__ Cambodia is the ultimate test of digital technology's power to transform. __
__ 1. __
If you want to see technology in action in Cambodia, attend the nation's first weapon-destruction ceremony at Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium. It's a sweltering Wednesday morning in May, and the place is filled with thousands of schoolchildren who have been bused there for the occasion. The stadium is a decaying and foreboding hulk where, 24 years earlier, the Khmer Rouge capped their seizure of the capital by executing officers of the defeated Lon Nol army. Now it reverberates with the children's incongruently birdlike predestruction chatter. The grandstand is filled with pols, bureaucrats, diplomats, and foreign-relief workers, even a contingent of saffron- and white-robed Buddhist monks and nuns. Signs all around the stadium, considerately translated into English for the foreign press, carry pro-gun-control proclamations that are unintentionally droll: YOU USE GUN TO KILL ME MEANS YOU KILL SOCIETY, and ANY PERSONS WHO SPREAD WATER WILL GET SOAKED. They're Al Gore-on-acid signs.
Presiding over the ceremony is none other than Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia's bluntly effective, one-eyed strongman, who has been known to resort to violence now and then himself. Two years ago, for example, he consolidated his hold on power with a bloody and well-timed coup. Since then, Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party have seen the light about gun control: Firearms are dangerous, particularly if hundreds of thousands of them are distributed among your 11.5 million violence-hardened, not necessarily sympathetic compatriots. And in a country where kidnapping wealthy businessmen has become a favored means of raising funds, violent crime discourages foreign investment.
A drumroll and a blare of trumpets accompany Hun Sen's arrival. He then proceeds to orate. And orate. Indeed, what is most notable about his 40-minute speech is the length of time it leaves field-level soldiers in dress uniforms wilting under the sun. By the time he finishes, two-thirds of his fellow grandstand occupants have left, presumably in pursuit of shade.
At last it's time to get down to business. Arrayed on the field in front of Hun Sen are 10 ancient bulldozers, all poised to run over (and thereby bend the barrels of) about 4,000 rusted rifles neatly tilted against railroad tracks in the vehicles' paths. Judging by the rifles' appearance, this ceremony is designed to destroy weapons that don't work anyway. Hun Sen descends the grandstand as his bodyguards shove clamoring photographers out of the way. Then, as he enters the infield and climbs into an idling bulldozer, the children's chatter turns to squeals. At first, as he steers his bulldozer down a double row of rifles, he seems like a perfectly adequate driver, but soon he has to stop the thing - and doesn't know how. He paws anxiously at the gears until the actual driver, seated beside him, takes over. Hun Sen hops down and walks behind the vehicle: He's on the prowl now for an impressively mangled rifle.
Unfortunately, few rifles show signs of their bulldozer encounters - the vast majority look just about as rusted and unbent as before. Hun Sen appears not to notice, though it does take him a while to find a satisfactorily V-shaped rifle barrel. He brandishes the weapon above his head. The crowd cheers. Hun Sen and his entourage look pleased, and start to leave. The children surge down from the stands, but they ignore Hun Sen, heading straight for a stage occupied by a Cambodian rock band.
The vehicles of destruction, meanwhile, toil on. They run over the rifles two, three, four, and five times. Still the barrels don't bend. The bulldozers go back and forth for half an hour, until everyone but the most perfervid rock fans has left the stadium. Even then, though much barrel-bending has taken place, some rifles still appear undamaged. As I depart, I take a last look backward and see the moving bulldozers against a backdrop of empty stands.
If the ritual looks ineffectual, that's not news: Not much works in Cambodia, at least not without an inordinate amount of effort. The forces that have overtaken the country in the last 30 years are so monumental they seem geological - like the tendency of mountains, over time, to flatten. The terrain has been pockmarked by a half-million tons of American bombs; millions of land mines are still poised for detonation. The forests have been logged and shipped to Thailand and Vietnam. The people themselves were hewn by the Khmer Rouge, which managed to kill between 1.5 and 2 million of the nation's 7 or 8 million citizens in a mere four years of self-devouring rule.
Thanks to all that, the country is not just predigital but nearly preindustrial. The desire for a high tech society exists, but the conditions for achieving it are largely missing. Outside Phnom Penh and a few other towns, information technology isn't even a rumor. Information doesn't travel quickly in Cambodia, and neither does anything else. Ninety percent of Cambodians live in rural areas, yet the nation's highways are nearly impassable, so rutted that driving them is like steering a boat in heavy seas. A road trip over them that manages 15 miles per hour is considered speedy. As one foreign diplomat puts it: "The pigs die before you can get them to the market, so you might as well stick to producing for yourself." Good rice gets shipped not to Phnom Penh but across the border to Thailand or Vietnam, where there is an actual transportation infrastructure. Bad rice stays home.
Even in favored areas like Phnom Penh, electricity and telephones are erratic; everywhere else, they're nonexistent. Where international phone calls are possible, they cost $7 a minute. Internet links, established via satellite only two and a half years ago, can cost $10 an hour, and most of the nation's 2,500 Internet accounts belong to foreigners. Phnom Penh has somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 computers, but the bulk of them were brought in by foreign diplomats and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Virtually all the software for sale in the capital is pirated.
A schooled populace is also missing. Khmers value education and pay a higher percentage of their income for it than citizens in nearly any other nation. Yet few students learn. The government is insolvent: Foreign aid and relief organizations underwrite almost all of Cambodia's spending on education, health, and infrastructure. Teachers, who are paid $20 a month (at best a quarter of a survivable salary), either don't teach at all or charge students for supposedly free services. Many families can't afford such fees. That's one reason why at least one in three Cambodians is illiterate.
In addition, Cambodia still suffers from a dearth of technocrats and teachers, three-fourths of whom were killed by the Khmer Rouge. The resulting shortage of schooled people in their forties and fifties has deprived the country of its most socially useful citizens.
Add to that the complexities of Cambodia's dominant language, Khmer, which is highly resistant to digitalization. Phnom Penh's fledgling digerati have devised several font systems to reproduce the Sanskrit-based Khmer tongue, but have reached no consensus on the best one. Unlike their dynamic and deeply resented neighbors in Vietnam, Khmers have never embraced a Romanization system. Part of the reason is nationalism: Some Cambodians fear that if Romanization catches on, their tottering culture will be further undermined. In the meantime, only Khmers who know a foreign language can use the Internet unaided.
How does technology fit into a country where 1 in 11 infants dies at birth and another 1 in 9 children dies before reaching age 5? Can the Internet be a high priority when AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are all epidemic and the countryside is filled with children stunted by malnutrition? What can ecommerce do for the 11 out of 12 Cambodians with no access to clean water? In many ways, the realms don't overlap.
Consider, for example, the mutual incomprehension that occurred last January during a speech by Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte was beginning a talk to about 60 journalism students at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, and he wanted to make a connection.
"How many of you use the Internet?" he asked. No hands went up.
"How many people have played Sega games?" No one had even heard of them.
"OK," said Negroponte, resorting to an electronic softball. "How many people have a toaster?" Again, none of the students raised a hand: Bread isn't part of the Cambodian diet.
__ 2. __
If you want to learn about technology in Cambodia, talk to Sam Rainsy, who has his own political party, ran for prime minister in 1998, and tries to use technology in his uphill fight against Hun Sen's regime. He's an Internet success story, up to a point. He's also Cambodia's main opposition leader, a man whose radical views - anti-Communist, anticorruption, anti-Vietnamese - appeal to Cambodians who hate the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen, the Vietnamese, or at least two of the three. Slight and studious, he looks too delicate for the lethal risks of Cambodian politics, but in this case, looks are deceiving: He's a workaholic who has survived numerous assassination attempts during his career. Rainsy speaks both English and French. To foreigners, he is reassuringly approachable. And why not? Thanks to the Internet, foreigners - or, at least, Cambodian expatriates - sustain his party.
Over dinner at the swank Cambodiana hotel, Rainsy tells me, "There are 500,000 overseas Cambodians in the United States, France, and Australia. They can influence their elected representatives, and that has impact here very quickly. When our activists are killed, we put information out through email, and we get support and money. We would lose three-quarters of our income without the Internet."
Rainsy says he can send an email to a thousand supporters, who forward it to friends and relatives. "So we reach 20,000 or 30,000 people. That's a lot! Imagine sending that many faxes! Few people in Cambodia have realized the far-reaching implications of the Internet for promoting democracy."
"But does it really promote democracy?" I ask Rainsy. I tell him certain politicians in the United States once thought the Internet advanced the democratic process - which they considered synonymous with their own political causes - until they noticed opponents using the Internet as effectively as they did. Rainsy is unswayed. It promotes democracy, he says, "because democrats rely on the truth. If Hun Sen puts lies on the Internet, it only makes his case worse."
Rainsy has reason to be confident about Hun Sen's fate in cyberspace. For one thing, Rainsy's supporters dominate the most popular Cambodian newsgroup, Camnews. Rainsy also was prescient enough to hire someone with high tech skills as his communications officer during his 1998 national election campaign. This was Rich Garella, a 33-year-old American who had worked for an English-language newspaper in Phnom Penh, and who immediately went about consolidating Rainsy's disorganized and overlapping electronic mailing lists.
"Their tendency was to collect email addresses and broadcast press releases to every address they could get their hands on," Garella says. To streamline, Garella developed separate lists for professions and directed event-triggered electronic press releases to foreign journalists, who often incorporated the material into their stories.
Even so, Rainsy came in a distant third in the last national election, with 14.3 percent of the vote. In addition, the disarray of Rainsy's electronic operations before and after Garella's tenure left a more lasting impression than any of his successes during the election campaign. Many people in Phnom Penh came to regard Rainsy's unceasing efforts to blanket the city with press releases as a major annoyance. In one recent instance, officials from his party sent out multiple copies of an email message with eight photographic attachments. Together, the documents amounted to more than a megabyte. Because many modems in Phnom Penh are slow and telephone connections are poor, downloading this material was overwhelmingly time consuming and left many recipients unable to handle email until they disposed of Rainsy's message.
The result is that Rainsy's electronic triumphs have been hollow. By contrast, Hun Sen's Net presence - his party has a modest Web site - hasn't been a major liability. In November 1998, Norodom Ranariddh, Hun Sen's only other significant rival, joined the prime minister in a coalition of convenience, and Rainsy's isolation was complete. He may have won the information war, but in Cambodia, money and bullets still count for much more.
__ 3. __
If you want to understand technology in Cambodia, by all means talk to Bill Herod. He has a clear-eyed take on the potential of computer telecommunications, and he's seen much of the good the Internet has done here. As one of the nation's most prominent information-technology specialists, he has watched Cambodians respond to the Net, often with gratitude for the mere discovery that their country registers in the world's media. Two and a half years ago, when links to the Internet were established in Phnom Penh, few Cambodians had any notion of their utility. Now politicians use information from the Net in legislative debates, and teenagers use search engines to find song lyrics by Céline Dion and the Spice Girls.
Herod is certain that the Internet will continue to spread. Even though an entry-level computer costs $500 in Phnom Penh - an impressive sum compared with Cambodia's $286-per-capita GDP - Herod knows high school and college kids who are working part-time to buy their first computers. For a small, youthful portion of the Phnom Penh populace, the digital era has already begun. "These prices may seem out of reach for ordinary Cambodians," Herod says, "but so would the cost of a motorbike or a cellular phone - and there are 70,000 cellular phones in Cambodia." Of course, most of Cambodia's cell phones are in Phnom Penh, where they outnumber the maddening land lines by two or three to one.
Cell phones already provide a surrogate telecommunications infrastructure for Cambodia's incipient economy. The streets may look chaotic - indeed, every sort of vehicle, from pedicab to left- and right-hand-drive SUVs, crowds the road - but high tech crops up in unexpected places. One day Herod was standing on a Phnom Penh sidewalk with a group of expatriates when a phone rang. All the expats reached for their cell phones, then broke into laughter when they realized that the ringing one belonged to a nearby Cambodian motorbike rider. "A mobile phone used to be a status symbol, but no more," Herod says. "Now it would take two mobile phones to constitute a status symbol - and one does see that."
To the extent that the Internet catches on, Herod deserves a significant share of the credit. He got hooked on Indochina when he went to Vietnam in 1966 as a development worker for the National Council of Churches, and has lived in Cambodia since 1994. A thoughtful 54-year-old who wears an earring, sandals, and a well-trimmed beard, Herod operates with a low-key, no-wasted-motion manner that masks a string of successes. In 1996, backed by Canada's government, he began a two-year stint setting up Cambodia's first Internet provider. CamNet, the resulting Cambodian-run business that began operating Internet accounts in May 1997, now has 928 subscribers. (Telstra Bigpond, CamNet's flashy, Australian-owned rival that opened a month later, has 1,000 subscribers.)
Herod also worked at the Public Internet Center, Phnom Penh's first Internet business for walk-in customers. As an offshoot of that project, he helped a small group of computer-adept students form a company to establish Internet centers in the city. Other students trained by Herod use their Net knowledge in jobs with government ministries, banks, and travel agencies.
As the digital revolution reaches Cambodia, Herod faces a uniquely Cambodian obstacle: During the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, the people were conditioned not to think. Thinking meant questioning authority, and that got them killed. Education was the enemy of Pol Pot's regime, and teachers - along with engineers, doctors, politicians, and bureaucrats - were targeted in the first wave of Khmer Rouge executions. The result is that the technological divide between young and old is more pronounced here than in most other countries. Even as their children take to computers, many Cambodians over 35 have trouble with the kind of analytical challenges the digital era requires.
The young people's use of technology is recent. Once the Vietnamese cast out the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and established their own decade-long repressive regime, executions ceased, but the flow of information remained tightly restricted. Now, in the freewheeling '90s, there are no limits - except the perpetual one, poverty. Cambodia is among the few Southeast Asian countries that don't impose controls on the free flow of electronic information.
"In the late '70s, Cambodians could have been killed for speaking a foreign language," Herod says. "In the '80s, they could have been arrested for having a connection with a foreigner. In the '90s, we're giving them the opportunity for unrestricted communication in any language, on any subject."
The word is getting around. Herod says the first evidence occurred in August 1997, when Princess Diana was killed. Three youngsters showed up at the Internet center where Herod worked and asked if they could find information about her on the Net. Then Cambodians began exchanging email with relatives overseas. If the senders didn't know English, Herod scanned their Khmer messages and sent them as image files. Once Cambodians realized what a scanner could do, they began sending family photos. In that way, some Cambodians who had taken refuge overseas two or three decades ago found out what their relatives looked like.
Cambodians also were pleased to discover that events in their country made international news. Students conducted searches of prominent Cambodians, then sent the cited articles to their subjects. A student majoring in tourism, surprised to find a photo of the Phnom Penh Inter-Continental on the chain's corporate Web site, showed it to the hotel's employees, none of whom knew about it.
For the first time in Cambodia's history, English is the second language of choice. The country's long, disillusioning romance with French and its dalliance with Russian are over. One contributing factor is computers: Cambodians must know English to learn what computers can do. Signs all over Phnom Penh announce schools that offer training in English and computers. Herod has learned that most students take computer courses simply because they're a requirement for a certificate, but he can quickly identify the eager, inquisitive minority.
His task is to mold something from this enthusiasm. His method is to teach and step back, teach and step back - until Cambodians have taken over all his jobs. ("Not a good career strategy," he says, "but, seriously, that is what development workers do.")
Two years ago, at the Public Internet Center, Herod noticed some kids who liked to show others how to use technology. He promptly enlisted four of them to manage the center. Six months later, he helped them start their own business, the Khmer Internet Development Service (KIDS). It didn't take a huge investment. Herod gave them three months' rent for office space, loaned them his computer, and secured credit at a local computer shop. He made himself available whenever his protégés needed him. Aside from that, the four were on their own.
They flourished. The students now run three Internet centers, and rates have dropped from $10 an hour to as low as $6. (The price, high because of Cambodia's expensive satellite Internet link, should drop again when the country switches to fiber-optic cable, installed by Alcatel, a French telecommunications company.) The kids expanded as their business allowed, buying new computers and peripherals when they could afford them. They repaid the computer shop first in six-week installments, then four. "Now they pay cash for continued expansion," Herod says proudly. A year after opening, they moved into new offices, and Herod rented a room from them - instead of the other way around.
Herod has also guided several Cambodians in searches on a Web database maintained by the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP). Funded by the US State Department and administered at Yale, the project is designed to locate and preserve Khmer Rouge documents for historians and for possible prosecutions of Khmer Rouge leaders. The documents include thousands of photographs of and "confessions" by prisoners at Tuol Sleng, the most notorious of dozens of Khmer Rouge torture centers in Cambodia. Prisoners at Tuol Sleng were beaten, forced to make bogus confessions about crimes against the regime, and executed.
In one instance, a French acquaintance introduced Herod to a former high-ranking Khmer Rouge official who still harbored illusions about the regime, even though he'd recently defected. The official knew that many of his comrades disappeared, but not why, and he dismissed reports of atrocities at Tuol Sleng as Vietnamese propaganda. Herod, reasoning that this man - who had been isolated in the jungle, working for a highly compartmentalized, ultrasecretive organization - might not have known what happened at Tuol Sleng, put him on the CGP Web site (www.yale.edu/cgp).
"As he began to look at the database photos, then read pages of handwritten 'confessions' by people he had known - admitting to all manner of ridiculous things - his attitude was that his deepest fears were being confirmed," Herod says. "He had never really known this stuff, though he had long suspected it. You could see this sick feeling come over him: 'It was all a lie.' He was like a scientist who discovers that the whole basis of his science is fabricated."
When an account of the man's Web encounter reached CGP director Susan Cook at Yale, she got goosebumps: One purpose of the program, after all, is to promote this kind of revelation. "It's probably happened many times," she says, "but I don't know of another anecdote like this. We get messages from a lot of survivors and survivors' kids in the States who have used the site to piece together what happened to members of their families - but not from people who were centrally involved and just kept in the dark, who were able to have the clouds lifted by looking at the site."
The former official now lives in Phnom Penh. He and Herod have become friends, and see each other often.
__ 4. __
If you want to see technology in action in Cambodia, follow Bernie Krisher around for a while. If Herod employs a gentle touch, Krisher wields a bludgeon. After living affluently but not luxuriously as a longtime Newsweek correspondent in Tokyo, Krisher has turned himself, at age 68, into a kind of wheeler-dealer philanthropist, raising money from donors and grants and then spending it on projects like a hospital that gives free medical care to 80,000 Cambodian patients a year; the Future Light Orphanage, which houses 200 children in the Phnom Penh area; and - his newest plan - the 200 schools he plans to build in rural Cambodia. He is also the founder and publisher of The Cambodia Daily, a 6-year-old English-language newspaper whose singular clout and quality belie the precariousness of its existence.
Along the way, Krisher promotes technology. He continually preaches the importance of the digital revolution, telling Cambodians that they can use computers to leapfrog over their infrastructure problems into a bounteous 21st century. Krisher's message is sometimes met with incomprehension, yet the Future Light Orphanage includes a computer house stocked with 31 donated machines, whose small, barefoot users are, Krisher says, on their way to becoming future prime ministers and Bill Gateses.
The Daily could not have run on its customary shoestring budget before the advent of Photoshop and QuarkXPress. And for the rural-schools project, Krisher is talking about equipping each building with a solar panel-powered computer, which would be linked by satellite to the Iridium Project, the tottering effort to make the most remote places on earth accessible via cellular phone. Not that Iridium knows about Krisher's plan: Krisher often talks about his visions as if they were facts, and (as often as not) they become facts. Barton Biggs, the Daily's first editor, wrote in an essay about his Cambodian experience that Krisher "doesn't understand the meaning of the words no and impossible."
The way many people would put it is that Krisher is a pain in the ass. Rich Garella, managing editor at the Daily before he worked for Sam Rainsy, says that, with Krisher, "the characteristics that enable him to achieve all he's done are the same ones that drive you crazy." Daily staffers invent names for him like Bernie the Burner and Krisher the Crusher. Krisher seems to be aware of his flaws. "Sometimes," he says, "I behave like a dictator who believes in democracy but doesn't practice it."
Traveling in Cambodia in late April, Krisher goes directly from the airport to the orphanage. The children, awaiting him in two lines along the driveway, break into unsmiling and apparently cued applause as he emerges from his van. "I keep telling them not to do this," he mutters, but he looks too pleased to be convincing. Soon we are ushered into the computer house, the only air-conditioned space in the orphanage. This is no accident. Because humidity and dust wreak havoc with computers, a far greater percentage of computers than people in Cambodia are housed in air-conditioned rooms. The orphanage's computers all carry ClarisWorks and Typing Tutor, so the kids can draw, practice typing, and send email to international pen pals. Many children have made progress in typing, even though the words they write are in a language some don't understand.
Krisher circulates with a proud strut, acting more like Don Corleone than a pleased parent. "Watch him," Krisher says to a teacher after noticing that a student has made an effective computer "painting" of a house on stilts, complete with a TV antenna. "Make sure his education continues."
The computer house is impressive. But it's also a bit disturbing, since it's packed with amenities that are so scarce and highly valued everywhere else in Cambodia. The average Cambodian has barely enough to eat, let alone a computer, and for much of its history, the Daily's reporters longed for a newsroom as well equipped as the orphanage. Given these children's limited skills, the abundance of computers at the orphanage seems like a misallocation of resources.
These incongruities reflect a problem with Krisher's approach to philanthropy. An important factor in a project is its appeal to givers: The idea of equipping a poor Cambodian orphanage is easy to sell to donors like Apple-Japan, which helped outfit the computer house. But sometimes the gifts don't fit the need.
Krisher has two main goals on this trip: to launch his rural-schools project, and to compel immediate installation of an Internet link at the technology-poor Royal University of Phnom Penh. A week into the trip, the school project is shaping up, but Krisher hasn't obtained Internet access for the university students. Never mind the links that already exist there for computer science students: For two years Krisher has been trying to install a link that all students can use, and he's tired of waiting. Along with Jeff Hodson, the Daily's acting editor, who will soon teach a journalism course at the university, and Sim Eang, a desktop-publishing teacher whose salary is subsidized by Krisher, the philanthropist visits Var Sim Samreth, the university's rector.
Krisher tells the rector that he will make things easy for him. If the university will provide a computer and a phone line, he declares, he can get three hours a day of free Internet use from CamNet, the Internet service provider that Herod helped establish. "I'm quite confident that before I leave here next week, you will have the Internet," Krisher says.
The rector hesitates. "Until now we don't know what is Internet," he says in not-quite-fluent English. "We would like you to help us to use Internet."
This is an opportunity Krisher can't resist. He decides to give the rector a Net demonstration. Eang has already told Krisher that a tree fell on a telephone line a week ago, severing the only university Internet link outside the computer science department, but Krisher is not convinced and wants to conduct a search right now. Within a few minutes he has found a room set aside for guidance in international-study programs. In it is a computer, a modem, and a live link. "The phone works, there's no tree that fell down, and here's the Internet!" Krisher says. "Let's get the rector in here!"
While someone fetches the rector, Krisher expresses his disappointment in Eang. Disregarding Cambodian distaste for losing face, he says volubly, "The orphanage is the most advanced place in Phnom Penh, and this is the most backward place! Mr. Eang doesn't know what's going on in this university. He doesn't even know if the phone line next door is working!"
The rector dutifully enters, cell phone in hand in case he's needed elsewhere. Krisher links to his own Internet account, then begins the demonstration - or tries to. Establishing a connection takes so long that the rector goes back to his office. When the link is finally made, Krisher tries to get on his orphanage homepage by typing "www.futurelight.com." The Web site of a lighting-systems company appears - Krisher has forgotten that the orphanage URL ends with .org, not .com. Finally, he links to the orphanage's Web site. "I really want the rector to see this," he says. "Can you get him back in here?"
Once more, the rector is found. "This is the homepage of the orphans," Krisher tells him. "Pick a child!" The rector hesitantly points at one, and Krisher clicks on the image. "Now you see a drawing by that child. This was done by children here in Phnom Penh."
The rector appears not to grasp the significance of this display. Next, Krisher types in "www.louvre.com," but instead of reaching the Louvre, in Paris, as he hopes, he opens the homepage of one Sonnai Frock-Rohrbeck, a Manhattan artist. Well, at least the subject is art. "Let's try something else," Krisher says.
On the debatable assumption that the rector is interested in American popular culture, Krisher next tries to locate the Disney homepage, but when he finds himself on the site of Disney's Go Network, he's mystified. He does a search on the word "Cambodia," but the connection stalls - minutes pass, and nothing happens. Krisher gives up and tries searching for "Hun Sen." Again nothing happens, until at last a dialog box says, "Negotiation canceled." Krisher gets Nuon So Thero, his Internet-capable assistant, to reconnect, but "Negotiation canceled" appears again. By now I'm getting the impression that Krisher himself has spent little time on the Web. "OK, let's go," he tells the rector. "You get the idea of how this works."
Krisher still wants to know where the other university phone lines go. A few minutes later he finds a Power Macintosh, almost certainly the most up-to-date computer at the university, in an air-conditioned room in the library - a perfect place for a student Internet link. Indeed, the computer already has a modem and a Net connection, but it's a gift from several nongovernmental organizations and is reserved for faculty and library staff, which the assistant librarian patiently tells Krisher.
"If I get you three hours a day, will you let the students use it?" Krisher asks.
The librarian is nonplussed - that's the head librarian's decision, not hers.
But Krisher doesn't let up. "You're in charge when he's not here," he says. "Don't you want to help the students? If I give you three hours a day, how can you deprive them?" The librarian refers Krisher to the rector, so he marches back to Var Sim Samreth's office. Along the way, he tells Hodson, "You have to kick them in the ass and tell them what to do!"
The rector responds mildly. He politely resists turning over the library computer to the students, saying he must first ask the NGOs that provided it. This doesn't placate Krisher. "The NGOs put it there for the wrong reasons! That should be for the students, not them! It's for developing our minds and our resources, not the NGOs'!"
Finally, Krisher asks for a piece of paper and pens a letter for the rector to sign. It's addressed to CamNet, the Internet provider that Krisher keeps saying has pledged to provide three free hours a day. "We have a landline, computers, and modem in an air-conditioned room at the university's Hun Sen Library," the letter says. "The Internet access would be used only by students for educational purposes."
The rector suggests using the computer in the overseas-study room, but Krisher answers, "No, I want the whole university!" Krisher apparently thinks that if the link is placed in the room for guidance in international studies, few students will use it. But it's hard to believe that they'd be more likely to use another computer set aside for faculty and librarians. It's becoming clear that, in Krisher's hands, the Internet is a club for pummeling hapless Third Worlders: He's dangling a link worth $500 a month in front of a university head who makes $35 a month. Still, the rector holds his ground. He takes the letter, saying he'll consult with the NGOs. On the way out, Krisher says, "Isn't it exasperating to deal with these people?"
As it turns out, Krisher hasn't even secured a promise of three free Internet hours a day from CamNet. I thought I'd heard Herod, a member of CamNet's board, tell Krisher earlier that the offer was only for six free hours a month. So I check with Herod, who confirms my recollection. I ask Herod why Krisher would claim to have obtained a three-free-hours-a-day pledge when it was never made. "That's a standard Bernie Krisher approach," Herod says. "He'll make himself annoying enough that he'll probably get 12 hours instead of 6, and it will be a great victory."
The rector eventually sends Krisher's letter on to CamNet, which responds with its standard offer of six free hours a month. It remains unclear when or if the library computer will be turned over to the students.
__ 5. __
If you want to see technology in action in Cambodia, go to Tuol Sleng. That's where technology - along with everything else - was enlisted in Cambodia's betrayal. About 16,000 people were brought to Tuol Sleng: Virtually all of them were beaten, interrogated, and killed. Over several months, many were also systematically tortured until broken, until they'd say anything just to be allowed to die, and then, having "confessed" to whatever their interrogators desired, they were killed, usually by throat-slitting. To go to Tuol Sleng is to imagine what it's like to suffer the worst imaginable death.
Before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975, Tuol Sleng was a high school. Now it's a genocide museum. Houses still surround it: From their crumbling, second-story flats, the museum's neighbors eat dinner while looking down into it. My first shock is realizing that Tuol Sleng is no shock to them. I enter the muddy courtyard, pay my $2, and wander through the school's malignant corpse. I pass the sign in Khmer and English titled THE SECURITY REGULATIONS and read the 10 rules. Number 3 is, DON'T BE A FOOL FOR YOU ARE A CHAP WHO DARE TO THWART THE REVOLUTION. Number 6 is, WHILE GETTING LASHES OR ELECTRIFICATION YOU MUST NOT CRY AT ALL.
One building contains "special prison" rooms, each filled with a single metal bed frame and an ammo box for a commode. In these rooms, captives deemed important were manacled to the bed frames. In 1979, as the Vietnamese closed in on Phnom Penh, the jailers performed their last killings, slaughtering the prisoners and then fleeing. Two days passed before the Vietnamese discovered Tuol Sleng. They took pictures of the rotting corpses, then mounted each photograph on the wall of its corresponding room. I look at the pictures, then at the floor, still spotted with dried blood.
Some rooms at Tuol Sleng were subdivided into tiny cubicles, where prisoners lay chained to the ground. One wall is covered with a map of Cambodia that is made of human skulls. Outside, a large earthen vat is stationed beneath old playground equipment. Prisoners were dangled from the equipment's poles into the water-filled vat, and held down until they confessed.
And what did they confess to? In the beginning, when many still clung to hopes of exoneration, they told the truth, which almost always was that they'd never done anything traitorous, never considered destabilizing the regime. That wasn't what the interrogators wanted to hear. Pol Pot had persuaded himself that a horde of outsiders, led by Vietnamese and Americans, coveted Cambodia to the point of infiltrating it with saboteurs and preparing military assaults. So that was what the tortured eventually confessed to, after they'd been shocked and smothered and whipped, and after they comprehended their interrogators' wishes.
The flow of prisoners was constant: Once terror became government policy, it never lost momentum. The Khmer Rouge first consumed people tainted with bourgeois manners, or education, or their association with Vietnamese. Then they consumed all of these victims' relatives. In the end, they consumed themselves. Any person named in five interrogations, no matter how innocuous the references, was arrested and killed. Many Khmer Rouge soldiers killed comrades to avoid being killed themselves.
The torturers kept elaborate records of their victims' written "confessions." They took photographs of the prisoners - usually just after their arrival, sometimes just before death. Now the walls of Tuol Sleng are filled with hundreds of black-and-white photos of Cambodians who knew they were going to die. Most gaped vacantly at the camera. Some women held babies. A few were handcuffed or blindfolded. A couple of prisoners actually smiled for the camera. Many were emaciated or bruised from beatings. One had a horribly bloodied mouth.
I look at the photographs of people about whom I know only one thing - the manner of their deaths - and I try to extrapolate their lives from all those blank stares. By the time I leave, I feel dirty and forlorn.
It happened that while I was in Cambodia, Tuol Sleng's chief, a former mathematics teacher named Duch, was identified and eventually arrested in a western province, 20 years after he disappeared. Duch has never been tried, but he has admitted signing execution orders at Tuol Sleng, and it's believed he oversaw the deaths of 16,000 people. It was also Duch whom some Khmer Rouge faulted for failing to destroy all those documents before he fled the death camp. Thanks to that oversight, a broad path into Khmer Rouge history remains open. Now 57, Duch was doing charitable relief work at the time of his arrest - he professes to be a born-again Christian. He is currently in custody in Phnom Penh.
In a regime that renounced technology in favor of frantically trying to revive Cambodia's agrarian past, Duch was an anomaly. For one thing, he liked cameras. When an unlucky Western yachtsman strayed into Cambodian waters in 1978, he was detained at sea by the Khmer Rouge navy and brought to Tuol Sleng, and his underwater camera ended up in Duch's hands. The story is that Duch was keen to find out how it worked, but his executioners tortured and killed the prisoner before he got around to asking.
Among those who stumbled across Duch in the few days before his discovery became news was the eminent Indochinese war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, who shot the photos for this story. Griffiths instantly recognized Duch from pictures. Duch wasn't ready to acknowledge his identity, so the two men had an odd cat-and-mouse conversation, interspersed with chitchat.
Talk about technology in action. After the encounter, Griffiths couldn't shake the thought that Tuol Sleng's chief executioner, overseer of one of history's most odious photography collections, wanted to know why Griffiths used not a Nikon camera, but a Canon.
