Shadow on Sunset Years in Cambodia

Their dreams and reputations spent, Khmer Rouge leaders have turned this malaria-racked frontier town into a retirement community where old friends reminisce and need offer no apologies for their murderous reign of terror.

For them and their followers, Pailin, a longtime Khmer Rouge fortress in the mile-high jungles of western Cambodia, is a purgatory of last resort, a one-horse town so isolated and primitive and full of sullied memories that life itself feels otherworldly and the darkness of the night is unsettling.

But with Cambodia now at peace for the first time in 30 years, Pailin no longer rattles the senses as do the killing fields of Choeung Ek, where thousands upon thousands died, or the torture chambers of Tuol Sleng. The guns are gone, the checkpoints have disappeared, and the denizens--a who’s who of Cambodia’s “dark years”--greet visitors with smiles and a graciousness that mask the town’s chilling history.

What feels most eerie is that all of Pailin has selective amnesia. There is no repentance, no soul-searching. No one accepts culpability, or blames the Khmer Rouge, for crimes committed 20 years ago, and the prospect of any war crimes tribunal is remote. The only culprit, people say, is Pol Pot, the movement’s mastermind, who died last year in a reported suicide. With him, they say, are buried the horrors of the past.

“During the critical years, we were told we were defending and rebuilding Cambodia,” said En Sopeap, 56, once a senior Khmer Rouge intelligence officer. “We believed that. It never crossed my mind there were killing fields.

“Personally, I never received an order to kill or harm anyone, and I never issued such an order. Sure, you’d go to work and find people had disappeared. You just figured they were suspected of something and were sent to an education camp.”

But even En Sopeap admits that the Khmer Rouge, during its 1975-79 reign, managed to turn back the calendar to another century.

Pailin has no telephones and no electricity except for what an occasional generator supplies. Teenagers can hardly read or write. No one knows what a credit card or a traveler’s check is. Few people have ever heard of a typewriter, much less a computer. Visitors are so rare that when a Westerner went into the Golden Swan for lunch, the entire staff of 12 gathered around his table just to stare.

“No, I wouldn’t say I had a normal childhood, though I don’t think I understood that at the time,” said Oeupn Chit, 29, a Golden Swan waiter who grew up in Pailin under the Khmer Rouge and its ultra-Maoist philosophy of creating an agrarian society free of all modern influences.

The Khmer Rouge destroyed the schools, so Oeupn Chit was taught communism and a few elementary necessities on a blackboard set up under a tree. That was enough to qualify him as a first-aid technician who performed surgery in the makeshift hospital. “Most of the patients died,” he noted matter-of-factly.

Oeupn Chit went on: “The Khmer Rouge were very strict. For instance, you couldn’t travel outside Pailin. You couldn’t have a shortwave radio. You could have a girlfriend, but you couldn’t sleep with her. If you did, the first time they would warn you. The second time they would kill you.”

Researchers at the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, the capital, say the Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of the 7.9 million Cambodians between 1975--when Pol Pot, declared “year zero” and began his grisly social experiment--and 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge into the jungles along the Thai border.

Here in Pailin, a 13-hour, bone-jarring drive northwest of Phnom Penh on a washboard road of dirt and crumbled pavement, the Khmer Rouge continued to pursue its obsessive ideology and to fight, first against the Vietnamese, then against the Cambodian army, and finally against itself.

Cambodia’s current prime minister, Hun Sen, himself once a mid-level Khmer Rouge officer, spent nearly 20 years trying to destroy the organization. In 1996, he scored a major victory by persuading Ieng Sary, one of Pol Pot’s top lieutenants, to defect to the government side with several thousand guerrillas.

In return, Ieng Sary was given Pailin as a personal fiefdom--a duty-free “autonomous zone” that pays no taxes to the government until 2002 and runs its own security force.

“I just switched uniforms,” said Houl Sali, 32, a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla who now wears a Cambodian army uniform. “Everything else same-same. But I miss my old commanders. As bad as life was in the jungle, they were good commanders and they always got you free medicine when you got malaria.”

‘Was I Afraid? Absolutely’

Kong Doung, 42, ran Khmer Rouge radio here from 1983 to 1994, overseeing the guerrillas’ propaganda and ensuring that Pol Pot--with whom he had daily meetings--personally approved every new song he played. He did his job dutifully, even though the genocide had claimed the lives of his father and four of his brothers and sisters.

“It is not something I want to talk about,” he said, “except to say being the director of Khmer Rouge radio was a sensitive position. There could be no mistakes. If a mistake was made, you had a serious problem. Very serious. Was I afraid? Absolutely. All the time.”

One of Kong Doung’s sisters fled Cambodia in 1979 with her daughter. Recently, that daughter--Sophal Sang, 22, a naturalized U.S. citizen--returned to Pailin from Oakland, where she owns a health food store.

She clutched her uncle’s arm and said her brief visit to Pailin had yielded many strange surprises.

“He wrote once, saying he was a radio station executive,” she said. “He just didn’t say at which station. My uncle a Khmer Rouge? What can I say? But it’s not as though he wanted the station job or anything. Still, I never told my friends in California my uncle was Khmer Rouge. No way.”

Hem Hai, 58, spent the dark years at forced labor on a collective farm. Now a peddler of vegetables in Pailin’s open-air market, she said: “There is nothing but sadness in me. An uncle, a grandmother, seven members of my family in all, were killed or worked to death. The Khmer Rouge tried to do good things for the country, but not Pol Pot. He brought all the suffering.”

The frail woman, her cheeks and brow a road map of wrinkles, looked up. The notorious Ieng Sary, driven by a bodyguard, had stopped his blue Range Rover in front of a nearby stand that sold meat. He has a kindly face and a friendly manner, wears safari suits and could easily pass as a schoolteacher or social worker.

“Welcome to Pailin,” he said with a broad smile as a Western visitor approached.

What did he think about Khmer Rouge leaders being tried by an international tribunal? “Oh, I can’t talk about that,” he said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand, “but enjoy our town. I’m glad you could come.”

Pair Granted a Sort of Amnesty

Down a dirt road, in a jungle-shrouded compound a few miles away, live two other senior Khmer Rouge leaders whom any international tribunal would be eager to question. Soldiers loll about in hammocks outside the house, smoking and dozing, their only link to the world beyond provided by an old Chinese-made field radio.

Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan “defected”--or surrendered--to Hun Sen in December and, after checking into Phnom Penh’s luxury hotels and vacationing at the resort city of Sihanoukville, also known as Kompong Som, at government expense, took up residency in Pailin with their friends.

Neither expressed much remorse, although Nuon Chea did say he felt sorry for the animals in the forest that had suffered during the Khmer Rouge’s reign.

The government has in effect granted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan amnesty. Only one Khmer Rouge leader--Ta Mok, the one-legged former army chief of staff known as “the Butcher”--has ever been arrested. He was detained in March and is in prison in Phnom Penh, awaiting a possible court appearance.

Another key figure, Kang Kek Ieu, nicknamed Duch, was tracked down last month by two Western journalists near Battambang, 50 miles east of Pailin. Duch ran Tuol Sleng, the secondary school the Khmer Rouge turned into the “S-21” torture chamber, and “killed people like birds,” said Larch Kalyan, the archivist at S-21, which is now a genocide museum.

Sixteen thousand people entered Tuol Sleng between 1975 and ’78. Only seven are known to have left alive. Duch, long believed dead, told photographer Nic Dunlop and reporter Nate Thayer of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review that he converted to Christianity in 1993 and had worked for years as a teacher and for Western aid groups unaware of his identity.

“I am so sorry,” he said in a rare expression of Khmer Rouge remorse. “The people who died were good people. . . . There were many men who were innocent. . . . I have great difficulty in my life thinking that the people who died did nothing wrong. . . . God will decide my future.”

The government has detained Duch while it decides whether to charge him. Because the Khmer Rouge documented everything--even photographing each victim in Tuol Sleng just before he or she was killed--and Duch had to sign off on every execution order, he would be a crucial witness in any tribunal.

“Duch is essential, the core witness, because he knows the truth and can implicate others,” said Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. “Finding him alive is going to put additional pressure on the government to hold a more international style of trial.”

Hun Sen has resisted foreign pressure for a war crimes tribunal, maintaining that if he tried to pry loose Khmer Rouge leaders from Pailin he would risk reigniting the civil war. He succeeded, he says, in destroying the reviled movement by trading concessions for defections, so why tamper with success?

But the truth is, most Khmer Rouge members no longer have the stomach for war now that they are out of the jungle and enjoying the relative comforts of Pailin.

“I don’t ever want to pick up a gun again,” said Outh Chhen, 39, who defected in 1996 with Ieng Sary, Pailin’s leader. He, his wife and daughter live in a one-room bungalow without electricity or running water on Pailin’s main street. Chickens scamper about his dirt floor. Life, he says, has never been so good.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been making chairs. I was always good at woodworking. I can make a profit of, say, 1,000 riel [about 30 cents] on each one. It’s amazing. I’ve never had money before.”

All of Pailin seems to find the smell of money invigorating. And this is testimony to the ultimate failure of everything the Khmer Rouge said it believed in. When it finally came down to survival, the movement’s choice was to ditch its doctrinal ideology in favor of once-vilified capitalism.

The Khmer Rouge blew up the central bank in Phnom Penh in its attempt to create a cashless society; now Pailin has its first bank.

Ten miles away, an open-air jungle casino with a thatched roof is packed with Thai gamblers who walk across the border to play baccarat and roulette. And the radio station that Kong Doung still directs plays popular music--which he chooses--and sells advertising.

The Khmer Rouge tried to destroy religion, but the Buddhist temple has been rebuilt and the monks are back. The Khmer Rouge made illicit sex punishable by death, but a dozen brothels now flourish by the market where Hem Hai sells her carrots and onions.

In the dark years, speaking a few words of French or wearing glasses were capital offenses, a symbol of being tainted by foreign influence. Today Ieng Sary is seldom seen without his spectacles, and Khmer Rouge children are studying English at Pailin’s language “institute.”

Down the street from the town square, the U.N. has set up a human rights office. And there is a new, 60-room hotel in town with a 500-seat nightclub that sells whiskey only by the bottle and offers diners a roll of toilet paper in lieu of napkins.

“I’ve told my people not to use the term ‘Khmer Rouge’ any more because if we do, we won’t get outside investment, which is what we need to make Pailin grow,” said Ieng Vuth, 40, Pailin’s deputy governor and Ieng Sary’s son.

Outside his spartan office in City Hall, dusk had settled. The streets were quiet. A handful of young men played snooker in the doorless parlors strung along the unnamed main drag. A gate squeaked as the druggist closed up his shop. The soft, sweet smell of boiling rice wafted through the evening.

With the night, generators wheezed and coughed and a few lights flickered on. But the wakeful hours of night are brief in the jungle, and long before midnight, the generators again fell silent, the lights died and in the darkness of a starless night, Pailin felt as lonely and isolated as some distant planet, a town destined to forever sleep with its own terrible secrets.