A Fortune-Teller Told Me (44 page)

“Yes. My cousin,” replied Leopold. The colonel stood to attention and gave him a smart salute, as if my friend had himself been one of the glorious dead in that battle and one of the Legion’s heroes.

He invited us to breakfast, and after a little while he asked us the obvious question: why had we arrived by ship? I told my story, and the colonel observed: “Too bad you weren’t on that helicopter in Siem Reap. The fortune-teller told you: ‘If you survive an air accident in 1993’ … Well, then! You should have been in that accident and survived. That way you’d be sure now of living to the age of eighty-four.” He found it very amusing that I had not thought of it before.

He advised us to leave soon for Phnom Penh, as the ambushes usually occurred in the early afternoon. He let us take an interpreter with
us, an old Vietnamese whom we had already met at the market and who spoke Chinese, Khmer, English and French. He was a survivor, and had plied his trade as an informer for all the past regimes (except perhaps that of Pol Pot). The Legion gave him $50 a month to make a daily report on the rumors circulating in town. Often, he told us, the report consisted of just three letters: R.A.S.,
rien à signaler
(nothing to report).

The old spy was a great help. He found a car with a driver willing to take us to Phnom Penh. For miles and miles the road was deserted, without a single car coming the other way. We sped past the carcasses of cars that had been ambushed. The heat created mirages in the distance, and at times it really seemed that tree trunks had been laid across the road a few hundred yards ahead, and that armed men were moving about. Our silence was a sign of the fear that each of us kept to himself.

On reaching the outskirts of Phnom Penh we all drew a sigh of relief. “Mission accomplished: R.A.S.,” said the Vietnamese spy. We burst out laughing.

As we drove past the airport I saw the Thai Airlines plane that flies daily between Bangkok and Phnom Penh coming in to land. I had an idea. Telling the driver to park the car, I took my passport and Leopold’s, and went into the airport. With an air of some importance, waving a UN pass that had expired months before, I mixed with the passengers queuing up at the counter where entry visas were being handed out for $20 a time. I filled in the forms, signed for myself and for Leopold, paid the fee and presented myself at the immigration window.

“And this one?” asked the policeman.

“It’s my friend’s passport. There he is over there, looking after the luggage,” I said, pointing at the crowd. Thump … thump. Two stamps, and in no time I was outside.

And that was how, on May 20, 1993, I arrived in Phnom Penh from Bangkok—officially by plane.

I
n Cambodia I never slept well. There was something in the air, something that haunted me in the silence of night, that hovered around me, that made me stay on guard, and never let me sink into a deep slumber. When I did drop off, it was for a brief, light nap, from which I kept waking to feel that presence again. During the war this had never happened to me. It began when I returned there shortly after the fall of Pol Pot.

What had happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime defies any fantasy of horror—it was more frightful than anything a man could imagine. The whole society was turned upside down, cities were abandoned, pagodas destroyed, religion abolished, and people regularly massacred in a continuous purificatory orgy. A million and a half, perhaps two million Cambodians, a third of the population, were eliminated. I looked for those I had known and found no one. They had all ended up as “manure for the fields”—because, as the Khmer Rouge said, even the “counterrevolutionaries,” or at least their corpses, must serve some purpose.

I traveled for a month through a tortured land, collecting eyewitness accounts of that folly. The people were so terrorized, so stunned by horror, that often they could not tell me about it, or did not want to. In the countryside I was shown the “collection centers for the elimination of enemies”—usually former schools—where the traces of torture could still be seen. I saw wells from which you could no longer drink because they were filled with the dead, rice fields where you could not walk without treading on the bones of those who had been clubbed to death on the spot in order to save bullets.

Everywhere new mass graves were being found. There were survivors who could not bring themselves to get on a boat since they had seen
their relatives taken to the middle of a lake and fed to the crocodiles. Others could not climb a tree, because the Khmer Rouge had used trees to test their victims and decide who should live and who should die. Those who could reach the top were considered peasants, who could be employed; the others were intellectuals, to be eliminated.

Since that time Cambodia has never been the same again; the marks of that suffering were everywhere, and the invisible weight of pain which had built up during the four years of Pol Pot filled the air, made every silence oppressive and every night sleepless. Even I could no longer hear the voice of the gecko, the speaking lizard, without counting its cries and asking, as with the petals of a daisy, “Will I die? … I won’t die … Will I die?” I could no longer see a row of palm trees without thinking that the tallest were those most fertilized with corpses. In Cambodia even nature had lost its comforting innocence.

Leopold and I stayed at the Monorom Hotel in the center of Phnom Penh. It was hard to find a room. The city was invaded by foreigners: soldiers, bureaucrats, experts in this or that, journalists. After years of ignoring the tragedy of Cambodia, at last the international community had intervened on a massive scale. Not, of course, to punish the murderers or to restore order and a minimum of decency in life. To do that was “politically impossible”: China, which had always supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was not willing to abandon its protégés. And so, for little Cambodia, the “Great Powers” had found one of those solutions that serve to justify any immorality: a compromise. With the Paris Agreements, signed with great pomp in 1991, the massacres were forgotten, executioners and victims were put on the same level, the combatants on both sides were asked to lay down their arms, and their chiefs to stand for election. May the best man win! As if Cambodia in 1993 were the Athens of Pericles.

By the time I had been in Phnom Penh for a few days, I had the impression I was watching a colossal show of folly. In a palace of the 1930s, once the residence of the French governor, the United Nations Transitory Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) had set up its general headquarters. Every day, standing on a beautiful terrace, a young Frenchman issued information and instructions to the five hundred
journalists who had come from all over the world to witness “the first democratic elections in the history of Cambodia.” An American explained that it was forbidden to photograph voters at the ballot boxes or to ask them who they had voted for as they left the polling station.

On the upper floors, in small offices carved out of the large halls of former times, were other international officials, lawyers and judges borrowed from various countries, and university professors on contract to the UN. They sat at their computers and drew plans for the development and modernization of the country. They drafted a new constitution, wrote laws for the reorganization of the customs services and prepared regulations for the restructuring of the school system and the efficient functioning of hospitals. To hear them talk, one would believe that this was a unique opportunity for Cambodia to get back on its feet, to become a normal country again. The whole world was there to help it.

And on paper that was true. The United Nations had been in Cambodia for more than a year, with a force of twenty-two thousand military and civilian personnel and with $2.5 billion to spend. The trouble was that with all those people and all that money, the UN had not managed to accomplish what the Paris Agreements had defined as the first step in the peace process: to disarm the combatants. The Khmer Rouge had categorically refused to lay down their arms. They carried on ambushing and killing, while their formal chief, Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s number two, the man who had rationalized genocide, went on living in Phnom Penh and meeting UN representatives and Western ambassadors who all shook his hand and called him “Your Excellency.”

But the international community could not accept defeat. The object of the whole exercise was the elections. Let there be elections then! Even if all the premises were lacking. The important thing, said the diplomats, was to get the economy started again, to begin the peace process. Surely the Khmer Rouge would join in sooner or later.

The “international community”—a motley crowd of people of all colors, sizes and languages—seemed to have only one common interest: to receive their daily expenses of $150, what an average Cambodian earned in a year. My impression was that they all wanted to stay in Cambodia at the cost of any compromise. The fate of the Cambodians was not the great priority. For the UN it was to bring their intervention
in Cambodia to a satisfactory conclusion so they could go and repeat the operation somewhere else.

But the United Nations, who were they? To judge by the news on the portable radio which I always have with me, the whole world was now in the hands of this omnipresent, wise and just government. The United Nations were in Cambodia, the United Nations had something to say about Iraq, they were going to intervene in the former Yugoslavia and in Africa. They were the first item in every news bulletin.

Then I went outside, onto the streets of Phnom Penh, and the United Nations were Indonesian soldiers (those responsible for the massacre of Dili on the island of Timor) and Thai soldiers (those who had shot at unarmed crowds in the center of Bangkok) and policemen from various African dictatorships. All of them with blue berets on their heads, bearers of democracy and respect for human rights.

There was one thing the United Nations had achieved: their presence had restored business confidence. House prices in Phnom Penh were as high as in New York, and everywhere new hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and brothels were opening. The peace process had reintroduced that logic of the market economy which knows no principle but that of profit. In the course of a few months Cambodia had become a center for speculators, mostly Chinese from Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Thanks to the widespread corruption in the local administrative apparatus, they had laid hands on the country’s natural resources and its shadiest traffic, from expired medicines to smuggled cars and precious stones. One businessman—an American this time—was trying to bury in Cambodia the nuclear waste that no other country would touch.

Everywhere big new billboards had appeared: “Angkor: The Pride of the Nation.” An invitation to visit the temples? Not at all! A new beer. The brewery that made it was financed by the only foreign investment in the industrial sector. Perhaps beer was not what the Cambodians needed most at that juncture, but the economy had its own logic. Like nature. After years and years of wars and massacres, life was returning to triumph over death, but it was doing so in the cruelest and most primitive way: the law of the jungle.

On the pavements of Phnom Penh bands of dirty, famished women and children went about begging. On the increase, too, were the numbers
of shiny brand-new Mercedeses, with smoked-glass windows at which those wretches vainly tapped with their bony fingers. Peace was rapidly re-creating two Cambodias: that of the rich few and that of the poor many; that of the cities and that of the countryside. The situation of the past, the situation that Pol Pot had exploited, was repeating itself. His theory was that the city is corrupt, rotten, and cannot be saved. The only solution is to abandon it and start again from scratch, to return, as he said, to “the purity of the grain of rice.” According to Pol Pot everything that had come from abroad had bastardized and weakened the Khmers, the true Cambodians. To return to the greatness of Angkor meant cutting all links with the outside world and expunging any foreign presence. Hence the decision to blow up the central bank, leaving wads of dollars fluttering about in the wind; hence the demolition, stone by stone, of the Catholic cathedral; hence the evacuation of cities, symbols of the modernity so detested by the Khmer Rouge.

And now just look at Phnom Penh! Alive and corrupt, risen from the ashes. Seen from the peasants’ huts, still infested with mosquitoes and malaria, the city again seemed something to be eliminated, purged; and there were already those, especially among the young, who wanted Pol Pot to return. What was this but madness?

But was it not equally mad of the United Nations to think they could solve the whole Cambodian problem at a stroke with some elections? And were not these officials mad who imagined that with their computers, with new laws and new programs and plenty of goodwill, they could, almost like Pol Pot, remake Cambodia?

If the international community had wanted to do something for the Cambodian people, it should have put them under a bell jar for a generation and protected them from their hostile neighbors, the Thais and the Vietnamese, and from the rapacious businessmen who had descended on the country like locusts. It should have helped them first and foremost to live in peace, to rediscover themselves. And then, perhaps, it might have asked them if they preferred a monarchy or a republic, if they preferred the Party of the Cow or the Party of the Snake. Instead of sending experts in constitutional law, economics and communications, the UN should have sent a team of psychoanalysts and psychologists to deal with the ghastly trauma which this people has suffered.