Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
front of the Royal Palace begging for rice, while nearby “the street in front of parliament
was Cambodia's largest parking lot for luxury Mercedes Benz, BMWs, and Landcruis-
ers.”
3
War also cast a long shadow. During two decades of conflict, Cambodia's armed fac-
tions had planted millions of landmines, which continued to extract a bloody toll in rural
areas. As old Khmer Rouge zones opened to the outside world, human rights workers re-
ported discovering isolated villages populated nearly entirely by landmine victims. In the
early 1990s NGOs and government agencies had begun the painstaking work of clearing
the 4-6 million mines thought to infect Cambodia's soil, but thousands of villagers lost
lives and limbs trying to reclaim farms abandoned during wartime. Mines claimed 1,715
casualties in 1998, a terrifying echo of war that failed to discriminate between man or
amputees in the world—around one for every 290 people.
5
Other scars were less visible. Chhim Sotheara, a foreign-trained psychiatrist who began
working among the Cambodian population in the mid-1990s, noticed surprisingly high
levels of depression, anxiety, and psychosis—the typical responses to prolonged trauma.
But he also noticed something else. The nightmare of the Khmer Rouge seemed to have
reinforced the most conservative and deferential strains of Cambodian culture. For many
Cambodians, particularly those in rural areas, Pol Pot's disastrous attempt to overturn a
feudal system only seemed to prove the wisdom of the old codes of conduct, the
chbap
,
which taught them to accept their lot and defer to those with authority. Sotheara would
later coin a phrase for Cambodia's cultural response to trauma. He called it
bak s'bat
, or
“broken courage.” Those who suffer from it “tend to be mute,” he told me, “not speaking,
not hearing, not seeing … They are very respectful of authority, submissive to authority.
They know what is right and wrong, but they dare not stand up.”
This reflexive deference was also encouraged by a political system that provided no
check on the actions of the powerful. On July 6, 1999, the actress Piseth Pelika was shot
three times by unidentified assailants in Phnom Penh and died a week later. The French
newsweekly
L'Express
later reprinted excerpts from what it claimed was Pelika's diary,
alleging that she was Hun Sen's mistress. The publication also claimed that Bun Rany, in
a fit of jealousy, had ordered the shooting of her young rival. Rany denied the claims and
threatened to sue
L'Express
for defamation, but no charges were ever filed. Neither was
there a serious investigation.
6
On December 5, six weeks after
L'Express
published its explosive allegations, the
karaoke singer Tat Marina was eating lunch with her niece at a market stall in Phnom
Penh when a luxury four-wheel drive pulled up nearby. A woman got out of the vehicle,
walked up to Marina, and yanked her to the ground. Along with one of her bodyguards,
she kicked the young woman in the chest until she fell unconscious. As she lay prone,
