River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Then one morning, Sunday, 23 July, six weeks after my kidnapping, I listened to the BBC World Service and heard my name. With elation, I called the guerrillas over. We squatted in the sand and listened together to a crackly interview with Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, reporting my disappearance. The broadcast proved that I had been telling the truth and from then on my captors were markedly more open and friendly.

  Their positive reaction made me feel my release would come. I began counting the days, but six more weeks were to pass before I reached the Sudan – weeks of boredom and frustration, broken only when, one morning, I was taken across the sandy valley floor to another series of bushes and introduced to the Tylers, a captive English family. The Tylers had been kidnapped on 9 May, a few weeks before me, when Lindsay – a thirty-four-year-old veterinary surgeon – took his family with him on a cattle-vaccinating mission in Ethiopia’s northern wilds. A blown bridge made a detour necessary and, while driving down a mountain road in the early afternoon, his Land Rover was fired on by the TPLF and forced to stop. When the news was broken to them that the guerrillas were demanding a one million dollar ransom for their release, they were exceedingly despondent. But our meeting was an exciting moment nevertheless – the only Britons for hundreds of miles brought together as captives. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure . . .?’ said Lindsay. Their children, Sally and Robert, jumped about and we all shook hands. Then we were allowed to eat lunch together, with the guerrillas listening all the time. They had not entirely abandoned their idea that we were members of an arcane western capitalist imperialist spy ring and were testing us, I think, to see whether we had known one another before.

  In the end, I won sufficient trust to be taken on a guided tour of the impressive EPLF cave complex. Some of the caves housed hospitals and workshops and were all bustle. But one was like a grave, where Ethiopian army prisoners of war sat on their haunches in the dark, eyes sunken and melancholy, forgotten men in a forgotten place, condemned to rot for years in captivity.

  Thank God, I thought (and not for the first time) that I was not born an Ethiopian. Outside, young recruits were drilling.

  I was released on 6 September, thanks to the intervention of President Nimeiri of the Sudan, the BBC broadcast, and belated efforts by the Sunday Times. Bowing to Foreign Office advice, it had stifled any publicity about my disappearance for six weeks. This was a mistake on this occasion. The oxygen of publicity can be harmful, even dangerous in kidnapping cases; it gives the captors a misguided sense of self-importance and emboldens them to be unyielding over their demands. On the other hand, concealment of the news of a kidnapping can, as in my case, endanger the life of the victim.

  When it came time to say goodbye to the Tylers I told them I would do what I could to help secure their early and safe return to Britain. During those desert days of tedium, I had watched the Tylers from my bush and grown to admire and respect the resourceful way they faced their ordeal. I had yet again the sense of being a privileged person in transit through other people’s lives. In a few days I would be in Europe, while they were left to their fate. Shaking hands and saying goodbye was another act of desertion.

  The Tylers were finally freed on 6 January after 238 days of captivity. Some months later, I got a letter from the TPLF’s Berhu Aregawi. It said, inter alia, ‘No doubt the essential part of your question has been answered. The Tylers have been set free unconditionally and unharmed. Their captivity for more than eight months is mainly due to their arrogance and the intrigue the British embassy in the Sudan tried to make. As to your release, you should be grateful only to your sincerity and integrity. Your release solely depended on your personality and job. I would like to repeat to you once more that we do not condemn kidnappings that are made for revolutionary ends.’

  I was handed over unconditionally to the Sudanese police the next afternoon. For more than twelve hours we had groped our way on camel-back through the thickest sandstorm. It was the worst day I lived through in the desert. I arrived at the police station exhausted, clothes and hair gritty with sand and eyes red-rimmed from rubbing. I was taken by lorry to Port Sudan and then flown to Khartoum. Twenty-four hours later I landed at Heathrow; sunburnt, grinning like a schoolboy, gulping in breaths of freedom. No day could have been happier. But inside there was a secret anguish.

  I felt like flying out to Asia; and the sooner the better. Tomorrow, if possible, blowing my bridges behind, if necessary. But not without Jacqueline, whom I loved but whom, bizarrely and unforgivably, I had left to go to Ethiopia.

  She was in the south of France. I flew to Paris and took the night train from the Gare de Lyon. The last time I had travelled on that train was as a Foreign Legion recruit running away from a chagrin d’amour, nervously chain-smoking troupes (French army cigarettes). Now I was travelling, I hoped, towards love. Raising a blind in the morning, I saw the French countryside flash by, ravissant, fat as butter. I had coffee and a hot croissant and for the first time in months felt I belonged among the living.

  She wore a summer dress. The early sun glowed on her radiant face. She was genuinely overjoyed to see me safe. But there was something else I noticed. A distance. A mistrust. A hurt in the eyes. I saw it with a sense of foreboding. She recoiled at the unkempt figure standing before her and indeed I presented a wretched spectacle. My face was haggard, sallow-cheeked and thin. I was overcome by a great lassitude. Unknown to me, I was already suffering from hepatitis caught while a prisoner.

  It was a fatal meeting, a night more of silent tears than love-making. ‘If you only knew what you have done to us,’ she said, ‘how much of us you have destroyed.’ She had believed, she said, for a long time that I was dead. There would have been a certain symmetry to my life had I died in Indo-China; she could have come to terms with that because it was the place I loved. But Ethiopia, a country so foreign to my being; to have died there would have been insane.

  She did not need to say any more. I realised then that she was no longer prepared to compromise over the mad lifestyle I imposed on our relationship. Grieving for another lost journalist-lover and soul mate, after Claude Arpin, was more than her heart could bear. She had passed through enough anguish and despair and had made up her mind that they were over.

  But she said she would forever wonder how I had managed so adroitly to throw away so much love. And, searching for words to reflect her feelings, she finally quoted to me a passage from The Little Prince: ‘You know you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .’ Jacqueline throughout those years in Indo-China was my rose; a lovely, wild, example of the exotic beauty of the lands of the Mekong. Instead of nourishing her and treating her with the tenderness she deserved; instead of staying and making her feel I was always there, I had run away. In that south of France apartment, she closed her coloured petals to me for ever. ‘Tu n’as pas le coeur fidèle.’ I could think of no adequate reply. The dawn and our farewells came with brutal sadness.

  A disconsolate and lonely figure on the platform, the green hills behind, the blue Mediterranean in front; a circle of love that would never now be closed – that is how she vanished from my world. I left for London a free man – free but shrivelled inside, learning too late one of the most important lessons of all; that it is the time you waste for someone you love that makes them so important. I think that I had found my enemy at last: it was myself.

  After the Khmer Rouge

  Ethiopia was like a personal taste of hell, and when I got back to London I was more than ever convinced that the past was lost and that the future seemed hopeless. There are those who say such events make one stronger and are character-forming. That is broadly true, but I was deeply scarred by the experience of my kidnapping. This showed by the fact that in the bitter aftermath of the whole harrowing episode I was temporarily cured of my disease of restlessness to the point that I found myself doing something I had vowed I would never do – working at the London office of the Sunday Times.
I did not become a journalist to be a journalistic bureaucrat and felt as uneasy and uncertain in that office as an immigrant does arriving in a strange land. But standing still was necessary while I sorted out what I should do next.

  By and by, the old inner restlessness took hold again. I needed ripples in my life to feel alive and, looking around me in the office, it was clear I was not going to get them there. I am sure that subconsciously I was rearranging events to make the memories more palatable, for there were moments in London when I was convinced that I missed even Ethiopia and the solitude and simplicity of a captive’s life in the desert. Inevitably, I went back on the road again, feeling an urgent need to be on the spot. I wandered the world in quest of news, through the carnage of Beirut, the Ogaden war, Chad, Zaire, where I renewed my acquaintance with the Foreign Legion, reporting on its second parachute regiment, the Deuxième REP, dropping onto the rebel-held town of Kolwezi.

  War reporting in those early post-Vietnam war years was still like a travelling circus – the same journalistic faces I had known in Indo-China kept popping up in every conceivable trouble spot, infesting bars from Beirut to Luanda with their rich banter and performing brilliant acts of journalism like the fine bunch of ‘trapeze artists’ they always were. There were times, however, when I felt trapped in London and I came, quite unfairly, to regard the London office of the Sunday Times as a journalistic gulag. This was preposterous, for while I was prospering there, Pran, the person who more than anyone had made living possible after Cambodia, was fighting for his own survival as a prisoner in an authentic gulag – Cambodia in the Year Zero under Pol Pot, with its hopeless horror and pain.

  Since that heart-rending day – 20 April 1975 – when he trudged out through the gates of the French embassy into the Cambodian countryside, there had not been an iota of news from Pran. From America, Sydney was pursuing his quest for his loyal friend as tenaciously as he had pursued the Cambodian story. Anyone, any organisation with a link with Cambodia, however tenuous, who he thought could locate Pran inside Cambodia and help him to escape, he bombarded with relentless requests for help and information.

  How many times had I thought of Pran as I shuttled around the world’s trouble-spots? Not often enough, I confess. It was not insensitivity, I hope; more that I had unconsciously allowed a gulf to develop between me and Indo-China for my own protection and sanity in the new present. And there was also a big residue of guilt. I and other westerners had saved our skins while Pran and other Cambodians to whom we owed debts of loyalty had been imprisoned or killed. How did we square that one? I, for instance, had not only survived; I had flourished to the point where I now had a staff job on a leading Sunday newspaper.

  One overcast autumn day, I was standing in the foreign department of the old offices in Gray’s Inn Road, thinking about nothing in particular, when the telex machine chattered into life. It was a message addressed to me from Sydney in Bangkok, telling me that Pran was safe. At the end of it was a personal, cosmic message from Pran, patterned after a Cambodian proverb. ‘Hi Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad shape, but the life is remained. Love Pran.’

  I held the flimsy telex message in my hand and stared out of the window in disbelief, beyond the blackened roof-tops and the construction cranes to a distant blue patch of sky as if it were the sunshine lighting up Southeast Asia. The present melted away and I saw Phnom Penh again – the familiar streets, the triumphant beauty of the Mekong in full flood, the rice paddies, the majestic sadness of a tortured but beautiful land. So Pran had survived, limping out of Cambodia into a refugee camp in Thailand. Life had an extra special meaning that day.

  Pran’s escape marked the end of a four-year nightmare for Sydney. Tortured by Pran’s disappearance, he had led an uncompromising one-man crusade to trace his helper and friend who had so courageously saved our lives. ‘This is the most wonderful, wonderful news. Please give Pran my love and a big hug from someone who owes him everything,’ I said in a cable to Sydney, who had flown to Thailand to welcome Pran. It was the best news out of Indo-China for a long while.

  Pran’s survival was a triumph of self-reliance, of tenacity, of endurance over an insanely brutal regime. Toiling in Pol Pot’s gulag, he had never given up hope that Sydney would find a way to rescue him; but the magnificent thing was that his escape was authentically his own doing. His powerful American friends with all their good intentions, their dollars and the resources at their disposal could do nothing for him in the end. A Cambodian had stood upon his own feet, demonstrating that Cambodians could be their own masters whatever cruel lessons to the contrary the war had taught. As Warren Hoffecker, an American working with refugees in Thailand, said in a letter to Sydney, ‘the era of American miracles is over . . . and there is nothing you can do.’

  On leaving the French embassy, Pran had even thrown away the thousands of US dollars Sydney had given him in case they compromised him. He had made his way through the chaos of millions of people on the move, to his native province of Siem Reap. There he joined a work gang in the fields. He soon realised that the Khmer Rouge were rooting out and killing people with education or past links with foreigners, and he hoodwinked them into thinking he was just an ignorant taxi-driver. Several times, he came within an inch of his life, but he survived, living off his wits, often with nothing more to eat than ants and bugs. He bided his time and finally on 3 October 1979 – 1627 days after we had abandoned him – he crossed the border to Thailand and safety.

  His trek to freedom took him through the Khmer Rouge execution grounds – the Killing Fields – burial pits littered with the remains of thousands of Cambodians axed and clubbed to death. He set out for the border with eleven other Cambodians. The fugitives had to move through the jungle stealthily, in single file, avoiding random Khmer Rouge patrols, booby traps and unmarked minefields. The last part of the journey was only sixty miles, but it took seventeen days. The final cruelty was that they had almost reached the border when a mine blew the two young men immediately in front of Pran to bits. He was lightly grazed by shrapnel. When he emerged, his health was breaking down – his teeth were falling out; he was suffering from malaria. Most of his family had died under Pol Pot; but he at least was safe and his escape from that death-haunted land helped to relieve our guilt.

  It was time now for me to go back to Cambodia and see what had happened to the country I loved. Nearly five years had passed since the fall of Phnom Penh and Cambodia was dogged, once again, by civil war and was emerging from a terrible famine. A new government was in power in Phnom Penh, installed by the communist Vietnamese who had invaded a year previously and set up a pro-Vietnamese communist state under Hanoi’s discreet direction. Using the Khmer Rouge massacre of thousands of Vietnamese villagers on the border as justification, their tanks and columns had moved up Highway One, crossed the Mekong at Neak Leung and, in a five-day blitzkrieg, rumbled into Phnom Penh and put the Khmer Rouge to flight. The population was too enfeebled by the demagogic exigencies of the Khmer Rouge tyranny to meet the Vietnamese with any effective resistance; the country was quickly overrun and Pol Pot chased to the border with Thailand, where he remains to this day.

  If the Vietnamese had not attacked when they did, Cambodia might not have survived much longer. All that Pol Pot left behind was blood and ruins. His dream of raising a new Khmer civilisation, greater even than the Angkorian era, had turned people into a race of human ants, toiling for long hours in rural rice communes on starvation rations of rice gruel, under the guns of young, hostile Khmer Rouge guards.

  Now the whole nation was on the move again, as people returned to their homes, searched for their loved ones, tried to rebuild their lives. But Cambodia was still closed to the world. Helped by the indefatigable Guy Stringer, deputy director of Oxfam, who bust through red tape to get the first western aid into Phnom Penh, and Chum Bun Rong, a gendarmerie lieutenant whom I had known slightly in the Lon Nol times and who had miraculously survived and was working in the
information department of the new foreign ministry, I was granted a visa.

  On New Year’s Day 1980, I took off from Bangkok on an International Red Cross flight for Phnom Penh, one of the first British journalists to be allowed in. In normal times, it was a one-hour flight, but the Vietnamese authorities perversely obliged our French air force Transall to fly a dogleg route, out to sea, then over Saigon, and finally into Phnom Penh.

  I think I felt more emotional crossing the Vietnamese coast and passing directly above Saigon, where every detail of that dear city was uncannily visible, than landing in Phnom Penh again. Britain had already been alerted to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, notably by Year Zero, a shaming television documentary made by John Pilger and David Munro, which had elicited a fantastic public response; yet I was not ready for the shock of coming back.

  The sense of homecoming I felt as I drove into the city from the airport did not last long. There was an overwhelming sense of emptiness and I was frightened by what I would find. I was staying in the Monorom, one of two hotels to be reopened; the other was my old stamping ground, the Hôtel Le Phnom, which had now been taken over by the international aid agencies.

  The first thing I did on that first day was to walk down the street to the Phnom, now renamed the Samaki or Solidarity Hotel, a new buzzword to emphasise the friendship between the Cambodian and Vietnamese people. I passed the empty ground where the Roman Catholic cathedral blown up by the Khmer Rouge had stood; not a brick of the building remained. I passed the old Air France office where so many frightened people had queued for tickets out to Bangkok, Singapore and Paris in the last days of the siege of Phnom Penh. I passed the former press centre where Am Rong delivered his surreal briefings, the Lycée Descartes, and through the gates to the hotel which had for months been home. It was in poor state, its garden weed-grown, its pool filled with stagnant water; I looked in something of a daze at the studio where I had lived, now occupied by a Swiss aid worker.