Episode 114: Cambodia, a Rocky Road to Recovery

 

This episode of the podcast covers Cambodia, from 1989 to the present.  As you can guess from the title, it’s mainly a story of how Cambodia has recovered from all the awful things that happened to it in the twentieth century.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/80319057/episode-114-cambodia-a-rocky-road-to-recovery/

 

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Arndt U., I hope I’m pronouncing that right, for making a donation to the podcast. I have mentioned before that late summer is a slow time for donations, what with people going on vacation or having other things on their minds, like going back to school. Therefore the donations that do come in are more appreciated than ever. And for the record, Arndt donated once before, earlier this year. Thank you very much, Arndt, not only for the donation but also for the kind words you sent with it! Your contribution will provide incense sticks for the local temple, or at least it will keep my wife and I supplied with authentic Philippine coffee. May you find whatever good things you are looking for now. Now on with today’s show!

Episode 114: Cambodia, a Rocky Road to Recovery

Greetings, dear listeners, for the 114^th time, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky! While I was working on this episode, the Summer Olympics were held, one year late, in Tokyo. How about those games! From what I heard on the news, most people were concerned about Simone Biles, and about the low ratings the games got on TV, but I noted that Southeast Asian athletes did well. For the first time in history, the Philippines has an Olympic champion; Hidilyn Diaz won the gold in women’s weightlifting. And the first American to win a gold medal this year comes from my home town of Lexington, Kentucky. That is Lee Kiefer, who won the fencing competition, and she is a Mestiza, meaning she is half-Filipino. What’s more, her husband entered the fencing competition as well, and he won the bronze. And finally, Sunisa Lee, one of the champion gymnasts, is a Hmong-American; I wish this had happened around the time when I recorded Episodes #96 and #108; those mentioned the Hmong tribe.

Now let’s begin today’s topic, Cambodia. The main thing you can say about recent Cambodian history is that it has been a hell of a time. Back in the 1960’s, the Cambodian leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, once described his country’s role in the Cold War by saying, quote, “When elephants fight, the mice scatter.” Unquote. Sadly, Cambodia was a mouse that that didn’t get away from the American, Soviet and Chinese elephants, and was crushed by events.

In fact, Cambodia has suffered more than its Indochinese neighbors, Vietnam and Laos. For the first few years after it became independent from France, in the 1950s, Cambodia’s future looked promising, but the factions fighting across the border in Vietnam would not leave it alone. I covered the Cambodian phase of the Second Indochina War, also called the Cambodian Civil War, in Episodes 91, 92, 95 and 96. Then in Episode 106, we looked the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, under which maybe a third of the Cambodian people died, and those who survived were forced into desperate poverty. All this was done in order to fulfill Pol Pot’s dream of creating an insane “Utopia.” Finally, in Episode 107 we looked at the period when Cambodia was a puppet state dominated by Vietnam, and the conflict called the Third Indochina War raged across the Cambodian countryside. So you will know what’s going on in this episode, I strongly urge you to listen to those other six episodes, if you haven’t already. Go ahead, download them from the website where you got this episode. They should be free; if you are being charged for the episodes, it has been done without my permission.

I mentioned in Episode #107 that few outsiders welcomed the change in Phnom Penh, when the Vietnamese replaced the Khmer Rouge. Only members of the Soviet Bloc recognized the new regime, and a Khmer Rouge delegate continued to occupy Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations. Still, with the Khmer Rouge out of power, life in Cambodia began to recover. The traditional religion and culture were restored, schools were reopened, and Phnom Penh was filled with busy people again, though most streets and buildings still showed the scars of war and years of neglect. Bright colored clothing replaced the black pajamas worn by everyone during the Pol Pot years. Eventually other factions besides the Khmer Rouge formed to oppose the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese found themselves receiving the same kind of treatment they had dished out against the Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. That, and the downfall of the Soviet Union, which caused Vietnam to lose its main source of foreign aid, persuaded the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia in 1988-89. And that is where things were when the narrative on Cambodia broke off, at the end of Episode #107. I’m ready to move on with the story if you are.

<Interlude>

Getting the Vietnamese out did not end the fighting, because there were four factions left — the Phnom Penh government and the three factions trying to topple it. To refresh your memory, those factions were the Khmer Rouge, Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s royalist faction, called FUNCINPEC, and a pro-Thailand faction called the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, or KPNLF. Talks between these groups began in Paris in 1989, and in 1991 all of them except for the Khmer Rouge agreed to a comprehensive peace settlement. The United Nations got involved and sent 22,000 soldiers, police and civilian workers to occupy the country and save Cambodia from itself. Here is what they promised to do in just a year and a half: stop the war, repatriate the 370,000 refugees now living in Thailand, and set up a market economy and democracy in a country that was not familiar with either. As for the communists led by Premier Hun Sen, they became the Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP.

The UN was now running a whole country — it had never attempted a project so ambitious before. Their transitional government was called the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, UNTAC for short. Phnom Penh became a Wild West-like boomtown, full of foreign troops, money, four-wheel-drives, and rampant prostitution. Years later, Hun Sen remembered this time with a grim joke, saying that UNTAC should really stand for “United Nations Takes AIDS to Cambodia.” That doesn’t surprise me; the same thing has happened in the parts of Africa where UN peacekeeping troops went, like the Congo.

The biggest problem for the UN was that the killers of the killing fields — the Khmer Rouge — remained on the prowl. Unlike the other factions, they refused to disarm or allow UN peacekeepers into the zones they controlled, and began attacking UN workers or taking them hostage. They realized that no one was likely to vote for them, so they returned to their jungle bases and went back to the things they were good at — killing Cambodians and waging war. Nevertheless, UN personnel registered 90% of the civilian population to vote, and after convincing them that their ballots would be secret, there was a big enough turnout to convince everyone it was a fair election.

Before the election, one of the factions, the KPNLF, was replaced with the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party, or BLDP. When the voting took place in May 1993, there was violence and imtimidation, because the Khmer Rouge, which was never disarmed or demobilized, blocked access to polling places. Nevertheless, Sihanouk’s royalist faction won with 45.5% of the vote. Did that surprise any of you? Second place went to the Cambodian People’s Party, which won in several provinces. The CPP threatened to secede from the 120-member National Assembly if they weren’t given a share in the new government. At first Sihanouk set up a transitional government that included only his own faction, but just hours later he pulled another of his famous flip-flops. This time he offered a coalition government with two prime ministers: one was his second son, Norodom Ranariddh, and the other was Hun Sen. The BLDP got a minor role in the government, so only the Khmer Rouge was shut out completely. In September a new constitution was adopted that restored the old monarchy. We saw in previous episodes that Sihanouk abdicated in 1955 so his father, Norodom Suramarit, could have a turn as king, so technically the Cambodian throne had been vacant since Suramarit’s death in 1960. Now that Sihanouk was king again, the refugees began to return, and the Khmer Rouge lost their seat in the UN. Because Sihanouk was friendly to the Chinese, his return to power without the communists also meant that the Khmer Rouge lost their lifeline of support from China, and now that Khmer Rouge atrocities could not be denied, nobody else would give them the time of day.

*****

Meanwhile, the UN peacekeepers withdrew, thinking Cambodia was a job well done. Instead, the country now had an unstable government, and the Khmer Rouge continued to fight it. Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen both had armies, they hated each other, and each wanted all political power for himself. In November 1995 Prince Norodom Sirivudh, secretary general of FUNCINPEC and Sihanouk’s half-brother, was accused of plotting to have Hun Sen assassinated; Sirivudh was exiled to France. In March 1996 Ranariddh threatened to withdraw FUNCINPEC from the coalition, thus forcing a national election, unless Hun Sen and the CPP agreed to an equal power-sharing arrangement at the district level. Hun Sen threatened to call out the military, which was dominated by his party, if an attempt was made to take any of his power away.

By mid-1997 the government was effectively paralyzed, because elected officials had not met for months. In July, when Ranariddh was out of the country, Hun Sen staged a bloody coup and took control of the whole government. Ranariddh was tried in absentia and found guilty of arms smuggling, while other opponents of Hun Sen were arrested and tortured; some of them were summarily executed. This wasn’t the end of Ranariddh, though, because his Dad the king issued him a pardon in 1998, allowing him to return. Thus, he is still active in Cambodian politics today.

There have been six elections in Cambodia since the coup, in 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013, 2017 and 2018. In all of them the CPP won a commanding majority. Because of those elections, Hun Sen remains the most powerful leader in the country, 36 years after taking charge; he enjoyed his 69^th birthday while I was working on this episode. And whatever else you can say about the elections, they have made the country stable; stability is what Cambodia needs the most, in order to recover from everything that happened to it in the twentieth century.

*****

Before we move on to another subject, I will introduce you to one more politician who has been making waves in recent years. Born in 1949, Sam Rainsy moved to France in 1965, when he was only 16, because his father — a politician who is believed to have been killed by government agents — disappeared. In France, he studied and worked as a banker before establishing his own accounting firm. Then in 1989 he started to follow in his father’s footsteps, by becoming a European representative of the FUNCINPEC Party.

Returning to Cambodia in 1993, he was elected to the seat in the National Assembly that represented the city of Siem Reap. He also served as the Minister of Economy and Finance. But in 1994 he was expelled from the party following a vote of no-confidence against him. One year after that, he was stripped of his seat in the Assembly, so he founded his own party, the Khmer Nation Party. Just before the 1998 election, it was renamed the Sam Rainsy Party, or SRP, to avoid registration issues. For that election, it came in third place, winning 15 of the 123 seats in the National Assembly. It did better in the 2003 election, but it was not allowed to join the governing coalition set up afterwards. As a result, the SRP members elected staged a boycott of the National Assembly, accusing the other two parties, the CPP and FUNCINPEC, of following corrupt procedures in forming the new government. The National Assembly retaliated by removing parliamentary immunity from Rainsy and two other SRP members, and Rainsy went abroad to avoid getting arrested. He was convicted in absentia of defaming Hun Sen and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but one year later, in 2006, Rainsy received a royal pardon and returned.

For the 2008 election, the SRP won 26 seats in the National Assembly. Because FUNCINPEC had disintegrated since the previous election, this meant the Sam Rainsy Party came in second place. Therefore Hun Sen saw Rainsy as a potential threat, and in 2009 the National Assembly stripped Rainsy of immunity again, forcing him to leave the country again. He was sentenced in absentia to ten years in jail after being found guilty of publishing a map that falsely showed Cambodia losing land to Vietnam, and of insulting a former foreign minister. While Rainsy was abroad, in 2012 the Sam Rainsy Party merged with the Human Rights Party to become the Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP. As the 2013 election approached, the United States put pressure on Hun Sen to allow Rainsy to return, so he was granted another royal pardon. Now Sam Rainsy replaced Prince Ranariddh as the leader of the political opposition.

Only two parties won seats in the 2013 election: the CPP won 68, and the Cambodian National Rescue Party came in a fairly close second, with 55 seats. The CNRP disputed these results, and boycotted the National Assembly until July 2014, when it reached an agreement with Hun Sen that allowed all members to take their seats. But in the following year the CPP found an excuse to declare Rainsy’s pardon void, so it could press new charges against him. Once again Rainsy chose exile ahead of imprisonment, and fled abroad; he was formally barred from returning to the country in October 2016. Rainsy requested another royal pardon, but this time Hun Sen made sure that none was granted. Then the National Assembly amended a law to bar anyone convicted of an offense from running for office; that would keep Rainsy from participating in politics should he return.

With Sam Rainsy out of the way, Hun Sen now turned against his party. He arrested Kem Sokha, Rainsy’s successor as leader of the CNRP, charging him with orchestrating street protests in 2014, and with conspiring with the United States to overthrow Hun Sen. In November 2017 the Supreme Court banned the Cambodia National Rescue Party, a move which caused all CNRP members holding public office to lose their jobs. When elections were held in 2018, opposition to the CPP was hopelessly disorganized, so the CPP won all 125 seats in the National Assembly. Naturally the international community called the most recent elections a sham, a formality to make the CPP’s continued hold on the government legitimate.

Sam Rainsy announced he was planning to return in 2019. The Cambodian government threatened “serious consequences” to any airline that brought him back, and it also warned Thailand not to allow Rainsy to stop in that country, on the way to Cambodia. Because of that, and more recent COVID restrictions on travel, Rainsy is still abroad at this time. In March 2021 a Cambodian court convicted and sentenced Rainsy and eight senior members of the CNRP party to more than 20 years in prison, effectively barring them from ever returning home…

*****

Cambodia was accepted into ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in 1997, along with Laos and Myanmar. However, because of the political infighting between Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, a Cambodian representative could not attend the meetings until 1999, so it was only then that Cambodia was declared a member. Of Southeast Asia’s eleven countries, the only one that hasn’t joined ASEAN yet is East Timor; more about that in a future episode. Every year, one of ASEAN’s members takes on the role of chairman, to host the meetings; next year, 2022, it will be Cambodia’s turn to act as chairman. Thus, for the first time in centuries, at least since the Khmers abandoned Angkor in 1431, Cambodia is also a full-fledged member of the world community. For most of the times when Cambodia was mentioned in this podcast, it only had dealings with a few nations: Thailand, Vietnam, and outsiders like France, the United States, and China.

The Khmer Rouge lost ground no matter who was in charge in Phnom Penh. After the 1993 elections, some Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrendered because the government offered amnesty to them. Others made foreign tourists a new target, kidnapping and killing groups traveling by taxi and train to the South Coast, reinforcing Cambodia’s overseas image as a dangerous country. In 1996, Ieng Sary, the former head of the Cambodian Cercle Marxiste in the 1950s, and the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, broke with Pol Pot. Ieng and his forces were in the western town of Pailin, where they were making money through logging and gem mining. Pol Pot was based in Anlong Veng, a town on the northern border, and his faction felt that not enough money was going to them. So what broke this murderous communist movement was not a squabble over ideology, like the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, but a squabble about cash. When Sihanouk heard about the split, he made it permanent by pardoning Ieng Sary, and those Khmer Rouge fighters under his command who gave themselves up as well.

Meanwhile at Anlong Veng, a break appeared between Pol Pot, his former defense minister Son Sen, and Ta Mok, the last military leader of the Khmer Rouge. During the years of Democratic Kampuchea, Ta Mok directed the massive purges I told you about in Episode #106, including the mass killing of 30,000 people in a single county-sized district. For this he had earned the nickname Butcher, which will tell you he wasn’t a nice person. In 1997 Pol Pot committed his last atrocity, by having Son Sen and thirteen members of his family, including children, shot; then trucks were driven over the bodies.

Sensing that their association with Pol Pot was the reason why nobody wanted anything to do with the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok acted next, seizing control over Pol Pot’s faction and naming himself supreme commander. Pol Pot, now old and ailing, was brought out in the open and the Khmer Rouge staged a show trial with him. After accusing him of capital crimes and subjecting him to rounds of name-calling, Khmer Rouge leaders sentenced the ex-strongman to life under house arrest. The following spring saw a major government offensive on Anlong Veng, and at this point it looked like Pol Pot would be captured and extradited to the UN, to stand trial for the crimes of his regime. But instead, on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot’s guards reported that he had died of a heart attack. They cremated the body by burning it on a pile of old tires, before any outsiders could perform an autopsy, leading some to suspect he had been smothered in bed to prevent him from testifying against his former comrades. A long and painful era of Cambodian history died with him.

By the end of 1998 two other senior Khmer Rouge members, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, gave themselves up to the CPP. On March 6, 1999, Ta Mok was captured by the Cambodian army near the Thai border and brought to Phnom Penh, where he joined former comrade Kaing Guek Eav (also known as “Comrade Duch”) at the Military Prosecution Department Detention Facility. Ta Mok was the last leading member of the Khmer Rouge to remain at large in Cambodia; because all the other senior members had died, were captured, or had made immunity deals with the government of Hun Sen, Ta Mok’s capture marks the end of the Khmer Rouge. It also meant that Cambodia’s civil wars were finally over. To commemorate the end of those wars, a monument was built in Phnom Penh, called the Win-Win Memorial; it was completed in 2018.

Podcast footnote: I mentioned Comrade Duch in Episode #106. In the 1970s he ran S-21, a former school where at least 15,000 victims were tortured and killed. Today S-21 is a tourist attraction in Phnom Penh, called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The place is horrifying, for the same reasons as former Nazi death camps like Dachau and Auschwitz, but what today’s Cambodians did to Anlong Veng may be a bigger shocker; they have turned the site of the Khmer Rouge’s last stand into a theme park. When you enter Anlong Veng, you will first see a town with cheap guest houses, shops selling Chinese-made mobile phones, roadside BBQs, and seedy karaoke bars clustered near a covered market. Tourists can visit fourteen attractions associated with the Khmer Rouge, including the houses of Pol Pot and Ta Mok, an execution site and the place of Pol Pot’s cremation. Cambodians and Thais at the cremation place will pray to Pol Pot for lucky lottery numbers, job promotions and beautiful brides, because they believe that people infamous for their evil deeds also have supernatural powers. Most outrageous of all, some Thai investors have built a hotel with a casino, next to the cremation site. Finally, the one-thousand-year-old Preah Vihear Temple is close enough to Anlong Veng that you can visit it on the same day. More about the temple in a few minutes. End footnote.

*****

In 1997, the Cambodian government requested UN assistance in establishing a tribunal to try Khmer Rouge mass murderers for the atrocities they committed. Because it would be a hybrid court, containing both foreign and Cambodian judges and prosecutors, it took until 2004 to reach an agreement on how the tribunal would be organized, and how its members would be paid. All Khmer Rouge leaders in custody would be tried for genocide (against Cambodia’s Vietnamese and Cham minorities), crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes. More delays followed, so the trials did not begin until 2008. One reason for the delays was that Hun Sen opposed holding too many trials, saying he wanted to avoid political instability. In other words, he did not want those who supported the Khmer Rouge in the past to resume the conflict, and maybe he wanted to avoid being accused of any crimes from the war years, since he had been a Khmer Rouge officer at the start of his career.

Ta Mok should have been one of those tried, but he died in 2006, while in custody. The first case tried was that of Kaing Guek Eav, alias Comrade Duch. He was sentenced to life inprisonment, the maximum sentence permitted by law, and was still in custody when he died in 2020. The second case started in 2011, and it had multiple defendants: Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith. In the middle of the trial, proceedings stopped against Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith, because they were in poor health, and both died soon afterwards. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were sentenced to life in prison, and Nuon Chea died in 2019, so only Khieu Samphan is alive as I record this. His case was appealed, and the appeal hearing was scheduled for the third week of August 2021. Since I was recording this episode at the time of the hearing, I haven’t heard yet what the results were. The third and fourth cases were against five defendants who have not been mentioned in this podcast before, so I won’t burden your memory by making you learn their names now.

Although world opinion considered the tribunal a success, it also has been criticized, mainly because the government under Hun Sen delayed the tribunal and limited the number of defendants. We saw that because of the delays, many top leaders died before they could testify in court, including Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Ta Mok. Not only were they never brought to justice, but the stories they could have told are forever lost. In addition, many Cambodians have complained about how long the trials have taken and how much they have cost, arguing that the money spent on the tribunal could have been better spent on improving the lives of today’s Cambodians, because as we noted, most of them are dirt poor. On a positive note, the testimonies of the victims and defendants at the tribunal has helped to fill in the pages of one of the darkest chapters of recent world history, a chapter that went largely undocumented when the events in it happened. In fact, many young Cambodians did not believe the horrible stories told by their parents about the Khmer Rouge until the stories were backed up by the testimonies.

*****

King Sihanouk left Cambodia again in January 2004, to be treated for cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure; first he went to North Korea, then to China. This time his condition did not improve, so in October he abdicated for the second time, and spent most of his final years abroad, as you might expect. He died of a heart attack in October 2012, two weeks before his 90th birthday, in Beijing. For this podcast, Sihanouk’s death marks the end of our longest-running character, and what a character he was! I first mentioned him in Episode 34, when the French crowned him king; now he is gone, eighty episodes later, and almost four years later in real time. How about that! His body was sent back to Cambodia, and in early 2013 it was cremated at a traditional royal funeral.

One week after Sihanouk abdicated, his eldest son, Norodom Sihamoni, was chosen as the next king by a special nine-member throne council, and he was enthroned after he received the endorsements of Hun Sen and Ranariddh. Currently Sihamoni is 68 years old, and still on the throne.

*****

Once or twice in past episodes, I mentioned the ancient Preah Vihear temple. Located on the Cambodia-Thailand border, this Hindu temple was built in the early eleventh century, by the Khmer king Suryavarman I. For reasons unclear, when the border between Cambodia and Thailand was demarcated in the early twentieth century, the temple ended up on the Cambodian side of the line, but because of its location on high ground, it was more accessible from Thailand. When the Thais, who call the temple Phra Viharn, discovered this, they said the border should follow the watershed line of the nearest mountains; that would give the temple to them. Thai troops occupied the temple in 1954, shortly after the French granted independence to Cambodia. In 1962 the dispute was referred to the World Court at The Hague, which ruled in favor of Cambodia. Then we saw in Episode #96 that Preah Vihear was the site of the final battle of the Cambodian Civil War, in May 1975. The Khmer Rouge occupied the ruins later on, from 1992 to 1996, again because it was a defensible site.

Nevertheless, some issues won’t go away. In 2003, an enraged mob set the Thai embassy on fire, because a newspaper article reported that a Thai soap opera star claimed Angkor Wat was stolen from Thailand. The article was fake news; the actress in question never said any such thing, but the Thai ambassador had to flee for his life as the mob rampaged through Phnom Penh, burning anything that reminded them of Thailand. The Thais retaliated by closing their borders and the Khmers suffered a trade embargo from Thailand that year. Then Thailand revived the Preah Vihear dispute in 2008, when the UN organization UNESCO listed Preah Vihear as a world heritage site. The argument over the ruins got so heated that soldiers armed with artillery clashed several times from 2008 to 2011, killing 22 Khmers and 18 Thais, and causing damage to the site. The two nations were willing to talk, though, so Indonesia, the current chairman of ASEAN, negotiated a cease-fire, and Cambodia asked for the World Court to re-interpret its 1962 ruling, because it said nothing about the hills surrounding the temple. The World Court responded with a second ruling in 2013, which again awarded the temple to Cambodia, but also said one of the neighboring hills, Phnom Trap, belonged to Thailand. Will this be the last word on the matter? Only time will tell.

*****

Cambodia today is still in a state of recovery. From 1998 to 2019 the Gross Domestic Product grew at a rate averaging 7.7 percent a year, meaning Cambodia has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Then COVID-19 struck, and the Cambodian economy shrank -3.1 percent in 2020. Recovering from this slump must be a real challenge, because at the beginning of August 2021, the United States shipped more than one million doses of COVID vaccine to Cambodia. The vaccine is the Johnson & Johnson variety, so each patient needs only one dose. I know because I was vaccinated with a Johnson & Johnson dose last April.

But even with twenty-one years of impressive growth, the Cambodians still have a long way to go, before they catch up with any developed countries, because they were dirt poor to begin with. Currently the per capita income is $4,320, when adjusted to reflect purchasing power, making Cambodia the poorest country in Southeast Asia.

The nation’s infrastructure had to be built from scratch, because it was virtually nonexistent after the Khmer Rouge were done. The population has grown to almost 17 million, more than twice what it was before 1975, and it’s a young population, with a median age of only 25. However, older Cambodians are poorly educated, and many are maimed or ill (both physically and mentally) from the wars. And do you remember when I told you how American planes dropped millions of bombs on Laos, and the bombs that landed without exploding are killing and wounding those who find them, even now? Cambodia has a very similar problem with millions of land mines scattered across the country, buried by all factions during decades of fighting. On top of all this, Cambodia has a serious problem with human trafficking, with men forced to work in the agriculture, fishing, and construction industries, and women turned into domestic servants or sex slaves. I remember a few years ago, one of my daughter’s best friends made a trip to Cambodia when she was about twenty years old; there she met some of the victims of human trafficking, and she decided helping them would be the purpose of her life.

Currently, Cambodia’s most important industries are clothing exports, tourism, and construction. In 2005, oil and natural gas deposits were discovered in the nearest part of the Gulf of Thailand, representing a new source of revenue if drilling begins. As the owner of Southeast Asia’s most fertile farmland, Cambodia has the potential to prosper greatly, like it did in the past. Now that Cambodia’s neighbors, especially Thailand and Vietnam, are more interested in cooperation than domination, there is hope that good times will return some day.

*****

After hearing all the tragedy that fills Cambodia’s recent history, would you like to hear a feel-good, heartwarming story about a real hero? Of course you would, and I will finish today’s narrative by telling it. Meet Aki Ra, Cambodia’s champion minesweeper. Born in 1973, his parents were killed during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Then when he was only five years old, the Khmer Rouge drafted him as a child soldier, and taught him to plant landmines. The Khmer Rouge used children for this task because they weigh less than adults, so they are less likely to accidentally set off mines. And that’s only the beginning of the story; when the Vietnamese army captured Aki Ra, they put him to work planting mines for them, too. Then in 1994, United Nations peacekeepers replaced the Vietnamese, and the UN called for people who wanted jobs as minesweepers. Now Aki Ra found a new mission in life; he would get rid of the danger he had created over the previous fifteen years.

The UN trained Aki Ra to wear body armor and use metal detectors in this extremely risky job, but he could not afford the gear, so he used the tools he already had: a sharp stick to dig up the mines where he remembered putting them, a knife to defuse each mine by cutting out the detonator–and his bare hands. He claims that because of his crazy, no-frills method, he singlehandedly removed and disarmed 50,000 mines, 10 percent of the estimated total buried in Siem Reap Province. Siem Reap also contains the ruins of Angkor, so when Aki Ra had enough mines, he opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum in Angkor National Park to display his souvenirs. Yes, that’s a real place; currently the museum is closed due to the COVID pandemic, but you can still visit the museum’s website at https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org . A film director, Richard Fitoussi, raised the money needed to build the museum’s current building, and in 2010 he made a movie about Aki Ra, called A Perfect Soldier, starring Aki Ra as himself.

The museum has another purpose; it is also an orphanage, for children injured in landmine accidents. These days Aki Ra doesn’t do much minesweeping, because he is busy running his combination museum/orphanage and teaching what he knows about mines to others. Here is Aki Ra’s best quote. Quote: “I will do anything to make my country safe. Sometimes I get nervous, but that is rare. In 20 years I’ve never been injured.” End quote.

*****

Well, we ran into overtime, but we finished the narrative for Cambodia! Because we already finished up Laos and Vietnam in previous episodes, that means our story is now done for all of the former Indochina. For the next episode, I plan to go to one of the island nations, either Indonesia or the Philippines, to wrap up recent history there. Join me for that excursion. Also, if you have any questions about Southeast Asian history that haven’t been answered already, write them down; I am planning to do another Question & Answer episode soon.

In the meantime, are you one of those who enjoyed this episode? If you are and can afford to support the show, I would greatly appreciate it. Financial support can be done through Paypal or through Patreon; I have included links to both on the Blubrry.com page that hosts this episode. And even if you cannot make a financial contribution at this time, you can still help by writing a review, if you get your episodes from a website besides Blubrry, and by letting everyone around you know about the show. Spreading the word shouldn’t even take much of your time. That’s all for now, so thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>