Doug says: What is a guy to eat - cheap, and fast but always good - Pho in Saigon

Pho 32

A type of Vietnamese noodle soup know as Pho, in English it would be pronounced like fuh, if there was such a word.  Originally a street food ate by workers as a quick, inexpensive morning meal. Though, over time it has risen to one of the world’s most popular eats.  As an example in 2011 CNN GO ranked pho as the 28 th most popular dishes in the world.

The soup pho gets its name from the pho noodle which is the base of the noodle soup.  In creating this dish the pho noodles are added to an individual serving dish filled with the beef broth.   The broth is created by simmering beef bones and adding seasoning over a lengthy period, like 12 hours or something like that, anyway a long time.

After the broth is ladled into a serving bowl, an individual portion of pho noodles is dipped into boiling water for a minute or two in order to soften them. Once the noodles are soft they are added to the individual bowl of broth, along with a small amount of finely sliced beef, onions and a dash of ground pepper.

At your table will be a plate with sprigs of fresh ngo gai, hung que and…. Along with these vegetables their will be sliced jalapeno pepper and lime.  It’s up to you to decide how many leaves you want to pull from the sprigs and pop them into your bowl of pho. Then season the pho to your liking with hoisin sauce and chili paste and oh ya, they should have brought you a plate of bean sprouts, use your chopsticks and scrape them into the soup.  You do know how to use chopsticks, don't you? Anyway not to worry, there will be spoons on the table as Vietnamese use both hands to eat soup, chop stick in the right and a spoon in the left.  However this is out of the realm of most Westerners, myself included, so just dig in and remember to smile a lot.

A bit of pho history:  So now you may be wondering how and where pho came from; If not you're not or just could just care less, than  go ahead and skip this part.  For those still with me, here we go.  In the North of Vietnam around the late 1800’s pho was introduced and quickly became a very popular, inexpensive street food served in the morning to workers.

About the same time the French started colonizing Vietnam this is where some think the pho name derived from. As their is a French Phrase “pot of feu” – meaning pot of fire, which referred to the lengthy time taken to cook the broth used as the soup base.  Which tosses out my original pho noodle theory but a lot of pho has passed over the pallet since and history can be a fickle mistress.  

Spreading pho’s influence in gastronomic affairs was hastened by the influx of a million or so Northerners who resettled to the south in 1954 and the pho flowed along with them.

Then came along the Vietnam War and the eventual takeover of the South by North Vietnam and if anything positive was to come of this it was the spread of pho’s deliciousness.   As the refugees fled the tyranny of the north as it took control of the South they carried with them the richness of pho.  

helper and owner waiting for you Pho 32

My favorites for pho: Pho 32- 32 Le Thi Rieng, in district 1 is just a skip and a jump from the backpacker’s area and not far from Starbucks at the roundabout. Old school here, charcoal fired hot pot for the noodles, open air seating with a kicked back atmosphere.  As in the song “ just walk right in and sit on down”, no menu or

friendly staff at Pho 32

much English so just point at a bowl of pho, it’s the only thing going so they will get it..  You can order iced tea (tra da) and beverages along with coffee (ca phe sua da - iced coffee with condensed milk) and drinks, all except the tra da come from the motor bike seat, upholstery shop a few doors down. Cost for pho ba and a ca phe sua da about 55,000 dong.

My other pick is Pho Quyen – 323 Pham Ngu Lgo again in district 1 and on

busy corner Do Q, Dau / Pham Nhu Lao across from 9-23 park

the edge of the back packing area, across from 9-23 Park.

cute and friendly staff
Pho Quyen

Has an English menu offering both beef (bo) and chicken (ga) pho and a couple other soup entries along with coffee, tea  and sodas.   Pho bo and a ca phe sua da is about 75,000 dong.

Bon appétit - thanks for stopping by.......Doug 

How to kill a Frog - Can Tho Market, Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Not my footage, I pulled it off of You Tube.  So errors like the spelling of Can Tho, bellow as Can Thao is not me.

The demise of this frog is pretty grisly and graphic.   Yes, I know the meat I eat comes from living beings that have to die to fill my needs but................ Anyway take a look.  

motorbike way - Saigon

bikes and a street side food vendor

yup, riding on the side walk

Looking through some of my older stuff on vietnam-now.com  and found this piece on motorbike traffic and though you might enjoy it.  Think it was written  about 10 years ago but traffic hasn't changed all that much, other than we have much more, traffic that is. About twice the  number of motorbikes and what  really complicates things the is the increase in the number of cars trucks and buses.     
         click -  The Motorbike Way


Side bar: In 2011 3.671 motorbikes were registered in Vietnam - compared to 2012 at 3.282 million, and 2013 at 3.272 million. So the numbers of registered motorbikes are declining but still is one hell of a lot of motorbikes and on the horizon auto sales are set to pick up..  All this on unimproved roads originally built for bicycles and ox carts. 

Then it was Vietnam - part 5 - Same, same but different

Get your motorbike running 

As lives do, mine did stabilize, but the Vietnam experience stuck with me.  That is the reason why some 35 years after my return from Vietnam I found myself thinking about revisiting. Since then I've made numerous trips back and once again arriving with my butt jammed into one of those ever shrinking seats in the economy class section of Cathay Pacific. We are arriving at Ton San Nhut, no longer a key US Airbase but now one of the two international

Saigon at night  -  by Nguyệt Cát

airports in Vietnam.  As a US Airbase it was on the edge of Saigon but now the ever expanding Saigon has grown around it.  As our plane taxi es up to the  terminal,  I watch through my window as the few remaining remnants of what was Ton San Nhut Airbase slide past.

"Damn", I think to myself,  all these years when so much has changed and still so much seems the same - "same same but different"

On my first trip back, taxing in was really eerie as the terminal had the outward appearance of base ops of the 60's where my first Vietnam experience began. Since 1999 it went through several upgrades and then a few years ago a new modern terminal was erected. Through the entry drill has remained pretty much the same.

On arrival our flock deplanes, guided by strategically stationed, cute ao dai clad attendants, directing us towards customs and immigration's.  We queue up at immigration's to have our visa's checked and have our entry stamped in our passports. Nowadays this is a quick and painless process, gone are the days of those little slips of paper they called entry permits and wondering if you need to slip a fiver in your passport to speed up your entry process.   Still immigration officers in general are a grim bunch but guess it's part of the job. Though an exception to this was the immigration officer in Singapore who noted I wasn't feeling well, offered up a smile and a cherry sucker.

Head to the luggage carousel, grab a cart and wait for my bags to show up. Load my bags onto the cart and head to customs.  At customs you pull your bags off and send them through the x ray

tunnel, really not sure what that is all about as you only have to send through the big bags and they don't really look at the x ray screen.  Maybe they just want to see you struggle with your bags. Anyway, nothing to declare and my luggage passed the x ray test, so once again I'm officially in Vietnam.  

Bags in hand I look around the terminal, seeing a few currency exchange outfits, some travel operators but as usual the terminal seems strangely vacant. That is until you peer out the exit door of the terminal lobby, looking past the security and the vacant rectangular shaped patch of side walk to see a wall of people.  You work your way through the wall which is a mix of relatives, friends of folks arriving, taxi cab and motorbike types, hotel and guest house drivers flashing cards with their new guests names drawn out in magic marker and of course their are always those enterprising gents who are probably in search of a expeditious way to increase their fortunes. For some unknown reason, anyway to me, people aren't allowed into the terminal to wait for arriving flights.

I work my way through the mass of folks out to the taxi queue.   Taxi queue, in the past it was up to you not to get ripped off and conversations such as "Yes, I know you have a meter but what do you think it will cost" were common conversations as arriving passengers tried to waylay creative long expensive rides to the city center.  

We leave the airport and enter the traffic filled road taking us into city center district 1.  Motorbike traffic in Saigon is legendary and that was when motorbikes were expensive and now a mass of cheap Chinese bikes are available, population was less back then and added to this now you have a tremendous increase in the number of cars on the road which makes traffic a bigger mess then ever. Looking out my window past the congestion of motorbikes, cars, taxi's, buses and trucks and still a random push cart or bicycle I see newly built, modern looking buildings but still much of the old Vietnam shows through.  As one of my friends shared with me "after 24 years of living here, they can make as many physical changes as the want but the Vietnamese people are the same and because of this I stay". 

So, without putting much strain on my brain, even with all the changes, vestiges of pre 1975 Vietnam slip out of my memory and another times comes flowing back...   

                                 "Same, same but different"                    

                                                       

from beyond - Doug's on going stomach problem and the VA

"From beyond"  that would be California. Here I am, stomach still a problem and  reading my visa statement, yikes, did I Really spend all that while thinking I was living low budget lifestyle on my travels.  Though, still the stomach problem and my leg and hip are still not 100% but improving.

At one point I tossed my recovery of my stomach issues into the VA's (Veterans admin.) hands and now I better understand the complaints people have lodged against them. It started off well with an appointment date within a reasonable time period. When I arrived for my appointment the nurse and then the doctor and I had a long discussion about my life in Saigon and SE Asia before we got around to stomach talk, then the  usual doctor drill.

She recommended a CAT Scan of my abdomen in the hope of identifying an underlying problem. A few days later someone from from the lab contacted me about an appointment. I found the CAT Scan was fast and easy but the ramp up to it was icky, as I was given a pitcher of what they called Kool Aid, isn't that they called the stuff that took out the folks in the Jonestown massacre, one glass every 30 minutes until the pitcher was empty, then the CAT Scan and different than Jonestown I survived.

So a few days later I called for a follow up appointment with my doctor to discuss my test results and a plan of treatment.  The telephone lady advised me that this kind of thing was handled via phone but I insisted I needed an appointment the tela appointment lady rung off promising a nurse would call within a few hours about an appointment. I knew she lied and so I set the phone down and called the imaging dept to make sure they were open and mounted up for the VA where I had the test. Weird, when I arrived the main entrance was locked so I patiently waited for someone  to come out and then slipped in before the door could close and made me way to their reception desk.  Waited for someone to show up and when someone did I told them I needed the CAT Scan results for Douglas Rice and rattled off my SS number.  Though I was pretty sure the guy I was talking to wasn't my man but I made friendly small talk about the military and life.  Soon an older lady, my age old, showed up asking what was going on,  ah ha, I could tell she was the man and she was.  Within 20 minutes I not only had a copy of the report but a disk with the scan on it.

Sent one copy to my primary care doctor and he called the next day and explained the finding of the CAT Scan to me, still no word from the VA.  Anyway Dr. Fong found nothing of any major importance in the scan but recommended an gastroenterologist.   Meanwhile, I was due for my annual cardiologist visit so l set that up along with the gastroenterologist, man a lot of doctors.

The Gastroenterologist didn't seem impressed with my problem or the results of the CAT scan.  However, he though my stomach wasn't emptying properly, wrote me a prescription to try (expensive) and sent me to another imaging place for a stomach emptying test.  This is an all day test - feed you radioactive egg beaters and every hour slide you into a tube where you hear a bunch of whirring and rumbling that they say are the pictures being taken. When I asked about when the results would be available, the techheto t replied "no news is good news".


Okay on to the cardiologist, reviews the scan and decides this problem I have is not my stomach but is heart egina so on to a heart stress test.   It's a test where they compare the movements of a resting heart to a working heart directly off of your work out on a treadmill. 7 minutes, ending in a phase 3 full uphill run and no problems detected.  With that the good news is that my stomach pain isn't my heart.

So I'm still left wondering about my spending habits feeling good about my leg and hip improving but still the stomach problem.   All this time and money on doctors and tests and the only relief I get is from peppermint oil, Gaviscon and rum and coke but not all together at the same time.    My money issues, still no resolution  but by fall I'll be back in the Thailand /Vietnam region of SE Asia one way or another.

Thanks for stopping by - Doug

Review - Cathay Pacific, have their policy's and are sticking to it

                                      


I'm a long time Cathay customer and will continue to be but that doesn't mean I like the way they treat customers. The airline is changing and this is  about that and due to that the bad experience I experienced with Cathay's customer service manager.

However, other than my specific my present specific complaint I've noticed a general decline in  customer service over the past few years.  This might be caused by the corporations demands for improved  profitability.  To this end it seems as though their is a decrease in support staff which might explain the sometimes curt actions by their staff. Though, in fact my flying experience is that the friendly sky's are a thing of the past not only with Cathay and most airlines.

The deteriorating service is something I passed off until a year ago when the hip I damaged while visiting Sai Gon had me in needing a little special attention on my flights back to the states. Oh ya, they gave me priority boarding and arranged for a wheelchair to get through Hong Kong airport but it was a mechanical thing with no compassion. I grumbled quietly to myself about poor me but didn't say anything. Maybe if I had spoken up all would have been different. I was thinking old school air travel when you were treated special even if you weren't a sad half crippled person such as myself but it takes more than a subtle expression to get what you want.    

Last month on my latest return from Saigon  it all came to a head, not on the plane but at their ticketing office in Sa Gon, over the phone and ended with e-mail  with  Racheal Barretto, "Customer Relations Executive".  This was all over my attempt to change my return city from Bangkok to Sai Gon.   I had done this many times in the past, though it required a penalty charge, which I was OK with but this time it seemed the only way was to toss my return ticket and buy a new one but nodody acually suggested that. From my start in person at Cathay's ticket office in Sai Gon to ending in terse e-mails  from the Customer Relations Executive.  Guess all this would have been easier to stomach if I would have been given a solid reason or some options. For this ticket I had used my miles to upgrade to economy deluxe but what difference should that make.  Anyway, It was the same flight from the Hong Kong to SFO but just a different departing city from the original ticket.

The reason I wanted to change was that I was having trouble getting around on my recently rebuilt leg but all I got was changing a ticket was against  Cathay policy and not in so many words, now please go away.

Just wanted to share this as I still believe Cathay is good to fly with but wanted to get the warning out that you need to make sure you're up on their policy's before hopping aboard.  Kinda like the motorbike or tuk-tuk guy where you need to discuss everything and agree before you pillion. 

An alley is a hem in Sai Gon - (original posted May, 2014)

As a kid growing up in Flint, Michigan my grandparent’s lived  only about a few blocks away us. Though, even living as close as they did I often thought of my visits to their place as an adventure. You see, beyond their backyard they had an alley, mom said – “dangerous people lurk in alleys and strange things happen there so if I knew what was good for me, I was to stay clear”. So as any boy might, at the warnings of his mother, I became obsessed with the alley and the part of my grandparent’s back yard bordering it.

Now my grandpa, though unspoken on this, never the less seemed to understand and would often let me peek through the bushes separating his back yard from the alley, look away as I peered around the corner, or for a most excellent adventure, slide into the alley for a moment. As a quiet and very serious man my grandpas had little time for his own adventures but think he wanted more for me, as he would sit me on his lap and share and explain his latest National Geographic magazine. Though, I think it was those forbidden forays into the alley he allowed, that had the biggest influence in my adult adventures.



So now let’s take a gigantic leap from 1950’s flint to March 2011, in Saigon, Vietnam and it’s the alley thing all over again, no mom it’s now ok to go out in it and as a matter of fact I have to in order to get to my rented room. Though, still the danger, but not the unknown type as when I was a kid in Flint but now it’s the very real danger of motorbikes and bicycles wizing by trying to beat the light on the intersection it skirts around. My alley is as most; the center of life and living for the people around it and for me as well as my room entrance is off it and my balcony over looks it. It’s also a place where, along its edges and against its buildings, food is sold, motorbikes are repaired, garbage is sorted and folks just hang out. Vietnamese take all this for granted but I think these urban alleys are amazing in how are they bring everyone in and around the alley together.

Now, mind you, this alley is not a large area, otherwise it would be a street. We are talking about a place maybe 300 ft long by 12 - 15 ft wide, but within this relative small space there is a lot of stuff happening.

The food sellers – one end for the morning set, tables line the side with tarps strung over the top, open air kitchen, dishes done in tubs – the other end in the evening it’s the same thing. All this is put up and torn down when the serving is over and the area is cleaned so you would never know they had been there. Across from my room is the motorbike repair guy which my landlord says he has been at it in his little alley spot for 20 years – no shop but a box and a large metal bowl on the curb with all his tools and there again he sets up in the morning and in the evening picks up everything and stuffs his box and bowl in someone’s place, like under one of my landlords chairs down stairs and goes home. Down a ways, at about 6:00 PM, a big pile of stuff shows up along the far side of the alley and then a lady appears, sorts through it, guessing she is separating plastic from paper and then they are gone, both her and the pile.

A side from the businesses that set along the sides of the alley, do their thing, fold up shop and go home only to repeat it again tomorrow, there are people walking and chatting from 4:30 in the morning till around 9:00 at night, kids playing, mom’s walking their babies, retires sitting around little tables playing board games, motorbikes parked, some with people lounging a top chatting or texting into their cell phones and through the middle of all this is a steady stream of motorbikes bustling by in both directions.

It’s what in the states city planners might refer to as a mixed use area, the alley edges are like canyon walls as the homes and businesses fit tightly together forming a solid 3 or 4 stories high cliff face, each opening directly into the canyon like floor. For example we have an LP gas distribution center with motorbikes used for delivery, office machine business, lawyer, Vietnamese traditional medical clinic, cell phone store, several other food related shops, rooming houses like where I stay, private residences and a hand full of others that I have no idea what they do.

However, I’m comfortable in my canyon in urban Saigon, it’s noisy, especially when the motorbike guy is fixing a horn, a bit warn around the edges and I’ve had a couple real close encounters of the speeding motorbike kind. Funny, now that I think about it, I have the same kind of comfortable feeling here that I had hanging out with my Grandpa, in his garage, by his alley, in Flint a zillion years ago.

What goes around comes around, maybe it’s Karma.

How to Drink From a Coconut

Say you're in the jungle and you've finished off your sports drink. Here is all you need to know about tapping into a coconut for it's juice. Nature's own sports drink, coconut juice ..

A machete does the cutting best but with patience a jackknife could get the job done.  Also Using found objects, like sharp stones might work but you need to be very patient and determined.  

Lodging - cheap but good, Sai Gon

cyclo ride

Sai Gon,  A little while ago I finished up a three month stay at the Dong Huy hotel in Sai Gon's district 1. It's a small place with only 11 rooms, located mid way down a narrow alley between Nguyen Tri and Le Lai street, a block away from 23-9 park and on the other side of the park from the Pham Nhu Lao backpackers area.  Note: addresses in Vietnam can be tricky and in this case the address is 71/12-14 Nguyen Tri - 71 is the alley number off of Nguyen Tri, and the 12-14 is the hotels physical address.  Le Lai Street is on the opposite end from Nguyen Tri street but alley access at this point is closed around 12:00 am. So the alley experiences limited motorbike traffic and in turn is relatively quiet and peaceful at night. Also only a few businesses are located here along with a smattering of private residences and a few places offering rooms for rent. You'll see only a few foreigners and then it's mostly of the expat variety but for the most part it's your typical Vietnamese neighborhood.

During my stay at the Dong Huy the front desk was manned by Nam, a personable young guy with strong English skills, so communication is easy.  At night, things change, as the night staff lack Nam's English skills but try hard. So it's still a pleasant experience interacting with them. For example one late night or closer to early one morning the motorbike guy I hired to get me back to the hotel decided to shake me down for more money in front of the hotel. The night shift desk guy looked out and saw what was happening and in a flash was outside and before he could say anything, the motorbike guy pocketed our agreed to fare and was gone.

The rooms are small but pleasant with western style bathrooms, shower stall, hot water and nice fixtures in good condition.  Floors are tile, a decent bed with nice linens, small refrigerator, workable and quiet AC, no elevator but the stairs are easy to navigate.   A minus was that their was some water damage at the base of one of the walls in my room.

They offer two types of rooms, the ones in front and a bit more pricier have small balconies overlooking the alley,while the ones facing the back are cheaper and only have the one window.

A couple handy tips:  take a right out the front door of the Dong Huy and then a left at Le Lai street and you will see a little laundry that offers next day service at very reasonable prices, wash and iron a shirt for less than $1.00 and bulk wash and fold at less than a dollar per kilo.   Go to the right out of the front door of Dong Huy and a left at Nguyen Tri, up a ways in Pho 99 and other interesting restaurants or walk across the park to Pham Nhu Lao and there are many inexpensive places to eat, western and Vietnamese fare.     

snack wagon - Vietnamese style 

The Dong Huy was booked  on line through bookings.com and I highly recomend using them.   This is the link to the Dong Huy   




http://www.booking.com/hotel/vn/dong-huy.html?aid=383305

Click for a complete offering in Sai Gon

                  http://www.booking.com/district/vn/ho-chi-minh-city/quan1.html?aid=383305

Covet action quarterly, fall 1997, regarding Cambodia

"Are you like me and can never get enough"(thanks David Letterman), of South east Asia politics, then the following will awe and amaze you.  Most of us know Pol Pot was evil but it's surprising how behind the scenes their were a lot of players who really weren't supporters but covertly offered him their support, including the USA, as a means to accomplish there own goals. Overlooking the destruction Pol Pot was inflicting on Cambodia and  the subsequent genocide he endorsed to use his military might to meet there own objectives.  

excerpted from

US intervention in Cambodia from bombs to ballots

by David Roberts

Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1997

 

There was little room for irony in Washington this summer as Congress puffed itself up with outrage over possible foreign influence in the US electoral process. "The American people have the right to know" intoned Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), "and we have the highest duty to determine whether there was a concerted plan by foreign governments to infiltrate our electoral process.''

Applied to the US, the rhetoric is melodramatic and hypocritical; used to describe the US role in Cambodia, it is glaringly inadequate. The legacy of US interference is written in blood and misery across the map of Cambodia. Although the bombing has stopped, and the world has a "new order," the US is still interfering in the domestic affairs of this small nation. And elections are only one part of the strategy.

On the surface, the recent ouster of Norodom Ranariddh, the leader of the UNCINPEC (National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia) royalists, by his coalition partner Hun Sen, head of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), seems a straightforward enough violation of democratic practice; it also appears to have little relationship to Washington. But the surface in Cambodia is shallow indeed and the roots of this coup lie deep and entangled with a history of US interference spanning almost three decades.

Although the US weapons of choice are now dollars and ballots, in the 1970s, they were bombs and troops. Then, as the war in Vietnam spilled across its borders, the US under Nixon and Kissinger launched "secret" and murderous air attacks on Cambodia's eastern border in its effort to wipe out Vietnamese communists. When revelations of this violation of a neutral country reached the anti-war movement and sparked public protest, the US temporarily halted the bombings and deployed a covert army of ground troops. But as soon as the political heat died, the bombers flew again and rained down the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a country which had no quarrel with the US.

Apart from killing innumerable Cambodians and returning parts of Cambodia to the Stone Age, Washington's military and political intervention had other, long-lasting consequences. In March 1970, just after US ground troops invaded, a ClA-backed coup deposed King Norodom Sihanouk. His pro-Washington replacement, Lon Nol, who ruled from 1970 to 1975, was a weak, corrupt despot rejected by much of the nation. Antagonism to his regime, outrage over US bombing, and the starvation and destruction which flowed from Washington's policies in Southeast Asia breathed new life into Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. From the jungle where it had been banished by Sihanouk in the 1960s, the movement rapidly built popular support.

Out of the inferno of civil war and foreign invasion, the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, gained strength and in April 1975 took power. Declaring "Year Zero," they closed down Cambodia and began dragging the country back to a pre-industrial era devoid of the foreign influence they blamed for the country's woes. In the process, Pol Pot split Cambodian society in two. His "new" people were those the regime distrusted: educated professionals who had lived cozy lives in Phnom Penh and members of the former government. Corrupt and corrupting, they were executed by the thousands. The second group, the "old," were rural peasants whose lives were romantically seen as hard but honest and who were to be more trusted because they were uncorrupted by modern city life and Western influences. To prevent their contamination, Pol Pot ordered the abolition of memory. Money and medicine were abolished. The national bank was blown up. The library, repository of much of Cambodia's precious history, was turned into a pig-sty The Catholic cathedral was razed to the ground, and Cambodia's ancient religion of Buddhism was outlawed.

Then came the genocide. Under the pretext of US bombings, the Khmer Rouge emptied the capital, Phnom Penh, which was swollen with refugees. Leaving behind homes and possessions, up to 1.5 million people were expelled to a countryside devastated by "secret" bombing, invasion, and five years of civil war between the troops of Lon Nol and Pol Pot. One journalist at the time described the evacuation as the greatest caravan of human misery the world has ever seen."

In the three years and eight months that followed, Cambodia entered the darkest period of its history and experienced a unique, horrific auto-genocide. Looking to explain why its impractical, flawed, and intellectually bankrupt revolution had gone asunder, the Khmer Rouge, like so many before them created "enemies within" and accused its terrified victims of being CIA, KGB, or sometimes both. People suspected of "crimes" against the Khmer Rouge organization, who perhaps wore glasses or spoke foreign languages, were often sent to a small converted school in Phnom Penh where Pol Pot's henchmen extracted false confessions and imposed sentences. Of the 20,000 who entered Tuol Sleng, seven survived. One, an artist, Heng Nath, whose work appears on this page, painted recollections of cruelty that beggar belief. The images haunt the tragic, dilapidated school: Scorpions are coaxed from a box next to a woman as her nipples are pinched with pliers; a man suspended up side down in water is electrocuted; prisoners are forced to eat their own excrement. The reign of terror, slavery, overwork and starvation that spread throughout the country claimed between one and two million lives.

 

Helping Pol Pot

With the regime enjoying tacit economic, political and military support from China, it looked as if the horror would end only when there was no one left alive to blame. By 1977, even as Cambodia descended into chaos, some of Pol Pot's troops along the border with Vietnam had been sporadically murdering, looting, and raping Vietnamese villagers. Then, on Christmas Day 1978, Pol Pot's vast and grisly social experiment came to an abrupt end. The People's Army of Vietnam, in response to growing attacks by Khmer Rouge Eastern Zone cadre, entered Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was by this stage in such disarray that the People's Army, despite being unprepared for such an operation, pushed Pol Pot's "army of genocide" to Thailand on Cambodia's western border, and deposed the brutal dictator.

With assistance from Vietnam, Pen Sovann and Heng Samrin became heads of Cambodia's defacto government until Hun Sen took over in 1985. At 35, he was the youngest prime minister in the world and was supported politically and economically by Hanoi. Vietnamese civil administrators quickly withdrew, but elements of the army remained to help defend the population from Pol Pot's forces. The People's Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK- later the CPP) inherited a country in ruin; the nation lacked the most basic infrastructure-money, health care and transportation networks had all but ceased to exist; most of the country's human resources, doctors, teachers, engineers had been slaughtered or died of malnutrition and overwork in the agrarian "experiment" gone grotesquely wrong.

But over the next decade, rather than provide desperately needed aid, the West and China, led by Washington, withheld assistance and instead pumped aid, money, and arms, often through Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conduits, to the Khmer Rouge and its newfound "allies" in the refugee camps in Thailand. Also withheld was formal recognition and a UN seat, without which Cambodia could not get the development aid so crucial to the mammoth task of rebuilding from the ruins of Year Zero. To this date, it retains the ignominious distinction of being the only country in the world to have been denied development aid by the UN. Instead, the world body surrendered to superpower realpolitic while thousands more Cambodians died in floods and famine.

Not satisfied with an aid embargo, Washington continued to demonize and punish both Cambodia and Vietnam. Humiliated by losing to a Third World peasant guerrilla army, Washington saw its chance to extend the war and elicit revenge by isolating Vietnam and punishing poor Cambodia, whose only mistake, as award winning British journalist John Pilger once wrote, was having liberators from the wrong side of the Cold War.

 

US Intervention

For more than a decade, the Khmer Rouge, protected by Western and Chinese antagonism to the Hun Sen government, continued to wage guerrilla war from its bases on the Thai border. Then, with the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Vietnam backed away from supporting Hun Sen. The Khmer Rouge, however, supplemented continuing international support from the US, China and Thailand with extensive logging and gem mining from its resource-rich control zones on its western border with Thailand. A tortuous peace process-originally blocked by secret US diplomacy because the deal didn't suit Washington's interests-resulted in the establishment of the most comprehensive, intrusive, and expensive UN peacekeeping operation to date. From November 1991, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) employed over 22,000 people including more than 6,000 civilians, and carried out staggeringly successful elections against enormous odds in a hostile, complex, and demanding environment. About a month before the elections, amid claims of UN partisanship, the Khmer Rouge withdrew its participation in the elections. Nonetheless, the polling took place from May 23 to 28, 1993, against a backdrop of intimidation and threats of violence by Pol Pot and his guerrillas.

The charge that elements of the UN were partisan was accurate, but the victim was not the Khmer Rouge. The October 1991 Paris Peace Accords that paved the way for the giant peacekeeping force had been skewed from the beginning. Washington, along with Beijing, had consistently influenced the Accords to marginalize Hun Sen's CPP, which (in various guises) had controlled Phnom Penh since 1979. Both China and the US also insisted on including the Khmer Rouge in any peace plan. Thus, allegations that the UN and US were trying to exclude the Khmer Rouge neither follows precedent, nor explains the covert political machinations that characterized aspects of the peacekeeping operation.

US intervention in the electoral process itself was multifaceted, although not necessarily coordinated. It was guided by Washington's desire to extend the Cold War demonization of Vietnam and Cambodia into the post-Cold War order. Since Vietnam-after ousting the genocidal Pol Pot-had helped install the predecessors of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), Washington extended its animus to Han Sen. While around the world, far worse rulers basked in US warmth, Cambodia became a special target. Again, its involvement was an accident of geography, as it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s when US bombers illegally flattened its eastern border in pursuit of Vietnamese communists.

The politics of punishment that characterized the 1980s also marked part of the UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia. Unfortunately, the few official government sources corroborating this agenda do so with tantalizing slips of intention, rather than direct admissions. However, information assembled from a wide variety of non-governmental sources, from researchers and aid workers, and from documents leaked from UNTAC show where, how, and by whom US influence over the Cambodian election process was exerted.

 

*****

 

The War On Vietnam Prolonged

... more than two decades of US foreign policy in the region using both covert operations and overt pressure. In the 1980s when all foreign aid to Cambodia was embargoed, the US tried to isolate Phnom Penh and Hanoi, to eliminate the CPP and its political predecessors, and to continue punishing Hanoi. The goal, noted journalist John Pilger, was to sweep "away the last vestiges of Vietnam's humiliation of the US, with the aim of overseeing a pro-American anti-Vietnamese, IMF-indebted regime in Phnom Penh"

But even more destructive than under mining reconstruction efforts in this war ravaged country were efforts by Washington-with Western complicity and extensive Chinese military and diplomatic aid- to restore the Khmer Rouge to diplomatic credibility and military prowess. US and

Chinese vetoes in the UN Security Council ensured that the Khmer Rouge, and not the de facto regime in Phnom Penh, held Cambodia's UN seat. Washington also established the Kampuchea Emergency Group and its successor the Kampuchea Working Group which established links with the Khmer Rouge and other groups, and helped funnel information, aid, cash, and weapons 67 Facilitated by representatives who would later join the Info-Ed division in the UN peacekeeping operation, this clandestine operation worked to shore up Pol Pot's forces.

By consistently supporting Pol Pot and torpedoing regional deals that might have ended the conflict and condemned the Khmer Rouge to isolation and ineffectiveness, the US guaranteed continuing conflict and instability. Meanwhile ClA-led disinformation campaigns ensured that Phnom Penh would remain in near virtual diplomatic, political, and economic isolation for over a decade. And when the end of the Cold War appeared inevitable and the tepid as Raul support for the US and China's onerous intervention in Cambodia began to wane, Washington, along with its more powerful allies in Beijing, sought to control any peace deal. "The reason for the inventing of the Peace Process " Vickery reminds us, "was not to marginalize the Khmer Rouge, nor to end a war, but to forestall the danger of a [CPP] victory, or its recognition. The peace deal removed the last of Vietnam's troops-which had been defending Cambodians from the marauding Khmer Rouge-and ensured that the CPP lost more weapons than the guerrillas. While a 70 percent cut across all parties seemed fair in principle, in practice, the Khmer Rouge could conceal its weapons in remote mountain and jungle hideaways while the government had to surrender its arms stored in garrisons. Even Sihanouk took umbrage, advising Hun Sen to "surrender your worst weapons and give your ill-trained, poorly motivated troops to UNTAC for demobilization because otherwise there will be no balance between you and the Khmer Rouge ... [and] there has to be balance before there can be peace."

Ultimately the plan to destroy the CPP failed, but not for want of trying. The 1993 Cambodian elections suggested strongly that Washington, in pursuit of its foreign policy goals, sabotaged free and fair elections, even when run by the United Nations. Having weakened Phnom Penhs position, and compromised Vietnams sup port for its former allies with promises of "normalization" in return for cooperation, the final stages of the operation to punish both Vietnam and Cambodia were little more than war by other means.

If the hypocrisy was not so appalling, Cambodians might be cheered to hear the halls of the US Congress ring with condemnation of foreign interference in an electoral process. But while the scandal in the US surrounding campaign contributions is mainly a melodrama of political posturing, in Cambodia the result of interference in the electoral process is a tragedy of horrific proportion. The unstable coalition the US and others forced on Cambodia has promoted infighting and crushed development.

Again, the Cambodian people are the losers, victims of policies created thousands of miles away by comfortable bureaucrats who have turned a blind eye to consequences of three decades of devastating interference. In the 1970s, the US anti war movement helped stop the bombing that was surely not a secret from those on whom destruction rained.

In mid-l990, Americans who penetrated the mist of media propaganda demanded that President Bush stop aid to the monsters of Pol Pot's creation. But while many Americans joined cause with the Cambodian people, Washington embraced the demon of revenge. US cynicism to ward Cambodia and its own people ironically parallels that of the Khmer Rouge during the Pol Pot regime to the Khmer innocents: "Preserve them, no profit. Kill them, no loss.''

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