Cambodia's Curse (34 page)

Then in early 2010 the government gave an answer of sorts. Its new National Strategic Development Plan set back the nation’s education targets, such as achieving universal enrollment and literacy. The previous plan, published in 2006, had offered the fanciful idea, for example, that 75 percent of all students would attend both primary and middle schools by 2010. When January 1, 2010, arrived, however, only about 30 percent of the nation’s students were enrolled in middle school. The number had barely budged since 2006. So the government changed the goal—to 51 percent by 2013. Similarly, the earlier plan had promised that at least half of all children who lived in what it called “remote” rural areas would attend elementary school by 2010. Well, 2010 had dawned, and the government was far, far from its target. The new goal: By 2013, 22 percent of the little boys and girls who lived in remote areas would attend school.

Carol Rodley was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy during the late 1990s. Back then, just a few years after the UN occupation, “I heard a lot of distress about the state of the education system,” she
said. “They talked about the corruption in schools. It was shocking and really, really distressing to the middle class.” She returned to Cambodia as U.S. ambassador in 2008 and quickly discerned a change. The anger had faded. In fact, it had disappeared. Instead of being upset, people were now simply dispirited. “They don’t talk about it anymore. Now it’s the status quo.”

T
wenty-seven-year-old Leang Saroeun didn’t much like his job. He worked for Lt. Col. Ou Bunthan of the Cambodian military, stationed in Pursat Province. The colonel hired him and his wife, twentytwo-year-old Let Ting, to chop lumber and do other chores. Shortly after they took the new position and moved into a small cottage on the officer’s property, however, Ou Bunthan told them the job had another, sinister, element.

After warning him not to tell anyone, Ou Bunthan ordered Leang Saroeun to help him smuggle endangered species for sale to China and other places. In July 2009 the colonel sent him to pick up a pangolin that a poacher had captured in a protected national forest. Pangolins, also called scaly anteaters, were in danger of extinction. Capturing them was illegal in Cambodia and most of the world. Native to Southeast Asia, they are large beasts that some people refer to as walking pine cones. Their scales and claws are razor sharp, allowing them to climb trees, and they can grow to be six feet long, including the tail.

Leang Saroeun picked up the young animal, stuffed it into a bag, tied it to the back of his motorbike, and drove back toward the colonel’s home. During the drive, though, the pangolin managed to claw his way
out of the bag, jump down, and scamper into the woods. Leang Saroeun screeched to a halt and ran after the beast, but it was nighttime. Chasing after the beast in the dark was hopeless. Still, he searched for hours but finally gave up and drove home. When he called his boss to relate the bad news, Ou Bunthan was furious. “He accused my husband of selling it to someone,” Let Ting related. A live pangolin was worth hundreds of dollars. “He told the colonel he didn’t sell it. It ran into the forest.” The colonel was not mollified. The next morning Ou Bunthan called, his voice icy, and summoned Leang Saroeun to his house twenty yards away. Let Ting stayed back at their cottage, but a few minutes later she heard her husband screaming and ran out to see what was wrong. “He was on fire, all over his body. He ran off and jumped into a cistern full of water. He climbed out and walked to the road, then slipped and fell down. He could not get up. He never walked again.” Sobbing, Let Ting ran to him. A local police officer passing by stopped and “took pity on us. He drove us to the hospital.” There, Leang Saroeun told his wife what had happened. “My husband told me he poured five liters of gasoline over him and then lit him with a cigarette lighter. My husband couldn’t run away. The man had his pistol pointed at him and would have shot him to death.”

Leang Saroeun was shuttled from hospital to hospital over the next several days but finally died. He’d been burned over 80 percent of his body, said Ek Sonsatthya, a nurse at one of the hospitals. “He was burned like a grilled fish,” said his older brother, Map Narin.

Ngeth Theary, a local human-rights worker, had photographed him. The picture showed parts of his clothes still fused to his charred skin. Most of his face was black, locked in a terrible expression of pain and horror.

 

Cambodians are a conflicted people, generally passive, quiet, nonthreatening—but also capable of extraordinary violence and brutality. Their history and religion have taught them “not to exhibit extremes of behavior,” observed Youk Chhang, who runs the Documentation
Center of Cambodia. It collects records of the Khmer Rouge era. “So when they hold it in for so long, when they do resort to violence they get very emotional, which leads to extremes of violence.”

Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs, is also a medical doctor, and she offered a clinical explanation, saying, “I think a lot of people are hiding a lot in their subconscious. You can see a person, perfectly normal, and then an hour later see him transformed into another person who will kill you.” Part of it, she and others said, is the post-traumatic stress disorder so prevalent in society. Extreme anger and violent outbursts are common symptoms. But there’s more.

Experts have found that compromise is next to impossible in Cambodian culture. A team of Swedish anthropologists in the mid-1990s studied Cambodian society and came to this conclusion. For Cambodians, like most Asians, they noted, few things are more important than saving face, protecting personal dignity. Yet “there is no cultural tradition for reconciling contrary opinions—or even for the acceptance of the existence of contrary opinions,” the Swedes wrote in their book,
Every Home an Island
. As a result, in any debate one side or the other is certain to lose face. “So when Khmer men resort to violence—when young men form gangs, or when a husband beats his wife, almost to death,” they are “impotent human beings who act out of frustration because their ‘cultural heritage’ offers no other way out of a humiliating situation. In most cases an act of violence is preferable to the loss of face.”

Raoul-Marc Jennar, a Belgian who worked for the United Nations in Cambodia for many years, concluded that “killing was an everyday act, the automatic almost direct consequence of the negation of differences.” Actually, following Jennar’s logic, killing was an automatic tactic for eliminating differences of opinion. Quinn, the former ambassador, also found this personality characteristic remarkable. “We Americans are inculcated in the art of compromise,” he said. “Not there. That’s just not part of the Cambodian character.”

Clinicians have found striking uniformity in Cambodian behavior and psychological state. “Cambodia is fascinating,” said Daryn Reicherter, a psychiatrist who treated Cambodians in San Jose, California, and in Cambodia. “Unlike a lot of other countries, there is no diversity to the client population. There’s a single story. Ask any of them, and you get the very same story. I wouldn’t do it, but I could write the note before I even see the client. They all have major depressive disorders. They drink. I’d ask women if they had been raped. Every one of them said no. I told a case worker: ‘It’s amazing, none of them were raped.’ She told me all of them had been raped, but they wouldn’t talk about it to a man.”

 

In most societies conflicts can be resolved in court. Not so in Cambodia. Leang Saroeun’s death proved the point. It produced a couple of newspaper stories. Nothing long or prominent, just another episode in the running catalog of injustice, misery, and death. But when one reporter asked Top Chan Sereyvudth, Pursat Province’s chief prosecutor, what he intended to do, the prosecutor said he was waiting for the police report before considering the case, then added, “But it is slanderous to say that Ou Bunthan burned Leang Saroeun.” How could he know that before he’d even seen the police report? The answer: Top Chan Sereyvudth was the face of injustice in Cambodia.

Top Chan Sereyvudth was a little man, maybe five foot four, with a bit of fuzz on his chin that some might mistake for a beard. A few months earlier, through a bureaucratic sleight of hand, he had managed to have a case transferred from Banteay Meanchey Province, on the other side of the nation, into his own courtroom. The case in question involved a dispute with four villagers over ownership of some land. These villagers were locked in argument with none other than Top Chan Sereyvudth himself, who stood to gain five acres if he won the case. Bringing it into his own courtroom, where he was the prosecutor, therefore proved convenient. He managed to dispatch the quarrelsome villagers to jail. Given the graft and general inequity
that plagued the courts, that would normally have been the end of it—if not for Chhay Sareth, council chief for Pursat Province.

Chhay Sareth had been out of town during the prosecutor’s escapade, but he heard about it when scores of the victims’ friends from Banteay Meanchey began raucous demonstrations in the center of town. “I was just informed that there were angry people in the street,” the council chief said. “I was one hundred kilometers away. The case was getting bigger and bigger. I thought, ‘If we don’t stop it, Hun Sen will hear about it!’ I told the police, ‘Please don’t do anything.’” After hurrying home, he called in the protesters, heard their story, and ordered the police to ensure their security—afraid, he said, that someone would order a grenade attack on these people, “and then they would blame the government for mistreating its own people.” A few days later the case moved to trial.

By now the governor’s concern was well known, and the trial judge, In Bopha, let the four men go. When asked why, he chose his words carefully. “It was determined that the crime was committed in Banteay Meanchey province and was out of our jurisdiction. So I ordered it forwarded back to Banteay Meanchey under article 290 of our code.”

Not to be outdone, Top Chan Sereyvudth took the case to the court of appeals and asked that court to hold the men in jail during the appeal, he told a
Cambodia Daily
reporter. (It was too late; the men were already gone.) But when the reporter asked about the five acres he stood to gain in this dispute, the prosecutor abruptly hung up the phone.

It was because of people like Top Chan Sereyvudth that In Bopha, a judge in the same Pursat courthouse, paused for a moment when asked about Leang Saroeun’s death and finally said, “In this case, from my point of view, the victim should not seek help from any institution under government control.” Let Ting’s only option, he said, was “go to an NGO for help.”

When I approached Top Chan Sereyvudth outside his office and said I wanted to talk to him about both the land case and Leang
Saroeun’s death, he said he had an urgent appointment, bolted to his car, and slammed the door. His driver whisked him away.

Meanwhile, Ang Vong Vattana, the minister of justice, was growing angry. After all, he had approved the prosecutor’s request to transfer the case. Now, the minister thought, what was a governor doing messing around in his courts? “The minister of justice asked me why I got involved in this,” council chief Chhay Sareth recalled with a slight shake of the head. “I told him: ‘This problem came here from Banteay Meanchey, and when someone vomits on your leg, you have to react. So I got involved.’ I respect these people, even though they came from Banteay Meanchey. I did not know about this case until they came here. The prosecutor brought this case here.”

So then, why, after all of that, was Top Chan Sereyvudth still chief prosecutor in Pursat Province? The governor said he was asking the same question, “why the prosecutor, who was really involved in this case, why there is no punishment, no measure taken against him. I still wonder why. If you want to know more, I suggest you talk to the minister of justice.”

A few days later, Justice Minister Ang Vong Vattana swept into an anteroom to his office in Phnom Penh and sat in one of the room’s elegant chairs painted with gold leaf and upholstered with brown velvet. He was tall, balding, with gold wire-rim glasses. He wore a gray suit and a bothered expression. “What do you want?”

I asked him about transferring the land case into Top Chan Sereyvudth’s courtroom. The minister answered with an imperial tone: “I have the right to transfer the case, and I did it.”

But didn’t the prosecutor have a personal interest in the case?

“People say he was involved, but nobody has shown me the proof.”

Okay, then, was it proper for this same prosecutor to pronounce guilt in the Ou Bunthan case before he had even seen the police report? For a moment the minister simply glared with a pinched-lip, narrow-eyed stare. Then he stood up and stormed out of the room, muttering, “You waste my time.”

Let Ting was six months pregnant when her husband died of his burn wounds. When I spoke to her, he had been cremated just the day before. Let Ting was sorrowful, but she did not cry.

The colonel kicked her off his property, so she had no choice but to move back to the “house” she had lived in before—just a platform a foot or two off the ground with a low, sloping palm-frond roof and no walls. A plastic tarp on bamboo poles provided a porch. It was there that her husband passed away. When the hospital could do nothing for him, she brought him home to die. Her home held no obvious possessions. Whatever they owned was still in their cottage on the colonel’s property, and Let Ting said she was afraid to go back. It was getting dark. Neighbors came by bringing food. One middle-aged woman was frying some fish over a wood fire. The pan rested on three stones. “We could earn 50,000 riel in that job,” she volunteered. That’s $12.50 a month. “Now, I don’t know what I am going to do.”

 

Even though Leang Saroeun’s murder was a heinous crime, it barely stood out among the various acts of brutality and carnage that Cambodians wrought on each other every day. About once a week, on average, police reported an acid attack, often committed by a wife intent on destroying a woman suspected of sleeping with her husband. Typically, she would splash battery acid on the victim’s face. The numbers of attacks were increasing so fast that a victims’ group called Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity opened to treat victims who could not get help anywhere else. It worked with more than two hundred victims between March 2006 and December 2009, including scores of children. For its part in 2002 the government refused to pass a law making it illegal to possess acid for use as a weapon. Only in 2010, when government officials became concerned that the nation faced an acid-attack epidemic, did the National Assembly impanel a committee to study the issue.