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their operations elsewhere. In early March, the Ministry of Interior dismissed Bundith
from his post and ordered his arrest.
The case should have been clear-cut. Dozens of workers had witnessed the incident and
could testify that Bundith had walked into the crowd and fired at least two shots. (The two
other victims, Kao Near and Nuth Sakhorn, were injured by a single bullet.) But things in
Cambodia are never so simple. While some powerful people wanted to see him punished,
the governor, like many high-ranking government officials, had powerful patrons determ-
ined to shield him from punishment. One of those was Men Sam An, who represented the
province of Svay Rieng in the National Assembly and was the highest ranking woman in
the ruling Cambodian People's Party.
In June 2013, after an acquittal and an appeal, the ex-governor was sentenced to 18
months' jail for “causing unintentional bodily harm”—a paltry charge for the daylight
shooting of three unarmed protestors. But when the verdict was handed down, Bundith
was nowhere to be found. His luxurious two-story villa in Bavet lay empty. He had van-
ished. The police claimed to have no clue about Bundith's whereabouts, even though he
had been sighted several times since his disappearance. “He's staying at Men Sam An's
house in Phnom Penh,” said one police officer in Bavet. “It is not difficult to find him.”
1
But the truth was that the case had reached an equilibrium that suited everybody. The
Cambodian authorities could claim to have punished the Kaoway shooter. And Bundith,
the nowhere man, could disappear—to a realm far beyond the reach of justice.
In the Western mind, Cambodia is nearly synonymous with the terror and mass murder
that engulfed the country in the mid-1970s, when the Khmer Rouge seized power and em-
barked on a radical experiment in communism. Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot,
who dreamt of recreating the glories of Angkor, Cambodia's powerful premodern empire,
the Khmer Rouge set about forging an agrarian arcadia of stark and uncompromising pur-
ity. They emptied the cities, abolished money, banned religion, and put the population
to work in vast labor camps. For almost four years, Cambodia retreated from the world.
By the time “Democratic Kampuchea” collapsed in early 1979, an estimated 1.7 million
Cambodians—about a quarter of the population—had perished and a green land had been
sown with hundreds of mass graves.
Even now, four decades on, the name of this small country still has the power to con-
jure. Cambodia remains an international shorthand for suffering; a hazy land of skulls and
spires; an ancient civilization slipped from glory and sunk, inexplicably, in madness. “I
have a gloomy view of Cambodia,” Henry Kamm once remarked, reflecting on the two
decades he spent covering the country for the
New York Times
. “It is a nation at the end of
years it is finally a country at peace and open to the world. Millions of foreign tourists
