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Matt Warren - Times Educational Supplement –
January 2002
 Matt is a freelance journalist, and wrote this article after his
extended trip to Cambodia end 2001. It was published in the TES January 4th
2002.
Please do not reproduce the article or pictures without Matt's permission.
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 It
is 9am, and outside the Hun Sen primary school in Anlong Veng, children are
gathering in the searing heat for the first day of the new academic year.
Many have walked for miles across the rice fields to get here and their
white and blue uniforms are stained red with dust. Nearby, water buffalo,
carrying produce to the local market, trudge down the pot marked road that
provides the only link between this remote community and the rest of
Cambodia.
Minutes
later, a whistle has blown and the school's headmaster, Som Noeurm is
introducing himself to his new literacy class. The concrete walls are bare,
but for two sun bleached AIDS awareness posters, and mosquitoes buzz through
open windows. There are no fans in the classroom and there is no
electricity for overhead lighting.
He
starts by warning the children, who sit on plain, wooden benches, about the
danger of landmines. Both the teacher and his pupils have first hand
experience of Cambodia's deadliest legacy. In 1983, Som lost his leg to a
mine and, until three years ago, the children that now fill his class, were
being taught how to lay them in the nearby rice fields. Only last year,
four anti-personnel mines were removed from the school's dusty playground.
 Until
recently, this seemingly peaceful farming community had been at war for
nearly three decades. As the last stronghold of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, who
in the late 1970s were responsible for one of Asia's most devastating
genocides and were fighting the Cambodian government until a fragile peace
was finally brokered in 1998, Anlong Veng was devastated by conflict. Only
now are its schools being rebuilt.
For
Som, 52, who was himself a member of the Khmer Rouge from 1970, until the
ceasefire in 1998, education is a priority in the newly unified Cambodia.
Five years ago, he was working at the same school, which was originally
built in 1991 by Pol Pot's right-hand man, Ta Mok. But the lessons were
very different then. Officially employed by the Khmer Rouge as a literacy
teacher, Som was required to spend the majority of allocated school time
teaching children as young as nine how to lay booby traps, make explosives
from fertiliser and transport weapons to the guerilla fighters at the front
line. After years of indoctrination and conflict, Som maintains that only
education can now offer the local children a chance of building a more
peaceful society. Cambodia's children have long been the silent casualties
of the decades of fighting.
When
the Khmer Rouge swept into the capital Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the
curtain came down on the country's fledgling education system. Forcibly
evacuating Cambodia's urban centres, the Khmer Rouge led the population to
rural labour camps where they were put to work building Pol Pot's agrarian
idyll. Aiming to eradicate all influences at odds with their vision of a
rural, communist utopia, the Khmer Rouge systematically banned televisions,
newspapers and radios. Music and singing were strictly controlled and,
although Pol Pot himself was a former teacher, education, which was seen by
the party faithful as providing the groundwork for counter-revolutionary
ideas, all but ceased. Over the next four years, 1.7 million Cambodians
were murdered or starved to death before being buried in fields where their
bones still stain the red earth white.
Teachers
and academics were quickly targeted by the death squads and schools, most
notably Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng
High School, where more than 17,000 Cambodians were interrogated before being
executed in the nearby Choeung Ek Killing Fields, became prisons or barracks
for Pol Pot's soldiers. |
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While
a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979 led to the collapse of Pol Pot's
government, the Khmer Rouge maintained strongholds in areas such as Anlong
Veng and Pailin, where the children were largely denied education and
were instead co-opted in the ongoing war effort. Only recently, after the
death of Pol Pot in 1997 and the final laying down of arms in 1998 have
government and aid agency officials been able enter these areas and set
about rebuilding the infrastructure.
But
new problems have developed. With the adult population devastated by Pol
Pot's regime, 50% of this nation's people are under the age of 18. 10,000
Cambodian children have been orphaned by AIDS and twice that number are
exploited by the sex industry.
Now
sharing his simple, wooden home with ten, government soldiers, sent to the
region to maintain peace, Som, the Cambodian government and Save the
Children Norway, who are at the forefront of delivering primary education to
Anlong Veng's children, face a formidable task. The government's education
budget for the region is negligible and while teachers can expect a salary
of only $25 dollars a month, few are paid.
Som
works six days a week in a hot, dark classroom with few of the teaching aids
and textbooks common in the west, before returning home to tend the rice
fields that feed his family. He has not been paid in six months.
Gracefully, he suggests that his unseen pay cheques are being spent on
relieving the floods that, in late 2000, affected 3 million Cambodians.
But
with five illiterate children of his own, he is committed to making a
difference. Som's young grandchildren are now growing up in the shadow of
the soldiers they share their home with, and as we speak, he sits with an
AK-47 nearby. But he is determined that they will never hear the guns fired
in anger. Working with Keo Sarath, Save the Children Norway's Programme
Manager for Basic Education, who lost more than 50 family members to the
Killing Fields, and the local government's District Education Director, Heme
Khem to build and staff basic schools, Som is already seeing results beyond
his wildest dreams. On his first day as a headmaster in 1998, there were
only a few hundred children being educated in the whole of Anlong Veng
district. Within a month, there were 1,000. Today, 4,117 children are
being taught by 68 staff in the 11 schools built by foreign aid agencies in
the last three years. |
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"In
the days of the Khmer Rouge, the children were made to feel like dust. They
were worthless, without a future and with only the war to think about,"
explains Som, who now deeply regrets the Khmer Rouge's education policy.
"Now the children arrive at the new schools as soon as they are built.
There is no need to advertise them. They speak for themselves because they
speak of a future. Today, there is so much enthusiasm that we cannot keep
up with it. We have to stop children at the door."
 On
the steps of the school, where a tattered Cambodian flag flutters in the
late afternoon breeze, 7-year-old Reack is playing with a 13-year-old
friend. Despite their age difference, the two boys are in the same class.
This is typical of Anlong Veng. With all children long denied even the most
basic education, girls and boys of all ages are now determined to take
advantage of the new opportunities. Today, teenagers sit alongside
six-year-olds as the older children attempt to make up for lost time.
In
the neighbouring, but even more remote district of Trapang Prasat, Save the
Children Norway and teachers like Som are making similar advances. Nearly
touching Thailand, the cluster of huts that since 1998 has become a district
capital, has no access to electricity or sanitation and many of the
surrounding, fertile fields are peppered with mines. As we pass through the
village on motorbikes, small crowds gather at the roadside and stare in
disbelief.
But
54-year-old district governor Chum Cheat has ambitious plans. During the Pol
Pot regime, Chum was a senior cadre, overseeing the whole of nearby Preah
Vihear province. Today, he receives less than $20 and a few kilos of rice
in salary a month after turning down the Government's offer of a promotion
to general in Cambodia's official army. But after recently discovering that
both his brother and sister were killed by the Khmer Rouge, despite his
allegiance to the same organisation, Chum is now committed to peace,
rebuilding his district's shattered education system in the hope that his
community will never be revisited by its turbulent past. |
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“Few
of those in the Khmer Rouge in these parts knew about the terrible things
that were going on further south,” he explains. “We simply wanted to
bring the poorer people of Cambodia a fairer society and once the fighting
had started, there was little we could do but battle on. Children faced
terrible things during the fighting, but war is a terrible thing. Now, we
have to work to restore peace and rebuild.”
So
far, his results have been impressive. In a district where more than 70%
of the population is illiterate and the first school was only built in 1999,
this academic year will see 90% of Trapang Prasat's children enrolled in the
education system.
Additionally,
after forging a network of unpaid volunteers from within the community
itself, teachers have this year volunteered to work double shifts, while 76
non-formal literacy teachers and care-givers have been given bicycles so
they can travel to homes to give basic education to all those unable to read
and write. They now travel along muddy, jungle paths to educate even the
most distant families.
But
while both Som and Chum have laid down their arms, casting off their ties
with the Khmer Rouge to build a new, integrated and educated Cambodia, the
problems they face are enormous. With 20% of families in both districts
now headed by a war widow and most families relying on rice farming for
survival, many families need their older children to stay at home to bring
in the harvest.
Similarly,
while there are plenty of willing teachers in the community, few have had
any formal training and, with salaries currently set below subsistence
level, few qualified tutors will leave the big cities to make up the
shortfall. Primary education may now be available for most, but secondary
schools remain the preserve of the few.
But
the communities controlled by the Khmer Rouge were not alone in their
suffering. In Angkor Chum district, many of the local people supported the
government during the years of civil war. But as the frontline moved across
the country with the army's annual, seasonal advances, the villages in this
region were often caught in the crossfire. |
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 Bou,
42, was a member of the local government militia until 1998. He
speaks to me beside the wooden hut
which he shares with his wife and six children. The road to the nearby
village was washed away in the recent, monsoon rains and it is now an hour’s
walk through the rice fields to the pump that provides him with fresh
water.
"Here,
there were government schools, but things were rarely stable enough for
children to get to them," he explains. "It was a terrible life. One day,
we might have been attacked three or more times by the Khmer Rouge and the
next the village would be rocked by a government artillery bombardment. As
many as 50% of the people living in the surrounding villages were killed and
20 children were killed in 1992 alone."
Today,
his three youngest children go to the simple, concrete school that was built
by Save the Children Norway across the paddy fields. The two, basic rooms
are dark and lizards skit across the bare walls. Few children can afford
schoolbooks and they instead write their alphabets in chalk on small,
hand-held blackboards.
But
Bou tells me that his 14-year-old son has found fresh confidence since
starting school last year and when I ask, he can tell me that Tony Blair is
the Prime Minister of Britain. In the UK, such knowledge is commonplace but
in this remote district, cut off from television and the media and where few
villagers have been more than twenty miles from their birthplace, this would
not have been possible until a few years ago. Like Som and Chum, Bou is
hopeful about the future.
And
with $1.6 million pledged to the Save
the Children (Norway) programme by the
Japanese Social Development Fund (JSDF) this year alone, they have reason to
be. But these remote communities are determined to bring education to their
children with or without foreign funding.
"For
many Cambodians, it is like waking up on New Year's day, looking out of your
window and seeing that the nightmare has ended," says Som. "For years, the
children have been victims this country's wars. Now we have discovered that
we are all just Khmer, they can finally stop looking back and start looking
forward." |
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Copyright
©
Matt Warren 2002 e-mail Matt
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Slide
Presentation to King Edward's School, Bath
- November 2002
Anlong
Veng & Trapang Prasat photos - March 3 2003
Angkor
Chum & Varin photos - March 4 2003
Svay
Leu photos - March 5 2003
Siem
Reap / Artisans d'Angkor - February 20 2004
Anlong
Veng & Trapang Prasat
- February 21 2004
Dangrek
Mountains & Preah Vihear
Temple - February
22 2004
Kulen
District & Koh Ker Temple - February 23 2004
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