The unspectacular job of rebuilding a society should Concern everyone

THE sun is so hot, the bus-loads of Japanese tourists put away their cameras and deploy fans instead.

The restaurants offer cheap, beautifully-presented local, French and American cuisine. The hotel information sheet lists room service, internet and laundry at discount prices, then adds: “Thank you for your valuable reading time taken.”

At night, visitors heading to dinner in open carriages pulled by mopeds pause at a stall selling souvenirs. The man who owns it has no legs. He sits among his goods and bunts himself around on his hands.

The day they arrived, the European visitors would have been stilled by the sight of him. Now, they’re accustomed to people rushing about on one leg or seated in carts because they have none.

“Landmines,” the souvenir-seller will explain, smiling. Just as the tour guide escorting them around a local temple that dwarfs Versailles smiled, when he told them that, for several years, he and his family lived in a hole in the ground to survive the genocide. Two million people were murdered, out of a population of less than 10 million.

Today, one concentration camp where thousands were starved, beaten, tortured and shot to death is a tourist attraction, and the skull-and-crossbones sign warning against landmines is a favourite design on t-shirts.

Welcome to Cambodia, emerging tourist destination.

For many Westerners, Cambodia evokes the name Pol Pot, the communist dictator whose four-year reign of terror generated mountains of bleached skulls. He moved into the big cities, like Phnom Penh, removing their population more effectively than an anti-personnel bomb.

The French-speaking educated elite got into their cars, clutching what belongings they could grab, especially the women’s jewellery (the traditional method of family savings) and joined the procession of the non-elite, the latter on bicycles and on foot. Going they knew not where.

After hundreds of miles, the cars ran out of fuel. Thereafter, elite and peasant trekked side-by-side, victims of a class warfare unequalled in its indiscriminate, unstrategic venom. The Khmers Rouges, the communist army, black-clad and grim-faced, believed anyone who had lived in the big cities was polluted by bourgeois thinking and must be brainwashed into acceptability — or massacred as a frightening example.

Former surgeons gathered cow-dung for fuel. Former slum-dwellers were in the fields at dawn, digging irrigation drains. If the drains didn’t join up or follow any pattern that made sense, they matched the rest of what was going on.

It was time-warp stuff. Ray Bradbury, only non-fiction. Books, sheets of music, cassettes and films were burned. The bulk of the Cambodia populace had never had much education. Now they had none.

Reading, writing and doing sums were dangerous skills that could buy their owner a ticket to extinction. Modern medicine was evil, too. In future, ailments would be cured by traditional herbal potions.

Your grandfather’s prostate cancer got worse, not better, when “supported” by such therapies? You had to hope he was disciplined enough not to cry out in pain, because if anything provoked the guards, they’d react by herding the whole family together, bayoneting and beating them to death. They got so used to doing it, they would say among themselves that killing the smaller children was the easy bit: “We only have to tear them apart.”

Huge numbers of people living in open fields in the middle of the monsoon tried to work harder, be more compliant, keep smiling, to stave off the boundless rage of their captors. They didn’t get together and fight back.

WESTERNERS hate that. How could they not fight back, they ask. How could the Cambodian people be so passive? Westerners don’t add up hundreds of years of varying foreign occupation matched by local corruption and capped by Prince Sihanouk, a man too clever for his own good, never mind the good of the Cambodians.

Nor do Westerners comprehend a simple reality: the dispossessed in rural Cambodia didn’t know who to fight, even if they’d had the means. For several years, in isolated camps, they had no idea who their black -garbed, heavily armed torturers were or how connected they were with other groups of the same army.

If they could not fight the Khmers Rouges, they could at least try to escape across the border into Thailand under cover of darkness, and many of them did.

They would start out as a family, but rarely completed the journey as a family. When the older ones wearied and fell, they instructed the younger ones to keep going, and, because obedience is part of their culture, the eight-year-olds and 12-year-olds did as they were told.

Their parents and grandparents were captured and killed, while the youngsters became orphans long before they could understand the word. Orphans in a foreign land, dreaming of return, hoping vainly to see family members again.

The number of orphans inside Cambodia grew, too, as their parents died in the concentration camps.

The older orphans were turned into child soldiers, the younger into toddler informers, pleasing their teenage guards by telling on individuals who pocketed an insect for later eating or rested for a moment — concealed from adult observation — in the shadow of another worker.

In a sense, the informer-toddlers personify the unconscionably persistent damage done by the Pol Pot regime to the population of Cambodia: it robbed them of skills, whether of horticulture or herding. It destroyed the social fabric; the habits of easy sharing and mutual support. It disincentivised basic hygiene: there’s not much point in spending hours washing clothes if the only place to hang a clothesline is beside an unpaved trail where each vehicle is a beeping rumour inside a red dust cloud.

It demolished entrepreneurship, individual or collective. It created a learned helplessness, a deep-rooted conviction that power and influence resided somewhere else, somewhere distant, unattainable.

Into this desert has gone Concern, perhaps best-known for its man-the-barricades work in the wake of disasters and famine.

They fund a partner bank to provide tiny loans to start minuscule (and frequently female) enterprises: a motor-scooter allowing a woman to bring fruit to a market, for instance. But of arguably more importance is something they call “capacity-building:” working with local government to re-create structures, systems and trust to support individual entrepreneurs and educate their children.

Listening, last week, to Concern people on the ground in Cambodia explaining civic capacity-building, I was struck by their frustration-in-advance: they don’t expect the listener to find it interesting.

It doesn’t fit in the steam of human-interest stories of lives instantly transformed by generous overseas gifts. It doesn’t deliver photo-opportunities, like feeding the starving does. It doesn’t make donors feel like Bill Gates. It ain’t rocket science.

It’s just an unspectacular local way to help people move a notch up from abject poverty. To weave the first threads of societal repair after a holocaust.

Which, when it comes down to it, is immeasurably more productive than rocket science.