Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When I went to Cambodia in January 1999, I wanted to see its architectural marvels, but I also hoped to understand how people lived in a country emerging from inconceivable tragedy. I wondered what happens to your emotions when you have seen a quarter of your compatriots murdered, when you yourself have lived in the hardship and fear of a brutal regime, when you are fighting against the odds to rebuild a devastated nation. I wanted to see what happens among the citizens of a nation when they have all endured almost inconceivable traumatic stress, are desperately poor, and have little chance for education or employment. The despair psychology of wartime is usually frenzied, while the despair that follows devastation, numb and all-encompassing, more closely resembles the depressive syndrome that afflicts the West. Cambodia is not a country in which factions fought brutally against factions; it is a country in which all the mechanisms of society were completely annihilated. It was like visiting that part of the Antarctic ice sheet over which there is no ozone at all.

During the 1970s, the revolutionary Pol Pot established a Maoist dictatorship in Cambodia in the name of what he called the Khmer Rouge. Years of bloody civil war followed, during which a fifth of the population was slaughtered. The educated elite was obliterated; the peasantry was regularly displaced; many were taken into prison cells where they were mocked and tortured. The entire country lived in chronic fear.

Most Cambodians are soft-spoken, gentle, and attractive. It’s hard to believe that Pol Pot’s atrocities took place in this lovely country. Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have come to power there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, or Nazism makes sense. In retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to such regimes; but where in the human imagination such behaviors originate is unknowable. Such evil is both contiguous with the ordinary evil of all societies and so extreme as to comprise its own law. The social fabric is always thinner than we care to acknowledge, but it is impossible to know how it gets vaporized. The American ambassador told me that the greatest problem for the Khmer people is that traditional Cambodian society has no peaceful mechanism to resolve conflict. “If they have differences,” he said, “they have to deny and suppress them totally, or they have to take out knives and fight.” A Cambodian member of the current government told me that the people had been too subservient to an absolute monarch for too many years and didn’t think to fight against authority until it was too late.

People cry easily in Cambodia. The words of the American ambassador were in my ears each time I witnessed a smiling Cambodian abruptly begin to weep, without any apparent middle ground or transition. During numerous interviews with people who had suffered atrocities at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I found that most preferred to look forward. When I pressed them on personal history, however, they would seem to regress before my eyes, slipping into an agonized past tense. Every adult I met in Cambodia had suffered such traumas as would have driven many of us to madness. What they had endured within their own minds was at yet another level of horror. When I decided to do interviews in Cambodia, I expected to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

Phaly Nuon, winner of the Figaro Prize for Humanitarian Service and a sometime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, has set up an orphanage and a center for depressed women in Phnom Penh. Her success with these women has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around her. If you save the women, it has been said, they in turn will save other women, who will save the children, and so via a chain of influence you can save the country.

We met, as Phaly Nuon had suggested, in a small, disused room at the top of an old office building near the center of Phnom Penh. She sat on a chair on one side, and I sat on a small sofa opposite. Like most Cambodians, she is relatively short by Western standards. Her black hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back from her face and gave it a hardness of emphasis. She can be aggressive in making a point, but she is also shy, smiling and looking down whenever she is not speaking.