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.