Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER TWELVE
UNTAC Redux
The man in the hammock swung gently back and forth, one leg dangling free. On a nearby
chair lay a pouch of tobacco and a book of Buddhist sutras. Above, a straw roof provided
protection from the hot afternoon, silent except for a faint strain of music coming from
a transistor radio somewhere nearby. The old man stirred slowly and sat up. He was in
his early seventies, with thinning ash-grey hair and a creased brow. As he shook himself
awake, a young man brought him a pair of dark green trousers. He dressed and settled back
down in his hammock, taking a pinch of tobacco and rolling it into a stubby facsimile of a
cigarette. Then he began to talk.
Ta Sanh Cheung village was a peaceful place. The fields all around blazed emerald
green, with wooden stilt-houses sitting in groves of banana trees. At a dusty village junc-
tion was a large illustration of a man prying apart an old rocket—a warning against dis-
mantling the unexploded remnants of war that still litter this pocket of western Cambodia.
Now and then a child passed unsteadily on a bicycle. In front of small shacks stood racks
of old Coca-Cola bottles filled with gasoline, dyed yellow, red, candy-green.
To all appearances, the old man napping away the afternoon grew rice or maize, like
most families in Ta Sanh Cheung. But Meas Muth was no ordinary peasant. When the Kh-
mer Rouge movement capitulated in the late 1990s, he was one of the last commanders to
give up the fight. When I met him in 2011, Muth's name had just appeared on documents
leaked from the UN-backed tribunal set up in 2006 to try surviving leaders of the Khmer
Rouge. Prosecutors described him as a harsh leader who had a hand in killings and purges,
and recommended he be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
Muth's home stood in a quiet corner of the village, a lavish residence by local standards,
topped with satellite dishes and blue ceramic tiles. After his defection in December 1998,
Muth became a two-star general in the Cambodian army. To the local farmers, many of
them grizzled former Khmer Rouge fighters, he became a sort of revered Buddhist patri-
arch, constructing a new pagoda—a wooden structure with blue shutters and painted
naga
statues—and showering local residents with advice about matters both agricultural and
