Cambodian despot's hideout seen as tourist draw

By Alan Sipress
The Washington Post

	Pol Pot
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But when Thong Khon, Cambodia's state secretary of tourism, stood beside the small rubbish pile in a forest clearing earlier this month, he saw much more. He explained eagerly how he would rebuild the house, restoring it to its condition before the Khmer Rouge despot died six years ago and was cremated on a nearby pyre of old tires.

The original carpenter will be hired, Thong said. Local officials have located Pol Pot's looted sofa, table and chairs. It would be the first step toward Thong's vision of restoring the entire Khmer Rouge complex in Anlong Veng, the redoubt deep in the northern jungle that was overrun by Cambodian government troops in 1998.

Under a master plan completed three weeks ago, Cambodia would rebuild and refurbish the villas, headquarters and offices, courthouse, jail, guard posts and other facilities of the Khmer Rouge oligarchs. Tourists would pay up to $2 to see each of 30 attractions. New hotels and restaurants would follow.

"That's the dream," Thong said. "In five years, this whole area is going to grow up."

But while Thong plans to promote Anlong Veng to foreigners as part of a package tour including the famed temples of Angkor Wat 60 miles to the south, some Cambodians are asking whether a Khmer Rouge version of Colonial Williamsburg is an appropriate way to mark the darkest chapter in the country's history.

"Memory cannot be commercialized. It has to be preserved a different way," said Youk Chhang, whose Documentation Center of Cambodia collects documents and personal testimonies about the Khmer Rouge atrocities. "Buying a ticket to see the grave of Pol Pot undermines the value of the memories and the suffering we've been through."

The mandate to develop the Anlong Veng Historical Tourist Area, Thong said, came directly from Prime Minister Hun Sen, a Khmer Rouge defector who became their adversary.

For Thong, 53, it is also personal. Among the estimated 1 million Cambodians who died during the Khmer Rouge terror of 1975 to 1979 were 13 members of his family, including his father, three siblings, their spouses and six nieces and nephews.

Thong, a poor peasant's son who became a physician, said he survived the slaughter of intellectuals and professionals only by fleeing the capital, Phnom Penh, for the countryside and posing as a bicycle rickshaw driver. He didn't dare utter a word in either the English or French he had learned as a student. "You speak a foreign language, you die," he recalled.

"Almost every family had people killed by Pol Pot, but the young generation doesn't know what happened," he said. "My son doesn't know. What about my granddaughter? What does she know?"
 
The main obstacle to developing Anlong Veng, however, is not public debate over its propriety, but the absence of a decent road. The location, near the northern border with Thailand, was selected by the Khmer Rouge as their haven precisely because it was so hard to get to.

Setting out from the northwestern city of Siem Reap early one morning this month to survey the site, Thong deemed the direct route impassable. He ordered the driver of his Toyota Land Cruiser to take the "good road," a roundabout, 120-mile-long, bone-jarring track of red dirt that runs through fallow rice fields before entering the jungle. "The good road's not so good," Thong conceded. The crow's feet deepened at the corners of his eyes as he laughed, one in a series of chortles and rasping chuckles.

After five hours, the Land Cruiser reached the dusty town of Anlong Veng, with its large billboard welcoming the few intrepid tourists, and began the steep climb into the wooded hills that separate Cambodia and Thailand. Thong gestured toward the dense forest on the left.

"Over there is one of the sites," he said in the tone of a tour guide, over the groaning engine. "That's where Pol Pot produced land mines." The site was on the restoration list.

The villagers here have their own version of history. They were the few favored by the Khmer Rouge, benefiting from their patronage and provision of imported rice. One of those was Unkhemara Sophorn, 25, an earnest, clean-cut man wearing a pressed white shirt and tan pants who is now the only English-speaking guide in Anlong Veng. He said that as an adolescent he had lived with Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok as his foster son.

"I tell people who come here that the Khmer Rouge were good. People are surprised because they think the Khmer Rouge were bad men," Unkhemara said. "Ta Mok was a good man. He liked children and liked to feed small animals."

Ta Mok is now in a Cambodian jail, but other surviving Khmer Rouge leaders remain free. The Cambodian government and the United Nations are preparing a special tribunal to try between five and 10 of them for crimes against humanity.

Thong, who is counting on local residents to serve as tour guides, acknowledged that this contested history poses a challenge. Guides would have to be closely supervised. "Most of the people here are Pol Pot people," he said. "The question is whether they will follow our political line or say whatever they want."

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