Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [56]
From here the situation spiraled into hell. When the republic fell finally in 1975, the Khmer Rouge was left running Cambodia under the rule of a guy called Pol Pot.
In photos he's quite the charmer, with a smiley, kind face. The sort of guy you'd let babysit your grandkids or count the collection money at your church. Whereas, in reality, he was an odious psycho-madman who'd kill one and steal the other.
As prime minister, he banished thousands of city dwellers into the countryside, where they perished of disease and starvation. He confiscated and destroyed private cars, made it illegal for anyone to wear jewelry or glasses, and stomped out any religion he didn't happen to care for, including Buddhism. Random atrocities became the norm. People were shot on the spot for being gay. Others were made to dig their own grave, then beaten unconscious with a hammer and pushed into it. Whole families were run over with tanks and flattened. Children were tied to posts, where they were whipped without mercy. Horror upon horror upon horror. It was one of the worst bouts of ethnic cleansing in history. Furthermore, Pol Pot set about mass-murdering as many eminent teachers, politicians, librarians, police officers, intellectuals, monks, and social leaders as his attack-dog soldiers could get their hands on. Anyone senior enough, enlightened enough, or literate enough to recall the good old days before the Khmer Rouge rose to power, and who might, God forbid, pass on stories about those days to others, maybe causing the young folk to rebel against the obvious joys of life under Maoist Communism and demand freedom, was slaughtered.
Nobody's able to pin a final total on the carnage, but a conservative estimate has 25 percent of Cambodia's 7 million inhabitants dying at Pol Pot's hands during those years; 1.5 million have since been recovered from mass graves. Statistics that are impossible to comprehend and that left a dark stain not only on the region, but the world.
I read recently that roughly one million antipersonnel mines were laid during the civil war days, and in the most innocent of places too—places ordinary people might walk: in forest glades, on footpaths, in the vicinity of small villages, alongside rivers. Yet, despite concerted clearance efforts, thousands of them, not to mention antivehicle mines, booby traps, and bombs left over from multiple air raids, remain scattered across the countryside.
This makes the job on a show of this sort that much more difficult.
In other locations, when we're shooting B-roll, the cameraman simply points and says, “Okay, Cash, see where I'm pointing? Go stand over there and start walking toward me,” and that's what I do. But yesterday, when Kevin, our zippy new camera guy, tried this, ordering me to amble through a sunlit forest glade (check), along a footpath (check) that passed close by a village (check), beside a small, lazy river (check), for obvious reasons I freaked out and refused.
“Cash, you'll be fine. There are no land mines around here,” he said. “Siem Reap is a major tourist destination. I'm sure somebody—the government—cleared them away.”
“How sure?”
“Well, er …”
Precisely. He's not that sure. Not sure-sure. Nobody is.
In the past few years, millions of square meters of land in Cambodia have