Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  That was the day things went back to normal. The normal from before. When fear caused silence. When protests were disallowed, and gatherings of more than ten people in public space simply didn’t happen. When people refused to talk politics. When no one accused anyone of murder, although everyone knew murders had occurred.

  Freedom Park was like how people talk about Occupy Wall Street. Of course, “occupy” means something different in countries that have seen—or admit to having seen—military occupations, so few in Cambodia had heard of the Occupy movement. My experience of Occupy Chicago was abrasive and sexist, but others found their politics there. Everyone was so friendly! We were all in it together! This was Freedom Park for me. Far more important, this was Freedom Park for the thousands of Cambodians who spent time there, most without a history of political engagement to compare the experience to.

  Each time I visited in December 2013 and the first days of January 2014 there were more people in Freedom Park, marchers from rallies and strikes corralled by Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) leaders Sam Rainsy, Kem Sokha, and Mu Sochua. Newcomers came from the provinces, lured by pictures on Facebook, the social networking site of choice in the newly wired culture. People who didn’t know each other made sure others had enough food, re-villaging the urban setting. Freedom Park was a “park” not in the Jens Jensen sense, but in the “momentary respite from the roadway” sense; it was a bricked slab with a few straggly trees here and there, to which occupiers tied tarps to create shade for themselves and whoever wandered by. It seemed in all ways the opposite of the Khmer Rouge days, when city dwellers were forced into the provinces, food was hoarded when available at all, and neighbors couldn’t be trusted not to report you. Freedom Park was beautiful and happy. Whatever may have felt unsettling for a moment dissipated quickly.

  On my third visit, I was befriended by a newly arrived group of garment workers. I had been reporting on the Cambodian apparel industry for five years; garment workers liked me because I openly coveted their fashion sense, and tried to speak Khmer to them and failed. I acted like the girl who can’t ever quite break into the cool group, which is exactly how I felt. A crew of six waved me over and gave me some peanuts; I ate them, although I am allergic.

  I asked how long they’d been there. They told me three hours. I asked how long they would be on strike, and they explained, nearly in unison, “It depends on the GMAC.” The government had announced, just that day, a wage raise to $100 per month. It was a concession to the protests that had greeted the Garment Manufacturing Association of Cambodia’s (GMAC) wage-raise announcement a few days previous, to a mere $95. I asked if they were satisfied with the one hundred dollar figure. They were not.

  “If the government does not give the salary of $160, all the employees want to change the prime minister. They don’t want him to lead again,” one told me in response. Another repeated it, verbatim. It sounded canned. Several days later, after the $160 wage raise no longer seemed achievable, many garment workers would tell me that they didn’t care about the government. They just wanted to be able to afford meat that wasn’t rotten.

  The $160 wage was a figure of some dispute. It’s significantly higher than most living wage estimates in the country, but the CNRP had promised to raise the minimum wage for garment workers to $150 during their campaign. When they lost the election in July 2013, the government was forced to announce a wage-raise inquiry, eventually floating $160 as a goal for 2018. The CNRP and unions began demanding it immediately, and rally participation soared. Sam Rainsy, the bespectacled president of the CNRP, repeatedly told workers to fight for it, whatever the cost. He told them he would support them, and protect them, throughout their struggle. The government had a history of violently cracking down on protestors, shooting demonstrators and striking garment workers with impunity. Kem Sokha, the CNRP’s second in command, announced onstage at Freedom Park one day that the workers were not afraid to die. (This turned out not to be true, but we wouldn’t find that out for a few more days.)

  In a photograph I took on January 1, 2014, the garment workers are flashing me a sign, raising seven fingers in the air. It is a reference to January 7, Victory Over Genocide Day. The scuttlebutt I’d heard had a general strike planned for the sixth, leaving the seventh open to celebrate a day of renewal, the day the prime minister steps down, opening up the way for a true democracy in Cambodia. It’s possible something darker was planned if the strikes didn’t succeed; my Khmer had dwindled in recent years, and even if my tutor had taught me words for destructive activities, I’m certain the giggling garment-working ladies would never have said them to me.

  We’ll call my translator and tuk-tuk driver Nike. It’s a pseudonym I’ve chosen to protect him in case the Cambodian government reads this, but it’s a faithful one: like his real nickname, it was chosen to signal the automatic respect and honor the nation craved, primarily available to the poverty stricken masses by way of the brand names that passed through their hands in the garment factories, quickly and easily.

  Nike was attractive and lean, and raising two kids: a son he was educating and a daughter he’d sent off to live somewhere else; he didn’t tell me where. On a tuk-tuk driver’s salary (about $250 per month a couple of times per year, but $100 per month is more common, with occasional stretches when almost no money comes in at all), Nike could barely afford the bribes necessary to keep his son educated. Although the government is supposed to pay teachers, they often do not. When they do, it’s very low (only $50 to $70 per month for elementary school educators), so teachers request “thank you money” from the kids’ parents so they can eat. Going rates at Nike’s son’s school were only 1,000 Riel per day, or about a quarter in USD, but $7.50 per month was more than Nike could afford. Education is not the only supposedly public service that actually requires substantial personal investment—they all do. It’s what a nation awash in corruption looks like, and no amount of clever sloganeering by NGOs has curbed it. It is just how Cambodia works.

  That’s one of the reasons folks took to the streets at the end of 2013 and early 2014, before the massacre on Veng Sreng Street in Canadia Industrial Park, one of the country’s Special Economic Zones. Corruption has kept steady pace with increasing cash flow into the country, and it’s eating away people’s chances for financial growth, or even stability. Corruption was not, however, the only reason—not, for example, why Nike was keeping a close eye on the protests since they started, nor why every morning began with his query about whether I had seen the latest developments “on Facebook.”

  Corruption hits some harder than others. It’s a particular burden on women trying to survive on garment-industry wages, and most working women in the country are. Besides garment work, there’s not much an uneducated woman can do in a country with entrenched gender roles besides sex work, which (with Khmer customers) pays a little less than teachers’ salaries before the bribes, or food vending, which pays about the same. A job at a grocery store or on the cleaning crew of a university pays about $60 per month. If women can afford higher education, there’s teaching—high school teachers can make twice as much as elementary school teachers—but Nike’s already demonstrated how, with limited funds, educational opportunities for girls often suffer.

  It is still worth noting that, even at $80 per month—the wage in place when the protests started in November—garment workers made more than many in Cambodia. At the $100 wage, they would make more than most. And at $160, they would be among the highest paid laborers in the country, mostly women, and remain one of the only workforces with a legally protected minimum wage. Perhaps most significantly, the wage increase would have been won by a popular uprising against the ruling party—a stunning display of political power.

  That was never a likely scenario. The Khmer Rouge regime remains a recent memory for many, including the prime minister. Hun Sen was only a senior-level cadre in the regime before he worked in the Vietnamese government and then headed up the Cambodian People’s Party (
CPP) to win the first official general election in 1993. He’s stayed in power ever since—partially due to his embrace of garment industry money—so it was difficult to envision an outcome that included his agreement to double the current wage for garment workers.

  Yet the arguments for a wage increase beyond any recent estimates of a living wage were compelling, if largely unvoiced. The population of Cambodia is around fifteen million, and the garment industry labor force around four hundred thousand. As a body, these laborers are surprisingly influential: as the third largest industry in the country, wages from garment work support the nation’s second largest industry, rice farming. If you distill this economic model down to a single countryside family, imagine how it might change mealtime dynamics when the girl no one could afford to educate five years ago becomes the family breadwinner. Her workplace needs grow vital to family sustenance. This effect, multiplied by four hundred thousand, is why garment workers were said to have been the driving force behind the sway toward the CNRP, the opposition party, in the July 2013 election.

  Some suggest that this sway was larger than official election tallies showed: the results of that contest remain under dispute, which is another primary reason folks from all over the country gathered at Freedom Park toward the end of that year. Charges of ballot-fixing and coercion at the polls plagued the CPP’s declaration of victory, as they have plagued Hun Sen since his first election over two decades beforehand. In that time, he’s led the country to the first economic prosperity it’s ever seen. His nickname is “strong man,” and a whole lot of murders, politically motivated and otherwise, can be linked to him. He’s also one of the longest-serving leaders of any nation, a factoid that doesn’t sit comfortably with those familiar with how democracies work. Yet Cambodians feel gratitude for whatever relief from abject poverty his policies have brought, and that is tough to overlook. Still, even official results—offered by the ruling party, natch—show that the CPP lost a record twenty-two parliamentary seats over the summer. The CNRP won twenty-six. The tide was clearly changing.

  Yet the CNRP’s Sam Rainsy is an ambiguous figure, too. While many like him simply because he’s not Hun Sen, he spent years in self-imposed exile in France, unengaged in significant political developments, including the fight for higher wages in the garment industry. He had helped to establish one of the most important apparel worker unions in the country, although his dedication to workers lags in crucial moments. Many workers told me in near whispers that they wanted a change in government leadership, of course, but would be just as uncomfortable with Rainsy as prime minister as they were with Hun Sen.

  The day Varn Pov was arrested, Nike hardened.

  Pov was the leader of IDEA, the Independent Democracy of informal Economy Association, an ad hoc union for informal workers like tuk-tuk drivers, food vendors, and sex workers—someone I had met a few years previous, and respected—and, I discovered, a friend of Nike’s.

  “How you know?” Nike demanded when I informed him of the arrest, his eyes getting big.

  “Twitter,” I told him. He used “Facebook” and “the Internet” interchangeably, but hadn’t yet embraced mobile microblogging. Nike folded his hands and leaned angrily on his tuk-tuk. “He a good man.” He looked at me again and spit out a word in Khmer that I did not understand. Then, uncharacteristically, punched the back of the seat he’d been leaning on a moment before. He paced for a minute, and then said, “OK. Now I take you to Freedom Park.”

  It was not a question posed deferentially, service provider to client—it was a command, a role reversal. I now offered him something more significant than cash for driving me places and translating Khmer: I offered him international eyeballs on what he could sense was about to happen in Cambodia.

  He drove angrily, no longer chatty, for several minutes. Then he whipped out his phone—a dangerous if common distraction while driving a motorcycle, but he had things on his mind. When he got off the phone he shouted back at me, over his shoulder: “Anne. You know, I concerned about the human rights.”

  “You should be,” I agreed.

  The arrest of Pov and nine others on January 2 was the first retaliation the prime minister had taken against demonstrators calling for his resignation in 2014, but this was an old tactic of Hun Sen’s that often preceded violence. In 1991, the CPP had over one hundred opposition party members killed while the UN ruled the country, Human Rights Watch has charged. Six years later, the prime minister’s bodyguards led a grenade attack on a Rainsy-led rally. Sixteen died and over 150 were injured, shortly in advance of the general election. Only months later, in 1998, hundreds of potential political enemies of Hun Sen’s died or disappeared. After the results of that vote were announced, thousands of protestors swarmed the streets of the capital to demand a recount or new elections. Riot cops then cracked down and cleared the protest site.

  When Nike and I arrived at Freedom Park that day, we were greeted with chants of “Hun Sen Must Go,” the rally cry of the moment.

  Who cuts the tree?

  Hun Sen

  Who stayed in the pagoda and ate all the food?

  Hun Sen

  Who hurt the monks?

  Hun Sen

  Who killed the pop star?

  Hun Sen

  No More Corruption / Hun Sen Must Go

  The chant had emerged after a December 10 rally in Siem Reap. The allegations it lists against Hun Sen are so commonly understood as to be undisputed, and indeed, the prime minister himself acknowledged the lot once, laughing off the idea that he would resign over such trivialities. Illegal logging has flourished throughout the country; an activist threatening to expose it was killed by military police. The prime minister studied in the pagoda before ordering the dispersal of monk protests, over both landgrabbing and, more recently, a Buddhist relic rumored to be stolen in revenge for an unpaid government salary. He also had an affair with a pop star who, later, turned up dead.

  In a speech delivered that same day, Rainsy elaborated on the chant’s allegations, with descriptions of how the Vietnamese were stealing jobs from hardworking Cambodians and comparing Hun Sen to a woman for refusing to take responsibility and step down. The xenophobia and misogyny caught him a few rebukes from human rights organizations, and another from within his own ranks, by women’s rights leader (and former parliament member) Mu Sochua. But xenophobia and misogyny can pull in support, too, especially when economic fears run rampant.

  An elderly, toothless farmer in Freedom Park offered an example in conversation with Nike. He was from the Kandal province, southeast of the capital, and had been camping in Freedom Park for three days. “I want to change the government,” he told Nike in Khmer. He wore a white shirt and a krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, tied around his waist in a skirt, a style many city folk have abandoned.

  “The government cut down the trees, stole the land from the people . . . and now they lost their relic of the Buddha,” Nike interpreted for my tape recorder. The farmer could have been anywhere between sixty and eighty, and elaborated at some length on the forced evictions that have often preceded the development of land by CPP party members or their cronies. But what he was really upset about, Nike translated, was that the Vietnamese held the contracts on the logging in the Kampong Speu province and many tourism sites in the country. Which was true.

  To the farmer’s left, a younger but somehow more haggard-looking man broke in to explain something to Nike. He went on for several minutes, uninterrupted, spitting as he spoke. The only words I understood were “Viet” and “Nam,” and when he ran out of vindictives, Nike translated the tirade succinctly: “He does not like Vietnam.”

  As we left the park that day, a song blasted through the area, bouncing off the street’s metal roofs and lone, nearby skyscraper, heralding Sam Rainsy a national hero.

  I’m foreshadowing—I can’t help it. There was a sinister tinge to the air, although I was perfectly capable of overlooking it at the time. The truth is, thousands of happy
young Cambodian women—smiles bigger than entire heads—were swarming the streets and the park, openly waving at me for the camera, chatting, hugging me, cheerfully declaring themselves political actors, agents of social change. During my first trip inside the garment factories in 2010, I had to give a pseudonym to the name of the factory and could take no pictures of the women that agreed to talk to me; still I could only convince every fifth or sixth worker to tell me what she thought about her job. No one told me their name. Tuk-tuk drivers would hush you in those days when you mentioned the prime minister, fearing that the wrong word in response would get them jailed or worse. Even the comparatively comfortable middle class resolutely shook heads, reminding me that change does not come overnight, and that patience would be rewarded, before falling silent. An odd way to respond to the name of the prime minister.