Phnom Penh: 40 years after the Fall

PHNOM PENH:  The world knows much of the story on the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from the acclaimed movie “The Killing Fields."  On April 17, 1975, five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Cambodia and the installation of the Lon Nol government, Phnom Penh was taken by the ultra-leftist Khmer Rouge.  This secretive organization, which was founded by left-wing Cambodian intellectuals from the Sorbonne in Paris, was known by the population at the time as "The Other."  It soon proved to be one of the bloodiest regimes in history.  The intent of the founders was to return Cambodia to "Year Zero," to remake the country into the ultimate and perfect agrarian society. Their model was to be the Chinese “cultural revolution."

Daniel Hung Meas, a Cambodian by birth and a Frenchmen by education, lived for nearly four years in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.  He and his mother, father and five siblings survived.  Four of his older brothers were already living in Paris.

“You cannot imagine 2 million people, the population of Phnom Penh at that time, all in the streets trying to leave the city," Daniel recalled of the fall.

"No one could move. The Khmer Rouge told us that the Americans were going to bomb the city, so we had to leave, but that it would only be for a few days. So we brought next to nothing with us.  We were very lucky in that my father worked for the French Embassy and had an inkling of what was to happen under this new government.  He saw that we smashed up our glasses, watches, books - anything that would identify us as the educated class.  He told us to never, never speak a word of French … to anyone.”

Of the group of 300 families that the Meas family lived among, near the town of Neak Luong between Phnom Penh and the Vietnam border, half were to perish.

The highway from the Vietnam border to Phnom Penh today is lined with industrial zones filled with new steel warehouses and manufacturing facilities.  A great deal of the business in Cambodia is Vietnamese controlled, much to the displeasure of many Cambodians, who have mixed feelings about their former liberators - and long-time traditional enemies.  However, though this country has a long way to go before it catches up with Vietnam, it is eons from Year Zero.

Monks along the riverfront in Phnom Penh.

The 30-year prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, has been the subject of much criticism because of alleged human-right violations and other anti-democratic actions.  Members of his family hold positions of power in the government and in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces.  His son Hun Manet was a 1999 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  Whatever the truth of the accusations against Hun Sen, it must be said that great progress has been made in Cambodia since the Vietnamese-led overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.

Though the ruins at Angkor Wat outside the town of Seam Reap in northwestern Cambodia remain the country’s most famous tourist attraction, Phnom Penh is a bustling tourist town of its own, and rightly so.  It boasts a strikingly beautiful park along the Tonle Sap River, and that area of the city is loaded with hotels, bars and restaurants catering to the international tourist.  Most of the traditional government buildings and museums can be found in this vicinity.

The Tuol Sleng prison, a former high school, was the site of the infamous Khmer Rouge S-21 torture center in mid Phnom Penh.  This site, along with the Killing Field museum on the outskirts of the city, are must-sees for most tourists who come to Cambodia.  Between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians lost their lives during the Khmer Rouge reign.

Tourists at the Killing Fields where 17,000 victims of S-21 were finished off.

C-Kong, the Tuk-Tuk driver, has had a hard life, as do most of the Cambodian working class.  Too young to remember the liberation of his country by the Vietnamese, he nonetheless carries the traditional resentment of Cambodians toward his neighboring country.

“They control most of the big businesses,” said C-Kong, “and more than a million Vietnamese have moved to this country for the good jobs.  At the same time, more than a million Cambodians have moved to Thailand for employment there."

Ralph Conroy (left) and C-Kong (right) on the streets of Phnom Pehn..

The Hung Meas family made it to France after escaping to Vietnam during the border fighting between the two countries that led to the Vietnamese invasion beginning Christmas Day 1978.  Phnom Penh was liberated from Khmer Rouge control on Jan. 7, 1979.  

Daniel lives in Ho Chi Minh City these days with his wife and daughter.  Two children from an earlier marriage are being educated in Paris.  He recently turned down a part in a French movie playing ‘"Duch," the warden of Tuol Sleng prison.  He feared being recognized as the convicted war criminal and having revenge taken on him by a victim’s family.  

He played the Vietcong agent that killed “The Quiet American” in the 2002 film of that name, which starred Michael Caine.  A former photographer for Agence French-Presse, Daniel still makes his living with a camera.

Daniel Hung Meas as he would look playing Duch in the French movie.

*A version of this article appeared in the Press Republican on May 24, 2015.