In a thread in the Isaan forum, members have been extolling the virtues of their Isaan wives. It got me thinking about how my wife grew up in southeastern Thailand.

 

She was born in Trat in 1969. Her father had a ruby mine in the area. The family was poor, with occasional bursts of wealth when he got lucky. But her experience growing up there in the 1980's was colored by the presence of the province's most notorious, but rarely acknowledged, resident -- Pol Pot.

 

For those who don't remember Pol Pot, he was the leader of the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia ("Democratic Kampuchea") from 1976 to 1979. In the course of trying to socially engineer a classless communist society, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died from executions, starvation and disease, nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population. It would be fair to say that the Pol Pot regime was one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.

 

When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1978, what remained of the Khmer Rouge army encamped in malarial forests close to the Thai border. But the whereabouts of Pol Pot were unknown.

 

At the end of 1979, Pol Pot emerged from hiding long enough to be photographed at a fortified camp in Trat province in Thailand. He lived there through most of the 1980's, protected by the Thai army, while he tried to rebuild the Khmer Rouge.

 

If you thought the Thai army might be evil, their support for the Khmer Rouge should remove any doubt. The motive was a familiar one -- money. The Khmer Rouge supplied lucrative cross-border trade in gems and lumber, while the Thai Army provided protection and arms. They also shared a mutual fear of neighboring Vietnam.

 

Though Pol Pot was sentenced to death in absentia by the new Cambodian government in 1979, he was never brought to justice. Human rights activists in the west tried to bring him to trial at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands. They failed because the Thai army were unwilling to hand him over and because his patrons in Washington and Beijing were more interested in punishing Vietnam than in bringing Pol Pot to justice.

 

In April 1998, Pol Pot died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 72 after being placed under house arrest by the Khmer Rouge.

My son has been reading Orwell's 1984 and the other day he asked, "Dad, can they really rewrite history?" I answered, "Son, go ask your Mom about Pol Pot and the Thai army."

 

Paul Laew

 

Someone is sure to ask me for a source, so this would be a good start:

 

Pol Pot & Co.: The Thai Connection - A Special Report; In Big Threat to Cambodia, Thais Still Aid Khmer Rouge