Pol Pot's ghost

t had been a tiring day in August sixteen years ago and I wanted to retire early. I could have but for a knock on the door before eleven.

It was the comrade from Bangkok next door. "I'm so Thai, damn." "I'm just so Thai," I heard again. So you are. You really really are, I should have said. The third time, I was awake enough to get the sense of his weariness from our day's journeys. So I had to open a few badly brewed bottles of Vietnamese beer.

It is difficult to recount all the details. But I remember that that day, we had been to Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, not so far from the border with Thailand. One of the world's wonders was being preserved and restored by Indian experts paid by Unesco even while it was under threat from mortar attacks from the Khmer Rouge. It was defended by youths, one of whom, not more than thirteen in my reckoning, had an RPG slung on his shoulder, had asked me for a cigaret. I even lit it up for him, perhaps because he was nursing an AK-47 with both hands besides.

Earlier, we had visited a farm where, our hosts claimed, the Khmer Rouge had tortured the more 'dangerous' threats to its rule. After extracting confessions, the so-called liberators of that Indochinese land would throw their captives into the pits filled with hungry crocodiles.

In Phnom Penh for two days, we visited the many torture chambers and mass graves. Pits filled with bones from which it was difficult to assemble even just a few skeletons.

I was a delegate to a 'solidarity' conference organized by a part of the international Left to lend or shore up legitimacy to the government of Heng Samrin, installed with the aid of the Vietnamese, in December 1979. At the time, the United States, with the active support of China, had succeeded in isolating the new government. But there were of course the independent-minded who thought that ideology and geo-politics should never get in the way of one's humanity.

There were various relief and project missions by the Swedish---I remember echoes of ABBA at the airport; Japanese delegations; Indian scientists. There was, too, Julie Andrews bringing goods for the children at an orphanage; we missed her by a few minutes. There was even a Boholana working for a religious mission---World Vision---who arranged for a meeting with me.

I cannot tell you now how I ever got there. Or how the Thai comrade managed to elude authorities in his country, who was not only harboring but also actively supporting the deadly triumvitate of Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Pol Pot.

The story of the Khmer Rouge is not really unfamiliar in this century, full of mad men who wanted to do good to their fellows, even kind men who wanted some crude egalitarianism to reign forever. If not by transporting all of them to the countryside, by evening out opportunities for many six feet under.

At that time, the leftist sect that I belonged to, on the other side of the Sino-Soviet divide, had distanced itself from the nightmare of Pol Pot's dreams. But there are still people who have not even explained their support for that "revolutionary project" up to now.

As I write this, I am no longer even with the sect I was with. I was "expelled" after I had resigned more than seven years ago; and for that I have no regrets. I now know that the road to hell can look so idyllic, especially if one has ideological blinders on.

My Thai comrade, then in his fifties and writing for a Bangkok paper, could not sleep. He had been told by a room boy he was sleeping in the room Pol Pot used to occupy. The next morning, after confirming the allegation, I too, suddenly felt so Thai. Haunted by the man's ghost way before his death, we just couldn't sleep.

(The essay above was published in the Manila Times in May 1998 (when Malou Mangahas was chief editor, I'm back in Cambodia for the third time partly to update myself on efforts to take the remnants of the Khmer Rouge to account. I was here in 2002, 20 years after the first visit, when the land was still recovering from the ravages of Pol Pot.)