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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia--Twenty-nine years ago, this city of 1 million-plus was the world's largest ghost town, its streets, homes, and shops as silent and empty as the quarters of a long-sunken battleship. On a calendar of madness issued by the Khmer Rouge regime, it was Year Zero of a new Cambodia.
Before this reign of evil ended--starting on Christmas Day 1978, when the Vietnamese army invaded--the Khmer Rouge under radical Maoist Pol Pot had slaughtered outright or worked to death some 2 million fellow Cambodians branded enemies of the state for such high crimes as wearing glasses.
A visit to the Cambodian Genocide Museum here shows just part of what Pol Pot wrought: On the walls of the one-time high school are thousands of mug shots snapped by the jailers of Security Office 21, or S-21. Khmer Rouge documents show that from 1975 to 1978, 10,499 adults (and about 2,000 children) entered barbed-wired and brick-celled S-21. The Vietnamese who liberated the death camp found seven alive.
With its educated class all but exterminated, Cambodia in 1979 began its slow revival. Decades of highly factionalized politics, continuing today under Vietnam-backed Prime Minister Hun Sen, have deterred investment, the best foreign aid. But, as of just last week, the Hun Sen government at least emerged as clearly in charge after national elections. When more foreigners do decide to open up shop in Cambodia, they will find a work force almost radioactive with entrepreneurial energy.
A visit to Phnom Penh's Central Market--a 1937 domed French building with stall-choked grounds--is a reactor of such energy. From the cabbies and cyclo (imagine a bike-propelled rickshaw) drivers who deliver its patrons, to the small merchants whose diverse wares make Wal-Mart look like a specialty shop, to the child vendors hawking sodas, the hustling market people are a GNP multiplier waiting to happen.
Neang Sok began selling exotic fruit in 1980, the year after the Khmer Rouge, who had herded her to the countryside to perform brute labor, fled to the mountains. Mangos are moving well lately, and, though competition is fierce, the 64-year-old still sells enough food to buy her own. She dreams of moving to America.
Sok Phal, a soldier who lost his right leg to a land mine along the Thai border, pushes postcards and books from a tray strapped around his neck. Mr. Sok has no real goals beyond subsistence, but that doesn't mean life hasn't improved. Until this year, he begged. Now, staked by some friends, he sells. Every day. All day. It's a hard life. But, he says, it's "a better reputation than a beggar."
Inside, pretty Lim Chhorvin, 29, presides over a long glass case filled with watches she buys from Taiwan and Japan. Her life, she says, is "quite good," though competitors who offer low-quality knock-offs of her brand-name timepieces are cutting into her profits. Still, she can't imagine living any place but Cambodia.
America's corporation-dominated economy inspires few poets. Yet in the streets of this brutalized, brave nation, which Virginia's congressional delegation should lose no chance to assist, what's clear is the beautiful freedom of free enterprise, a system of dreams and dignity.
Where dead Pol Pot resides, one might imagine a sound system that plays for eternity the screams of S-21. But we suspect he is doomed to hear a far more hideous score: the happy babble of shoppers at Central Market, the raucous putting of motorbikes on Pochentong Boulevard, the smack of a cue ball hitting a fresh rack in a pool hall along the Tonle Sap.
This is the voice of Phnom Penh, the music of life triumphant--and the ultimate torture of a monster who failed at everything, save monstrosity.
