A ceremonial horse at Angkor Wat in the complex in Siem Reap. Photograph: Emma Hardy |
Nicholas Shakespeare returns to the scene of a childhood trauma.
21 February 2013
By Nicholas Shakespeare
NewStateman
Sihanouk’s sanction opened the door for Pol Pot and his deranged regime to “govern” Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Along the way, they put to death a third of the population. Among the 1.8 million casualties was our gardener Hem.
For those curious to observe a demigod in the flesh, the body of Norodom
Sihanouk lay on display in Phnom Penh until 4 February, when it was
cremated. The outpouring of grief at the passing of Cambodia’s “King
Father”, who ruled the country after its independence from France in
1953, brought hundreds of thousands of mourners on to the streets, some
discerning his protean features in the rising half-moon.
The Guinness Book of Records nominated Sihanouk during his phase on earth as the politician who had held more official positions and titles than anyone.
After his death on 15 October 2012, at the age of 89, television
stations made continuous broadcasts of historic footage of Sihanouk from
the 1960s, when he dominated Cambodia as its prince, prime minister and
head of state. This was the period, now regarded by many as a golden
age, when the saying that “Sihanouk is Cambodia” was perhaps truest.
It was also the time when my family lived there – until Sihanouk chucked us out. In
March 1964, in an act of petulant frustration, he ordered a mob to
attack the British embassy, where my father, John Shakespeare, worked as
a diplomat. In an incident largely unreported at the time, given that western journalists were banned from Phnom Penh, the
chancery offices were ransacked, eight cars were destroyed, the
apartment of the head of the British Council was burned down, and the
large freezer in which embassy staff kept sausages was raided. “Rocks
and bricks came smashing through the windows and, most terrifying of
all, frozen legs of lamb,” my father remembers.
Sihanouk was furious at the British government for buckling under
American pressure and impeding his cherished plan for an international
conference to preserve Cambodia’s neutrality. Desperate to keep his
country out of the Vietnam war, and so, in effect, out of both communist
and capitalist clutches, he had hoped that Britain would reconvene the
Geneva conference in April 1964 to guarantee Cambodian independence.
Britain at first agreed to do this, then reneged.
In a characteristic gesture, he exempted my father – who next day was
standing in the still-smouldering embassy compound when Sihanouk
delivered to him a pre-dated gift of hideous silverware. Attached was a
letter from “Monseigneur”, as Sihanouk was also known, paying tribute to
my father’s “obvious capacity to approach complex Asian problems with
an open mind”.
Only a few days before the trashing of the embassy, Sihanouk had invited
my father to join his small entourage on a private “peace mission” to
Malaysia and Indonesia. What my father remembers vividly about their
week together was not the military band that welcomed Sihanouk by
striking up one of his compositions for saxophone, “Brise de Novembre”;
nor the valet who was detailed to brush the divine dandruff from the
royal collar; nor Sihanouk’s scathing remarks about President Sukarno’s
weakness for women; nor even his sexual confidences – “I, too, have made love in my time”. The image that lingered instead was that of the
aide-de-camp who followed Sihanouk wherever he went, holding a silver
casket that contained the ashes of the prince’s favourite daughter.
Cambodia is a country where it is believed that the spirits – royal ones
especially – live on. The spirit of his four-year-old daughter Kantha
Bopha, who had died of leukaemia in 1952, tracked the King Father in the
way that he is likely to go on haunting his successors.
+++
No one shaped Cambodia’s character and destiny more flamboyantly than
the saxophone-playing, film-directing Playboy Prince. As Sihanouk joked
to my father, he had “played” until ten years earlier – until Cambodia’s
independence – because the French would not let him work. “But now I
work all the time, as you can confirm to your government.”
We swiftly discovered, fleeing with our belongings to the Thai border, that Sihanouk’s friendly grin concealed a vein of ruthlessness. “We can smile,” he said of his people, “but we can also kill.”
A general in the French colonial army told my father that the
Cambodians were by far the bravest and most brutal of his troops, and
Sihanouk had ambitions to be seen in this light. Weeks after we left, he ordered the execution of a dissident supported by South Vietnam to be filmed and projected in all cinemas.
Further, in his overriding project to keep the country out of the
Vietnam war, he started to treat Cambodia like one of his movies.
Starting roughly from the time of our departure, the idea of making
films consumed him to the exclusion of other responsibilities. His
biographer Milton Osborne judged that this obsession with cinema, which
resulted in the Phnom Penh International Film Festival (in which
Sihanouk’s entry routinely won first prize), had “real political
consequences”, as it allowed his US-backed, bombastic prime minister
(and, incidentally, our landlord) General Lon Nol to manoeuvre himself
into power while Sihanouk’s attention was diverted and created the
conditions for Cambodia’s ensuing catastrophe.
A trivial and little-known episode ignited this film mania. His mob had
attacked the British embassy a week after Peter O’Toole finished
shooting Lord Jim near Angkor Wat. Charles Meyer, a mysterious Frenchman
who had accompanied my father as part of Sihanouk’s entourage, appeared
on location one day and “darkly advised” the director, Richard Brooks, to get his company out of Cambodia by 12 March.
O’Toole was convinced that some of the rioters had worked as extras in
the film. In America soon afterwards, O’Toole sounded off on The Tonight
Show and in Life magazine, complaining how he and his wife had had to
hide in a lavatory and how he had found a snake in his soup. “If I live
to be a thousand,” he said, “I want nothing like Cambodia again. It was a bloody nightmare.”
Back in Phnom Penh, these remarks incensed Sihanouk.
In one of his interminable radio speeches, he denounced O’Toole’s
comments as further evidence that western governments were conspiring
against his country. “Stew made from snake’s meat, scorpions lurking in
boots, the poverty of the people . . . that is the image of Cambodia
current in the four corners of the globe.”
A different image was needed. Faithful to his reputation as the Pioneer
Prince, Sihanouk announced that he had decided to take up the
challenge: “For who is more qualified to provide such a real picture of
present-day Cambodia?”
Incredible to relate, from 1964 until his overthrow in 1970 by the
palindromic Lon Nol, while Sihanouk was on a visit to Moscow to seek
Russian support, Sihanouk directed his best energies, energies that he
ought properly to have devoted to the affairs of his disintegrating
country, into shooting a series of anthologisably bad feature films.
+++
In October last year, in what turned out to be the last fortnight of
Sihanouk’s life, my father and I returned to Phnom Penh for the first
time since our ejection nearly half a century ago. At a retrospective of
the prince’s work at the Bophana Centre, a superb audiovisual and
visual archive founded by a technician who had worked on the movies, we
watched perhaps the most representative of Sihanouk’s nine films, La
Forêt Enchantée. It is dedicated to the memory of Kantha Bopha. A print
had been discovered in the street after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge
regime in 1979, following Cambodia’s invasion by the North Vietnamese,
and sent back to Paris to be digitised. An orgy of nepotism, in which
Sihanouk assumed the roles of director, producer, librettist,
screenwriter, set designer and principal actor, La Forêt Enchantée cast
contemporary Cambodia as a fairy-tale forest kingdom and starred
Sihanouk’s wife Monique, his daughter Bopha Devi, a senior army general,
and the prince himself as a mythical forest spirit.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a Paris-educated Marxist, Pol
Pot, was planning his revolution and showing Sihanouk’s films as
propaganda. My father was educated in Paris at the same time as the
Khmer leader and he recalled how Pol Pot’s movement was reported in its
early days. “In his radio broadcasts, Sihanouk often appealed to his
Khmer brothers in the jungle to come back, so we knew about these
people. He would refer to them like members of a family who had gone
astray, more in sorrow than in anger. “We thought they were a little
band of renegades living in the remote forests. Perhaps that’s all they
were then.”
+++
Many of those who see Sihanouk’s face in the moon believe that he
brought peace to Cambodia: in 1991, after more than two decades of civil
war, he
buried the hatchet with a one-eyed Khmer Rouge battalion commander, Hun
Sen, who had been the country’s de facto ruler since 1985, and still is. But in fact, a
great many others see Sihanouk as largely to blame for the Khmer Rouge
and also responsible for the movement acquiring that name.
After Lon Nol deposed him in 1970, a hysterical and hurt Sihanouk urged
his loyal subjects to flee into the same forest as Pol Pot,
broadcasting to the people from Beijing on 23 March: “Brothers and
sisters, go to the jungle and join the guerrillas.”
Before that critical moment, as a former Khmer Rouge fighter told me: “We did not have even a section.” Sihanouk’s
sanction opened the door for Pol Pot and his deranged regime to
“govern” Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Along the way, they put to
death a third of the population. Among the 1.8 million casualties was
our gardener Hem.
In the past year, four of the Khmer Rouge leaders have been on trial in
Phnom Penh for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. They
included Ieng Thirith, the bespectacled, 80-year-old former minister of
social affairs and sister-in-law of Pol Pot. In the early 1950s, when my
father was a lecturer at the École Normale in Paris, she was studying
Shakespeare at the Sorbonne and translating his plays into Khmer. Just
before we flew back to Phnom Penh, she was released from detention – on
account of Alzheimer’s. Her English lawyer told me that the UN-backed
tribunal’s Cambodian judges initially had difficulty grasping the idea
of Alzheimer’s disease. “They didn’t understand it because, my theory
is, Cambodians didn’t live long enough.” Thirith was among the few
people in her country who had grown old enough to be in the fortunate
position of not remembering what she had done.
So far, the only person who has been convicted for atrocities that
occurred during the Khmer Rouge years is a giggling former mathematics
teacher known as Duch, who ran the Tuol Sleng torture centre at a former
lycée in south Phnom Penh. Eradicating all evidence of bourgeois
individualism, Duch the mathematician and his regime replaced the names
of people, streets and institutions with numbers: Tuol Sleng became
S-21. Duch would examine prisoners’ palms and be surprised to find those
who had a long lifeline. “It’s not true!” he would say. Afterwards, he
would have the prisoners executed – 12,380 of them in total. “Usually we
slit their throats. We killed them like chickens.”
Some were subjected to medical experiments. One of those Duch dissected
alive was the wife of Lon Nol’s minister of education. He also ordered
the executions of his primary school teacher (after she had been
tortured with a stick in her vagina) and his own brother-in-law.
“Whoever was arrested must die, it was the rule of our party. Even
children. No one could leave S-21 alive.” In February last year, he was
sentenced to life imprisonment by the war crimes tribunal.
One rainy morning, we visited Tuol Sleng, where children were dropped
from balconies. “They were killed to prevent them from being a
nuisance,” said a guard, Prak Kahn. Before the prisoners were killed,
they were photographed. Their faces gaze out from a wall in what is now a
holocaust museum, beneath a sign forbidding visitors to laugh.
These children were the age I was when I lived in Phnom Penh and took my
first history lessons at the Lycée Descartes, sitting in a classroom,
possibly at the same slanted wooden desk, where several pupils who grew
up to become leading members of the Khmer Rouge had sat.
Suddenly each face was looking at me, staring out over dark collars in
the way only children can do, in the way that Kantha Bopha may have
gazed at Sihanouk, in chastising innocence and bewilderment, as if
saying: “Why did you leave us to die?”
Seated outside in the courtyard behind a table piled with histories of
this period was one of only two living survivors of S-21. Chum Mey was a
small husk of a man who has recited his story almost daily since 1989. I
asked him to show me his former ground-floor cell in the building
behind. He led the way across the rain-spattered tarmac – from the back,
a clerk or an accountant; fine white hair, buttoned yellow shirt,
watery brown eyes drained of expression – and into a classroom with a
floor of the original orange and cream tiles, on the wall the remnants
of a slogan (“If we join together we will be stronger”).
The room was divided down the middle by two rows of crude brick cells.
Number 22 was one metre wide, two metres long, and identical to every
other. Chum Mey pointed at the metal bullet case on the floor – his
toilet. He could not talk to others in the cells, though he heard their
cries. He could not look out of the window, now open, into the courtyard
planted with frangipani trees. “I could not see the leaf of a tree or a
bird.” A smile blurred his face. When it subsided, it left all that had
sunk to the bottom poking up.
Chum Mey was interrogated and tortured for 12 days, obliged to confess
that he worked for the KGB or the CIA, even though he never knew what
the names meant. If he complained or made a noise or moaned, he was
taken out to the interrogation room and tortured again. He showed me his
hands, the fingers broken, then stooped down to his feet to indicate
the toenails that had been ripped out (in some cases the mashed hands or
toes were plunged into buckets of urine). Then he pointed to his ears,
into which Duch’s men inserted an electric wire, and he said, “Buk,
buk,” and his body shook and his eyes rolled white and he tapped his
forehead in a gesture to indicate that he blanked out. But he was glad
the Europeans were making the UN tribunal happen, because at last he
could speak openly after many years when he couldn’t. His wife was shot
dead with their newly born son in the final days, as he ran to escape
from S-21 guards and found her on National Road 4. Her last words to him
were: “Run, baby! They’re going to shoot me.”
+++
One evening my father and I had dinner beside the Tonlé Sap, the only
river in the world that completely changes direction, twice each year.
Punctual as blossom at the end of the rainy season in November, the grey
waters start flowing the other way – rather like the shifting political
views of Sihanouk and his successors.
What it shocked us to discover was that some of the
same people who out of extreme Maoist views abolished currency and
schools and expelled Phnom Penh’s population, including our gardener,
into the countryside were the ones still in power under Hun Sen; and that they continue to drive Cambodians from their land, only now in the name of no ideology other than profit.
The bulk of Sihanouk’s enchanted forest – the priceless rosewoods and
yellow vine – had been logged and flogged. And not only the forests: a
young Cambodian working for Oxfam told us that, since 1998, when the
Khmer Rouge finally laid down their arms, 700,000 people had been
dispossessed and 63
per cent of the arable land sold off to private companies, many of them
owned by Cambodia’s old enemies, the Thais and the Vietnamese.
“My country,” he said, “is like an old and dilapidated house, newly painted on the outside – but go inside and you see it’s going to break down very soon. Democracy is only a shadow, a black shadow.”
I spent two days visiting the shacks of Cambodians forcibly thrown out
of Phnom Penh to make way for shopping malls on land suddenly claimed by
Hun Sen and his cronies. Senator Lao Meng Khin, for instance, purchased
Boeung Kak, the biggest lake in Phnom Penh, and the land around it
without public consultation or access to information about the lease or
what he paid for it (a rumoured $79m). Four thousand, two hundred and
seventy families had been removed from around the now filled-in lake.
When they protested, 15 women were arrested and imprisoned. One of the
women showed me an effigy that she created to represent Hun Sen and his
government, the figure dressed as Pol Pot but with dollars spewing from
his straw head. She said with contempt: “They take our land, they evict
us, they lose us our livelihoods, they put us in jail. They are the same
as Pol Pot, but they need the money.”
In June 2006, another 1,367 families were uprooted and dumped in an open
field in Andong, 22 kilometres away. They had received “not one grain
of rice” in compensation. The government was yet to provide electricity,
medical facilities, sanitation. “You see that field?” said an old lady,
and angrily pointed her finger. “That’s everyone’s toilet.”
If Andong painted a pestilential picture of what happens to people who
are uprooted from their native soil, the village of KrangLa Hong offered
a grain of hope. Thanks to NGOs such as Oxfam and Licadho, the village
chief had learned his legal and human rights, and how to mobilise his
community. When a quarrying company laid claim to the local forest and
came one night with armed men to cut down the trees, Nhann Kong and 50
villagers confronted the bulldozers and demanded to see a valid
document. Not only did Kong save his forest, but he introduced
rice-growing practices that, in three years, revolutionised conditions
in his village and six others besides. By planting rice shoots singly
instead of clumps of ten – the habit in Cambodia for at least a thousand
years – Nhann Kong increased his yield twofold.
His family no longer goes hungry for three months of the year, and he
can sell the surplus. Standing in his kitchen beneath a surprisingly
bright light – fuelled, like his gas ring, by manure from his cow – he
told me how, with the money from his rice, he had been able to buy
concrete for his house, a motorbike, and education for his children.
+++
At the end of our visit we returned to Angkor. We had stopped off
briefly on our flight to the border. Lying in the heart of Sihanouk’s
enchanted forest, the 10th- to 13th-century temple complex provided his
most extravagant film set. He was not alone in drawing inspiration from
the ruthless Khmer rulers who built it – at who knows what human cost.
Pol Pot and Hun Sen, too, invoked them.
Angkor was both impressive and unsettling. Visiting in the 1920s, the
French poet-diplomat Paul Claudel found it “one of the most accursed . .
. evil places that I know”. As we wandered again along the Terrace of
the Leper King, I thought of the words of an exasperated forestry expert
who since 1996 has monitored the government’s involvement with illegal
logging: “The problem with the Khmer Rouge was not the ‘Rouge’.”
Ever-changing and all-promising, Norodom Sihanouk incarnated the spirit
of his great Khmer forebears.
In the final week of his life, on our last morning in Cambodia, I
climbed with my father up the steep steps of the Bayon Temple, where the
gigantic face of a divine ruler is carved into all four sides of each
tower. It stares out in every direction, as if broadcasting the line
that Sihanouk said about himself, best read to a tune by Édith Piaf.
“I’ve experienced everything, won everything, lost everything, I’ve seen
wrong, seen everything too soon, I didn’t see the dagger in my back,
I’ve made mistakes, I have often lied, I told the truth a lot, too
much.”
Nicholas Shakespeare’s most recent novel is “Inheritance” (Vintage, £7.99)
0 comments:
Post a Comment