The post-punk era certainly had its defining moments, with songs of teenage angst seared onto the memory of a generation. In the period from 1978 to 1981 jarring guitar chords were often married to leftist politics, and served with a high dose of youthful cynicism. The Dead Kennedys’ ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ summed up a generation’s malaise with an aural blast that coupled insolent lyrics with killer riffs: It’s a holiday in Cambodia / Where people dress in black / A holiday in Cambodia / Where you’ll kiss arse or crack. Jello Biafra’s screeching vocals provided ironic commentary to Pol Pot’s nightmarish regime (1975–78) when world attention focused on the Killing Fields and the infamous torture school S-21 Tuong Sleng, some fifteen minutes by pedalled rickshaw from Phnom Penh. Flared jeans and ritual murder sat side-by-side in this confused and contested period. Why would any holiday-maker want to visit this hell-hole?
But if we’re honest in our historical memory, we’d recall that Cambodia was previously a holiday destination. Jackie Kennedy and Catherine Deneuve swanned about on the palm-fringed beaches of Sihanoukville in the late 1960s—evidence of a prior history when Cambodia was a pleasurable sojourn for jaded tourists. Today, tourism is once again thriving in Cambodia.
No tourist would ever lead a revolution, of course, so they are still welcomed in oppressive regimes (Burma anyone?) and kept safe by governments keen on safeguarding the foreigner. Dictators don’t rule Cambodia nor is it oppressive, but it has a compliant government keen on following neo-liberal programs, competing in the global economy while tightening police and army into the party apparatus. Tourism fits nicely into this paradigm by bringing in foreign currency and some favourable PR (a glance at weekend travel supplements is proof enough). Hun Sen’s Cambodia People’s Party (CPP) is committed to reminding tourists of Cambodia’s raw holiday potential (Phnom Penh’s cultural clout is evident in the gilded palaces, likewise in the bespectacled intellectuals playing chess at sidewalk cafes), but balks at acknowledging the UN War Crime Tribunals to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. But as a youthful nation (the average age is twenty-two) emerging from its horrific past, do Cambodians need to be reminded of past traumas by the West’s conscience?
Tourists visit Cambodia’s shrines of remembrance out of curiosity and respect—a form of disaster tourism pioneered by Chernobyl. The Choeung Ek genocidal site that focuses on one major Killing Field showcases nine tiers of densely packed skulls, bones and bloodied rags in a memorial tower. Surrounding pits used for disposing corpses have been reclaimed by tufts of overgrown grass, with the occasional butterfly weaving an aerial danse macabre.
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Tourism can handle irony, so I wasn’t that surprised by blurbs about ‘unforgettable experiences’ accompanying pictures of saffron-robed monks beside bombs on brochures advertising neighbouring Laos. The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, a compact landlocked country ruled beneath the fluttering flag of the hammer and sickle, has become an example of controlled capitalism rather than heavy-handed communism. Having avoided a civil war, Laos is more developed than Cambodia; it is influenced by the Thai economic model, meaning commercial and tourist development is a priority for the fifty-year governing Pathet Lao Communist Party. In truth the government acts as a centralised state corporation exercising monopoly power, with an obvious zeal for telecommunications, constructing roads to access the verdant jungle, and advertisements for skin-whitening creams. Any indication of an Orwellian closed society is immediately quashed by numerous satellite dishes beaming fifty international and domestic channels into the thatched huts of far-flung villages (some so aged they seem to have rusted in the countryside).
The country’s attempts to become a hydroelectric power have been shelved, with the Xayaburi project—consisting of eleven major dams and reservoirs along the Mekong—stalled by Vietnamese objections. That’s a saving grace for the next decade because if there is a more enchanting country than Laos, I have yet to see it. Sheer limestone karsts jut upright; the mist swirling around the peaks resembles a mink stole around the neck of a grande dame. I completed overnight treks in Luang Prabang, as well as Luang Namtha in the north, and inland around Nong Khiaw. At the latter, the silky Nam Ou River drifts past geological formations that rise like totems in the morning haze.
But Laos is also the most bombed country per capita in the world. Between 1964 and 1973 half a million US sorties dropped two million tonnes of ordnances on unarmed Laos. ‘The Secret War’—sanctioned by that diabolical duo of Nixon and Kissinger, bypassing Congress approval—meant the indiscriminate bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines. Carpet bombing, saturation bombing—call it what you like—occurred in abundance in the Xieng Khouang province. Maps dotted in red ink to indicate dropped ordnance show a severe rash along the border of Laos and Vietnam. The exploits of the fighter pilots responsible are documented with glee by Christopher Robbin in The Ravens. Robbins portrays gung-ho mercenaries, high on adventure but short on conscience, acting in covert operations in something of a freelance air force. The pilots dropped cluster bombs that split in two in mid-air to scatter ‘bombies’ (tennis ball-sized mines) or defoliants on the unarmed civilian population, destroying lives—and also livelihoods when one accounts for the slaughtered livestock and poisoned agriculture. An annual average of 350 casualties continues to this day from mine-related mishaps, causing disabilities that require attention in the capital Vientiane.
And yet in Luang Prabang you might find pamphlets—devoid of any irony whatsoever—advertising ‘bomb trekking tours’. Perched on the elevated banks of the Mekong, Luang Prabang is an elegant town that maintains its sophisticated French ambience. From here it’s a six-hour drive east to Phonsavan, a major target for US bombing raids due to its 130 km proximity to the Vietnamese border. Phonsavan was destroyed twice: first it was bombed by the United States; then it was re-built by the Soviets. A dusty main street contains double-storey buildings with a slab-like socialist aesthetic. Drab shops sell mobile phones and state-of-the-art TVs, and also advertise the ‘latest photocopiers’.
I stayed at the King Keo Guesthouse, adjacent to a disused airport shadowed by a defunct transmission tower. My room was at the end of an abandoned runway. At reception I was handed a key attached to a brass shell one finger in length, with the bullet and gun-powder removed from its nose. Mortar shells pierced light down the hotel corridor; overturned cluster bombs, split in two, served as metal benches. The surrealism of place was furthered by the patio’s panoply of artillery better used by Rambo: a crisscrossed cartridge belt displayed beneath a helmet next to a rusted bazooka. War occurs first as tragedy, second as kitsch?
In Phonsavan everyone is in on the act. At Dokkhoune Hotel downtown they’ve dressed up the foyer as part museum, part theme park, and a dizzying array of weaponry is displayed. Types, serial numbers and countries of origin are imprinted on their cold metal casings: BLU 42, BLU 61B, M127. There are green, yellow and blue bombies; UXOs (unexploded ordnances) courtesy of China, the United States and the USSR including missiles, hand grenades, mortars, rockets, ‘pineapple’ mines, projectiles, parachute flares and fragmentation bombs. Perversely, these instruments of death were finely crafted out of high-grade metal and resilient alloys. Military contractor Honeywell was a creative industry of the time, specialising in this dark science of design and destruction. Next door to the hotel, the British-based Mining Advisory Group (MAG) displays its own artefacts of the Secret War including plastic defence guards (forerunners of bullet-proof vests) with ‘PLACE IN FRONT OF ENEMY’ boldly stated lest combatants wore them back to front (so-called grunts were US youths with little education).
We began our bomb trek on Route 7, the highway paved by the French. MAG’s red and white markers demarcated a safe corridor bounded by unseen, sunken bombies. We walked for two arduous days, enjoying spectacular vistas while side-stepping mines. Not only was there genocide and eco-cide in Laos but culture-cide and religio-cide as well, with gold-filigreed pagodas and the Plain of Jars also bombed. The latter are a must-see for the cultural tourist: these ancient vessels in Ban Phakeo bear monkey and turtle designs on their lids, but their uses still remain unknown.
In Ban Tajo, an impoverished village of no more than twenty families, they’ve made use of the bombs in enterprising ways. Cluster bombs have been erected upright to create a long fence; others have been filled with earth and used as vegetable patches flower beds. And so Laos reclaims its history by incorporating its recent past.
Arriving in Ban Khai we saw enormous craters hollowed out in the parched earth. At fifty-six strides in diameter, their size corroborates with local stories of decibel-breaking howls from the sky as bombs rained down to crush Pathet Lao guerrillas in this zone (now completely treeless as defoliants cleared out the jungle entirely). MAG’s de-mining programs, along with support from NGOs in Australia and New Zealand, are providing personnel and resources to clear mines left over. It’s a daunting task. Of the 250 million bombies dropped from the sky, approximately 30 per cent remain unexploded, and it’s estimated that at this rate it will take 250 years to rid the area entirely.
The United States spent $7 billion to drop bombs over Laos. It’s spending a paltry $3 million a year to clean them up. That Henry Kissinger still can parade the world as an elder statesman pitching his geopolitical views is a measure of the West’s selective memory, no less hypocritical than Hun Sen’s reluctance to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.
In downtown Phonsavan’s Craters Cafe—where upright missiles form a faux Chinese portal—youngsters seemed more interested in the ‘all Stallone’ weekend on TV. Soft power still does what hard power couldn’t: Laos resisted US imperialism but allows it to re-appear via the back door, or rather an open window with fifty channels. A communist nation in thrall to Hollywood? The skin-whitening creams perennially advertised throughout Laos were beginning to make disturbing sense.
If Phonsavan’s setting is strange, so is its calendar. New Year celebrations occur over four days in April, with festivities reaching fever pitch as the ‘water wars’ are enacted. Battles, duels, fights and surprise attacks delight the young and old, Laotian and foreigner alike. Toyota utes packed with water barrels ferry a teen army out for skirmishes against opposing vehicles equally armed, and telecommunications firms sponsor various colour-coded teams. The fun lies in dousing pedestrians or pelting powders of purple, green or yellow on every unsuspecting farang in sight. Westerners participate, particularly backpackers, having bought their brightly coloured weapons at stores selling Mickey Mouse merchandise. Armed with plastic pistols, do they see any irony? This war played out as farce is a reminder of Phonsavan’s strategic location for US attacks on the Pathet Lao.
To evade these antics I joined a trek visiting the Hmong hill tribes, a few hours’ walk into the evergreen jungle. More remnants of the Secret War were common in this small village centred by a communal well and an ancient mill. Pigs poked their snouts in cluster bombs used as troughs. I slept in a bare wooden hut, drank lao-lao at midnight to fire up the body (it has a 50 per cent alcoholic content) and conversed with youngsters by gestures. They assumed I had strayed out of the TV powered by the village generator and refracted via the ubiquitous satellite dish.
It was only from the Hmong that I heard any dissent regarding the one-party system that Laos has endured over the past forty-five years. Yang Xang, our Hmong tour guide, summed up neatly: ‘Loyalty is to our tribe first. Then our country’. Ever keen to keep foreign aid coursing through the state coffers, the Laotian government makes all the right gestures by protecting its hill tribes, celebrating ‘minority people’ in smiling billboards. Originating in Mongolia, and escaping as refugees from Burma, in Laos the Hmong have made advances to protect their culture. Their presence here and in Thailand is a reminder of the geo-politics of Southeast Asia that causes entire people to cross borders that only seem real on maps.
I admired the Laotians in their shyness and their robust sense of mischief. How they deal with their memory of hardship is significant: they recognise it and seek to disarm it by incorporating it into daily life in an ever-present reminder of the past. Bombs used as flowerpots or metal forged into utensils turn the tables on the war industry. By contrast, Cambodia wants to get over its traumas by not opening up old wounds for fear of destabilising the nation. Behind the ever-smiling Cambodians is a fragile society. Chacun son gout, I guess—to each their own—but my money is on Laos emerging from its past with greater strength.
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The Cambodian beach resort of Sihanoukville was as alluring as brochures promised it would be, and the Ream National Park a small gem of nature. Greater resources for rangers monitoring the reserve have minimised deforestation over the past years. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Cambodia’s islands. Some are earmarked for tourism by Russian developers, and have been sold off in lots over the past five years by CPP Cabinet Ministers. Only the GFC has stalled the bulldozers’ cull of old-growth trees. Tourists who visit these islands savour the moment—it’s a pleasure that will soon sour, as it has already on Thailand’s islands in recent decades. But having conveniently forgotten the Dead Kennedys’ rant, I enjoyed my holiday in Cambodia. The crystalline beaches of Otres, Hawaii and Serendipity on the Sihanoukville coast helped sooth the soul after a detour to the Killing Fields.
Jorge Sotirios’ South American odyssey Lonesome George, C’est Moi! will be published by Big Sky Publishing in 2011.