Free Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer Page A

lanes—completely unlit and unpaved—where a former Zen monk runs a guest house and Africans on the run live by teaching English.
    In such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws where some protective coating, some layer of civilization keeping Darwin’s jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads like it was written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than twelve thousand “ghost soldiers”—nonexistent employees—have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys.
    It seems almost apt that half the cars you see have steering wheels on the left and half have them on the right, ensuring bloody accidents every day.
    In the midst of all this, the ones who live among ghosts conduct their own private investigations. “My friends think I’m crazy,” says a well-to-do Cambodian who returned here from Canada. “People tell me, ‘Why do you want to look at these things? It’s easier to forget.’ But I want to understand why it happened”—he means the self-extermination of his country— “so it will never happen again.” When Pol Pot died, Keo Lundi, from the Tuol Sleng center, says, “I spent my own money to go to his province, to talk to his brother and sister. I wanted to know what he was like as a child.” What he found was that Pol Pot— born Saloth Sar—was a notably mild-mannered boy, pious and delicate, who “never played with a gun” and often accompanied his mother to the pagoda. His own siblings claim not to have known that it was their courteous brother who was “Brother Number One,” the man who loosed a national madness.
    The hope now is that Duch, the last Khmer Rouge leader to leave the city when the country’s longtime enemies, the Vietnamese, took over in January 1979, may shed some light on what happened. But though the government has, for the time being, acceded to the demands of the world, and the U.N., to hold a partly international tribunal of the Khmer Rouge leaders, almost everyone agrees that terms like “justice” and “democracy” are virtual luxuries in a country as desperate as Cambodia, where politics can often look like a Swiss bank account under a false name.
    “I don’t want to watch the trials,” a diplomat in a Western embassy says with feeling. “Because everything that has happened in the past year has been staged. So we know already what will happen. They will blame everything on Pol Pot, on others who are gone. Or on the Americans. Or the King. It will be lies.”
    On New Year’s Day, as a visitor inspects carvings of demons and gods and mythological battles at the haunted temple of Angkor Wat, suddenly a Cambodian standing nearby clutches a pillar till his knuckles turn white. “Look,” he says, swallowing. “There’s Khieu Samphan!” He points to a trim elderly man in white shirt and slacks, walking with relatively little protection towards his helicopter. “He killed so many,” says the visitor. “He killed my mother, my father,” says the man, who was himself forced out of his home as a boy to work in the fields. Khieu and Nuon Chea are walking through a city they have orphaned, among people whose lives they have destroyed, VIP sight-seers (courtesy of the government) this bright festival day.
    “Let us finish the war,” says a twenty-five-year-old local nearby, flush with the promise of a new future. “We are Buddhists: if you do badly, bad will come to you. Let us shake hands.”
    Six months later, the debate continues like a tolling bell. On the twenty-third anniversary of Pol Pot’s announcement of national collectivization, a thousand or so people gather at dawn in the killing fields, among 129 mass graves, some of them reserved for women and children, some for 166 corpses found without heads. For