Standing next to cages that once housed political prisoners, former Khmer Rouge foot soldier Tho Lon gets a surprisingly sympathetic hearing from a clutch of students, despite his work for a regime that wiped out one-quarter of Cambodia’s population.
“All my life, I’ve been cheated by politicians,” he told them in Anlong Veng, a dirt poor town where Pol Pot and his henchmen are still venerated.
“My heart is pained, but I pretend not to be hurt,” he added.
Photo: Reuters
That his complaints get an airing might jar with many Cambodians in a country still piecing together the horrors of the past.
However, his testimony is part of a pioneering reconciliation scheme introducing students to former fighters.
Until now, historians, officials and civil society groups helping Cambodia have struggled to decide on how to approach Anlong Veng, which lies on Cambodia’s remote northern border with Thailand.
It was there and among the surrounding Dangrek Mountains that Pol Pot and senior Khmer Rouge leaders lived on long after their murderous regime was toppled by Vietnam in 1979.
Hidden deep in the jungle, they launched two decades of guerilla attacks that only ended with the region’s final defeat in 1998.
As the students listened intently, Tho Lon explained why he kept on fighting.
“We were living in the mountains,” he said. “We had lost all contact with others, so we believed what we were told, that the Vietnamese would behead us [if we stopped].”
Tho Lon, 57, paid for his loyalty. He lost his sight in one eye and his right arm below the elbow in a mine blast fighting for a Marxist agrarian utopia that never materialized.
The country paid a bigger price — a grisly legacy for Cambodia’s younger generations. Along Veng also hosts the dilapidated grave of Pol Pot, the regime’s “Brother No. 1,” who died about two decades after the Khmer Rouge fell.
“I feel a mixture of excitement and pity,” said Sang Thong, a 25-year-old student from the town of Battambang, as classmates snapped pictures of the grave on their phones. Some of his relatives died under Pol Pot, he said.
“But I don’t come here to take revenge against him, I come here to learn more and understand more deeply about his regime,” he said.
Ly Sok-Kheang, head of the Anlong Veng Peace Program, part of the Documentation Center of Cambodia that researches the country’s genocide, said the meetings “promote historical empathy and understanding.”
However, he admitted it was no easy sell.
When Cambodia’s long civil war finally ended with the fall of Anlong Veng, he said, most of the reconciliation work understandably centered on commemorating the Khmer Rouge’s victims.
The country’s killing fields and notorious detention camps like Tuol Seng have become focal points for those efforts, while Anlong Veng has remained an impoverished backwater.
However, Ly Sok-Kheang said the town should also be remembered, precisely because it was the place where Cambodia finally managed to end decades of violence.
“I think Anlong Veng is the perfect place when we talk about peace in Cambodia,” he said.
Ignoring it, some say, has fed the festering support for Khmer Rouge in the region.
Tho Lon gave his lecture in the grounds of a tumble-down, but once grand villa that was owned by Ta Mok, a senior Khmer Rouge leader nicknamed “The Butcher” for the massacres he perpetrated.
He died in 2006 without ever seeing justice.
Ta Mok rose to No. 3 in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. However, he eventually turned on Pol Pot as the remnants of the movement imploded and turned on each other.
Pol Pot was arrested and tried by Ta Mok’s faction in 1997.
Ta Mok remains celebrated in the town, primarily for irrigation projects and doling out money and favors.
“I would like to stress that living under Ta Mok, both civilians and troops loved him,” Tho Lon said.
Sieng Sok Heng, chief of Anlong Veng’s tourism office — a wooden shack down a dusty road — agreed.
“A lot of the people here were under Ta Mok,” he said, adding that they instead “hate the regime and its leaders.”
Sieng Sok Heng hopes more tourists will seek out the town. About 2,000 locals and 30 international tourists visit each month.
Many seek out Pol Pot’s grave.
The Khmer Rouge leader died in yet to be fully explained circumstances shortly after his trial by Ta Mok’s henchman.
He was swiftly cremated on a bed of car tires on a hillside overlooking the town, a stone’s throw from the Thai border.
His grave lies in the shadow of a large, newly constructed casino filled with Thai and Chinese tourists, the only clue to its existence a rusty blue sign.
For Chhoeun Chhay Lin, 18, the grave stood as a warning.
“I feel a little bit scared of him as a leader, whether he’s dead or alive, he still has some power over people,” she said.
“But students should know about history. We must learn never to follow the direction of that dark regime again,” she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
RSS