Pol Pot by Philip Short Read Free Book Online Page A

far beyond the reach of all but a tiny fraction of the population. In the country as a whole, no more than a few thousand children, among half a million of school-going age, had access to even the rudiments of a ‘modern’ education.
    Phnom Penh, at that time, was an unusual capital city. It was strangely un-Khmer.
    Visitors found ‘tables of chattering Frenchmen . . . Chinese in white suits and helmets, Annamites with bare torsos and full black trousers — and, among them, surprisingly few Cambodians.’ Khmers accounted for little more than a third of the population of 100,000. Most of the others were Chinese-speaking merchants, who controlled the country’s commercial life, and Vietnamese, who worked as junior civil servants, fishermen or coolies. There was also a scattering of Thais, Malays and Indians from Pondicherry. The few hundred French families formed a tiny, if highly visible, microcosm, who put their stamp on what passed for the cultural and intellectual life of the city, its pavement cafés, tree-lined boulevards and colonial, Mediterranean-style buildings. The result was a cosmopolitan, contradictory place — languid yet bustling — a hodge-podge of conflicting styles:
    The street traffic
    is a mêlée of rickety native-built gharris [known locally as matchboxes], glittering motorcars, rickshaws, top-heavy omnibuses drawn by tiny ponies . . . and bullock carts exactly like those illustrated on the walls of Angkor . . . all moving against a background of avenues and suburbs full of typically French villas . . . The street-markets of Phnom Penh are peculiarly its own, yet have much in common with those of France . . . The goods are set neatly out on the pavements instead of on raised stalls . . . Flowering plants in home-made basket-pots [stand] in ranks of scarlet and orange, white and mauve, pink and green . . . As the sun moves across the heavens, the goods are [transferred to the other pavement] and laid out patiently and methodically all over again.
    Even the King’s palace, a gilt-and-gingerbread confection with crenellated yellow-plaster walls, ornately curlicued sentry-boxes and imposing wrought-iron gates — not to mention a
    belle époque
    summerhouse, used by the Empress Eugénie for the opening of the Suez Canal before being dismantled and shipped to Indochina — seemed to have been created by its French architects with an oriental Monaco in mind.
    The foreignness of Phnom Penh, and the leading role played by other
    Asians at the expense of Khmers, appear to have had little impact on Sâr. ‘It
    didn’t surprise us
    ,’ Nhep explained later, ‘because . . . there were Chinese everywhere in Cambodia.’ Even in a place as small as Prek Sbauv, there was a Chinese shop — the only one in the area — where the merchants from Kompong Thom congregated each year to purchase the rice harvest.
    The Vietnamese were viewed differently. Every Khmer child knew the story of the three Cambodian prisoners, whom the Vietnamese buried up to their necks so that their heads formed a tripod on which a kettle could be placed, lighting a fire in the middle and enjoining them not to move lest they ‘spill the master’s tea’ — just as every child knew that sugar palms, or
    thnot,
    emblematic of Cambodia, stopped growing a few miles before the border ‘because they don’t want to grow in Vietnam’. That such tales were patently untrue was irrelevant; they summed up a perception of a country which Cambodians viewed as an hereditary enemy. Despite the atrocities committed by the nineteenth-century Siamese, there were no comparable stories about the Thais.
    Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman. When Khmer children squabbled, one of Sâr’s friends recalled, an older child would intervene, reminding them that Cambodians had enemies enough without fighting among themselves. Yet it was above all the
    idea
    of the Vietnamese that was hated. They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not: a disciplined,