THE DARKNESS OF CAMBODIA

By Terry McCarthy

The Cambodian village of Kdep Tmar, deep in the northwest forests near the Thai border, lies within a minefield. In the nine months since Khmer Rouge cadres forced 188 families to live there, mines have injured 16 people, killing five. Planted by numerous belligerent factions during Cambodia's three decades of war, the mines are in the fields behind the houses, along the rutted track that is the only access to the village and in the forest where the villagers gather wood.

"Life is bad here," says Pou Venh, father of three, a sad-faced man whose body is emaciated by malaria. "There is no land for growing rice, no food, mines everywhere. The school has no furniture." He and his wife try to keep their children from wandering too far, but they don't even know if the patch of ground around their small wooden shack is safe. Two months ago a pregnant woman was killed by a mine as she walked to the outdoor latrine 20 yds. behind her hut.

Outside the areas that the Khmer Rouge control, villages are acquiring motorcycles, electricity, pagodas, noodle stands. But the Khmer Rouge do not permit such progress to reach Kdep Tmar. Malaria is endemic there, and the settlement's only doctor was killed by a mine in the forest when he went to gather herbs for his sick son. Kdep Tmar's people are on a dark, forbidding path that stretches back through years of civil war and bad karma and leads to nowhere but suffering and death. It is the road Pol Pot chose for Cambodia.

Last week Pol Pot reached the end of that road, in a show trial staged in the jungle by his own cadres, which have officially expelled him from the movement that was responsible for the death of more than 1 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. To publicize his removal, the Khmer Rouge invited reporter Nate Thayer, of the Far East Economic Review, and cameraman David McKaige, whose footage was purchased by ABC's Nightline, to witness the proceedings.

Thayer says the gray-haired Pol Pot is "thoroughly destroyed, a broken man." Maybe so, but his announced punishment, life imprisonment, is curiously lenient by Khmer Rouge standards, which traditionally hold justice to be a bullet or a blow to the back of the skull with a hoe. Many Cambodians believe that the trial was a sham, and the U.S. continues to insist that Pol Pot be forced to stand trial before an international tribunal.

Meanwhile his brutalizing legacy lives on in a country where government policy is carried out by force. Early last month, a bloody power grab by Hun Sen, one of Cambodia's two Prime Ministers, left at least 65 people dead in the streets of Phnom Penh. Hun Sen's followers then rounded up more than 30 of his chief rivals, some of whom had their eyes gouged out before being summarily executed.

Visitors to Cambodia have come away charmed by the lush beauty of the countryside and the smiling people. But the violent side of Cambodian life can manifest itself almost without warning. "Cambodians have this darkness, which is part of the shadow of their sweetness," says David Chandler, who has written a biography of Pol Pot and several histories of the country. "Many of us who keep going there still find it hard to understand." Chandler observes that Pol Pot, with his gentle voice, never failed to charm those he met. He liked to quote French poetry. This was the same man who had his staff executed after his house in Phnom Penh had power failures.

When the Vietnamese communists took Saigon in 1975, they put their "class enemies" into re-education camps. In neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot built extermination camps. Teachers, doctors, people who could speak a foreign language, even people who wore glasses, were purged as he sought to reduce all of Cambodia to the level of the peasant class. The Vietnamese could be cruel captors, but their Confucian heritage left them open to educational reform. In Cambodia, by contrast, Buddhism encouraged a belief in the ineluctability of karma and the idea that evil suffered is evil deserved. "The idea of karma goes very deep in this society, and I think that was part of the mentality of the Khmer Rouge when they were massacring people," said Francois Ponchaud, a priest who first went to Cambodia in 1965. "They believed their victims had made errors, political errors, and that killing them would allow them to be reborn as better people in their next lives." Pol Pot has admitted to some mistakes in the period from 1975 to 1979, but in his eyes they were mistakes of policy. About the million dead, he has never expressed any remorse.

A Cambodian proverb says: If you are strong, make yourself feared; if you are weak, make yourself pitied. Cambodians are deeply insecure, aware that the proud temple-building empire of Angkor, which covered much of Southeast Asia in the 12th century, has shrunk to the small area of today's Cambodia. This insecurity has prompted much irrational aggression. In 1978 Pol Pot launched attacks on Vietnam, bragging that one Cambodian soldier could kill eight Vietnamese. It is a behavior pattern that is deeply rooted in the national psyche: to hold power one must show the utmost ferocity and single-mindedness and never reveal weakness.

Pol Pot is visibly weak now, suffering from recurrent bouts of malaria and, reportedly, a bad heart condition. But even so, there was something unreal about the televised jungle trial. When the rehearsed ranting of his accusers was finished, young soldiers respectfully guided the vilified leader to a waiting vehicle, which took him to a house in the jungle, possibly the last time the outside world will ever see him. Gone too was any likelihood that he will ever be brought to real justice for instigating some of this century's most unspeakable crimes.

By arresting Pol Pot and staging the subsequent trial, the Khmer Rouge were hoping to sanitize themselves so they can move from their futile armed resistance into the political game. In the past two years, a steady stream of people, tired of the deprivations of life in jungle villages like Kdep Tmar, have been defecting from Khmer Rouge control. Pol Pot may even have tacitly approved his trial for the sake of the survival of his movement.

But Pol Pot did not kill 1 million people on his own, and few Cambodians cheered as the man once called Brother No. 1 was carted out of view.

Terry McCarthy is a freelance writer who has covered Southeast Asia for 10 years and has just returned from Cambodia.