The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (38 page)

Mr. Nhem had all the artifacts: over 300 photos from the Khmer Rouge era and the post–Khmer Rouge fighting. He had a pair of Pol Pot's shoes, and part of a statue that was once displayed in Anlong Veng, the town we were in. He even had the camera he'd used when he'd worked as a photographer at the S-21 prison, the infamous detention and torture center where he'd aided in documenting the 14,000 people who came through the facility, only 7 of whom survived. He'd dubbed the relic “the Genocide Camera.”

All he needed was investors, he told me. This was my opportunity, he said. They could advertise me as “the American partner Lauren”; I could display my nation's flag, along with a sign that said I had cooperated to support the museum. I asked how much he was looking for. An animated exchange sparked between Mr. Nhem and Samithy, the translator and tour guide who'd brought me to Anlong Veng, who'd tracked down Mr. Nhem and scored me this meeting in his mildewed office.

Samithy wrote down a figure and slid the piece of paper my way: $120,000.

Mr. Nhem had clearly mistaken me for someone other than a preschool teacher living on $800 a month in Phnom Penh. But I decided it was better not to say this.

Anlong Veng is a dusty, sweaty slab of no man's land in northern Cambodia. It's one of those towns you'd pass through on a bus to somewhere better, and nothing about its battered storefronts, rubbled roads, or shabby markets squatting beneath beach umbrellas would make you think it was anything special.

The region had been the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime under which nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population perished between 1975 and 1979. For almost 30 years after the official fall of the Khmer Rouge to Vietnamese forces, the regime remained active in the countryside, attracting devotees and plotting a resurgence that never materialized. The Khmer Rouge had been siphoned into smaller and more isolated parts of the country until, at last, all the diehards holed up in an isolated wedge of land along the Thai border, getting rich off logging and living in relative impunity.

The Khmer Rouge's leader, Pol Pot, was among these men. He spent his final years languishing, bored, inside a mosquito net in Anlong Veng, under a house arrest ordered by a former comrade, Ta Mok. Here, journalist Nate Thayer conducted the famous last interview with Pol Pot, in which the old man with crushed-silk skin declared that his conscience was clear. And here Pol Pot finally died, old and of natural causes; his body was burned beneath a pile of tires.

I'd read in the local newspapers about plans to turn Anlong Veng into a new stop on the temples-and-genocide tour-bus circuit. One article detailed plans to train the area's large number of former Khmer Rouge cadres to become tour guides. Another claimed Nhem En, the spearhead behind the tourism development, had tried to raise money by selling Pol Pot's toilet seat for half a million dollars. (There'd been no takers.)

In the common Cambodian lexicon, the Khmer Rouge era is known as “Pol Pot time,” a linguistic reflection of the way in which all the regime's atrocities have become concentrated on one man. It's a way for the living to deflect responsibility, and an important distinction to maintain: while the UN-backed tribunals are painstakingly under way, the current government is composed largely of former Khmer Rouge, including the ironfisted prime minister Hun Sen—men who could, should the tribunals continue, be tried for their role in war crimes. But beyond that,
Khmer Rouge
isn't a cut-and-dried term. Aside from the well-to-do urbanites at the top, the regime was mostly composed of uneducated rural peasants, many of whom were coerced to join as children, under threat of death. Today former victims and perpetrators of Khmer Rouge violence display similar levels of trauma, often living side by side.

Nhem En is one of the former Khmer Rouge occupying this expansive gray area. He isn't one of the big names: he isn't a Brother Number One (Pol Pot) or a Brother Number Two (Nuon Chea), or even any brother, really. He's one of the former midlevel cadres who always have someone above them to point to: “just following orders”; “kill or be killed.” He's one of the many who've been folded back into society uneventfully, the way a body most often reabsorbs a blood clot. But while Nhem En's name may not be famous, the work he produced under the Khmer Rouge is. The silent faces in Mr. Nhem's photos from S-21 have become one of the most emblematic relics of the regime. His photographs are prominently displayed at the former prison site in Phnom Penh, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, one of the top tourist attractions in Cambodia.

Genocide sites are Cambodia's second-ranking tourist attractions, after the temples of Angkor Wat. Foreign tourists seem to have a fascination with the genocide that Cambodians largely don't share. Most often, the only Cambodians one sees at Tuol Sleng or the Killing Fields site are the
tuk-tuk
drivers and acid-burn victims clustered outside the gates, hoping for runoff from the tourist dollars.

The guidebooks and placards inside don't tell you that these sites were created more to influence international opinion than to memorialize the dead. Both were set up by the Vietnamese during their post–Khmer Rouge occupation of Cambodia as a way to justify their occupation and prove that they had not committed the war crimes, as the remaining Khmer Rouge claimed. I'd heard conflicting reports about Cambodians' initial interaction with these sites: expats said that Cambodians were not allowed to visit Tuol Sleng in its first years, but an acquaintance told me of being forced by the Vietnamese to visit Tuol Sleng in the early postwar days—the smell of the blood, she'd said, was awful. What was true was that both of these sites initially featured displays of victims' bones. In fact, the Killing Fields still does—a bone pagoda, a supposed memorial to the victims whose bones lie inside it, is in complete opposition to the Cambodian tradition of cremation. In 2004, the former king Norodom Sihanouk went so far as to claim that the purpose of such a display was “to punish the victims, humiliate them, dishonor them.”

Also absent from mention is that the Cambodian government has allowed the Killing Fields to be privatized, selling a 30-year concession to operate the site to the Japanese company JC Royal, which has since raised ticket prices and introduced $3 audio tours that have eliminated the need for local Cambodian tour guides. While Tuol Sleng still employs Cambodian guides, concrete information about who owns and operates the site appears intentionally murky. Thus the only Cambodians one can be sure are engaging with and benefiting from these genocide tourism sites are the
tuk-tuk
drivers and beggars outside the gates.

While genocide tourism is not distinct to Cambodia—Tusafiri Africa Tours and Travels offers a six-day “Rwanda History Will Tell! Safari” for $2,000—the privatization of and profiting from genocide memorials appears to be. Founded by the Polish parliament, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum is operated by the nonprofit Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, whose website offers structural and financial transparency. Rwanda's Kigali Memorial Centre is operated by the local city council, in partnership with United Kingdom–based AEGIS Trust, and maintained by goodwill donations left by its visitors. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, in Yerevan, is a subdivision of the National Academy of the Republic of Armenia and has a similarly donation-based entrance. Bill Clinton headed the founding and fund-raising for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery to Genocide Victims, in Bosnia, garnering support from private groups and governments alike. Cambodia's sites, however, are shrouded in opacity, and it is only through careful digging that one can discern who is running and profiting from these sites.

“Pol Pot time” isn't often discussed in Cambodian daily life—with so many former Khmer Rouge still in the country, ruling the country, how would the conversation begin? In fact, war history has only recently begun to be taught in the schools, and the silence is so thick that it is not uncommon for youth to believe that the Khmer Rouge didn't actually happen. In high-school-level English classes I'd taught, my students could wearily recite the length of the Khmer Rouge occupation of the country—“three years, eight months, and twenty days”—but they couldn't tell you the difference between Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as a whole.

Nhem En was quoted in one of the articles I had read in the local English-language media as wanting to build a museum to preserve the war history for the next generation. It sounded good. But I wondered if a genocide-tourism site developed by a former Khmer Rouge cadre would actually benefit Cambodians and help to end the silence, or if it would be just another exploitation of foreigners' fascination.

The first thing Samithy said to me when I got into the van on our way to Anlong Veng was that both of his parents had died in the Khmer Rouge. His brother and sister, too. I'd been in Cambodia long enough to understand the silence surrounding the war, and to grow suspect of such intensely personal divulgences. It was rarely coworkers, friends, or acquaintances who shared the impact of the Khmer Rouge on their families, I'd noticed, but rather the
tuk-tuk
drivers, shopkeepers, tour guides, and beggars—people with whom my interactions were transactional.

Samithy picked me up from my guesthouse in Siem Reap, the tourist town closest to the Angkor Wat temple complex and the closest accessible city from which to travel to Anlong Veng. I listened to him talk as the van glided through the small city center, its roads lined with the morning bustle of markets and street vendors. Foreigners in sun hats were climbing into
tuk-tuks
, armed with water bottles for a long day spent temple-hopping. Before the Khmer Rouge, Samithy told me, he'd lived in Phnom Penh. His parents had been “high-class people.” He'd been separated from them early on in the regime. As a teenager, he'd been sent to a youth camp where he'd slept outside for the first year, even during the monsoon season, working 18-hour days and living on watery gruel. It's a story with which one becomes familiar, living in Cambodia, and one I'd learned well before moving there, growing up with the children of Khmer Rouge survivors in Oakland, California. The majority of these refugees had fled Cambodia by escaping to Thailand following the Khmer Rouge fall to Vietnam. During the actual “Pol Pot time,” the country had been on lockdown, with virtually no foreigners coming in or Cambodians going out.

Earlier, on the phone, Samithy had laughed dismissively when I'd asked him about his familiarity with Anlong Veng's history. “I work for the UN for fifteen year. Anything you want to know, I tell you.”

“I'm not a big man,” he told me now, looking out over the steering wheel. “I don't want a big position. I want to live peaceful in my country. I want to help the people in my country. I want to tell tourists about Cambodia to help my country. In Cambodia, there is no neutrality. The police and military are corrupt. So who will help the people?” He raised his open palm as if offering the landscape to me. We stopped at a security checkpoint; Samithy rolled down the window and exchanged words with the guards. They laughed and waved him through.

“They all know me,” he said with a smile. “Because I was a number-one tour guide here. But the government raised the bribe fees to be a tour guide and I could not pay. Now I'm just a taxi driver.” He waved his hand and repeated, “I don't want to be a big man.”

We passed the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by tour buses and
tuk-tuks
, saggy-eyed elephants waiting to give rides to tourists. The morning light cut across the crumbly spires. Samithy kept repeating how he didn't want to be a “big man”—so often that it was hard to believe him. We left the temple area, the roadside fruit stands petering out into long, hot expanses of grass and dirt as we moved at a crawl.

We'd been driving for about two hours before Samithy started talking about Anlong Veng. “The people in Anlong Veng—these days they are very isolated, powerless. All the big men from Anlong Veng, the former Khmer Rouge, they are now in Phnom Penh. In 2008, Hun Sen, the prime minister, he said to the big men, ‘Come to the government.' And they did.” He shrugged. “Now they sit in air-conditioned rooms to make strategy to stop the tribunals.”

I asked him what people in Anlong Veng thought about the Khmer Rouge. Samithy was quiet a moment. “In Anlong Veng, they are old people.” “Old people” was a term used for rural people during the Khmer Rouge, people seen as loyal to the revolution, whereas “new people” were urban, educated, upper-class, enemies and imperialists—what Samithy's parents had been, and what my California friends' parents had been. “They don't think Pol Pot was so bad, but not so good, either. They think maybe so-so; they live with it but they don't support it.” He paused. “They were captured by their leader.”

I tried to imagine how the Khmer Rouge would have “captured” the people—through poverty, fear of reprisal, fear of a return to the work camps and violence. Even still, Samithy's casting seemed in direct opposition to my research: I'd read reports of people worshipping Pol Pot in Anlong Veng. I'd seen photos of women burning incense at his cremation site, praying for lucky lottery numbers. “It's like they don't see Pol Pot as a genocidal killer,” one former aid worker had told me, “but as a nationalist hero that said ‘fuck you' to imperialism.” The two depictions of Anlong Veng seemed too polarized to both be true.

“What do the people think now?” I asked.

“Now they are painful,” Samithy told me. “When they see Pol Pot die of natural causes, not punishment—they think not good. When they hear the tribunal is slow, they think not good. They don't understand why some people get tried and others don't.”

We fell into silence. I looked out the window, the fields giving way to charred stumps and scorched earth: logging territory. During their years in Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge's leaders had turned to other means of supporting themselves, namely logging. Ta Mok, a.k.a. “Brother Number Five,” a.k.a. “the Butcher,” had amassed a small fortune in the semilegal timber industry. By charitably allowing a trickle of the funds to reach the destitute residents of Anlong Veng, Ta Mok had inspired their loyalty and gratitude. Ta Mok remained in Anlong Veng until 1999, when he was brought to Phnom Penh, where he'd die awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. When he left, so did the remaining wealth. Trucks full of logs rumbled past, motorbikes manned by razor-thin boys weaving between them. Women in electric-colored pajama suits covered their heads with
krama
scarves; their black eyes blazed out at us.