Waking up in a b a c k s t r e e t guesthouse run by Cambodian gangsters wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. One of their number – a small, heavily tattooed teenager – knocked on my door at 8am to ask if I wanted any breakfast.
To my surprise, they turned out to be pretty decent cooks. While I was eating in the guesthouse’s modest café, another of the lads approached and introduced himself as Jay. He offered to take me on a sightseeing tour of Siem Riep and the Angkor Wat ruins. Angkor Wat was very much on my to-do list. The sprawling, ornate ruined complex hacked out of the jungle once served as the administrative and religious centre of the Khmer empire that controlled most of southeast Asia, and for sheer visual impact was said to only be rivalled by India’s Taj Mahal and Peru’s Machu Picchu.
First, though, I wanted to check out another stop on the tourist trail Jay suggested – the Siem Reip war museum. I had read quite a lot about the conflict that ripped across Cambodia from the early ’70s to the mid-’90s, and in particular the role of the infamous Khmer Rouge.
The bloodyminded, ultra-communist group gathered support among Cambodia’s rural poor amid the fury generated by the USA’s bombing of the country as part of its war in neighbouring Vietnam. The Americans backed the corrupt, ineffectual Lon Nol regime that was in power at the time, and the Khmer Rouge (KR) – buoyed by swelled ranks and weapons from Vietnam, Russia and China – toppled Lon Nol’s forces and captured the capital Phnom Penh in 1975.
The KR idealised national self-reliance and a simplistic, classless rural lifestyle. They set about realising their agrarian utopia by forcing all city an town dwellers into the country, where they were pressed into labour camps. What followed was one of the most horrific genocidal massacres in recorded history, as the KR began to see enemies everywhere. They murdered over one million people, with many more succumbing to overwork and lack of food. The KR were eventually run out by the Vietnamese, but the Khmer people very much bare the scars of the terrible period in their recent history.
Jay and I cut across Siem Reip on the back of his moped. Despite the fact that he was a gangster and his crew had been ripping me off ever since I left Bangkok, I couldn’t help but like the guy. He fancied himself as a playboy and he spent most of the journey chatting about the various lonely foreign women he had comforted, some of whom, he said, still sent him money every month. His situation was exactly the same as the scenario in which Thai bargirls cop off with foreign guys who, upon returning home, subsidise their ‘girlfriends’ in the hope it will keep them out of the bars and other men’s clutches – only with the gender roles reversed.
When we reached our destination, what we found was not so much a museum as a battered collection of munitions, arms, tanks and artillery left over from the conflict. Jay waited outside with the moped while Sam, a thirty-something Khmer Rouge survivor, took me around the displays and told me his story.
When he was a small child, practically every member of Sam’s family had been killed by the KR in one way or another, and on several occasions he had witnessed their deaths. “I was too small to pick them up or huthem so I just sat and watched them while they died,” he said.
Sam’s uncle was the only other survivor in his family, and he was determined to spend his life fighting the regime. Sam, still little more than a child, would tag along after him from one battlefield to another. Sam held up his mutilated right hand and explained that when he was 13 he picked up a fuse from a landmine which immediately detonated. He also had a deep scar along the side of his eye from the shrapnel burst. He was lucky to be alive, he said.
The stacks of muddy rocket launchers, stricken artillery pieces and piles of AK47s were interesting, but what Sam had to say added a bit of humanity to the normal, detached curiosity you get when hearing about a distant, nasty event. I felt quite uncomfortable when he encouraged me to pose with various guns that had killed God knows how many people, but I went along with his routine. I did, however, feel quite sorry for the guy – his job was to retell that story and relive those experiences for every punter that walked through the museum gates.
The weapons were rusting away as the country outside attempted to move on from its nightmarish past, but Sam was stuck there among the skeletons, with the war still raging and his family dying around him
