Opinion: Pol Pot's younger brother finds peace

Saloth Nhep bears a striking resemblance to his older brother, Pol Pot, but has lived a very different life. (Jay Mather/GlobalPost)

Cambodians appreciate, even savor, the calm in their country, rather than worrying over the deprivation of their present-day lives.

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By Joel Brinkley - GlobalPost

PREK SBOV, Cambodia — Saloth Nhep enjoys watching the Khmer Rouge trial, underway in Phnom Penh. Like most Cambodians, his home does not have electricity, but he has a small black-and-white TV powered by a car battery.

What strikes him, he says, is that “the court is not Cambodian, it’s partly international. That’s unusual here.”

Both the United Nations and Cambodian government are administering the trial. Still Saloth Nhep says he hopes the defendants, aged Khmer Rouge leaders, are convicted, even though they were close friends and war-time compatriots of his older brother, Saloth Sar — Pol Pot.

The Khmer Rouge leader, Brother Number One, died 11 years ago, and at that time Saloth Nhep grieved. "When I heard the news I was very sad, and I felt my heart slow down," he said then.

Now he is 84 years old. Even with a creased face and white hair, Saloth Nhep holds a striking resemblance to his brother. Whatever anger he still holds toward his brother relates primarily to Pol Pot’s neglect of his family — not his role in the deaths of two million Cambodians.

Before joining the Cambodian communist party, Saloth Sar studied in France, and “after he came back from France, he came to see us only twice,” Soloth Nhep complained. "He did not care about family. He has never even seen the face of my oldest child.”

While the Khmer Rouge held power, from 1975 to January 1979, “I did not know the name Pol Pot, did not know he was my brother,” Saloth Nhep said. Even as the president’s brother, he was swept into the vortex of the Khmer Rouge horror. Unlike his older brother, he was an illiterate rice farmer — just the kind of Cambodian the Khmer Rouge respected.

“They treated me like everyone else; they didn’t know he was my brother. I didn’t know Pol Pot. The work was very hard, and their was no freedom.” But then in 1977 he saw a poster with his brother’s picture. He stared. He was shocked.

“What I was thinking was that he should not be leading the country this way and letting people starve to death.”

After that, he says he did not tell anyone that Pol Pot was his brother. Asked why, he just shrugged. He continued working with little if anything to eat until the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. Neither during the war nor after did he ever see his brother again.

Today, Saloth Nhep illustrates the paradox of Cambodian life, 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime — 10 years after the last Khmer Rouge guerrilla surrendered. He lives with his extended family in a small house. The walls of his home, and the roof, are of bamboo and palm fronds. He has no toilet, no telephone, no clean water, no furniture other than straw mats and a hammock he sits in without a shirt as he dries off from his bath from a bucket. As he talks, three young children, Pol Pot’s great nieces, watch him from behind another hammock, giggling and chewing on rice cakes.

Saloth Nhep is content now. His expression at rest is serene. “The present government is better than the previous regime,” he avers. “There is freedom of travel, and we have security.” That’s all he seems to want.

For most Cambodians, life is an unending struggle to survive.

Just down the road, Tuy Khorn, 42, is trying to plow her rice paddy with a single-blade plow pulled by two oxen. The Khmer Rouge killed her husband, so she is alone. She tries her best to tie a heavy rock to the plow blade so it will dig a deeper furrow. But as soon as she ticks the oxen with a stick, and the animals begin lumbering forward, the rock falls off. Again and again.

“Some years I can grow enough rice” to last through the year, she says. “But if there’s no rain, I can’t grow enough. I don’t know what I will do if there’s no rain, maybe just go by nature” — meaning eat fruits and insects and whatever she can find in the wild.

But Tuy Khorn does not complain. The country is at peace. She needn’t worry about Khmer Rouge raiders popping out from behind the line of trees just ahead. Even now, she and most Cambodians appreciate, even savor, the calm and worry less about the deprivation of their present-day lives.

“We worked hard to achieve peace,” said Prach Chann, governor of Battambang Province. “Now we don’t want to fight among ourselves anymore. Now we can move on.”

After a long life of hard labor, Saloth Nhep does not complain, either. He is calm, clear-eyed, comfortable with himself. He now has enough to eat, and he has gained respect in his village, even with his uncanny resemblance to his notorious brother. Once, they actually elected him to a school committee.

“They can see that I behave in a good way, so they accept me,” he said. “I just live like everyone else. I never had to prove myself because I was not involved with my brother. That is hard to explain to people from far away.” He, too, is at peace.