Skirmish in Anlong Veng denied by Cambodian general

20 August 2010
Everyday.com.kh
Translated from Khmer by Socheata

General Chea Morn, the commander of military region no. 4, rejected local news about a 5-minute armed skirmish between Cambodian and Thai troops in Anlong Veng area, Oddar Meanchey province. Chea Morn told The Phnom Penh Post on Thursday that nothing happened and there was no armed skirmish at that area. Chea Morn explained that, in reality, on Thursday, Thai soldiers shot 5 times into the air after Thai loggers tried to log trees in Thai territories, about 3-km from the border. Touch Ra, the deputy-director of the Choam Sa-ngam border post claimed yesterday also that there was no armed clash between the two troops, only that Thai soldiers shot in the air in the pursuit of illegal Thai loggers inside Thailand.

Cambodia's new battle: Reconciling with the Khmer Rouge

Mon, 12 Apr 2010
By Robert Carmichael
DPA

Anlong Veng, Cambodia - Twelve years ago the town of Anlong Veng in north-west Cambodia surrendered to the government in a move that marked the end of the infamous Khmer Rouge movement.

Today most residents in the district are former Khmer Rouge cadre and their families. On Friday, 150 of them came together in a unique effort to discuss reconciliation, justice and reintegration.

Trying to reintegrate the supporters of one of the 20th century's most brutal regimes is vital to rebuilding Cambodian society, says Daravuth Seng, a Cambodian-American who heads a local non-governmental organization called the Center for Justice and Reconciliation (CJR), which organized the meeting.

"Our focus is to try to get victims and perpetrators to start talking in an effort to really understand one another, and in an effort to really work on reconciliation in Cambodia," he says.

He says he feels that most of the country's reconciliation efforts to date have been one-sided, excluding the Khmer Rouge.

The irony of setting the meeting in Anlong Veng was enhanced by holding it at the compound of the late general Ta Mok, the movement's final leader and one of its most brutal and intransigent members. Ta Mok is still well-regarded here.

Seng, who fled the killing fields of Cambodia as a boy with his family, acknowledges that what the organization is trying to achieve is "a huge, huge task," but says reconciliation must be inclusive.

"And with the Cambodian context, that must include a lot of the former perpetrators as well," he says, since understanding their perspective is central to reconciliation.

It is no small task. The Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of around 2 million people during their rule of Cambodia from 1975-79. Many of those who died were executed, while others succumbed to starvation, overwork and illness.

After the movement was driven from power in 1979, it regrouped on the western borders with Thailand and fought the government in Phnom Penh until finally capitulating in the late 1990s

In Phnom Penh, 300 kilometres south-east of Anlong Veng, the formal process is underway to provide some measure of accountability for crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. That process is the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, a joint Cambodian-United Nations court.

Four former leaders of the movement, including its head of state and foreign minister, are in pre-trial detention. A fifth person, the regime's former security chief, was tried last year and judgment in his case is due in the coming months.

Early on at Friday's meeting, which was sponsored by Germany's development arm DED, it becomes clear that some former Khmer Rouge are concerned the court is looking to prosecute five more suspects.

The participants tell the meeting they are satisfied that justice and reconciliation require the prosecution of the five already in custody, but say the tribunal must stop there.

Im Chaem, a deputy council chief in Anlong Veng, says she and other elderly residents are concerned the court will investigate more and more suspects.

She says when they crossed over to the government in 1998, Prime Minister Hun Sen promised there would be no losers.

"Now we don't know when our turn will be because we lived and served during that time," says Im Chaem, who has previously denied allegations of extreme cruelty levelled at her when she was a Khmer Rouge district chief. "There might be another five, and then five more and then 10."

The tribunal's public affairs officer Lars Olsen says the exchange highlights the contrast between victims and perpetrators of violence. He says that most Cambodians he encounters around the country are victims and want more prosecutions, not fewer.

Olsen tells the participants that the court is not looking to add further names to its list of suspects, and says a maximum of 10 in total are to face trial.

His answer reveals the limitations of the tribunal's work. The inevitable political and practical compromises mean thousands of people will get away with murder - including possibly some of those present at the meeting.

The former cadre broadly agreed on a number of points about reconciliation. One was that more than a decade after the movement's collapse they want other Cambodians to stop referring to them as "former Khmer Rouge."

"The term 'Khmer Rouge' is associated with killing and persecution," says one. "We are finished if we are referred to as that. Our children's lives will be ruined, and no one will let their children marry ours. We should just say we are all Cambodian now."

They also called for more economic development in the area, and said all people should be equal before the law.

There is recognition too that their lives have improved since reintegration. Anlong Veng today has schooling, medical care, tarred roads, and the opportunity for educated young people to go on to university.

It is a far cry from what went before, when thousands of Khmer Rouge lived in the mountains and were constantly on the move.

"Now it has changed from bitterness to sweetness - this is very important," says another attendee. "During the war we were always changing our position, unable to stay together and even eat together. Now that the war has ended we are able to gather at the same table and have a meal."

CJR's Seng is encouraged by the day's exchanges, and says one old lady cried as she told him she regretted what she had done as a Khmer Rouge cadre.

Seng says it is vital to understand the psychology behind what happened in order to prevent future atrocities.

"There is no quick fix for reconciliation, but I honestly believe this is moving in the right direction," he says. "We can't leave out a huge group from the reconciliation process."

Offerings to Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot [-Even his KR followers are still in power in Cambodia]

Khmers have placed offerings at Pol Pot's cremation site.
The view of the river around Ta Mok's house, now used by locals to bathe and for their cattle.
The mural of Angkor Wat inside Ta Mok's house, near Anlong Veng.

Friday, February 13, 2009
Illawarra Mercury (Australia)

He is responsible for the death of at least one million Cambodians during one of the most brutal revolutions in history.

So when I visited the cremation site of Pol Pot, the leader of the radical Khmer Rouge, I was shocked when I saw a freshly cut mandarin placed at the site as an offering to his spirit.

The fruit had not even begun to dry out in the fierce Cambodian heat.

"They ask him for good luck,'' my moto driver, Dan, explained.

"Do they still like Pol Pot?" I asked, not quite believing that I had reason to ask such a question.

"Yes, they still like (him).''

Pol Pot's ashes are buried on the site where he lived leading up to the election of the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, and until 1979, when it was defeated by the Vietnamese.

It is just outside Anlong Ven, a small town about three hours north of Siem Reap and the ancient temple of Angkor Wat.

His house was destroyed by those who suffered during his torturous reign over the country, but his cremation site has since been beautified from the pile of rubble and old tyres that once marked it. It is now sheltered by a wooden hut and a statue of Buddha has been erected.

His second house, used to meet with his comrades (Pol Pot only called the opposition soldiers), is a few kilometres away and we returned to our motorbikes to take the remote path that leads there.

Along the way, we passed Cambodian soldiers waiting in the forest in anticipation of an invasion from Thailand, which is less than 1km away. The Thais have made a recent attempt to claim one of the country's ancient temples, Preah Vihear, about 200km from Anlong Ven, and the nation is now on full alert.

Landmine warning signs also dot the side of the path - a bush toilet stop could become deadly.

Dan told me when he first visited Pol Pot's cremation site in 2003 it was surrounded by landmines, which have now been cleared by an NGO project.

We arrived safely at Pol Pot's second house, a single cement room now covered in the names of tourists and the dates that they visited.

It is nowhere near as lavish as the house of Ta Mok, the regime's military leader. My friend Jill and I visited Ta Mok's house when we arrived in Anlong Ven two days earlier.

His residence included three two-storey wooden buildings with decorated floor tiles and beautiful murals depicting the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and Preah Vihear. The wreck of an old truck used by the men to transport prisoners still lies in the garden and the tower communications system also remains.

The river that Ta Mok built for protection around his home still holds water, although all the trees have drowned. From the window of one of the buildings, I watched a local family bathe in the water and two farmers herd their cattle along its bank.

Khmer also come here to pray in front of a Buddha statue. I cannot comprehend how they can pray in such a haunting place - or how they find peace at the home of one of the men who is responsible for the deaths of so many of their own. Perhaps it is for that reason that they come here. Are they seeking peace from the past?

A steady flow of tourists visit the Pol Pot and Ta Mok (he died in jail in 2006) sites almost thirty years after the fall of the regime. Most are Cambodians or Thais, Dan said. Jill and I are the only Western foreigners in Anlong Ven at the moment, he claimed.

Dan and our other moto driver, Jacky, who has just moved to the town from Phnom Penh in an attempt to benefit from the growing number of tourists heading here, were more than happy to share their stories with us.

Both men lost family members during the Khmer Rouge regime. Dan was just three years old when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh and he and his family fled west to Battambang.

Jacky does not know what happened to his parents. I didn't ask him whether that is because no one can tell him or because he doesn't want to know.

Dispatches: Anlong Veng

• The main courtroom at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, in Phnom Penh, known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Photograph by Elena Lesley. •

September 29, 2008
By Elena Lesley
Granta Magazine, UK

Chit Leang does not know his real name or his age or who his parents were. He was a small child in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, he tells me, and his memories from that time come back as disjointed images. We talk outside his modest restaurant, our faces damp from the mid-day sun, and Chit describes, in vivid detail, the gunshots that called him to lunch each day and the flat plates on which his Khmer Rouge comrades spooned out watery rice porridge. What happened to his entire family, Chit does not know. Like so many other Cambodians, they disappeared.

Today Chit’s open-air restaurant sits along a new, paved road in Anlong Veng, a border town in Cambodia’s north that remained a Khmer Rouge stronghold into the late 1990s. Chit moved here two years ago, for purely business reasons. Friends had told him that a planned border checkpoint in the area would see an influx of tourists from Thailand, en route to the Angkor Wat temple complex, and Chit set up shop, selling noodle soup and Angkor beer to the growing packs of travellers. Along Veng, which just a few years ago was a jungle strewn with landmines, is undergoing a building boom.

Pol Pot’s grave is a short walk from Chit’s restaurant. The site is unmarked from the main road and it was Chit who showed me where to find the narrow path that leads to the grave, a mound of dirt covered by a rusty corrugated metal roof. Flowers and sun-faded glass bottles frame the place where Pol Pot was supposedly cremated in 1998, on a heap of rubbish and old tyres. An old man in poor health, he died in his sleep.

It was a quiet end for a man responsible for the destruction of his country. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population – roughly two million people – through overwork, starvation and execution. Chit’s family were among the victims. Yet Chit remains friendly with his next-door neighbour, the grandson of an infamous Khmer Rouge military leader nicknamed ‘the Butcher’. And he politely serves customers who come to pay their respects at Pol Pot’s grave, those faithful Khmer Rouge holdouts who light incense and carry offerings of fruit and chicken. ‘They have their understanding and I have mine,’ Chit says.

After suffering through the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and a decade of civil conflict, most Cambodians have adopted a similar survival strategy – try to feed your family and refrain from becoming actively involved in politics. Although none of those responsible for Khmer Rouge atrocities had been punished for their crimes, the people of Cambodia understood they had to move on. Their momentum pushed the country forward, but crookedly, like a broken bone that heals without a cast. They opened shops and restaurants amid rubble and landmines. They struggled to raise children – roughly sixty percent of Cambodians were born after 1979 – who don’t learn about the Khmer Rouge in school and have trouble believing their parents’ and grandparents’ stories. Much of the population just tried to forget, to ‘dig a hole and bury the past and look to the future,’ as Prime Minister Hun Sen told them to do in 1998, after a series of senior leaders defected from what was left of the Khmer Rouge movement.

In this climate of pragmatism, some Cambodians believe that spending millions of dollars to put on trial a handful of elderly former leaders is absurd. It has been nearly thirty years since the Vietnamese ousted the Khmers Rouge from power. But domestic and international political interests have prevented the trials from happening until now.

• Pol Pot’s grave in Anlong Veng, near the Thai border. The site is maintained by the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism. Photograph by Elena Lesley. •

Throughout the 1980s Cold War era, China and much of the free world continued to support a re-packaged Khmer Rouge coalition force as a means of weakening Vietnam and its ally, the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until 1997 that Hun Sen requested UN assistance in creating a Khmer Rouge tribunal, some say to delegitimize the country’s ongoing Khmer Rouge insurgency. When the guerilla movement essentially died the following year, along with Pol Pot, Hun Sen began to insist that putting former Khmer Rouge leaders on trial would jeopardize the country’s fragile peace. The international community continued to push for a court and, after years of negotiations, the tribunal began its work in earnest around two years ago. Since then, five former leaders have been taken into custody and the first trials are expected to start in late September. Still, given that most of the defendants are in their seventies and eighties, any justice meted out by the court will be largely symbolic.

That doesn’t bother the tribunal’s supporters, who believe a verdict on the Khmer Rouge period must be rendered before Cambodia can truly advance. For years, former Khmers Rouge have lived freely in the country, often side by side with those they persecuted. The country’s lack of historical accountability has created a lawless society, where rampant land grabbing forces the poor off of their newly valuable property and justice always has a price tag.

When I first came to Cambodia as a journalist in 2004, I saw the Khmer Rouge’s insidious legacy everywhere. In the twisted faces of beggars who had been permanently disfigured through contract acid attacks. Amid the ‘broken girls’ who turned tricks on Phnom Penh’s crumbling boulevards and the street children who huffed glue from dirty plastic bags. When a bright young student I knew was killed over a romantic dispute, I tried to find a way to write about it for my newspaper. The twenty-two-year-old had been gunned down in front of a popular nightclub, surrounded by witnesses, but because the triggerman was the son of a powerful official no one was ever arrested. After struggling with several potential angles for a story, I finally had to accept the fact that in Cambodia, the student’s death was not newsworthy. He was just another casualty of what scholars have come to call the country’s ‘culture of impunity’.

I returned to Cambodia this spring to write about the Khmer Rouge tribunal. While the society’s dark undercurrents continued to haunt me, even after I left the country, the warmth and resilience of its people had an equally profound impact. Through improving coverage of the tribunal, I hoped to play a small role in the country’s recovery, to help Cambodians confront and exorcise the demons of their recent history.

After a three-year hiatus, I found the country greatly changed, at least superficially. Cambodia’s first suburban developments (cookie-cutter mansions with reflective glass and neocolonial flourishes) are under construction outside of Phnom Penh. Several skyscrapers, including a gleaming gold-coloured tower, are planned for the downtown area. Yet the country’s feeble infrastructure can’t accommodate this scale of development, and the huge strain of such vanity projects frequently plunges much of the city into blackouts.

As Cambodia’s growth accelerates, so too does the disparity between the tiny elite and the impoverished masses. Impunity is endemic. Weeks before July’s national elections, an opposition-aligned newspaper journalist and his adult son were shot to death in the middle of a busy Phnom Penh street. Witnesses said the gunmen, who rode on a motorbike, made no effort to conceal their identities and even circled back to make sure they had hit their target. It was a brazen act. Yet there are no suspects in custody and little hope among Phnom Penh’s beleaguered journalists that the killers will ever be punished.

• A statue of Khmer guardian spirit Lokta Dambang Dek (Lord of the Iron Staff) stands outside the Khmer Rouge tribunal. In legends, the spirit is an all-seeing and all-knowing witness, an administrator of justice. Photograph by Elena Lesley. •

Change is not on the horizon. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won a landslide victory in the national elections, amid accusations of voter fraud and observer assessments that the polls ‘failed to meet international standards’. Most Cambodians have never experienced a truly democratic society and cannot imagine government institutions free of rampant corruption. Khmer Rouge survivors like Youk Chhang, who has devoted much of his life to cataloguing the regime’s crimes as head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, believe the tribunal can be a turning point for the entire country, setting a new precedent for the notoriously corrupt judiciary and ultimately creating a more accountable society.

‘I want justice for the future, not for us,’ says Chhang. In his Phnom Penh office, surrounded by boxes of books, newspapers and archived documents, he describes how the Khmer Rouge cut open his sister’s stomach after she was accused of eating stolen rice and, thus, trying to sabotage the revolution. The survivors ‘are too broken and divided,’ Chhang says, ‘no one can compensate what the victims lost. But we need to leave a legacy for the country’.

That can only be achieved if those in custody actually face trial. And given their frail health and the glacial pace of the law, many Cambodians worry the defendants may yet elude justice.

‘The court moves too slowly. It needs to move fast, before the defendants die,’ Chit Leang tells me, lowering his voice and glancing nervously toward his neighbour’s house. ‘There are no words to say how angry I am. I want to know why they killed their own people. I want answers.’ Chit wishes he could travel to see the court himself, but the daylong trip to Phnom Penh isn’t practical. He has a restaurant to run.

If he could go, I am not sure how worthwhile he would find the experience. Although a tribunal lacking outreach and education will be meaningless, sometimes I think that the process underway is too abstract, too disconnected from everyday life in today’s Cambodia. A sleek, new complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, populated by international lawyers and judges who seem plucked from their homelands – robes, wigs and all – and deposited on this strange judicial island, the tribunal could not be more foreign to people like Chit. It was not designed to be accessible, physically or conceptually, to average Cambodians.

And yet, they come.

From the tribunal’s dusty parking lot, I watch survivors arrive for the pre-trial hearing of Ieng Sary, whose Foreign Ministry underwent a series of radical purges during the Khmer Rouge period. Organized and transported by various NGOs, the old men and women stream out of their buses. Most are peasants, with rough hands and wide feet, and they’ve dressed as if they were going to the pagoda – probably the only opportunity for formal wear in their home villages. The men seem a little uncomfortable in their button-down shirts, slacks and flip-flops; women are wrapped in long traditional skirts paired with sparkly, handmade tops.

Once they pass through parking lot security, they shuffle along a covered walkway that leads to the central court building. To the left, across a small field and past the wall looped with razor wire, they can see the yellow villa where the five defendants are kept. The court itself is impressive, but sterile.

The survivors settle into their seats. They watch as a man enters the courtroom from a side door, bowed over a cane, his free hand gripping a security guard for support. Thick spectacles, a hairline receded to the back of his head, Ieng Sary is the very picture of infirmity. He stares straight ahead, expressionless.

The scene unfolds in what looks like a giant fishbowl. A long, curved glass panel separates actual courtroom actors – Sary, the lawyers and judges – from those observing the process. In the front rows of the audience section are court staff and students. With their stylish haircuts and smart professional attire, they remind me of the young men and women I often see after work at the new Lucky Seven fast food restaurant, members of the country’s burgeoning middle class sharing gossip and study tips over gelato.

Just a few rows behind them, the Khmer Rouge survivors seem to occupy a different space and time. Men and women with deeply grooved faces, their eyes betray an expression I have seen too often in Cambodia. It’s a look I saw in Chit Leang, a glassy and disconnected gaze so unsettling it makes me want to turn away.

When the court breaks for lunch, observers discuss their plans for the afternoon. Having found the morning’s proceedings hard to follow, many confess they won’t be returning for a similarly tedious afternoon session; I worry that their time at the court had little impact. Until an overheard exchange gives me hope.

‘Are you going to come back for the rest of Sary’s hearing?’ an aid worker asks one of the departing men.

He pauses to think. ‘I’ve seen his face,’ he answers triumphantly. ‘That’s enough.’

Life and death in Anlong Veng, the former KR stronghold

Cambodian labourers pulling a cart-load of Thai goods in Anlong Veng. (Photo: AP)
Sieng Kim Chean, a 40-year-old Cambodian villager, pointing to the grave of the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold, about 305km north of Phnom Penh. (Photo: AP)
Incense stick holders stand at the grave of the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. (Photo: AP)

Khmer-Thai Border Disputes in Anlong Veng

Radio Free Asia, 8th November 2007
By Sav Yuth
Translated from Khmer by Khmerization

Khmer border guards in the Dangrek Ranges who are guarding the Chorm Sa-Ngarm border pass in Anlong Veng, Banteay Meanchey province which borders Phu-Sing district in Thailand's Sisaket province have reported that the black-clad Thai soldiers had sent a letter to them asking them to stop the construction of a concrete fence on the Khmer side of the border. Those border guards have also claimed that recently those black-clad soldiers had crossed into Cambodian side of the border to prevent Khmer soldiers from constructing a border outpost.

Vice-chairman of the Khmer Border Committee in charge of relations with the Thai Border Committee, Major Touch Var, has said on Thursday morning of the 8th of November that the Thai Border Committee had sent a letter on the 6th of November asking the Khmer land owner to stop building a 60 metres concrete fence on his land which is located on the Cambodian side of the border.

And ten days before heavily armed Thai black-clad soldiers had crossed into the Cambodian side of the border to stop the Khmer soldiers from constructing a border outpost by claiming that the area is sitting on the border line which has not been clearly demarcated yet.

Major Touch Var has said that:" They have sent a letter to us two days ago requesting us to suspend the construction of a concrete fence on the eastern side of the casino which is located parallel to the demining site which was also prohibited by the Thai side. Earlier we have converted our border outpost from a tent building to a building with a corrugated iron roof but the Thai side have prevented us from doing so".

A Cambodian border officer who spoke on condition of anonimity has reacted with accusations that those Thai soldiers had intended to cause a border crisis by violating the maps agreed by both the Cambodian and Thai border committees.

This same anonimous officer said that:" The Cambodian and Thai border committees have agreed to use the 1907 maps with the 1,200 scales. Everyday the Thai has been using the 150 scales American maps which are produced/drawn once every 5 years which we did not agree with, even if they say that their land is deep inside Anlong Veng we couldn't careless".

However, this Thursday Radio Free Asia is unable to seek any comment from the Thai Border Committee or from any officials of the Thai embassy in Cambodia.

Mr. Var Kim Hong, chairman of the Cambodian Border Committee has commented that he has not yet received any information about this issue and therefore he is unable to comment about it. Mr. Var said that:" I cannot confirm about this issue because I have not yet received any information regarding this issue".

The Khmer border guards have said that in the last 3 months the border disputations had occured 4 times, with the Thai black-clad soldiers crossing into the Cambodian side to stop the deminer Halo Trust from clearing land mines in that area.

On 10th of October the Thai soldiers have crossed the border to prevent the building of a petrol station and 10 days ago the Thai black-clad soldiers have crossed the border to prevent the Khmer side from constructing a border outpost in the areas which the Khmer border guards claimed that the areas are located on the Khmer side of the border.