Asia Watch: Cambodia Journal

...And then there is Angkor, the capital of the Khmer empire that flourished from the ninth through fourteenth centuries, ruling over a vast area...

...A chilling challenge to the confidence in human progress...

...In one version, Hun Sen and his party have used a combination of violence and guile to undermine all important opposition to restoring their tyranny...

...Each of its major buildings required decades of work by a half million laborers and a thousand elephants and hundreds of artists...

...Just mass mobilization...

...This lively though small-scale commerce was not the only hopeful sign I saw...

...Hun Sen is a survivor...

...JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...When we finally arrived, he picked a quarrel with the gatekeeper, objecting to our having to sign an entry log, and once inside he tried to rush me through the exhibits...

...They encouraged a split in the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party and moved to suborn the free press that emerged under the U.N.'s aegis...

...The highway to Saigon just reopened when a bridge across the Bassak was rebuilt, and a hundred little open-air restaurants have sprung up along it within the span of a couple of kilometers...

...His latest book is The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (AEI Press...

...There are, for example, no discernible traffic rules...

...The irascibility apparently extends to his entourage as well...

...When I asked whether it was safe for me to be out alone nights near my small Phnom Penh hotel, I was told no, "especially not in this neighborhood," because I was located only a block from Hun Sen's residence...

...The streets are lined with curbside merchants selling two products: petrol out of soda pop bottles (for the motor bikes) and cigarettes...

...One frame shows a jolly Pol Pot posing with seven top comrades, four of whom, says the caption, later were executed here...

...Bevies of pretty Cambodian girls surround you as soon as you are seated, representing various beer and cigarette importers, each pressing her brand on you...

...A S I A W A T C H Cambodia Journal The road to Angkor remains strewn with blood...

...He survived the purge of his Khmer Rouge co-factionalists...

...If our people were capable of building Angkor," Pol Pot is supposed to have said, "they can do anything...

...Here, too, was social engineering, only devoid of the art, the religious faith, the constructive accomplishment...

...human rights officials I spoke to leaned more to the critical, pessimistic interpretation, while American diplomats were more optimistic...

...Hun Sen, representing the electoral losers, and Sihanouk's son Prince Ranariddh, representing the electoral winners, became co-prime ministers...

...Employing "salami" tactics reminiscent of the Communist consolidations of power in eastern Europe in the late i94o's, they have compelled FUNCINPEC to oust its two most able and anti-Communist leaders, former Finance Minister Sam Rainsey and Sihanouk's halfbrother, Prince Sirivudh...

...The faces of the women convey the blackest depression, while those of the men stare out in wide-eyed terror...

...One wall shows three levels: life on earth, heaven above, and hell below...

...I took this as evidence that the will to rebuild their ruined society endures...

...Unlike in many other poor countries, the capital has neither buses nor taxis, the only public transport being pedicabs...

...This echoed eerily in Tuol Sleng, where one room is hung with crude paintings of Khmer Rouge tortures, only these were not imagined...

...However soulless its curatory, Tuol Sleng is nonetheless devastating-room after room is lined with photos of victims, mug shots the wardens apparently took with a bureaucratic thoroughness reminiscent of the Nazis...

...The contrary interpretation holds that, with the Vietnamese gone, Communist ideology spent, and the country desperately dependent on outside aid and investment, Cambodia will stumble along on a semi-democratic path...

...That's how we were," he said...

...He is a rare survivor of a prison-execution center similar to Tuol Sleng-Kach Roteh, in Battambang province...

...They used the time to finish off their current batch of prisoners, leaving intact the institution's files, which is why we know as much as we do about this defining episode in Communist history...

...And mass death...

...Hun Sen also survived the electoral loss suffered by his Cambodian People's Party (CPP), despite the promiscuous violence with which it worked to intimidate its competitors, all duly recorded but not prevented by the U.N...

...Those bikes often carry four people, and I've seen one with five: fortunately, Khmers are slender...

...Then he survived the departure of his Vietnamese patrons, participating in a U.N.-brokered settlement with the opposition factions that resulted in the landmark 1993 election...

...The exercise of arbitrary and lethal authority, oddly, goes hand-in-hand with much lawlessness...

...With Ranariddh giving every appearance of caring more for the trappings of office than building political power, Hun Sen increasingly seems to be the first among equals...

...In this city of one million, most roads are unpaved, there are no more than one or two working traffic lights, passing is done by crossing the center of the road into oncoming traffic, and when convenient, motor bikes simply drive on the wrong side of the road...

...And while in Phnom Penh many Cambodians are struggling to regain some kind of normal life, in the provinces, battened by the unconscionable support of the Thai military, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge fight on, hoping to do it all again...

...What social engineering...

...Although otherwise the surest of guides, Kassie missed the turn for Tuol Sleng, despite its being marked by a large sign...

...Bas-relief covers the exterior walls of Angkor Thom, the great palace...

...Tuol Sleng was a Phnom Penh high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison...

...My host was Kassie Neou, head of the Cambodian Institute of Human Rights...

...The regime cooperates with this...

...The foreign minister chaired a talk I gave, and was obviously discomfited by my central emphasis on the importance of keeping government limited...

...I saw other signs of the regime's ambivalence...

...One room is devoted to photos of those prison officials and other top Khmer Rouge personnel who themselves eventually fell victim to purges, when the revolution by Joshua Muravchik began the familiar process of swallowing its own...

...49 The American Spectator • August 19 9 6...

...A coalition government was created...

...Obviously, this was not an easy visit for him...

...There are many women among these, and not a few children...

...Audiences at each of my lectures were larger and more attentive than I am accustomed to at home, and they asked questions for hours, sometimes in sweltering heat...

...At the foreign ministry, dozens of mid-level staffers turned out and surprised me with the range of their questions...

...Puzzled, I asked whether that wouldn't make the area more secure...

...48 August 1996 • The American Spectator Hun Sen's consolidation of power was the leitmotif of one of the two contradictory interpretations of Cambodia's political prospects that I heard from Western diplomats, journalists, and aid and human rights officials stationed there...

...In 1979, when the advancing Vietnamese troops entered the city, Tuol Sleng's guards and wardens had only a few hours to escape...

...On one wall a vast map of Cambodia has been constructed out of the skulls of Tuol Sleng victims, although, as Kassie pointed out with disgust, this violates the traditional Khmer respect for the dead...

...It is known as Angkor Wat, but this in fact is the name of a single great temple which is just one of hundreds of astonishing structures that survive...

...At the same time, however, a package mailed to me by the program's sponsors arrived slit open on all four sides and clumsily taped back together...

...The panels of hell depict scene after graphic scene of imagined tortures...

...which they loved to hear him tell...

...It sprouts all about like shoots of grass through pavement cracks...

...Three stories high, its balconies, which overlook an inner court, were strung densely with barbed wire so that inmates could not make suicide jumps to escape torture...

...I was the guest on a television talk show on human rights where one part of the studio audience was made up of Buddhist monks and the other part of soldiers...

...Death had to come at its appointed time, as it did for everyone who passed through its gates...

...It was the puppet regime installed by Hanoi that turned Tuol Sleng into a memorial to the Khmer Rouge's atrocities, and its exhibits bear the earmarks of agitprop...

...Several Asia hands point out that, although journalists have been bribed, beaten, and murdered in Phnom Penh, presumably by agents of the regime, the press still prints things regularly that would be unthinkable in the newspapers of nearby Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and even Thailand...

...I ordered a Tiger beer (from Malaysia), and the lucky winner quickly had a dozen brought to the table...

...To murmurs of approval, one questioner demanded to know why America was not taking a harder line in support of Taiwan against Peking...

...An artless painting showed a room with prisoners lying over every inch of floor, side-by-side and foot-to-foot in rows, all joined with leg irons...

...Decades of war and Communism have left Cambodia in a sorry state...

...When we came across an example of the heavy-bar leg irons with which prisoners were fastened, Kassie rolled down his sock to show me the permanent scars that his had left...

...What mass mobilization...

...forces departed Other new ventures, however, seem to be prospering...

...Because the non-Communist parties lacked the military muscle to forestall this, and the international community lacked the will, a compromise was reached...

...His teenage (and younger) Khmer Rouge guards had spared his life because he had committed to memory many Khmer children's stories, as well as Aesop's fables...

...Curiously, U.N...

...I came to Cambodia as part of a program to help strengthen its fragile democratic forms, lecturing on the workings of elections, a free press, and civil society...

...Despite Khmer Rouge threats, 9o percent of the eligible electorate voted, casting the majority of their ballots for King Sihanouk's royalist party, FUNCINPEC, and the smaller party that grew out of Son Sann's pro-Western guerrilla faction with the somewhat oxymoronic name, Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party...

...I could not help but think of these as Molotov cocktail stands...

...I t bespeaks Cambodia's tragedy that I saw more tourists at Tuol Sleng, the country's holocaust museum, than at Angkor Wat, the crowning architectural and artistic accomplishment of Khmer civilization...

...Also, a dense neighborhood of thatchedhut brothels had sprung up, nicknamed "UNTAC alley," but it has fallen on hard times since U.N...

...Yet, I learned that my talk, which had been videotaped, was broadcast on local TV a few days later...

...From this incident it is easy to see why local human rights groups are eager to give human rights training to police and military units...

...One even dismissed Cambodia's recent derogations from democratic norms as mere by-products of Hun Sen's overwork and irascibility...

...Still, economic liberalization and the vast infusion of foreign money that came with the U.N...

...A lieutenant of one of these purged leaders was Hun Sen, Cambodia's current coprime minister, who fled to Vietnam to escape his mentor's fate and then returned fronting for the Vietnamese conquerors...

...When the votes were tallied, the four provinces most dominated by the CPP threatened to secede, which would have initiated a new civil war...

...It was explained that only a few weeks earlier three Europeans on motor bikes had driven past the residence and were shot down, gratuitously, by Hun Sen's guards...

...Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC, which supervised the peace settlement) have spawned a renewal of commerce...