International Herald Tribune
Published: August 11, 2006
ANLONG VENG, Cambodia - In a dream the other night, two snakes slithered out of Pol Pot's grave and gave his neighbor, Loan Pheap, what she said was a winning lottery number.
This was not a surprise. The site of Pol Pot's cremation on this barren mountainside eight years ago is collapsing from neglect, its small fence broken, its low metal roof rusting and curling. But Pol Pot, one of the most brutal mass murderers of the last century, has become a sort of bookie for those who pray to him for numbers. For many here, he is the guardian spirit of the Dangrek Mountains, curing ailments and dispensing lottery numbers.
People who live here say visitors have plucked the last bits of bone from among the cinders and carried them home for good luck. A casino is being built nearby to capitalize on this spiritual bounty.
Last month, formal proceedings began in preparation for a trial of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who, with Pol Pot as their chieftain, were responsible for the deaths of about 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 - nearly a quarter of the population.
Here, in one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge before the movement finally collapsed as a guerrilla army in 1998, some of its most reviled leaders are remembered with loyalty and affection.
"The way I see it, he wasn't a bad guy," said Loan Pheap, 46, who served under Pol Pot in a women's military brigade and now sells gasoline and plants from her house beside the cremation site.
"I still regard him as my father," she said. "He arranged my marriage because we didn't have any parents. During the wedding he told us to love each other forever, just the way a parent would."
This drab, muddy town in the remote north of Cambodia is in mourning now for another top leader, Ta Mok, who died at the age of 80 on July 21, leaving a shrinking handful of frail, aging men as potential defendants.
Hundreds of people attended his funeral, weeping for a man who is accused of ordering tens of thousands of killings, but whom they remember as a benevolent patron, distributing rice and cattle even as he executed those who broke his austere communist regulations.
As the chieftain of Anlong Veng he banned theft, drunkenness, prostitution, marriage outside the commune, private enterprise, any contact with outsiders and listening to any radio station other than that of the Khmer Rouge, all punishable by death.
Those regulations, posted in the schoolhouse and elsewhere, have been replaced by emblems of the new world that has taken root here. Sharing a wall at the entrance to town are advertising posters for Bayon beer, Luxury cigarettes and Number One condoms.
Many people here are bitter about the changes - "worse than bad," one farmer said - remembering what they say was a time of purity, order and discipline.
"I loved him," said Yun Hat, 46, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who lost a leg to a land mine just as Ta Mok had. "He gave us everything we needed. We lived in love and happiness. I never saw him commit any crime."
But he and his friend, Em Man, also 46, said they wished Ta Mok had survived to face his accusers and to tell those who had put their faith in him whether in fact he had been a mass murderer.
"Now he has become zero," said Em Man, a farmer who said he had been a driver for Ta Mok and who wore a red mourning string around his wrist. "He can't answer any questions. I wanted him to explain in court the black and white of his life. I never saw him kill anyone. But black is black and white is white and whatever the court says we will accept."
Now, like Pol Pot, this man accused of ravaging his country has found a bleak and barren resting place - an unmarked concrete tomb on a sand- covered platform that is pocked with the hoofprints of wandering cows and visited by defecating dogs.
It is hard to consider how a genocidal killer should properly be laid to rest. Pol Pot was cremated in April, 1998 on top of a stack of old tires and furniture. Perhaps this offhand dismissal is appropriate for leaders who ruled by the adage, "To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss."
Mourners who trek through a muddy field have left only paltry offerings at Ta Mok's tomb: a clump of burned-out incense sticks, five plastic cups of water, a black oil lamp whose flame has died and a roll of toilet paper that people here say is to wipe his mouth when he has consumed any food that is left for his wandering soul.
But already, in what appears to be a Khmer Rouge tradition, people say his ghost has begun dispensing lottery numbers. On the day of his funeral, Em Man said, a woman saw him in a dream, bet the number 783 in a local lottery, and won a million riel, or about $250.
Em Man, squatting in the sand by the tomb, showed a scrap of paper with a list of numbers he said he had received from Ta Mok's specter. He said he would keep playing these numbers until he, too, wins a million.
The government has gotten in on the money-making game as well, hoping to turn the graves into tourist attractions. A shack on the main road, the Anlong Veng Tourism Office, lists the sites: faded photographs of weed-filled plots labeled as the former homes and swimming holes of Khmer Rouge leaders.
The only site that draws a regular trickle of visitors is Ta Mok's concrete villa in the center of town, with its irrational maze of big, bare rooms and its underground bunker.
Its broad balconies look out over a swampy artificial lake that is dotted with the skeletons of dead trees, a vista created by a man who seems to have felt a kinship with death.
When Ta Mok's harsh utopia collapsed, the outside world flooded in, bringing colored clothing to replace the black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge. Tiny enterprises opened - food stalls, gasoline in recycled Johnny Walker bottles, pirated videotapes, hair dressers and vendors selling cigarettes, duck eggs and mobile telephones.
The past and the present mingle as thin white cows wander among the parked motorbikes. And that is where development stopped - at the bottom rung of Cambodian poverty - except for the wide blacktop road that runs through it, with its incongruous yellow center line.
"Gift from Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Royal Government of Cambodia, 104 km of road built by the Army engineering unit," reads the town's only monument.
If tourists ever do come, the smooth road will speed them 14 kilometers, or nine miles, up into the mountains to the weed-filled lot where Pol Pot was cremated, 300 meters, or 980 feet, from the border with Thailand.
Once abandoned in the mountain overgrowth, the cremation site now seems forgotten in the midst of a burst of small-scale construction. The buzz of cicadas is drowned by the whine of power saws as small homes crowd the edges of the fenced-in lot.
As in the rest of the country, the future is being built on the ruins of a devastated past that has never been faced, where skulls from killing fields still lie in piles and three decades have passed without any formal accounting.
"They'll all be dying soon," said Loan Pheap, who pumps gasoline within sight of Pol Pot's remains, "all the old grandfathers. They are already shaking with age. They'll all be gone before anybody can put them on trial."
This was not a surprise. The site of Pol Pot's cremation on this barren mountainside eight years ago is collapsing from neglect, its small fence broken, its low metal roof rusting and curling. But Pol Pot, one of the most brutal mass murderers of the last century, has become a sort of bookie for those who pray to him for numbers. For many here, he is the guardian spirit of the Dangrek Mountains, curing ailments and dispensing lottery numbers.
People who live here say visitors have plucked the last bits of bone from among the cinders and carried them home for good luck. A casino is being built nearby to capitalize on this spiritual bounty.
Last month, formal proceedings began in preparation for a trial of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who, with Pol Pot as their chieftain, were responsible for the deaths of about 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 - nearly a quarter of the population.
Here, in one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge before the movement finally collapsed as a guerrilla army in 1998, some of its most reviled leaders are remembered with loyalty and affection.
"The way I see it, he wasn't a bad guy," said Loan Pheap, 46, who served under Pol Pot in a women's military brigade and now sells gasoline and plants from her house beside the cremation site.
"I still regard him as my father," she said. "He arranged my marriage because we didn't have any parents. During the wedding he told us to love each other forever, just the way a parent would."
This drab, muddy town in the remote north of Cambodia is in mourning now for another top leader, Ta Mok, who died at the age of 80 on July 21, leaving a shrinking handful of frail, aging men as potential defendants.
Hundreds of people attended his funeral, weeping for a man who is accused of ordering tens of thousands of killings, but whom they remember as a benevolent patron, distributing rice and cattle even as he executed those who broke his austere communist regulations.
As the chieftain of Anlong Veng he banned theft, drunkenness, prostitution, marriage outside the commune, private enterprise, any contact with outsiders and listening to any radio station other than that of the Khmer Rouge, all punishable by death.
Those regulations, posted in the schoolhouse and elsewhere, have been replaced by emblems of the new world that has taken root here. Sharing a wall at the entrance to town are advertising posters for Bayon beer, Luxury cigarettes and Number One condoms.
Many people here are bitter about the changes - "worse than bad," one farmer said - remembering what they say was a time of purity, order and discipline.
"I loved him," said Yun Hat, 46, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who lost a leg to a land mine just as Ta Mok had. "He gave us everything we needed. We lived in love and happiness. I never saw him commit any crime."
But he and his friend, Em Man, also 46, said they wished Ta Mok had survived to face his accusers and to tell those who had put their faith in him whether in fact he had been a mass murderer.
"Now he has become zero," said Em Man, a farmer who said he had been a driver for Ta Mok and who wore a red mourning string around his wrist. "He can't answer any questions. I wanted him to explain in court the black and white of his life. I never saw him kill anyone. But black is black and white is white and whatever the court says we will accept."
Now, like Pol Pot, this man accused of ravaging his country has found a bleak and barren resting place - an unmarked concrete tomb on a sand- covered platform that is pocked with the hoofprints of wandering cows and visited by defecating dogs.
It is hard to consider how a genocidal killer should properly be laid to rest. Pol Pot was cremated in April, 1998 on top of a stack of old tires and furniture. Perhaps this offhand dismissal is appropriate for leaders who ruled by the adage, "To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss."
Mourners who trek through a muddy field have left only paltry offerings at Ta Mok's tomb: a clump of burned-out incense sticks, five plastic cups of water, a black oil lamp whose flame has died and a roll of toilet paper that people here say is to wipe his mouth when he has consumed any food that is left for his wandering soul.
But already, in what appears to be a Khmer Rouge tradition, people say his ghost has begun dispensing lottery numbers. On the day of his funeral, Em Man said, a woman saw him in a dream, bet the number 783 in a local lottery, and won a million riel, or about $250.
Em Man, squatting in the sand by the tomb, showed a scrap of paper with a list of numbers he said he had received from Ta Mok's specter. He said he would keep playing these numbers until he, too, wins a million.
The government has gotten in on the money-making game as well, hoping to turn the graves into tourist attractions. A shack on the main road, the Anlong Veng Tourism Office, lists the sites: faded photographs of weed-filled plots labeled as the former homes and swimming holes of Khmer Rouge leaders.
The only site that draws a regular trickle of visitors is Ta Mok's concrete villa in the center of town, with its irrational maze of big, bare rooms and its underground bunker.
Its broad balconies look out over a swampy artificial lake that is dotted with the skeletons of dead trees, a vista created by a man who seems to have felt a kinship with death.
When Ta Mok's harsh utopia collapsed, the outside world flooded in, bringing colored clothing to replace the black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge. Tiny enterprises opened - food stalls, gasoline in recycled Johnny Walker bottles, pirated videotapes, hair dressers and vendors selling cigarettes, duck eggs and mobile telephones.
The past and the present mingle as thin white cows wander among the parked motorbikes. And that is where development stopped - at the bottom rung of Cambodian poverty - except for the wide blacktop road that runs through it, with its incongruous yellow center line.
"Gift from Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Royal Government of Cambodia, 104 km of road built by the Army engineering unit," reads the town's only monument.
If tourists ever do come, the smooth road will speed them 14 kilometers, or nine miles, up into the mountains to the weed-filled lot where Pol Pot was cremated, 300 meters, or 980 feet, from the border with Thailand.
Once abandoned in the mountain overgrowth, the cremation site now seems forgotten in the midst of a burst of small-scale construction. The buzz of cicadas is drowned by the whine of power saws as small homes crowd the edges of the fenced-in lot.
As in the rest of the country, the future is being built on the ruins of a devastated past that has never been faced, where skulls from killing fields still lie in piles and three decades have passed without any formal accounting.
"They'll all be dying soon," said Loan Pheap, who pumps gasoline within sight of Pol Pot's remains, "all the old grandfathers. They are already shaking with age. They'll all be gone before anybody can put them on trial."
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