Cambodia: What Happens to a Country After the Worst Thing Imaginable

Cambodia’s involvement in the wider Indochina conflict began in the 1960s, when the Vietnamese communist movement was using Cambodian territory along the Ho Chi Minh Trail for supply lines and staging areas. Prince Sihanouk, who had maintained a policy of official neutrality, was unable to prevent this, and the United States responded with Operation Menu, a secret bombing campaign conducted between 1969 and 1973 without the knowledge of the American public or Congress. Over four years, approximately half a million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, killing between a hundred thousand and five hundred thousand Cambodian civilians, depending on whose estimates you use, and destroying the agricultural infrastructure of the eastern provinces. The bombing campaign was declassified in 1973 only after journalists had already reported its existence. Its effect on the political stability of the country was decisive: it drove the rural population toward the Khmer Rouge, who offered both an explanation for the destruction and a promise of order.

In 1970, a US-backed coup removed Sihanouk and installed Lon Nol, a general whose government proved both corrupt and militarily ineffective. The civil war that followed ended with the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh on the seventeenth of April 1975. Within days they had evacuated the city entirely, forcing the urban population into the countryside at gunpoint as part of what Pol Pot’s government called the Year Zero: the abolition of the existing social order and its replacement with an agrarian utopia premised on the elimination of everyone associated with the old one. Money was abolished. Schools were closed. Glasses, as a signifier of literacy, became grounds for suspicion. Speaking French, which educated Cambodians did, became dangerous. Being educated, being foreign, being associated in any demonstrable way with the world before 1975, became potentially fatal.

Pol Pot himself had studied in Paris in the early 1950s, which is a biographical detail that the Khmer Rouge’s anti-intellectual ideology tends not to foreground. He had been involved in the French Communist Party and returned to Cambodia in 1953, spending the following years building the clandestine organisation that would eventually take power. The ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge named the country, drew on Maoist ideas about peasant revolution while extending them into something more radical and more lethal than anything Mao had specifically proposed, though the Khmer Rouge did receive substantial support from China throughout their time in power.

The number who died under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 is estimated at between 1.5 and 2 million, out of a pre-genocide population of approximately 7 million. The proportion of the population killed in four years is among the highest of any twentieth-century atrocity. Some were executed at facilities like S-21. Many more died of starvation and disease in the forced agricultural camps. The Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge government, was itself a military operation with its own geopolitical logic, but its immediate effect was the liberation of the survivors.

The rooms at Tuol Sleng have not been fully cleaned up. Each one contains a metal bed frame with chains attached, and beside each bed is a large black-and-white photograph showing how the room was found when the Vietnamese entered the facility in January 1979. The photographs show the beds with their last occupants on them. You look at the photograph and then at the bed and then at the floor, which still has stains that the cleaning has not removed, and you understand that you are in an actual room where an actual thing happened, and the distance between reading about history and standing inside it collapses to nothing.

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, fifteen kilometres south of the city, are where most of those who passed through S-21 were taken to be executed. The site contains a hundred and twenty-nine mass graves. The stupa at the centre of the site holds more than five thousand skulls, many of them with the damage of their killing still visible. As you walk the paths between the graves, the ground yields things in the wet season: cloth, bone, teeth. Seventeen thousand people, the current estimate, were killed here.

The country that exists now, in 2011, does not look like a country that experienced this thirty-five years ago, which is simultaneously the most hopeful and the most difficult thing about Cambodia. Phnom Penh is rebuilding. Siem Reap, two hours north, is a thriving tourist town serving the Angkor temple complex, the monument to the Khmer empire at its twelfth-century peak, eight hundred years before the Khmer Rouge appropriated the name. The temples are extraordinary in a way that makes the comparison between the two periods of Khmer history feel almost impossible to process: the same name, one producing Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, and the other producing Tuol Sleng.

Jonas, Gail and I hired a driver for the Angkor temples at fifteen dollars for the day, which is what it costs, and spent a day moving between structures that have been sitting in the Cambodian jungle since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, enormous and serene and largely intact, the faces of the Bayon temple looking out in every direction with the mild, slightly knowing expression that Khmer Buddhist iconography gives to things that have been waiting for longer than anyone currently alive has been doing anything.

On the last evening Gail flew home to Scotland and Jonas and Misa and I found a table on Pub Street and had a drink to the country we had just spent four days inside, which seemed like the appropriate response to somewhere that had given us this much to think about.