FORTNIGHT JOURNAL :: Documenting the Promise of the Millennial Generation

FISTFIGHT IN CAMBODIA

PAPER TRAILS ARE CUT THROUGH THE KHMER ROUGE TRIBUNAL. ANH-THU PURSUES JUSTICE IN A LAND OF "MISFITS, MERCENARIES AND MISSIONARIES."

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It is (like every other day), a sweltering, cacophonous morning in Phnom Penh, as my colleagues and I embark on our daily commute from the capital’s center to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Informally known as the Khmer Rouge tribunal, it sits, by design, on a military compound at the furthest edge of the city. A lonely, pastel island amidst a sea of red dust, its daily visitors include emaciated, trash-eating cows milling outside the tribunal gates.

Shielded from the hubbub inside an air-conditioned bus provided grudgingly by the Cambodian government, my head knocks against the bus window as headphones blare. The bus rumbles along at as quick a pace as Phnom Penh’s anarchic traffic will allow, then lurches to a stop. A man on a decades-old motorbike--probably of a similar model to the one my mother drove in Vietnam 35 years ago--has been hit by a bus alongside ours, crushed to death under the wheels. A crowd forms around his inert, mangled form--not to save his life, already a forgone conclusion, but to prevent further damage to his corpse. Traffic edges around the accident, but vehicles doggedly continue on their individual journeys. Deadly motorcycle accidents are commonplace, and I’ve stopped counting the number I’ve witnessed in my time here.

Snaking through tied-up traffic, we cross paths with workers arriving at the garment factory complex across the street from the tribunal. We share the same commute to this virtually uninhabited no-man’s land, and I see them every morning and evening pouring into and out from the garment factories. All young women in their twenties, they pack the backs of flatbed trucks like brightly-colored Legos, or grab rides on motorbike taxis. They are products of the population boom that occurred after the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, when Cambodians could finally leave the work camps and start eating again. I wonder if the workers know that we are just across the street, and I wonder if they ever attend, have the ability to attend, or even know about the public hearings at the court.

All young women in their twenties, they pack the backs of flatbed trucks like brightly-colored Legos, or grab rides on motorbike taxis. They are products of the population boom that occurred after the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, when Cambodians could finally leave the work camps and start eating again.

Probably not, as tribunal hearings overlap with their work schedule. Besides, what’s past is past, and the Cambodian government would like to keep it that way. Adhering to the barest letter of

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an agreement with the UN, the government cannily redrew city boundaries to place the Khmer Rouge trials in the newest (and farthest) reaches of Phnom Penh. The saying holds true: out of sight, out of mind.

II

Coming to law school with dreams of maybe pursuing some variety of human rights-related legal work, I didn’t have a comparable level of direction and drive to my peers who had spent years engaged in extensive work in and academic study of the theoretical and practical foundations of human rights and international law. I possessed, on paper, a hobbyist’s interest--a few human rights and international relations classes under my belt, a decent but not impressive record of travel and living abroad, and a penchant for getting into fistfights in my poorly articulated attempts to express an internal sense of right and wrong. In university, close friends of mine threw themselves into their causes with conviction and zeal, establishing themselves as campus leaders, gaining prestigious internships on Capitol Hill and at top-flight international organizations, and obtaining proficiency in geopolitically strategic languages.

I, on the other hand--a good but by no means spectacular student--spent most of my time

reading and then promptly forgetting 18th century treatises at the theological library where I worked, convincing roommates to skip class to do communal eBay searches for 1950s party dresses, or awkwardly memorizing Latin grammar worksheets at raves. In my more political moments, I engaged in weekend outings with friends to the various rallies and protests that marked Washington, D.C. social life. I shouted slogans and ran from cops--largely out of conviction, but in no small part also due to the entertainment value. Joining arms with egg-throwing, teenaged, self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalists surely beat out a weekend spent instant messaging in the library, or ranting incoherently on blogs.

III

My first trip to Cambodia was an almost serendipitous event. After a turbulent first year in law school, I was hotly anticipating a pedestrian summer taking classes and working as a part-time assistant at a legal aid organization in Austin. I had considered finding an internship in Vietnam, but had not seriously pursued it, partly out of fear that my Vietnamese (used primarily for communicating with relatives and cursing non-relatives) was not up to professional standards, and partly out of unease at the prospect of living and working in Vietnam

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outside of the protective cocoon of family and friends. However, during the course of an idle conversation, I was informed that a fellow classmate was going to pursue a summer internship in Cambodia.

Curious, I Googled the organization, applied, got funding from my school at the last minute, hustled for deeply discounted fare using my frequent flyer miles, and several months later found myself in Phnom Penh , for the first time in my life. On arrival, my knowledge of Cambodia consisted of: 1) Angkor Wat, 2) the Khmer Rouge, and 3) my mother’s assertion that Cambodia had excellent fish. What I didn’t know was that--due to the influx of international organizations and foreign investors--some parts of Cambodia were demographically indistinguishable from NYC’s Upper East Side.

“Holy shit, where did all these white people come from?!” It was my first outing in Phnom Penh, to a restaurant popular for its smoothies. Upon entry, completely taken by surprise, I realized that outside of the restaurant staff, I was the only person of Asian descent there. Though I had spent a lot of time in Vietnam, and I knew of the expat communities in Southeast Asia, my experiences had been limited to family gatherings, and I had experienced few interactions with expatriates.

Later on, I expressed my surprise and wonder at this situation. “Well, now you know--it’s made up of three Ms--misfits, mercenaries, and missionaries,” an old Cambodia hand told me, as we shared pitchers of Angkor--the watery national beer--at a forgettable expat bar. It was a neat categorization, as applicable now as it had been during the colonial era. There were the eager investors--young, brash, virtually all male--hoping to make a buck off of Phnom Penh’s unsustainable real estate bubble, buying bottle service at hotel bars representing two months' salary to a Cambodian civil servant. There were the repatriated Cambodian-Americans, welcomed to the U.S. as infants and refugees from the Khmer Rouge, then unceremoniously deported back “home” when they grew up and found themselves getting in trouble with the law.

There were the eager investors--young, brash, virtually all male--hoping to make a buck off of Phnom Penh's unsustainable real estate bubble, buying bottle service at hotel bars representing two months' salary to a Cambodian civil servant.

Mostly, though, there was the ceaseless stream of bright-eyed aid and development workers, almost all western, a disproportionate number of them female--populating Phnom Penh’s taverns and

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restaurants and clubs. A drink in any number of these places--reasonable to the average expat--could buy a week’s worth of meals from the local food stalls. I most certainly fell into playing the missionary, working at a human rights organization, purveyor of a secular variety of faith. A confirmed agnostic and always skeptical of well-meaning westerners in foreign lands, I was slightly uneasy to be ascribed this role.

However, I quickly found myself in a close-knit circle of those bright-eyed workers. My best friend was a Singaporean-English-Frenchwoman working at my organization on her gap year before starting university. J.C. was my mirror--an easily-excitable, recently-reformed goth who dressed like she had mugged a television psychic. She had spent her whole life living in Singapore’s ex-pat bubble, never quite belonging to her surroundings.

She spoke French with an English accent, and English with an accent that my untrained ear thought was British but that the British thought was from another solar system; traveled on a French passport and constantly craved street meat at all hours. Together we would eat miles of noodles, take orphans to water parks where you put your life in your hands every time you went down a slide, and throw alcohol-lubricated

karaoke boat cruise barbecues along the Tonlé Sap river. I would keep her company as she was treated for Dengue fever by a self-proclaimed doctor (who turned out, naturally, not to be one), laugh hysterically about our poor teenage fashion choices of fishnets and medieval-themed ensembles, and engage in the sort of wide-eyed idealistic dialogue about What We Wanted to Do When We Grew Up that everyone has when they get bit by the human rights bug, or when they become a born-again religious adherent.

IV

Two years later, I sit inside an un-air-conditioned, poorly lit office at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I am manually scanning thousands of pages of typed and neatly written “confessions” by Khmer Rouge cadres kept in the archives at the site, to be entered into the evidentiary record for the upcoming trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders. It is very hot, and after going through the 157th confession booklet, very boring.

You can get a discounted package trip
from a tuk tuk driver that takes you to both the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng.

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Tuol Sleng, a former high school converted into a prison for regime members, was the penultimate destination of some 15,000 (give or take a couple thousand or so) individuals cannibalized by the regime for which they had shed blood, tears and compassion. It is also the most famous tourist site in Cambodia after Angkor Wat and Choeung Ek, better known as the Killing Fields (the ultimate destination for the vast majority of Tuol Sleng prisoners). You can get a discounted package trip from a tuk tuk driver that takes you to both the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng.

Tourists, taking a break from all of the exhibits of death and torture, always step in for a cold drink at a very conveniently located restaurant/guesthouse directly across the street from the prison. It is flanked by a gauntlet of motorcycle taxi drivers, vendors selling overpriced water, and beggars of all shapes and sizes and degrees of missing limbs and body parts.

Fun fact! Tuol Sleng prison included not just the former high school, which was an administrative intake and detention area, but all of the buildings and houses radiating from it for several blocks. During afternoon breaks facilitated by daily rolling black-outs that start at noon, my co-workers and I go directly across the street to the guesthouse’s restaurant for milkshakes. Lounging

in the leafy cool, we joke about all the tourists getting a good night’s rest in a guesthouse that most certainly sits on a former site for interrogation and torture. In Cambodia, people joke a lot.

“Lady, motorbike?” a half-dozen drivers inquire as soon as I am dropped off by another motorbike. A beggar--whose face was burned off some time ago--engages in raucous laughter with the drivers and teases me whenever I enter and leave the prison grounds. My co-worker, who recalled sitting on a water buffalo as a child and seeing people executed in the distance, chuckles as he points out a desk in an old photo taken of Tuol Sleng. There is a corpse sprawled on the floor to its side. “It’s the same table we are using you know,” he laughs while giving the table a knock. Though disinclined to believe him, I figured that at the same time, no one would throw away a perfectly usable table just because someone died next to it.

Humor levies the drudgery of our daily activities, which consist of scanning, staring at documents, staring at more documents, reading documents about the documents, and so on. Legal work at tribunals (outside of the subject matter of the documents) is procedurally quite boring, involving a slog through millions of pages of documentation and case law for tiny glimmers of

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precedent and evidence that can support your case. Then comes the analysis, writing documents about documents, writing documents about those documents to make sure nothing is missed, and so on--in what seems like an infinite recursion of memoranda. The more interesting work happens behind-the-scenes, in the deal-making and posturing between the UN and the Cambodian government.

Politics is an explicit presence in the realm of international criminal law, and especially at the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Here, the Cambodian government and the UN, though technically partners, are often at loggerheads, and intrigue runs rife. Of course, it’s a misnomer to say that tribunal is doing nothing but show trials, as some skeptics would allege. However, internecine political forces are present at many levels, whether in the scope of the prosecutions allowed, or in allegations of misdeeds and corruption amongst personnel, or in the constant battle to obtain funding to keep the tribunal’s lights on.

Here, the Cambodian government and the UN, though technically partners, are often at loggerheads, and intrigue runs rife.

This is maybe the point in the story where the bright-eyed human rights defender slowly but

surely begins her transformation into hardened, resigned cynicism. One night, I find myself sitting next to an alcoholic old peacekeeper, waxing bitterly about life while simultaneously making lecherous advances.

"This could be my future," I think. Or, that I would end up like a woman who had arrived in Cambodia decades ago as an idealistic young activist, eager to find ways to bring peace during the midst of a bloody civil war. More than 20 years later, she was now a roly-poly advisor to the corrupt national government, living a lavish life bought and paid for by the prime minister and his inner circle. Good intentions, as I saw time and again, were not enough to stop the onslaught of time and disappointment.

V

We are celebrating my friend’s birthday at a Tex-Mex restaurant on the Phnom Penh waterfront, playing tourist bingo complete with cards that two friends had created. In the midst of downing margaritas, laughing at the red-skinned, raccoon-eyed tourists, and generally enjoying each other’s company, we see and hear a commotion start outside the restaurant.

A Thai woman and her Russian husband (who seem rather drunk) have gotten into some sort of

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argument with a taxi driver, whose colleagues (all seeming equally as drunk) come to back him up. Some of my friends and myself go out to see if any intervention may be required. As it is after 9 pm on a weekend in Phnom Penh, there are no police officers around to stop any fight, so in a moment of bravado, I get involved. As I trade words with one of the taxi drivers, the woman is surrounded by several others who proceed to drag her to the ground and take turns beating her, while her husband stands dazedly on the side.

...The woman is surrounded by several others who proceed to drag her to the ground
and take turns beating her, while her husband
stands dazedly on the side.

Right as the taxi driver and I start throwing punches, a friend pulls me back while others physically intervene on behalf of the woman, keeping the drivers at bay while the couple escapes, mouthing indignities as my friends find themselves in the midst of a full on brawl. Leaving, a friend and I are both screaming at each other over my getting involved in this dispute. “What the fuck were you thinking? You don’t do shit like that, you’d get killed!” “I’m not gonna watch a woman get her ass beat by a bunch of assholes in the street and not get involved!”

We’re both equally risible and running high on adrenaline--no one convinces anyone, but cooler heads prevail and we finally agree to a truce.

Later on, after the elevated feelings have simmered down, I talk to another friend about the incident. I don’t exactly remember how the conversation goes, but I know that her advice is something along the lines of “know when to pick your battles, but don’t just be a bystander.” Well, obviously, but the hard part is figuring when to pick your battles.

I think about my past mentors and friends I look up to. They are tenacious individuals in the realm of human rights and public policy, driven by a strong sense of justice and fairness. What keeps them aloft, though, are large doses of humor, compassion, humility, and self-awareness. A few are goofy human beings, when they aren’t Doing Important Things. I contrast my mentors with some people I’ve met in the field, who take themselves and their missions a bit too seriously. Some come across as assholes. Others seem burned out, standing on the sidelines because they’re too tired to go on, undone by their high expectations. They become ineffective advocates, and what they set out to do is undone by a lack of passion or arrogant, wrongheaded posturing. It is also the point, I think, where they become corruptible.

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Up until now, I’ve learned about my passions, which is important in providing direction. However, the battle now is to balance the fire with an ability to accept certain absurdities or differences with grace and humor. Also, to be aware that I am often a temperamental jackass, and deal with it accordingly. Though I still don’t know all the battles to pick yet, I know this one is worth fighting.

Anh-Thu is an Vietnamese-American lawyer who worked at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia. Anh-Thu studied at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and received her J.D. from the University of Texas. Her entries in Fortnight are essays about her experience in human rights law, growing up in a family of immigrants, and living a frugal life during an economic recession. Since publishing with Fortnight, Anh-Thu started and received incubation support for her own non-profit, Ahkun, a marketing platform for micro-loan textile goods made by formerly-trafficked women artisans in Southeast Asia.

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