When the War Was Over (3 page)

As urbane and clear-sighted as he appeared, Komphot was as blinded as the rest of his fellow educated Cambodians. They had been raised to be naive about war, revolution, and the modern realities of Asia. They had grown up under the coddling, dictatorial rule of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk came to the throne in 1941 and ruled as king or chief of state until 1970. He spun a cocoon of soothing myths and updated legends to protect his people and country from the Indochina War and whatever evils might lurk outside the “paradise” of Cambodia. Sihanouk had inherited a country filled with a sense of doom, a people who were taught by colonialists that their race was threatened by ambitious neighbors, and whose culture had reached a zenith centuries earlier. Because of this version of history and resulting inclinations, Cambodians allowed Sihanouk to provide them “shelter,” to treat them like children hidden away in a tropical garden.

The claim to paradise was not entirely implausible. The small population of Cambodia lived in a country blessed by beauty and possibilities of bounty. Cambodia sits in the lap of peninsular Southeast Asia, and the wide Mekong River flows down its center. There is precision to the country's geography: The small Cardamom mountain chain rises in the west, sapphires and rubies buried in its hills; the navigable blue waters of the Gulf of Siam form the southern boundary; the Tonle Sap or Great Lake fills the northwest and feeds the Tonle Sap River flowing into the Mekong; the low, flat heartland is covered with irrigated rice fields and all varieties of tropical fruit, vegetables, and trees growing in rich delta soil; foothills of the mountains and large
rubber plantations form the northeastern corner; and almost in the middle of the country, where the rivers cross and form an X, sits the capital, Phnom Penh.

Fish from the lake and rivers were plentiful. Cambodia regularly supplied its population more rice per person than any other country in Southeast Asia, even when crops were poor. The landscape remained largely as in medieval times, awash with emerald rice paddies, shaded and dotted by bamboo stands and knots of palm trees. Farmers lived in huts or traditional wooden houses built on stilts for protection from monsoon floods. The pointed spires of pagodas dominated villages and the peasants' lives.

The country even had its own annual miracle. The Tonle Sap River changes its course every August, flowing upstream half the year, downstream the other half—the effect of changes in the water table caused by the heavy monsoon rains and of the respective altitudes of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap.

The Cambodians celebrated this event with a water festival; they had religious holidays to mark most seasonal changes. Their society was old enough to have entwined religion and culture with the country's geography and environment, and their festivals and arts and the details of their daily life are distinctive. Cambodian society was perhaps too rarefied; the French compared the Cambodians in their attachment to their country to delicate wines—they could not travel outside their provenance.

Cambodia, however, did not escape the dark side of the tropics. Disease remained rampant if not carefully monitored; most often it was not. The weather is extreme; long, seemingly endless hot seasons are followed by heavy monsoon rains. The jungle and its beasts always threaten to take back the cultivated terrain. Drought and alternating floods can play havoc with crops.

Portraying himself as the embodiment of Cambodia's supposedly long-held belief that the monarch is a
deva-raj
or god-king, a semidivine ruler with absolute secular power and the benediction of the gods, Sihanouk treated Cambodia as his own paradise. He took it upon himself to design a state to “protect” Cambodia, to keep out unwanted foreign or modern influences that might disrupt the largely rural, Buddhist life in his kingdom. Sihanouk saw independence from France largely as a necessary step to prevent the First Indochina War (1946–1954) from spilling into Cambodia and destroying it forever. Independence, in his view, was not the prelude for bringing Cambodia into the twentieth century. It was insurance that Cambodia could remain an Asian beauty, unspoiled by too much modernity, which could also upset his own power.

Sihanouk resembled an Asian replica of an old European monarch rather than the leader of a third world country aspiring to a place in the modern world. He cherished the pastoral life and the arts while disdaining commerce, industry, and financial enterprise. While Thailand, Malaysia, later Singapore, and even war-torn Vietnam north and south struggled to build modern financial and industrial bases, Cambodia under Sihanouk gradually built industrial projects. The prince preferred to concentrate primarily on education and building an infrastructure of roads, railways, and a seaport, an approach inherited, perhaps unconsciously, from the French colonizers of Cambodia.

The prince believed that “agricultural pursuits ran highest in productivity, while commercial and other service activities are looked upon as more or less parasitic.” Sihanouk disdained neighboring Thailand, where peasants were abandoning their fields to work in new factories and live in city slums, and he discouraged large industrial schemes and foreign commercial ventures that might have attracted Cambodia's villagers to Phnom Penh. To this extent his plan worked—there was little large-scale urban migration during his rule. Phnom Penh remained the only sizable city, with about 10 percent of the population. But as early as the sixties the elite panicked. The parents of Komphot and his friends feared that Cambodia was falling behind both economically and politically

Over three-fourths of the country's population lived in villages. For them the benefits of independence were realized in educational and social improvements that Sihanouk believed would not significantly alter the traditional Buddhist character of village life. To that end the prince put aside one-third of the national budget, an extraordinary proportion. Most developing nations spend from 5 to 10 percent on education. In 1970, the year he was ousted, Sihanouk devoted fully 25 percent.

Cambodia's farm children did become educated. When the country won independence in 1955, only one-third of the children were enrolled in primary schools. By 1970, more than three-fourths were students. The enrollment in high schools rose as dramatically over the same period—from 5,000 to 118,000. The number of teachers increased from 7,000 to 28,000. But what these youths learned was another story. Often their courses had little to do with their future roles as farmers employed in wet rice cultivation. In the most remote rural schoolhouses, teachers used a curriculum patterned on French education in which world history was more European than Asian, and art and culture more French than Khmer. Vocational schools were few. In 1968, there were 7,000 university students enrolled in the country. Only 130 of them were majoring in agriculture. A Frenchman who taught history
in a Cambodian lycée in 1969 explained: “I soon discovered the bewilderment produced by the history courses on these youngsters' minds. . . . World history for them was an obscure struggle, with all great historical contenders fighting each other, from Caesar to Napoleon and Bismarck, in a vast rice field. . . .”

This type of educational system, geared to a foreign culture, had the effect of creating class divisions based on the idea that there was an elite cadre of
neak ches-doeng,
“those with know-how and knowledge,” who had all the answers for society's ills and were trained to lead if not to work. Such an idea grew naturally from another of Sihanouk's deeply rooted if not stated presumptions that the peasants could “just pick the fruit off the trees” and live comfortably, an idea that ignores the excruciating hard work of wet rice cultivation in the tropics. They were happy peasants, in Sihanouk's vision, and the prince insisted that Cambodians and foreigners alike accept this truth.

Komphot was to be one of those with know-how and knowledge. Such children went to the best lycées and later to universities overseas so that they might become the professors and teachers Sihanouk wanted for his “children,” the subjects of Cambodia. Other developing countries pushed their most talented and ambitious students to master the practical sciences, to become technocrats or businessmen, to become skilled enough to replace foreign (in Cambodia, French) experts. In Sihanouk's Cambodia, they became teachers of higher education. And they received the largest salaries of all government employees—$200 a month—while the top civil servants received only $120 a month. They staffed the new schools and universities, government and newspaper offices. And they created a boulevard society of professors, writers, and intellectuals; an artistic community of dancers, musicians, and painters.

They lived in a city whose beauty was zealously protected, one that reflected Sihanouk's plans for his elite. Phnom Penh would not grow with concrete high-rise buildings standing chock-a-block along the city's boulevards or factories belching smoke and polluting the Mekong and Bassac Rivers. Sihanouk commissioned government buildings designed to resemble French provincial architecture. (The French colonial rulers had done the opposite; they had built the city's grand palace, museum, and royal grounds in the style of Khmer architecture.) It would remain a romantic riverport city.

In the midst of Sihanouk's Cambodian Phnom Penh were other societies performing other duties for the capital. Commerce was handled by the city's ethnic Chinese, relatively new émigrés who arrived poor toward the end of the nineteenth century but eager to become prosperous by performing exactly
those activities Sihanouk considered beneath his elite. The Chinese held a near monopoly on business, trade, and informal banking. Those Khmer intellectuals interested in the country's economy were encouraged to become civil servants advising the government, and later to staff the government banks. This royal outlook was buttressed by traditional French attitudes, and the end result was a city cemented along racial divisions: The Chinese were the moneylenders and businessmen; the Vietnamese who had arrived with the French colonialists were middlemen or followed the service trades; the Cambodians were the farmers, civil servants, and intellectuals; the French who stayed on were the foreign experts, chief import-exporters, and plantation owners. In Sihanouk's day one did not need to know Khmer to travel about the city; French, Vietnamese, or Chinese would suffice.

The middle-class Khmers of Phnom Penh grew up pampered in this environment, isolated from much of the life of the city—and, consequently, the world. Komphot and his contemporaries grew up as privileged children of Sihanouk, not independent citizens capable of succeeding or failing on their own. Routine corruption ensured that the favored lived well; and Sihanouk's inclinations were imperial. He preferred to grant privilege and position out of noblesse oblige and not any modern notion of shared power or a rational reward system. Courtiers were favored, troublemakers punished. It was a small society, and Sihanouk, through his police and his instincts, knew one from the other.

Sihanouk created a contradictory, if not irrational, political society for people like Komphot. The prince claimed Cambodia was a democracy, but he ruled it as a medieval monarch, not as a politician; peasants voted for his party because he was a god-king and a charismatic medieval ruler. Sihanouk's socialism was an updated version of a royal welfare system. The prince used a pseudo-Marxist vocabulary to condemn “capitalism” when he was really condemning modernity, to promote “socialism” when he meant noblesse oblige, and in foreign affairs he spoke as an anti-American ruler promoting stronger ties with his communist neighbor states rather than “capitalist” Thailand when at the same time he boasted that he was the most effective anticommunist in the world.

The figure of Sihanouk dominated the country and loomed large over Komphot and his fellow lycée students as they came of age and began plotting their futures. But in 1960 the communists of South Vietnam inaugurated open warfare against the government in Saigon, fighting back against that regime's anticommunist campaign. The Second Indochina War began. In neighboring Cambodia that war quickly overshadowed even Sihanouk in
importance. Komphot understood that the war in Vietnam would determine the course of Cambodia's history.