fitting uniforms; swirls of creases swamped their wiry frames. Some of them were well into their fifties, some were mere boys. Their families looked on. Many of the children were thin, with distended bellies and yellow streaks in their matted hair.
Then Tea Banh, the Cambodian Minister of Defence, appeared with an entourage of bodyguards and a garland of jasmine around his neck. He could have flown in from Hawaii. With his buck-toothed grin, his unkempt hair and well-fed appearance, he was clearly enjoying himself, aware of his position and the power he commanded. After more than twenty years of fighting the Khmer Rouge the minister had now come to preside over their defeat.
Tea Banh wandered past the lines of guerrillas, hounded by cameras, giving a sompeah to nobody in particular, before climbing up to the hastily erected stage. A band blared out Khmer music at stadium volume. Then the speeches began.
Anlong Veng’s villagers sat behind the guerrillas and watched all the proceedings with the same concentration that one might watch aliens. Few had seen foreigners before and now the place was crawling with them. They were a reserved people, a peasant army who had been cut off from the outside world for years. Brutalised by an authoritarian regime, they had spent much of their lives being shelled and attacked in the forests. Now they were on parade for the outside world. ‘For them,’ one Khmer journalist said to me, ‘“Year Zero” has only just ended.’
The Khmer Rouge soldiers stood with impassive faces, resigned to the tedious formality of the occasion. The scene reminded me of photographs of Khmer Rouge political meetings, which were emblematic of their regimented lives. They would speak, applaud the Organisation and shout a slogan. Everybody would be required to punch the air in unison three times and shout, ‘Long live the Cambodian Revolution!’
After the speeches, three Khmer Rouge commanders joined the Defence Minister on the podium and grinned sheepishly at their new overlord. He gave them their new government uniforms and off they went to change. They returned to their rows as before, this time as members of a different army. The rest of the troops did the same. I followed them and watched an old Khmer Rouge soldier discard his worn Ho Chi Minh sandals and struggle with the laces of his new boots. Judging by the way he was tying them it was the first time he had ever worn boots. Some of them had been barefoot.
I pulled out my photograph of Duch as a cadre and began asking in halting Khmer if anyone had seen him. No-one had. They seemed amused at my request. Then the ceremony was over and we were trucked back to the waiting helicopter.
The helicopter dangled there as if unsure what to do next. It then swerved and jolted. It seemed the pilot was having problems getting enough power. Then, with a jerk it moved with all its might. I looked out of the window as a tree-top passed alarmingly close. We were airborne.
When we arrived at Siem Reap I wandered over to the Russian pilot and asked him apprehensively if everything was alright before we carried on to Phnom Penh. ‘In Anlong Veng,’ he cheerfully replied in thick accented English, ‘we had a little problem.’ The helicopter had been unable to get off the ground because of the sheer weight of ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers who, taking advantage of their new status as government troops, had clambered aboard. Here at Siem Reap they poured out and ran off across the runway towards the town. ‘Now,’ said the pilot, ‘no problem.’
Six months later, December 1998 saw the surrender of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea – Brother Number 2. They were flown to Phnom Penh to meet Hun Sen, the Prime Minister. At a press conference they were asked if they felt any remorse for the killing when they had been in power. ‘Yes – sorry, sorry, sorry, I am very sorry,’ replied a smiling Khieu Samphan. ‘Actually, we’re very sorry,’ added Nuon Chea, ‘not just for the lives of the people, but also for the lives of animals that suffered in the war.’ They then called on the world to ‘let bygones be bygones’. Hun Sen called on people to ‘dig a hole and bury the past’.
Later, Khieu Samphan was welcomed with embraces from the former UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He was visiting Phnom Penh to promote French as a language and took time to praise Hun Sen for his policy of ‘national reconciliation’. He then announced that the mass murder by the Khmer Rouge was an internal affair of a sovereign state and should not be the subject of ‘interference’ by outsiders. Cambodians must find their own route to resolving their rights issues, he said.
In a country plagued by an almost total lack of justice and continued political violence, Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s comments represented the lowest point of impunity. As if all Cambodians needed was a brief apology.
A year later, in a low-key ceremony at the cliff-edge temple of Preah Vihear, the last of the Khmer Rouge formally surrendered to the government. It was the end of an insurgency that had begun on the slopes of Samlaut more than thirty years before. Now, nearly three million lives later, the country was finally at peace. Three months later, the last of the Khmer Rouge leaders, Ta Mok, was arrested and placed in prison in Phnom Penh. He had refused to surrender.
Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were then sent on a state-sponsored tour of the country they had almost destroyed. They visited Angkor Wat as well as the seaside resort of Kompong Som, escorted by bodyguards and police travelling in convoys of LandCruisers.
At about the same time as I was handing out Duch’s picture in Anlong Veng, Duch returned with the other refugees from the border. They were taken through the city of Battambang and from there down Route 10 towards Samlaut. It was to be one of his last journeys as Hang Pin.
There was still fighting in Samlaut and so Duch camped off Route 10. Along with 2,000 other refugees, he set up camp in the village of Andao Hep in Rattanak Mondul or ‘the Place of the Gems’. It was here that he worked closely with World Vision, the Christian relief organisation assisting the refugees.
Chreng Darren of World Vision was introduced to Duch and his sister at a meeting of village leaders. Because of his experience with ARC on the border, Duch was able to help with World Vision’s health volunteers in immunising women and the younger children. If someone needed further treatment, Duch would help organise transport for them to the local clinic. He soon proved himself the most able of the volunteers.
Darren liked him immediately. He thought Duch pleasant, polite, respectful, very qualified and genuinely popular with the people. One time Darren visited Duch’s family shelter, which was much like the others apart from the neat files of documents and reports from the camp. They were organised day-by-day, week-by-week. Duch had proudly shown Darren his Bible and his training certificates to become a lay pastor, and he talked of wanting to join World Vision. When Darren asked who had baptised him Duch replied, ‘Oh, a very good man,’ and produced a picture of himself with Pastor Lapel. To Darren he was one of the most capable among the refugees; a natural leader who ‘showed a lot of initiative’.
Duch hitched rides with World Vision back to Battambang, where he attended meetings at the education offices. He still collected his salary from Sisophon and visited his mother and sister, who now lived in Siem Reap.
In the early 1990s, Andao Hep village, where Duch and the refugees had made their temporary home, was what my friends and I used to call a ‘grey area’. I spent much time in the area taking pictures. Andao Hep was located down a dark tunnelled track of mango, palm and hoki trees, close to the military zone that severed the district in two. To the west was the Khmer Rouge zone, to the east was government-controlled territory and Andao Hep was caught in the middle.
Then, to walk through the village, I found it hard to imagine this as a front line. I had always thought of a front line as a network of carefully dug bunkers with razor wire, packed with soldiers. In reality, it was somebody’s home or a field or a school. Children played games and pigs rummaged in the mud. Women sat outside making thatching from grass they had retrieved from the minefields nearby. Crude spirit houses with incense guarded their tiny shacks.
Many of the people from the district were known, with some derision by the lowland people, as Khmer Khmao or ‘black Khmer’; real peasants. They had been so cut off from the outside world that when cars first appeared in the district they had cut grass to feed them. The loyalties of the people here were at best murky. Although under nominal government control, many families of Khmer Rouge fighters lived there. Often, at night, Khmer Rouge soldiers would leave their weapons behind, cross the river and climb the banks and come into the villages to visit their relatives.
Five years after the end of the war I once again journeyed down Route 10 and followed Duch’s route on the back of an aged Honda motorbike. It bounced and swerved along the road, past a cluster of sugar palms that stood like sentinels in the middle of the plains. They marked the closest point the Khmer Rouge ever got to taking Battambang. The sky began to spit rain and I could smell the wet earth as I turned off the road and carried on down the track to Andao Hep.
I asked if anyone recognised the man in the photograph, or if they had ever heard of Hang Pin. They shook their heads. I stopped to talk to a man in a wheelchair. He had lost both his legs in a mine accident as a Khmer Rouge soldier in Samlaut. He said he didn’t know Hang Pin either. I then passed the photograph to him. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he passed it back, shaking his head. Further along, I spoke to another man, also a former Khmer Rouge soldier. He told me he didn’t know Hang Pin. When he saw the picture he said, ‘Oh, Grandpa Duch!’ He had never talked with Duch directly, he said, because Duch was of a higher rank.
I returned down Route 10. Beyond it, had been the military zone, a rough strip of abandoned scrub jungle covered in mines. Rattanak Mondul had been on the front line for years. Both Khmer Rouge and government soldiers had swept up and down Route 10, leaving fresh crops of landmines behind them. As a result, there were about half a million mines concealed in its dark soils, making it one the most heavily mined areas in the world.
The Cambodian conflict may be the first war that has claimed more lives and limbs to landmines than any other weapon. One estimate put the number of mines awaiting victims in Cambodia at ten million; more than one for every man, woman and child.
It was from the agony of minefields in places like Rattanak Mondul that one of the most extraordinary grassroots movements of recent times emerged. In 1992, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was launched, bringing together 350 aid organisations to place a total ban on anti-personnel landmines. It quickly gathered momentum. Today, the Campaign includes more than 1,100 organisations in sixty countries worldwide which continue to press to have these weapons outlawed. In 1997, the Campaign was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Cambodia galvanished people’s resolve to act together and, more importantly, to speak out. And it was paying off. Many of these organisations helped people affected by these hidden killers. Mine-clearance teams have destroyed millions of the weapons all over the world, enabling refugees to return home and farmers to plant their crops once again. In an area I had spent much time photographing, the concrete results of this campaign lay all around as the untamed grass of mined land had given way to fertile fields that spread out on either side of the road.
For many years the abandoned town of Treng had been the last stop on Route 10 before the Khmer Rouge zone. Before, in the early 1990s, it had been completely deserted apart from old Soviet-built tanks and a few impoverished soldiers with their families. The area had been laced with mines and the fallow fields were being devoured by the encroaching jungle. Above the trees the shattered roof of the temple could be seen. During the Khmer Rouge time, it had been used as a prison and execution site. When the Khmer Rouge swept into the area in the wake of the Vietnamese withdrawal, they collected all the bones and burnt them. Here the road divided. Ahead was the Khmer Rouge gem-mining town of Pailin and to the left, Samlaut.
Now Treng was a small town of packed shops, restaurants and stalls. Behind, the fields were once again cultivated and the jungle had retreated from the road.
Further south was Samlaut, which had exploded into violence in 1967, signalling the beginning of the Khmer Rouge armed struggle. It was also the last place to give up the fight. The leaders here were still deeply suspicious of outsiders and it came under the control of Sou Sameth, a veteran Khmer Rouge military commander, who had been deeply involved in the killings and regularly sent people to S-21.
In early 1999, I was commissioned again to photograph mine-clearance teams in Cambodia. After the assignment I had a day free. The organisation I was with had a meeting with the Khmer Rouge in Samlaut and I asked if I could accompany them. Early in the morning we travelled out in convoy down Route 10 and beyond Treng to our final destination, the hamlet of Ta Sanh. It was just a few months before Duch returned down the same road to the protection of Sou Samet.