SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
28 December 2008
By Thomas Fuller in Baray, Cambodia
THE dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an alpine torrent. Children do backflips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles.
"It's never dry here," said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of a dike.The reason? The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life. By the time the murderous government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodi ans were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was in ruin.
But the forced labour of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful – or that is how the current government here sees it.
The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country's glorious but perhaps mythical past as an agrarian wonderland.
"There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation," wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia's irrigation system.
"The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals."
Some of the canals were poorly designed – "hydraulic nonsense", says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable.
The Khmer Rouge built about 70% of Cambodia's 800-plus canal networks, according to a survey commissioned by the UN in the Nineties.
Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world's increasing demand for rice.
The Asian Development Bank is helping to finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by the Japanese and Korean governments.
"There's a lot of possibility," Goffeau said.
For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, a 61-year-old rice farmer, think back to the basketfuls of dirt he carried away hour after hour.
He recalled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge: the labourers, hands tied behind their backs, who were "dragged away like cows" and never returned, the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed, without explanation. Loh said he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a "speedboat".
Loh had a particularly wide view of the Khmer Rouge earthworks: when he was not digging he was assigned to collect the sweet sap from the top of towering palm trees.
All of the work was done by hand in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. There was no talking allowed among labourers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. Photos show huge crowds toiling in the dust.
"The earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part – the most compact ground," said Loh, sitting in a bamboo shelter beside his rice fields. "We had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree."
For so many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organised in small work units.
"I was a slave," said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry, who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and was assigned to haul dirt. Ang is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irrigate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20% of Cambodia's fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half of Vietnam's yields and one-third of China's.
The irrigation system in Baray, which is fed with water diverted from the nearby Chinit River, functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge left power. But in the mid-Eighties it fell into disrepair and the canals often went dry. It was only in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it.
Today the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to repair the embankments and keep the water flowing.
Loh hopes the canals he built will help double or triple his rice output. "I always recall the past to my children," he said. "I say, 'We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died.'"
Among the current workers on Baray's canal system is Sim Vy, 48. As a teenager she was also enlisted by the Khmer Rouge to help build the canals here, carrying dirt away on baskets tied to bamboo poles.
She was told she was working for national glory but received only watery gruel as recompense. Now she is paid $55 a month. "I prefer working this way," she said.
28 December 2008
By Thomas Fuller in Baray, Cambodia
THE dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an alpine torrent. Children do backflips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles.
"It's never dry here," said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of a dike.The reason? The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life. By the time the murderous government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodi ans were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was in ruin.
But the forced labour of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful – or that is how the current government here sees it.
The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country's glorious but perhaps mythical past as an agrarian wonderland.
"There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation," wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia's irrigation system.
"The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals."
Some of the canals were poorly designed – "hydraulic nonsense", says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable.
The Khmer Rouge built about 70% of Cambodia's 800-plus canal networks, according to a survey commissioned by the UN in the Nineties.
Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world's increasing demand for rice.
The Asian Development Bank is helping to finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by the Japanese and Korean governments.
"There's a lot of possibility," Goffeau said.
For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, a 61-year-old rice farmer, think back to the basketfuls of dirt he carried away hour after hour.
He recalled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge: the labourers, hands tied behind their backs, who were "dragged away like cows" and never returned, the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed, without explanation. Loh said he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a "speedboat".
Loh had a particularly wide view of the Khmer Rouge earthworks: when he was not digging he was assigned to collect the sweet sap from the top of towering palm trees.
All of the work was done by hand in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. There was no talking allowed among labourers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. Photos show huge crowds toiling in the dust.
"The earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part – the most compact ground," said Loh, sitting in a bamboo shelter beside his rice fields. "We had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree."
For so many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organised in small work units.
"I was a slave," said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry, who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and was assigned to haul dirt. Ang is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irrigate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20% of Cambodia's fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half of Vietnam's yields and one-third of China's.
The irrigation system in Baray, which is fed with water diverted from the nearby Chinit River, functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge left power. But in the mid-Eighties it fell into disrepair and the canals often went dry. It was only in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it.
Today the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to repair the embankments and keep the water flowing.
Loh hopes the canals he built will help double or triple his rice output. "I always recall the past to my children," he said. "I say, 'We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died.'"
Among the current workers on Baray's canal system is Sim Vy, 48. As a teenager she was also enlisted by the Khmer Rouge to help build the canals here, carrying dirt away on baskets tied to bamboo poles.
She was told she was working for national glory but received only watery gruel as recompense. Now she is paid $55 a month. "I prefer working this way," she said.
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