Singapore in Pictures

Four Days In Singapore

For the past few months, I have been studying for the GRE’s in the hopes that I will one day enter graduate school. With school slowing down this month, it seemed that late February would be an ideal time to take them. It would also require me to leave the country, as the GRE’s are not offered in Cambodia. My choices to take the test were Bangkok, Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Two of these places were places that I had already visited, with one I was saving for a future trip to Vietnam. Naturally my choice fell upon Singapore, a place that I would have otherwise never visited. I suppose I did not prepare very much for this trip as well as I should have. To be honest, my head was so pre-occupied with geometry, critical essay writing techniques, and vocabulary words that I could barely comprehend the fact that I was getting on a plane. Somehow I managed to fly there, find the testing center, take the test, and fly back all within a matter of days. Looking back on it, it feels as if I was awake for four nights straight.

On the morning of the 17th of February, I left my hotel in Phnom Penh in a taxi heading for Pochentong Airport. The driver was asking me questions about where I was from, and I gave him the perfunctory answers that I give everyone. Then he started going off about politics, and I could barely comprehend what he was saying. It did not help that this was four in the morning, and that my brain was not awake enough to load the foreign language program. After arriving, I checked in the Jetstar Airways and went over to the airport tax booth to pay the standard $25 in cold hard cash. I have always wanted to say some pithy remark to the people who run this booth, but I know my mouth can get me in a lot of trouble. The airport tax is a bribe, but there is nothing I can do about it. I see people demanding bribes every day, why should this be any different? The flight boarded at 7:30, and the stewardesses in black and orange dresses welcomed us on board. I wonder if they let anyone borrow their uniforms for a Halloween party. The flight only lasted an hour and a half, but I fell asleep during the middle of it.

Touched down in Singapore, and made my way to the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit). Their subway system seemed as modern as any of the ones I have been in. To buy a ticket you have go to a machine that features a touch screen computer and several ports for money and tickets. First you have to select on the computer what kind of ticket you would like, and then it shows you a map of the subway network. The computer then asks you where you would like to go, and upon pressing a selection it tells you how much money you have to put in. If you buy a single ticket, you pay a $1 deposit on the plastic green card, which is redeemable at any ticket machine after your journey is complete. It seems a little silly to put a deposit on a subway ticket, but I suppose it makes those green plastic cards reusable ad infinitum.

After transferring at Outram Park station, I followed the northeast line to Farrer Park. I did not have enough money on the green plastic card to leave the station, and the man working at the desk helped me sort through a pile of coins in my pocket until I produced the right amount. He asked me where I was from, and I said I was living in Cambodia. "Really?" he said. "Isn't that place really dangerous?" I told him the war was over and that it was quite safe to visit. If only Cambodians knew that their country was famous for mass killings and war, and not Angkor Wat.

The youth hostel I stayed at, The Mitraa, was close to the station in a neighborhood of old Chinese houses and apartment buildings. I checked into the hostel, put my stuff in the locker next to my bed, and took a shower in the shared bathroom down the hall. It was a fairly comfortable place, with six beds to a room and free wifi. The people I met there over the next couple of nights were fairly friendly and from a variety of different places. I met four people from the UK, one Australian, and two Americans.

After showering and getting my bearings a little, I went downtown to Clarke Quay to see a little something of the city. Tall buildings surrounded me, mixed in with gigantic shopping malls, and a comfortable breeze that come up from the river. It was very pleasant to walk around, particularly in the evening when an array of colored lights lit up the banks of the river and a white bridge that spanned the easy width of the river. It was also remarkable to see westerners walk around in business suits running to and from important high paying jobs, instead of the usual Cambodian fare of backpackers or creepy looking ex-pats. I felt embarrassed just to be standing next to them on the subway in my dirty hand washed clothing. (“Oh no, is that woman looking at my shoes or her shoes? I should have gotten the damn things washed or polished before I came here. It’s not my fault! You have to believe me. I just walked out of the jungle. I’m in the Peace Corps!”)

Not only were there adult ex-pats there, but also kids as well. To be specific, I saw American teenagers running around the city. They looked extremely well dressed, and polished, which makes sense. I imagine that their parents work in the island’s gigantic skyscrapers. I ate at a Chinese eating house named BK’s Eating House that evening, beef pepper stir fry and an iced tea.

The next morning I went to Starbucks and studied for the test, which I had scheduled for the following day. At some moment after I arrived, ordered a gigantic iced concoction, and started studying with my books, I wrote down in my notebook, “Am I really in Starbucks, studying for a test?” It also dawned on me just how easy I had slipped back into modern life, how easy it was to fall back into safe familiar pace of a giant city.

After lunch, I decided that I felt prepared enough to take this test, and that there was nothing I could do now that I had not already reviewed during the last three months. I went downtown to Raffles Place to go see some museums, thinking that it was an educational thing to do the afternoon before a test. It was. First I went down to Raffles Place, which features a statue of Sir Stanford Raffles himself as well as several museums. The first one I visited was the Asian civilizations museum, which featured many interesting exhibits about Asia in addition to one specifically devoted to the history of Singapore. When I was finished there I walked over to another museum named the Perankan, which featured an exhibit I had read about in the International Herald Tribune. It had to do with the ancient Indian epic named the Ramayana, and featured different kinds of artwork associated with the epic including a marvelous array of shadow puppets.

When I was finished touring for the day, I headed back to the hostel. A college student from the UK had just checked into the dorm that day, and the two of us found dinner at an Indian restaurant down the street. I ordered the Chicken Tikka Masala, he ordered a plate of samosas, a curry, and another Chicken Tikka. He complained that he had nothing but airplane food for the past day, and that he was on his way to Australia. I explained who I was, and what I was doing in Singapore. I tried to explain what the GRE’s were to him, and he casually dismissed them as being “just absolute bollocks.” We went back to the hostel, where we met another Englishman who started talking about his recent expedition to Australia. He said that he had flown over the whole thing, and that during the middle of the trip he looked out the window and thought that the plane had not moved in its position at all. “There is f@#k-all in the middle of the Australia,” he told us. Then the language arguments started. “Bloody yanks stole our language.” “Limeys gave it to us fair and square.” I had to explain where Limey comes from. It is not effective as “yank.” The Englishmen started going off about how Charles is a boring prince, and that the crown really should be passed to Harry. “He’s a proper prince, just like olden times!” Somewhere in this conversation I murmured, “How strange it must be to have a monarchy,” before I nodded off to sleep.

Next morning were the GRE’s. Found the testing center in the science center in East Jurong. Checked in, emptied my pockets, watch, put them in a locker and entered a room full of cubicled computers at nine o’clock. The next thing I knew it was 1:30, and I was done with the test. I did fairly well, considering all the studying I had done in the last few months. The only thing that went wrong was during the math portion of the test. I was working intently on one problem, and I had not noticed that a woman was coming around and collecting used scratch paper. While I was working at my desk, the woman leaned over me to get the paper. It happened that she was a sizable woman who wore a hijab. Out of the corner of my eye, the only thing I could see was this huge black thing coming towards me. It startled me for a moment, but I recovered enough to give the woman the scratch paper and get back to work. The rest of the day I was brain dead. I went back, showered, took a nap, and finally took a stroll along the lighted carnival fanfare of the Esplanade before retiring for the evening. A Chinese youth orchestra was giving a free performance near the main concert hall, and I stuck around long enough to hear them play. At one point, they featured a piece of music evoking a battle between a stalwart ox and a ferocious tiger. My best guess is that neither of them won, but I really could not say for sure.

Saturday was my final day in the city, and I endeavored to see as much of it as possible. After sleeping late and breakfasting with one of the Englishmen (His grandmother was American, who knew?) I went out to see the Chinese garden at the east end of the city, and walked around the carefully manicured plants and stones before heading back downtown to see the play I had bought a ticket for. The title of the performance was entitled “Invisibility/Breathing,” and was written by a Chinese author in Mandarin. A screen hanging down from the ceiling provided an English translation of the lines, not that it helped. The story revolved around a fisherman, a whore, and a poet who comes to live with the couple and periodically reads selections from western authors like Kafka and Dostoyevsky. Themes of restlessness in modern life and police brutality ran throughout the performance. It even went so far as to feature the execution of a mannequin on stage with an oversized double bladed axe. It was thoroughly bizarre, but interesting to some degree.

Following the performance, I went up to Orchard Road and browsed around the gigantic shopping centers until I stumbled upon a Border’s Books and Music. Oh books, wonderful expensive books how I love you. In Cambodia, we only have the cheap thrillers that tourists throw to us like the scraps of a meal. One of the lines from the play I saw kept spinning around in my head. “In the library I floated down the halls of the library, but the books would not speak to me. They were all full of dead men.” So many of them I could read, but I was still not done wandering the city. At Subway, I ate a chicken teriyaki sandwich and a giant cookie.

My flight left at six the next morning, which meant that I had to be at the airport at four and out of the hostel by three. So I decided to run off all the excitement of running around a city and stay up all night. I chatted with some Americans before I left. One was working in Kuala Lumpur as an English teacher, but he seemed rather too churlish to be pleasant company. The other was a delightful young lady from Kenya whose parents had emigrated from India during British colonial rule. She in turn had moved to America and became a pharmacologist and, among other things, a US citizen. She said that she had traveled for six months, staying in hostels and with distant family friends. I could not understand how she could keep that up for so long.

At three in the morning I made my way to airport, and wolfed down a hamburger from Burger King around four thirty before getting on the plane back to Phnom Penh. I then slept on the bus from the Penh back to Siem Reap and site.

I had done it. I had gone to Singapore, taken the GRE’s, gotten a good score, and made it back in one piece. Now I was very tired.

The History Project Part V

The Vietnamese Occupation

The Vietnamese invasion on December 25th 1978 marked the beginning of the end for Pol Pot’s regime. In the span of a few short months, most of Democratic Kampuchea’s soldiers were forced to retreat into hiding. They would have disbanded entirely if it were not for the help of the Thai military government, which fed and clothed Khmer Rouge soldiers in the areas just across the border from Cambodia. Arms from Chinese military aid enabled the Khmer rouge to become an effective fighting force by 1982. However, the presence of Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia prevented them from making any significant military gains possible until 1989 when the Vietnamese withdrew.

In the wake of the invasion, the entire country was thrown into disarray. People moved across the country looking for family members or shelter in the Thai refugee camps located just across the border. The situation in the countryside was disastrous due to starvation and loss of life. Because so many men were killed during the fighting between the different factions or by Pol Pot’s purges, some districts contained families that were mostly headed by widows. While local villagers were once put in charge of their affairs, military officers who had defected to the Vietnamese in 1978 were forming a new government in Phnom Penh. Some of these people included Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, and Hun Sen.

Like the most of the country, the 1980’s were years of slow recovery for the region of Angkor Chum. The most significant event during this time was the birth of the actual district. Until 1987, the area now known as Angkor Chum was a part of the larger Pourk district. District offices were established on the site of the Khmer Rouge prison, a secondary school was also established on the site where the high school now stands.

If the 1980’s were mostly a peaceful time for Angkor Chum, the situation had certainly changed by 1989. With the Vietnamese withdrawal, the Khmer Rouge were becoming more active in making territorial gains. Both the Khmer Rouge and the Phnom Penh government resorted to conscripting soldiers from towns and villages as they saw fit. One schoolteacher vividly remembers what it was like to be thrust into military service.

"I remember when I came to live in Angkor Chum in 1989. I had a gun every night. During the day I was a teacher, but at night I was a soldier. I took the gun and walked around the school and the district. If I didn’t go on guard duty around the district, they would not give me any salary. So I had to teach and guard. It was very difficult to live."

Government service in that time also meant compulsory military service even if the person had no training. Even regular troops were only given the bare minimum needed to be able to function in combat. If conscription was not being practiced at this point in time, it certainly was later on.

Angkor Chum and UNTAC

The period in which the United Nations stepped in to run the 1993 elections in Cambodia was probably a very interesting time for people in Angkor Chum. Not only were they allowed to vote in the first free election in their country’s history, but they were able to witness foreign visitors for the first time. According to local accounts, the UNTAC personnel stationed here included a regiment of soldiers from Bangladesh, as well as smattering of UN workers with different nationalities. What these workers experienced here was probably a frightening experience to say the least. The Khmer Rouge, despite being members of a pact allowing the UN to administer elections, were boycotting the process. They sporadically attacked anyone involved with the UN, regardless of their nationality.

The experience that the UNTAC workers went through is documented in an American newspaper article written by Raymond Whittaker. It describes the UN mission through the eyes of a Norwegian woman named Kathrin Brendel. Much of the work that this woman was involved in was the effort to register voters before the election despite the best efforts of the Khmer Rouge, who frequently fired shells at the town and lay mines on the roads. In the article, Ms. Brendel describes how she frequently had to use the sandbagged bunker dug for her by the Bangladeshi troops stationed at Wat Char Chuk. While these soldiers were prepared to defend themselves, they could not attack the Khmer Rouge because they had signed on to participate in the elections. This meant these soldiers had to simply endure the attacks that the Khmer Rouge launched at the cost of injury or death. One eyewitness describes how this could be so.

I remember when the Khmer Rouge would attack the UNTAC soldiers stationed at the pagoda in the middle of the night, shelling and shooting at each other. There was one soldier who was injured. Roboh jongkah? The shelling came down near him, and blew his face off. Parts of his jaw were on a tree nearby. After the fighting stopped that night, a helicopter came down and took him away.

Despite the threat of violence, Ms. Brendel was brave enough to try to organize a meeting with the Khmer Rouge in an effort to start a dialogue. However, her pleas went unanswered.

Two specific events are of particular interest in this article. The first is the attack on the two UN vehicles, which many people in the town still remember. According to the weekly military info published in December 1992, a civilian police vehicle ran over a mine three kilometers south of the Angkor Chum district center. Two civilian police members were seriously injured. Another car suffered the same fate just ten kilometers away from where the first car was blown up, injuring three Indonesians and one Napalese. Many people in Angkor Chum remember this event including Mr. Chee-Ah Bun Too-An. He recounts what happened as “One mine ‘Boom!’ and a helicopter came down and took one person who was injured. And when the helicopter went up, another car came up from Siem Reap along the road, and that was blown up as well. They were taking pictures of the wreckage and damage caused by the mine.” While many people in the town remember the explosion, few know what happened to the people who were injured in the attack. A 1997 interview with Benny Widyono, who served as the head of UNTAC in Siem Reap, reveals what a harrowing situation it turned out to be:

"At one point, there was a mine incident involving civilian police from Tunisia and Indonesia, on the road to Angkor Chum, in which two police were badly wounded. My decision was whether to have their legs amputated in Siem Reap, where we had an Indian field hospital, or evacuate them to Phnom Penh. The Indonesian was still conscious and he didn't want to be amputated, so I went with him to Phnom Penh. The Indian doctors told me 'If he dies on the helicopter, its your responsibility'. When we arrived in Phnom Penh, the hospital here said the wounds are so bad he has to be evacuated to Bangkok, and finally he was amputated there. So there were some close calls."

Despite all of this violence, the elections seem to have proceeded without any hindrance. In the final week of registration, the voters in Angkor Chum coming forth in unprecedented numbers. People walked from as far away as fifteen miles to register for the election, allowing Ms. Brandal to add 500 names to the list. It is remarkable that under such savage threats of violence from the Khmer Rouge that people in Angkor Chum were willing to register at all. It is truly a testament to their courage.

The Battle of Angkor Chum: 1993 to 1997

For much of the 1990’s, Angkor Chum was the site of many different skirmishes between government soldiers and the Khmer Rouge. It was a period in which the KR disintegrated as a national movement, resulting in mass defections over to government forces. These defections would ultimately weaken the KR as an effective fighting force, and by the end of the decade the fighting would stop. Much of the violence done to the people of Angkor Chum was at the hands of both the Khmer Rouge as well as the government soldiers. Both sides practiced forced conscription, extortion, and destruction of property in an effort to cow the local people into helping them. The violence would ultimately lead many people to leave Angkor Chum in an effort to escape these two forces, with many people resettling in the neiboring district of Pourk. Most of the recorded information about the fighting in Angkor Chum comes from weekly UNTAC military reports as well as the Phnom Penh Post. While much of the information found in these sources is incredibly helpful, it is more than likely that other incidents went unlisted. What is compiled here should be viewed as only a partial account of the fighting in Angkor Chum.

The first recorded battle for the control of the district comes from the weekly UNTAC military report from May 15th to the 21st, 1993. The report states that Angkor Chum was attacked from three different directions on May 16th by both ground forces and artillery fire. The government forces (CPAF) tried to resist the attack, but the Khmer Rouge (NADK) managed to come within 500-700 of the district center. The CPAF ceded control over the main road leading to Siem Reap, and retreated to the district center due to lack of ammunition. The NADK attack continued the next day, in which they managed to capture the nearby Kouk Kbat and Ta Soam villages. The CPAF brought in reinforcements, bringing their total number to 220 soldiers, and launched a counter attack against NADK on May 19th. Using mobile rocket launchers and artillery fire, the CPAF were able to push back the NADK from the captured villages and reestablish control over the road to Varin District.

This pattern of attack and counter attack for the control of territory was repeated several times during the 1990’s. The Phnom Penh Post reported that on 17 August, 1993 CAF (government forces) had massed in the district capital of Angkor Chum in preparation for an attack to recapture the capital of Varin district. Col. Dang Sing and Col. Hou Saron were in charge of planning the attack, and predicted an easy victory. The two leaders estimated only 60 NADK soldiers of the Khmer Rouge division 912 opposed their forces, stating that the rest of the NADK forces had moved south of National Road 6 towards the Tonlé Sap. Col. Saron is quoted to have said, “We have enough resources to take Varin.” Whether this attack was successful or not is unknown.

In September of 1994, the Khmer Rouge launched major offenses in several provinces and captured a few districts in Siem Reap. According to Colonel Yang Vuthy, who was speaking at a press conference on September 28th, both the main army in the province and the neighboring district of Srey Snam were overrun during the attacks. On September 20th, the Khmer Rouge attacked positions 7 km east of Angkor Chum. Government soldiers killed one guerilla and wounded two others in the raid. The Khmer Rouge were reported to have burned down 14 houses in captured villages and killed oxen during the attacks.

These attacks verify what was known about the senior Khmer Rouge leadership at the time. By 1994, the government in Phnom Penh had declared the Khmer Rouge “illegal” and had resumed military operations against them. The Khmer Rouge had also lost foreign support, and were now fighting for their very survival. Citing the need to create a dictatorship of the peasantry, they hoped to lay the groundwork for “victory” and recreate the conditions of the armed struggle against Lon Nol. The movement abandoned their capitalist efforts that fed their existence throughout much of the 1980’s, and in doing so pushed thousands of people out. The prospect of mandatory poverty and renewed socialism encouraged soldiers to defect to the other side.

In the wake of the 1994 attacks, many Khmer Rouge guerrillas defected to the government forces citing exhaustion and a general refusal to carry out the new orders by the KR leadership. In Siem Reap, 275 guerillas under the command of Colonel Phor defected from KR division 912 defected with weapons. The division was commanded by someone named “Kong,” a long time body guard of Pol Pot’s military advisor Ta Mok. Kong was not among those who defected. The soldiers who defected were said to no longer to carry the orders of Ta Mok, who ordered the burning of houses, destruction of crops, and killing. However, it was not clear as to what these soldiers would do now.

By 1995, these defections were becoming increasing effective at reducing the strength of the Khmer Rouge. At the start of the new year on January 1st, a ceremony was held in Angkor Chum in which former members of the Khmer Rouge presented their weapons to the Fourth Military Region commander Gen. Khann Savoern. Most of the defectors looked “bedraggled, hungry, and scared,” stating that they simply wanted to go back to their villages. It also seems that government had an answer as to what the newly defected soldiers would do now. According to Major General Tep Vichet, defectors were being given courses in human rights and freedom in a democratic society.

While KR attacks were sources of danger, the treatment of civilians by government troops proved to be no better. An article dated 10 Febuary 1995 reported that 476 families had left Angkor Chum district, stating that they were fed up with being attacked by the Khmer Rouge and extorted RCAF soldiers supposedly sent to protect them. The article states that a total of 2, 678 villagers made their way to a refugee camp in Pourk district, 13km west of Siem Reap. A village chief named Nong Reum stated that their village was shelled, looted, and burned by KR forces. If this was not enough, government troops in the area demanded 40,000 riel ($20) from the villagers. If they did not have the money, the soldiers would confiscate their rice. An army chief named Hel Sam Ol had come to his village and singled out people they wanted to get money from, claiming that they were KR or KR sympathizers.

Despite efforts by authorities to get these refugees to move back to their homes in Angkor Chum, many decided that the journey from Angkor Chum to Pourk would be an exodus. According to Oem Seh, many of the people who escaped Angkor Chum decided to stay and settle in Pourk. The village chiefs in the area found land for them to build houses, and a large number of them set up stalls in the market. Since the KR had a practice of burning down houses and killing livestock, it is logical to assume that many of the people who left Angkor Chum during this time simply had no home to go back to.

The damage done to Angkor Chum by the mid 1990’s was particularly extensive. The opening sentences of Nate Thayer’s 1995 article describing Angkor Chum are particularly haunting.

"Along this isolated stretch of provincial highway, 19 blown bridges isolate the remnants of villages that were burned to the ground in recent months by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Huge craters in the road explain the carcasses of trucks destroyed recently by anti-tank mines. Dozens of soldiers with protective eye-wear gently expose thousands of land mines laid in rice fields, as truckloads of ragged government troops pass by on the way to nearby front lines. Intermittently, deafening explosions mark another mine detonated in place. The automatic weapons bursts puncturing the quiet have been a regular feature of life in rural Cambodia for more than 25 years."

Thayer’s description goes on, describing a scene in which 552 Khmer Rouge guerillas defected in the previous week. The soldiers, still dressed in Chinese PLA style uniforms, lounged in the markets, flirted with vendors, and provided security against their former comrades. The commander of these forces stated that he refused to carry out the orders for attacking the civilian population, and instead led people into the forest to protect them. When he defected, he also brought with him the military hardware.

" …Tung Yun, 38, who commanded two regiments of 600 guerilla fighters until January. He smiled as a 152 mm artillery parked near his house shook the earth as it fired at his former division commander, who with less than 75 men, had retreated into the jungle a few kilometers away. “Don’t worry, I took all the big weapons with me, they can’t fire back.”

With this major defection, the area was able to achieve a state of security that was previously impossible. This allowed infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges, dams, and demining, to happen unhindered. Despite the proclamations coming from the Khmer Rouge that the United States, France, and other countries were waging war against Cambodia in collusion with Vietnam, little attention was paid to them. These warnings seemed especially hollow considering that most villagers now saw millions of dollars worth of donor aid coming in to build roads, hospitals, and schools.

With the armistice declared in 1997 and the death of Pol Pot in 1998, the rest of the decade finished peacefully. While fighting was reported briefly between FUNCINPEC and CPP soldiers during the coup of 1997, no written documents seem to suggest that the violence was ongoing. For the first time in almost thirty years, the country was not at war and was allowed to slowly rebuild itself.

The History Project Part IV

Under The Khmer Rouge

When Angkor Chum was placed under the control of the communists, the Khmer Rouge leadership was concentrating its efforts on capturing the city of Phnom Penh and bringing the entire country under its control. Until 1975, it is doubtful to assume that the various social programs that the communist movement later became famous for were implemented. The areas in Cambodia’s southwest were used as vehicles for these programs instead, which became national when Phnom Penh was captured in April of 1975. These included the formation of cooperative farms, the forced movement of some of the population, the repression of Buddhism, and the dress code that required everyone to wear black. A description from a refugee in Kampong Speu province of Khmer Rouge soldiers taking over his village could have been true for other parts of the country as well: “In 1972 the Red Khmers took over my village. I don’t know how they got there. I just saw them when they came. I don’t know where they lived…They would come by and give you a schedule of what to do and how to live…You could not refuse to do anything.” This description mirrors what people in Angkor Chum thought of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Oem Hom commented that they were not friendly with the people, and that they fished and ate mostly by themselves. The irony here is that the people living in Angkor Chum were mostly what they are now: farmers grouped in small villages living off the land. These people were supposed to be the base of the revolution, but paranoia and fear kept the Khmer Rouge soldiers confused about what they were actually supposed to be fighting for.

The period of from the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, to the Vietnamese invasion in December 1978 is one of the most tragic periods of Cambodia’s history. Trying to explain what the Khmer Rouge leadership wanted to accomplish is difficult. The utopian vision that Pol Pot and his followers wanted to force upon the average citizen of the country is nebulous at best. If any kind of brief description to describe what the communist leadership believed in, it would be the one used by Chandler: In essence, they sought to transform Cambodia by replacing what they saw as impediments to national autonomy and social justice with revolutionary energy and incentives. Family life, individualism, and an ingrained fondness for what they saw as “feudal” institutions stood in the way of this revolution. They claimed that the poor people had always been enslaved and exploited by those in power, and through this revolution they would master’s of their own country.

Under the “Four Year Plan” set forth by Pol Pot in 1977, rice production was to exponentially in order to used for commercial gains. Rice would then be sold to other nations in order to buy arms, equipment, and industry needed to build Cambodia into a nation with a strong independent proletariat. While rice had formed the majority of exports from Cambodia from as early as the 1920’s, the idea of cultivating “three tons [of unhusked] rice per hectare,” as the slogon went, was unreasonable. The people working in the rice fields throughout the country often suffered severely from exhaustion in trying to accomplish this goal. Forced to participate in building this utopia, the victims of Pol Pot’s vision number in the millions.

Angkor Chum was not immune to the tragedy of the time. Official documents and the stories of older generations of the district can paint of grim picture of what the area was like during the era of Pol Pot. How the area was organized seems to resemble a method used in other parts of the country, with mostly everyone working in the fields and supervised by soldiers. Village chiefs still retained their local influence, but reported to the soldiers and their superiors. According to Kroo Sambok, the separation between the village chief and the soldiers was an important one because it allowed the village chief some measure of control over who was punished by the soldiers. For whatever reason, the soldiers would often accuse people of being enemies and would punish them as they saw fit. However, the village chief of Thmei would often protect people as best he could by sending them away or saying that he had already been punished.

During this time, the site of the present day district office was a prison known to the local people as “Tuol Bos Preal.” People accused as being an enemy would be sent to this place to be punished. Kroo Sambok can recount some of the more bizarre acts of violence committed against these people. Hoes that were ordinarily used for tilling the soil were used to bludgeon people to death, as well as tiger traps. Another punishment involved the use of a horse. If a person was accused of stealing from the angka (organization or hierarchy, used here to mean “stealing from the people”) they would tie a person’s hands behind their back, get them to run, and then make the horse run after them. If the accused did not run, the horse would trample them. All of these methods precluded the soldiers from using the ammunition in their firearms, both of which were rare in Democratic Kampuchea. Loung Ung, who recounts growing up under the Khmer Rouge period in First They Killed My Father, recounts a speech made by a child soldier:

"Met Bong picks a rifle from the pile, the same kind that I have seen many times before on the shoulders of the Khmer Rouge. 'This is a weapon I wish we had more of but they are very expensive. The ammunition is very expensive too, so we have few rifles to waste.'"

Although these words were spoken in the west of the country, they were probably true for many other parts as well.

All of the social directives put in force by the Khmer Rouge were present in Angkor Chum. People were moved from one place to another, dressed in black, worked long hours in the fields growing rice, and ate together in communal dining halls. While no one who came to work in Angkor Chum was from a major city like Battambang or Phnom Penh, people were moved from one district of Siem Reap to another. People were moved from Pourk and Sar Sar Sdam to Angkor Chum and vice versa. If a person became sick or injured, they were moved to different places. When Oem Seh became disabled, he was moved from this area to an area near the Kulen mountain named Svay Leu.

If this policy of constantly moving people around did not destroy the unity of the family, the practice of eating communally certainly did. This effectively disrupted the ability of families to cook, make conversation, and allow themselves some privacy. The rationale for this action was that “capitalist framework,” which included families eating together, was still in place in China and North Korea, hindering their progress towards a truly socialist state. This was an extremely unpopular policy, and most Cambodians had little to no understanding as to how complex nineteenth century ideals bore any relevance their daily lives. This was probably true of even the ones trying to live up to these ideals. Sharing food in a central location was probably just another way for the soldiers to monitor the civilian population, whom they largely regarded as containing enemies.

Many people died in Angkor Chum from 1976 to 1979. Official documents from the Documentation Center of Cambodia show that a mass burial site exists near the former prison bearing the name of Tuol Bos Kuy. According to these documents, a survey in 1999 found the presence of nearly several hundred people buried among four different graves. How many of the people buried there were killed directly by the soldiers or by mass starvation and forced labor is unknown.

The History Project Part III

Post Angkor: From Thai Control To The French Protectorate

From the decline of the Angkorian Empire, Cambodia was caught between the competing interests of the Thai, the Vietnamese, and the French. While much of this had very little to do with ordinary people living in places like Angkor Chum, it is interesting point to point out that this part of Cambodia changed hands between over a period of more than one hundred years. In 1794, the Cambodian King Eng received permission from the Thai monarchy to establish a capitol at Udong. In return, the king granted the Thais control over the northwest sruk, an area comprising of the modern regions of Siem Reap and Battambang. This effectively made the area, which included the present day area of Angkor Chum, a buffer zone for Thailand for the next hundred years. Despite being under foreign control, there is little evidence today from that time that suggests lasting change took place from the province’s overseers. The Thai made little effort to bring this region into the fold, choosing instead to govern it with ethnic Khmers instead of Thai administrators. It is doubtful that anyone living in a remote part of the province, such as Angkor Chum, would have ever known that they were under Thai jurisdiction.

Revenue from the two provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap amounted to low amounts cardamom and other forest products, which made for a mediocre profit. For these reasons, among others, the Thai ceded this sruk to France in April 1907. By this time, France had succeeded in bringing Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos under its sphere of influence in a region named French Indochina. While Cambodians were no longer masters in their own land, and suffered from heavy taxation, the French occupation did have some fringe benefits. French scholars and Cambodian workers began to restore the temples at Angkor, something that they had not been able to do during the era of Thai control. Siem Reap province was temporarily given to the Thais once again during 1945 at the end of World War II, but was given back in 1947.

Independence and Civil War

When Cambodia gained its independence from France in 1953, King Norodom Sihanouk became its de-facto leader after successfully negotiating with the French. While his government was corrupt and his attitudes towards the population mirrored the French (he addressed them as his children), his time in power was the last one before the country was plunged into civil war. Opposition to his regime was brutally oppressed, forcing members of the Cambodian Communist Party to go into hiding. People such as Solath Sar, who was later known by the infamous pseudonym Pol Pot, retreated into the countryside and began forming a communist movement aimed at overthrowing his government.

While all these developments were greatly significant for the government in Phnom Penh, it probably meant very little to ordinary Cambodians during this time. The removal of the French did little to change the fact that taxes were collected by an “unresponsive government” in Phnom Penh, who so called “royal work” made it isolated from its own people. Because the people in the countryside had never been asked to play a part in the government they saw few rewards in resisting those in power. This was probably true for people living Angkor Chum, as well as other parts of Cambodia. Even though this probably meant very little to Cambodians at the time, a conflict was escalating across the border in Vietnam that would eventually bring a dramatic change to Cambodia’s countryside.

While Cambodia had negotiated peacefully for their independence from France, the Vietnamese were fighting a war to win theirs. When that war ended in 1954, following the defeat of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the country divided into two parts: North Vietnam, ruled by the communists, and South Vietnam, which was a democracy in theory but not in practice. This division marked the beginning of a conflict that would eventually spill over into Cambodia. The North Vietnamese launched an effort to unify their country under communist rule, and the Americans, who supported the South Vietnamese government, were determined not to let that happen. Thousands of American soldiers were soon in South Vietnam fighting the communists, and the war dragged on for ten years.

The war in Vietnam destabilized Cambodia and drove Sihanouk from his position in power, despite the former king’s best efforts. While the former king sought to protect Cambodia’s national interests by keeping the country out of the war, he was never the less forced to choose sides to prevent Cambodia from being dragged into conflict completely. During the early 1960’s, he broke off relations with the United States and forged a secret alliance with the North Vietnamese. The terms of the alliance stated that the North Vietnamese were allowed to station troops in Cambodian territory, and that arms and supplies would be funneled to them from North Vietnam and China via the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The idea behind this was that in supporting the North Vietnamese in the war against the Americans, their soldiers would leave Cambodian civilians alone and the country would emerge from the conflict unscathed. By the late 1960’s, Vietnamese forces were operating in the eastern provinces of Cambodia, and would also continue to play a role in Cambodia’s history for the next twenty years.

The year 1970 saw the end of Sihanouk’s reign of power as well as several important events that would eventually bring foreign troops to the villages in Angkor Chum. The first thing to happen was the coup. In March of that year, a general named Lon Nol removed Sihanouk from office while the prince was on a trip out of the country. Lon Nol supported the American war in Vietnam against the communists, and resented the fact that Sihanouk had given his support to help them. He also wanted the US military support and aid that Sihanouk had cut off seven years earlier. Supplies to the Vietnamese forces in Cambodia were cut off, and Lon Nol ordered all Vietnamese forces to leave Cambodia within forty-eight hours. In response, the North Vietnamese agreed to a full-fledged military alliance with the Khmer Rouge in April of 1970. Soon after the coup, several hundred well-trained Khmer set off from Hanoi to help in their country’s struggle. This was a huge benefit to the movement that Pol Pot had created because it allowed him to have an effective military force that he did not have before now.

Until this point, the war in Vietnam had spilled over only to the sections of Cambodia where Vietnamese had establish their famous supply line to South Vietnam known as Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now that the Vietnamese were determined to bring the fight against the Americans in Cambodia, their troops would be seen in many different parts of Cambodia.

Vietnamese Soldiers Come To Angkor Chum

Several people who lived in present day Angkor Chum remember seeing Vietnamese soldiers acting in collusion with Khmer Rouge soldiers around the early 1970’s. Both Oem Hom and Oem Seh recall seeing both of these soldiers around this time, with the latter noting the Khmer Rouge’s former political training in Hanoi as well as Sihanouk’s support for the civil war against Lon Nol. Mr. Seh also describes that the soldiers wore helmets, and not the cone shaped hats that survivors of the Khmer Rouge saw them wearing less than ten years later. Both of these eye witness accounts confirm much of what was happening in other parts of the country. By the end of1971, the Lon Nol government had abandoned all lightly populated areas of the country the communist forces. Vietnamese forces carried out most of the fighting that occurred in this time, with Cambodian soldiers only taking a supporting role. While it is difficult to determine the exact date that the northern part of Pourk district fell to the communists, the French scholar François Bizot recorded the presence of the Vietnamese in the area on June 6th, 1970. Le Portail (The Gate), an account of his struggle for survival in Cambodia, contains an episode where he describes a run in with some Vietnamese soldiers around the site of Angkor Wat. If what he describes is true, it can be inferred that Angkor Chum was under communist control around this time as well. When the Vietnamese troops left the area is not known, but it must have happened sometime before 1973 when North and South Vietnam signed a cease fire agreement. The former were concentrating their forces in preparation for an all out assault on Saigon, and needed all the Vietnamese soldiers currently disposed helping the Khmer Rouge. The North Vietnamese asked Pol Pot to sign a similar cease fire with Lon Nol, but he refused. The leader of the Khmer Rouge saw this is as a betrayal by the Vietnamese after he had helped them in their war against the Americans. This was one of many reasons for the rift growing between the leadership of these two countries, which would eventually lead to war.

The History Project Part II

Early Cambodia Through Angkor

The effort to trace the history of Angkor Chum district to its very beginning is really an attempt to describe events in ordinary village life in the many hundreds of years before this one. Understandably, this is a very difficult task. One can only infer that what must have happened to other parts of Cambodia must have happened here. However, what little we do know is extremely useful because it can be linked to practices that are still common today. Much of what is known about prehistoric Cambodia bears a striking resemblance to the modern country we know today. A large source of protein in the average person’s diet came from fish, and their houses were raised above the ground and made accessible by means of a ladder. They also had access to domesticated animals, and grew varieties of rice by the slash and burn method. The very first people to live in this area may have indeed used this method to literally carve out their existence from the surrounding jungle.

The earliest record of human settlement in Angkor Chum can be found in the northern part of the district. Following the laterite road away from Wat Char Chuk, one can discover three man made structures that date back to the time of Cambodia’s ancient empire. Turning left from the road at a gnarled old tree, two crumbling temples standing guard over an expanse of fields. If one goes straight about a kilometer past the tree instead of turning left, a disused stone bridge spans a river. Many of the provincial and district maps of the area do not have these structures marked, and finding them is a little difficult if you do not know where you are going. If one were to make a guess about their origin, one could probably say that they are connected to the great Angkorian structures some forty kilometers away, ranging from the tenth or eleventh century. The local people only know them only Prasat Koul, citing the commune in which they are found. Some refer to them as being part of an ancient highway between Thailand and Angkor Wat, but given its position on the map this seems entirely unlikely. Upon visiting the structures themselves, one can see the damage that centuries of disrepair have done to them. Only a few structures remain standing, and the jungle is reclaiming even those. The second temple, which is a much larger than the first, is littered with stone blocks and round balustrades. Many of the carvings on the stones remain intact, and one can still find a few nagas faced down in the dirt or broken into pieces. Their eroded expressions no longer hold the fierceness that they once did. As unfortunate as it is, these structures find themselves among the ranks of hundreds of temples in the surrounding area that were built during that time. If no effort is done to preserve them, it is likely that they will continue to dissolve into the earth until no trace of them is left.

What kind of society existed in that time is as elusive to historians as the one that existed at Angkor Wat. The presence of a temple in this area may well suggest that the area around it was inhabited enough for a temple to be built there. From a quick survey of the area, one can also guess that many of the practices of daily life in that time are little changed from the ones found today. Unlike the massive irrigation works around Angkor Wat, which were used to grow year round in order the feed its giant population, the farmland in this area was probably used to grow rice only during the wet season from April to October. Animals such as water buffaloes were probably used as a source of manual labor for plowing fields and transportation just as they are today. Houses were made from wood on stilts, with thatch covering the roofs and wooden planks lining the walls. Remarkably, a description of a rural market near the site of Angkor in 1296-1297 by Zhou Daguan, a visiting Chinese diplomat, resembles what the daily market in Angkor Chum looks like today: “The local people who know how to trade are all women…There is a market every day from around six in the morning until mid-day. There are no stalls…only a kind of tumbleweed mat laid on the ground, each mat in its usual place.” Many of these observations are still true. An observer of the daily market in Angkor Chum could tell you that the market closes down before lunch, and that most of the people who work there are women. While stalls and tables have sprung up, most of a person’s wares still lie on a mat on the ground. Other than these descriptions, one can only guess what other aspects of daily life have remained the same.

The History Project Part I

The following comes from the introduction of a paper I am writing detailing the history of Angkor Chum, which I hope to have translated and distributed before I end my service in July. I will try to post parts of it here as I continue to work on them.

In October of 2008, I arrived in the small rural district of Angkor Chum in Siem Reap province. My assignment as a Peace Corps volunteer included work as an English teacher at the high school, as well as any other projects that I thought could help the community. At first glance, I found that the area resembled many of the towns and villages across the country. There was a market made up of small wooden stalls, an ACELEDA bank, a high school, a hospital, a power generator that supplied electricity, and several NGO’s that operated freely throughout the district. Most of the activity around the district revolved around rice production, and the people moved about on motorbikes and slow moving bullocks carts. As I got to know the town more and more, I began to notice little differences that set it apart from other places in the country. To begin with, the ability of the students in Angkor Chum to speak English was far lower than what I had expected. I had previously taught a week-long English course in Kampong Chhnang province, and there little competition in my assessment as to which group of students had better skills. I also noticed that entire professional class of people came from other areas. Every time that I met someone who worked at the bank, the hospital, the high school, or any of the NGO’s, they would tell me that they came from Pourk, Siem Reap, Phnom Penh, Sisophon, or other places in the country. At some point I slowly began to uncover the history of this tiny place, and what I learned shocked me. The reason why everything in the area was newly built was because the Cambodian civil had dragged on in this area for years after the rest of the country had been able to recover. There were stories about constant shelling, UNTAC Bangladesh troops under fire, villages being burned down by the Khmer Rouge, and other horrifying tales of the civil war.

There is one I remember quite clearly. During my first few months, I became friends with a man who owned a mobile phone shop because he spoke English very well. One day, I sat in a plastic chair in the front space the shop. It was October, and as usual it was raining hard. While I sat and took shelter from the downpour, he was telling me of how he grew up in the Cardamom mountains under the Khmer Rouge. It was the same story told over and over again by survivors of the regime; there was more than enough malaria, starvation, and madness to go around. They shivered during the day because of the fevers, and froze at night because of the cold. Specifically he was telling me about what the soldiers would do to people that they suspected as being traitors to the revolution. It was horrible. They would make them kneel after tying their hands behind their backs. Then they would use some kind of blunt object to smash their heads together. Usually it was a hoe with a long wooden handle and a heavy metal blade on the end. When it was done, the dogs would come out of the forest and feed upon the bodies because there was no other place to put them. There was more there, and I quietly listened and remembered every word of it. This man had lived through hell, and the least I could do was remember his story.

When I heard this story and others like it, I began to make a connection between the Angkor Chum that existed in the past and the place that I knew today. The war had crawled its way like a snake into the heart of almost every aspect of rural life, disabling any chance that the area might have had to develop. The reason why the high school student’s abilities were so low was because the high school had only been completed in 2006. The lack of an educated middle class made the importation of such people a necessity if institutions were to be able to function at all. Everything suddenly started to make sense. There were also connections between this part of the Cambodia and events going on in the larger scheme of things. When I began reading more about Cambodia’s history, I began to realize that Angkor Chum bore witness to many of the larger events across the region. A great example is the fact that Vietnamese soldiers came to this area three times during the 1970’s as direct result of the American war in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge leadership. It came to a point where I had learned so many of these events and actions that linked everything together, that I needed to write them down. With that, I resolved to write a history of Angkor Chum so that others could read it and understand this little part of the country if they wanted to.

What I have attempted to do is trace the history of Angkor Chum from the beginning of its inhabitance to present day, connecting developments within the site to those within a larger perspective. Much of the information presented in it comes from traditional sources of Cambodian history such as Chandler and Osborne, but the remaining parts of it have been pieced together from newspaper articles, UNTAC military action reports, and interviews with many of the residents in the district. In presenting such a collage of information, I hope to explain how the people and history of Angkor Chum fit into larger events in Cambodia’s history. As a result of this explanation, it is the general goal of this history to give a better understanding as to why the district of Angkor Chum appears as it does today.

Fowler and Phuong

I have witnessed this scene played out before me so many times before this one. There sits an old man from the land where there is no sun sitting with a young woman of native descent. They are together, but not engaged in displays of gross affection in the street or the tawdry nightclubs hanging over the river. No, what they are doing is much more intimate. They are sharing a meal at a restaurant designated for foreigners. Where am I in all this? I am listening to their conversation from another table. Its rude, I know, but I cannot help it. Their language is not part of the background noise I filter out every day. It is not my fault if I start analyzing bits and pieces of what they are saying.

“My time is very free.”

He sits in a chair dressed as he might have done as a student in 1962. His neck rises out of a striped shirt with the collar buttoned without a tie. Spots from sun exposure gently appear here and there out of the lightly colored hairline (Maybe this is not his first time in the East?) His accent is American. Perhaps he was involved in the war that happened long ago and fell in love with the thought of being born into a new society without the familiar restrictions. I look at him and I can only think of one name: Fowler. Even though he is not English and sarcastically bitter at every phrase, I can superimpose the fictional character over the person I see in front of me. The young woman sitting across from him must then Phoung. The pairing come to life out of the imagination of an Englishman, who must have dreamed of all Americans being quiet during some moment of rage. Of course, I am being ridiculous. Both the wars in Indochina have run their course, we are not in Saigon, and the nature of their relationship is unknown. Yet there is something very familiar in the way that they are sitting across from each other. The old man could be anyone, but the woman has to be Phuong. Everything that leapt across the page at me fits her description completely. Her gaze is always looking down, always looking at her food or her feet. She is impenetrable in attitude, composed and capable only of expressing complacence and joy. She is the east as Phuong embodied it; indifferent to the major powers that threw bombs around in the name of democracy or communism, but not impervious to the taking monetary rewards that they offered.

“Sometimes I tired.”

His English is slipping. He has obviously spent a lot of time around people who do not speak it as their native tongue and begun to mimic their inflections by habit. He must have had a wife back in his own country for he is far too old and inveterate to have lived by himself for so long. Whether or not he is weighed down by a sense of Catholic guilt is doubtful. From the way he is sitting, his shoulders are raised too high to be weighed down by a millstone of mortality and sin. He cannot be Fowler in appearance. He is too uncomplicated to be the real thing.

“If we study at my hotel, is that okay?”

Does he love her? Did Fowler ever really love Phuong? In small sense perhaps he did, but it was hard to guess if Fowler loved anything at all. He treated everyone he knew with contempt so cold and typical of an Englishman. However, he was trying to save both her and her country from innocent ravages of Pyle. The American had to be stopped, we all know that. The sad part is that he was reborn into the conscience of so many others trying to accomplish the same mission. Maybe this man is trying to save the woman sitting across from him from something, a rescue from a drab little life in the middle of a hot tropical country. I doubt if she thinks that she needs saving at all.

“When I was young, my mother would take me to Banteay Srei, sometimes to Kulen Mountain.”

Does she love him? We would all loved to have read a scene in which Phuong and Fowler embraced in some passionate, fervent explosion of emotion, calling each other “Darling!” and dancing off into the sunset together. This would make us more of a prisoner of our own culture than we already are. Maybe a Hollywood actress in dark eyeliner could perform in such a travesty, but not Phuong. The whole thing would be as foreign to Phong as a man who comes from the land where there is no sun. There will be no big American holiday. These two people eating together will have to find a way to bridge that gap of age and culture just as Phuong and Fowler did. They do not have the war, The London Times, or Pyle to hinder them.

Instead they have only themselves.