Letter from Thailand

Here's an article I got into the Sunday Tribune recently (it's a major Irish national weekly for those not of God's Green Kingdom). But yeah, I'm being all socialistic and standing up for the little guy in this one :)

Cleaners at Dublin EU charity 'sacked and replaced'

After the trauma of spending days researching an article about the weapons sprinkled liberally all over Cambodian society, which had itself come hot on the tails of a terrifying fight against a pro Muay Thai fighter in Bangkok and a distressing trip to Burma that ended with me being ran out of the country by soldiers of the military junta, I was pretty much knackered and needed a holiday.

Cambodia’s colonial era coastline was awash with lavish European-style resorts, although they were all pretty much levelled by the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Over the past decade however, visitor numbers have being climbing rapidly. The Cambodian people have very much embraced tourism and employ all sorts of ingenious methods of taking their share of the revenue. Tourist resorts are beginning to recover although are now very much pitched towards the budget traveller. Among them is the difficult to pronounce Sihanoukville; a laid back bamboo-and-thatch job said to be similar to Thailand’s south island resorts 30 years ago.

There were a couple of other options that appealed but Sihanoukville had one key advantage – it’s home to Cambodia’s national brewery and a beer can be had for the princely sum of $0.75. The beachside bars also sell $2.50 buckets – the ones kids use to make sand castles – into which a bottle of Mekong Whiskey, a litre of cola and two cans of red bull are emptied. There are few people alive who could walk after consuming $10 worth of alcohol in Sihanoukville although many brave young men and women go down trying each evening. Cambodia, I was becoming aware, is probably one of the cheapest non-war torn or blight-ridden countries in the world.

I bade goodbye to my guide and translator Thida, who seemed surprised that I had survived my meeting with the grubby Cambodian arms dealers, before calling driver Sonny to ask that he take me to the bus station. I waved away his ludicrous suggestion that we drive the 100 or so kilometres from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville in his three-wheel tuk tuk, paid $10 for my coach ticket and was soon whizzing down a lumpy, dirt track road banked on either side by glistening rice fields dotted with bent figures wearing conical straw hats.

Our bus was met at the station in Sihanoukville by the customary mob of touts, one of which whisked me south to a strip of seaside bungalow outfits that have set up shop along the impossible to pronounce Ocheatueal beach. The pricing, by European or even Asian standards, was astonishing. I booked into a large two-bed en suite beachside bungalow with air con, fridge and satellite TV for $10 per night. After dumping my stuff and taking a shower I went looking for somewhere to eat along the beach. The price of a western meal in practically every establishment comes in at under $4 with most in-and-around half that. Cambodian dishes like fried noodles with chicken or Samlor Machu Trey (a kind of spicy seafood soup) cost around $1.50.

Most businesses along the beach consist of a beachside bar/restaurant with a few bungalows out back and they supplement their income by operating tours and activities for tourists. Still, customers can be relatively sparse and with prices so low I was amazed they could stay afloat.

Even more precariously balanced on the edge of ruin are the hawkers who trudge up and down on the blistering sand attempting to sell their wares to the-oiled-up-and-uninterested western and Asian travellers who sweat under parasols. Some offer one-hour beach-side massages for $3 while others give on-site manicures and pedicures. Children lug coolers full of fruit or ice cream from one end of the beach to the other and in a simply phenomenal demonstration of endurance given the 30-plus degree temperatures, dozens of women make their living by carting a fully lit clay pot barbeque and a massive box of live lobsters on either end of a wooden pole slung across their shoulders. $3 dollars to eat your way through a kilo of freshly barbequed lobster yards from the sea they were plucked from a few hours beforehand. You’d barely get a batter burger out of a Dublin chipper for that price.

At the bottom of the pile though, are the horrifically maimed beggars who in the absence of anything even resembling a welfare system are forced to drag themselves around asking for change. Landmine and combat victims from the civil war years, most are missing one or both legs or are burned from head to toe. Owning a set of crutches is a pipe dream for most, never mind a wheelchair. The rock-bottom price of everything in Cambodia means living like a king is easy. The crippling poverty that abounds here however, means that doing so without feeling guilty is slightly more difficult.

It was another one of those moments when you stop, exhale deeply and wonder how in the name of sweet suffering Jaysus you manage to land yourself into such ludicrous predicaments. It was night time on the lawless outskirts of Phnom Penh and myself and my Cambodian driver Sonny had just pulled up outside a small timber shack in a corner of a fenced, derelict allotment. It looked like it had began life as an outhouse in Angela's Ashes but given the lack of any other type of building, be they Victorian Limerick slum tenements or otherwise, I concluded that it was probably a security guard shelter.

Phnom Penh is currently in the darkest depths of a property boom and overseas investors have been buying tracts of land, expelling residents, fencing off their plot and waiting for land prices to increase before selling on. The patch of scrub land I was standing on looked to be one such project and at least one of the two guys who shuffled from of the shack at the sound of our tuk tuk I guessed, was probably tasked with keeping expelled former residents from returning. Of course he would have a gun.

We disembarked as the men flip-flopped across the gravel towards us. They were both shabbily dressed in oversized t-shirts and grubby trousers and the bang of drink off them led me to conclude that Mekong Whiskey was the preferred method of making shifts in the shack pass at speed. Slick, be-suited, beamer-driving arms traders they weren’t. Sonny greeted the elder of the pair warmly, and he responded with a sporadically toothed grin. He then stood with his hands on his boney hips staring at me for a moment before proffering a grubby hand for me to shake. I of course was all smiles as I greeted the two men, hoping meanwhile that niceties would be kept to a minimum so I could get out of there as soon as.

The three Khmers chattered quietly as they shuffled towards the shack and I followed along, thumbing the $30 I’d brought with me to pay for the gun. It was all I had with me as I’d opted to leave literally everything else back at my hotel. Just as I got to the shack door the younger of the pair hopped inside and killed the light before returning with a gun in his hand. I had visions of him handing me a shooter in a grubby white rag as is common practice in movies. He, my Hollywood conditioning assured me, was holding the thing like he was going to use it. My heart slammed around in my chest for a couple of seconds before he tried furtively to pass it to Sonny. Sonny however took a step back and nodded towards me. And just like that, there it was – I’d got my hands on an illegal firearm. I’m no expert thank God, but it was some sort of automatic handgun, probably a Browning 9mm or even a Chinese copy.

I asked Sonny by way of mime whether it was loaded, which prompted the elder of the pair of gunslingers to produce a handful bullets from his pocket. I smiled and waved them away, happy that I wouldn’t be cutting across Phnom Penh’s rutted roads in a suspension-free tuk tuk with a loaded firearm jammed into my waistband.

A sneaky one in the chamber was still a possibility so I carried out a risk assessment before deciding where to conceal the thing – the consequences of the gun going off when lodged in my belt at the front didn’t bear thinking about. Getting an arse cheek blown off seemed a delightful prospect by comparison, so I stuffed it under my belt at the back.

With that, I used my one and only Khmer phrase ('Awkun' means thanks) handed over the cash and motioned towards the tuk tuk. Sadly, it was then that we hit a bump. The two boys looked unhappy and Sonny looked confused. After much to-ing and fro-ing it became apparent that there was a mix up somewhere along the line with regard to what exactly I was paying for. The boys and Sonny thought I was going to take photos there and then before handing the gun back. It actually seemed a better idea than bringing the thing back to the hotel but it wasn’t what I’d planned for and fear of being robbed meant I’d left my camera in my room safe.

I tried to point out that I had to get a photo of the gun and simply needed to take it with me. For their part, the boys couldn’t understand why I hadn’t brought my camera and my excuse of ‘in case you blew my head off and took it from me’ didn’t seem the right thing to say. I suggested we go back for the camera but it seemed by then that a return visit wasn’t an option – curtains might twitch at any further comings or goings.

I eventually admitted defeat and handed the gun back. I felt like I probably should wipe my prints off it or something, but thought I might look like a bit of an arsehole so I just passed it over. I felt gutted as we trundled hotel-ward, not to mention somewhat annoyed at Sonny for messing up the arrangements. I decided to consoled myself with the pluses of the endeavour. The fact that I wasn't lying in a ditch with part of my head blown off was probably chief among them.

Research for the article I wanted to right about the proliferation of arms in Cambodia was going well. Weapons, it appeared, were everywhere. Signs on hotel doors requested that guns and explosives be checked at reception, army-run shooting ranges were among the country’s top tourist attractions and people who had been on the scary end of a gun crime were thick on the ground. But although everything suggested that guns were concealed in every other pocket and under every second bed I had yet to see an illegally held firearm for myself. I decided that the only real way of finding out just how abundant such weapons were was to attempt to buy one.

The best place to start I decided, was with Thida – my ever-cheerful guide and translator. Sadly, when I asked if she knew anyone who might sell me a handgun she gave me a look which told me she most certainly wasn’t the type to be knocking around with arms dealers and gunslingers.

We decided to pull Sonny, my self-appointed tuk tuk driver, off the subs bench to see if he could make the difference. So, the three of us headed out to a small Cambodian roadside eatery, ordered a ludicrous amount of food and began filling him in on what we were looking for. Thida chattered away at reduced volume while Sonny listened intently, throwing the odd alarmed glance at the foreigner looking to get tooled up.

Thida was explaining that I was a journalist unlikely to be planning a shooting spree when Sonny raised a question. “You can give back, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I only need it for a few minutes.”

“$30 I can get!” he replied after a pause, clearly still convinced I was some sort of nut job.

So, we made an attempt at finishing the food we’d ordered before Sonny headed off, promising to drop me a line when he got sorted. Thida, who was a college educated girl from a comparatively well-to-do family, began to look a bit perturbed as we chatted about what would happen next. She was clearly worried about the prospect of heading off down some alley way for a rendezvous with a bloke we didn’t know in the hope that he’d sell us a gun. The endeavour went above and beyond what I could expect a translator to assist me with so I decided to head off with Sonny on my own when the arrangements were made.

Sonny phoned me the following day to tell me he would collect me that evening at seven bells, upon which time we would go to meet his friend. Apparently, a friend of this friend was willing to temporarily part company with a shooter for the paltry sum of $30. The plan was that we would head back to my hotel where I would take a few photos of the gun before handing it back to Sonny. He would return the shooter to the loving arms of its rightful owner and it would go back to being put to whatever use it had been put to before I came along.

Sonny didn’t seem all that nervous as we rattled around the semi-familiar streets of Phnom Penh in the direction of wherever it was we were heading, but the seriousness of the whole thing was starting to set me on edge. For some reason, as we bounced through crater-like potholes in dirt-paved, darkened side-streets in a part of the city I had never been to, I recalled a conversation I’d had with a 40-something English guy called Ben who I became quite pally with while living in Bangkok. It was shortly after I’d fought a Muay Thai match against a professional Thai fighter and I’d just filled him in on my plans for the following fortnight. He was alarmed by the fact that they consisted of sneaking into Myanmar to report on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis before heading to Cambodia to see if I could buy a gun on the black market.

“Robbie, why do you do these things?” he asked, with arms outstretched and a shake of the head. I had coughed out some rubbish about not liking boredom but until then had never really paused to think about any reasons I might have. I never liked the idea of journalist as spectator – someone who sits in an office poking holes in the things other people do while never attempting to gain any experience or real understanding of what they write about. I always felt there was more honesty in participatory journalism and on-site media reportage.

If I heard something that shocked me then I knew it would make interesting reading for others, so, all I had to was gain a level of credibility on the subject by somehow involving myself in it. It wasn’t that I headed for things I thought would be hazardous, which I think Ben feared was the case, I just went towards stories which I thought would be striking and enjoyable for readers and set the safety issues aside. But as I came to a stop outside a shack at the end of a dirt track on the outskirts of Phnom Penh with cash in my pocket to buy a gun, the idea of few years pontificating from the safety of a swivel chair seemed a really, really good idea.

After a tough morning blasting away with an AK47 in a shooting range operated by the Cambodian Special Forces all in the name of journalistic research, I decided I’d earned a few beers. So after having dinner on my tod in a café on Sisowath Quay; the tourist-heavy heart of Phnom Penh’s social scene, I opted to head off to find an establishment which featured that great icebreaker so beloved by lone male travellers the world over – a pool table. I wandered into a bar, chalked up my name and low behold, quickly found myself in conversation with the boozer’s 50-something-and-hammered-drunk Scottish owner.

Chats with drunken strangers can often be enlightening affairs, and Larry didn’t disappoint. In the nicest possible sense, he was fascinating by virtue of his simplicity. You could fit the guy’s life story on one side of a stamp and his daily routine on the other. He’d left Glasgow in his teens and headed in the direction of Australia where he worked the mines for 30-odd years. He hadn’t been home yet when I spoke to him, but two years previously he had went on holiday to Thailand were he met, fell in love with and then married literally the first Thai woman he spoke to. With her encouragement, he effectively retired by investing in his Cambodian bar.

Larry got up every morning, ordered the same fry in the same café across the road and then returned to began his day’s drinking. He had his favourite seat close to the door and there he remained, smoking one cigarette per bottle of Heineken until the last customer left. He and his wife lived in an apartment directly above the bar so although he was rarely in a position to walk to bed, at least she didn’t have to carry him too far. His lifestyle wouldn’t be for everyone, but after his years split between the tenements of Glasgow and the mine shafts of the Australian Outback he was patently delighted with his lot.

Larry mentioned that there were quite a few Irish expats who had selected his bar as their watering hole of choice and it wasn’t long before one arrived. Paul, who had been working in Cambodia for just under a year as a computer networker for a multinational, was a cheerful late twenties traveller clearly enamoured with the country he how called home. It turned out that he and I both went to UCD at the same time and he grew up about 15 minutes walk from my own family home. I’m not sure exactly how incredible it was that we were meeting for the first time on the other side of the planet despite spending most of our lives on each other’s doorsteps, but we were locked by the time we discovered this anomaly so it certainly seemed quite the oddity through the beery haze.

As I filled Paul in on the reason behind my holiday/research mission in Cambodia ending with my trip to the firing range earlier that day, he was shuffling from one foot to the other in anticipation of his chance to tell a story. Apparently he had twice visited the Thunder Ranch, but only once got to shoot. The first time he pulled up at the shack of a building it was cordoned off and surrounded by jittery Cambodian cops and sobbing tourists. An American expat had rented a browning automatic with 20 rounds. He fired the first 19 at the target before putting number 20 into his head.

But Paul had got closer still to disaster as a result of the proliferation of arms in Cambodia. A couple of months previously he had taken the none too clever decision to walk home to his apartment after a night on the tiles. He made it as far as his own street when a moped with two Khmer teenagers whisked past him before stopping up ahead. He new he was in trouble when they spun and came back in his direction. Paul shoved his hands skyward and clamped his eyes shut when the driver produced a rifle and cocked it against the side of his head. The moped passenger jumped off and after a quick frisk relieved Paul of his wallet and phone before the pair sped away.

“If you argue they’ll just shoot you!” he exclaimed with eyes bulging at the horror of his memory. “They would aye!” Larry roared in agreement from his favourite seat. I got the feeling that Paul’s story had echoed around the pool table more than once – but I could hardly hold it against him - it was a fucking good one.

I originally decided to leave Thailand for Cambodia in the hunt for a story when a fellow Irish expat casually mentioned that the country was so awash with heavy weapons that tourists could pop along to a firing range and have a crack at detonating hand grenades and firing rocket launchers. So, on my second morning in Phnom Penh I got up with the birds, met up with my mini entourage and headed off towards the extravagantly named Thunder Ranch Shooting Range on the outskirts of the capital.

A few years ago foreigners couldn’t walk ten paces anywhere in Phnom Penh without being approached by a tout attempting to steer them into one of dozens of such establishments then dotted around the city. During the 1990s a trip to a Cambodian style range was a tad more adventurous than the average clay pigeon shoot. Legend has it that many a visitor was offered a live animal for target practice. Water buffalo were nervous – there was the ever-present danger that they could be innocently minding their own business, eating grass in a patty field or what have you, only to have some lunatic tourist creep up and blast them to pieces with an RPG.

Remnants of the Khmer Rouge were still launching raids from the hills around Siem Reap at the time and tourists arriving in town on a Rambo buzz after watching The Killing Fields could buy a rocket or mortar piece and fire it in the direction of hated communists. Unfortunately, for the sickos of the world anyway, the authorities soon tired of the chicanery and moved in to clean up/corner the market. Ranges were shut down and replaced with government controlled versions such as the Thunder Ranch, which is run by the Cambodian Army’s Special Forces. My guide and translator Thida however, was adamant that for the right price those of such tastes can still buy an animal and shoot it for the entertainment value.

After a 40-minute drive through the city’s manic traffic we pulled onto a dirt track that cut across a couple of kilometres of waste land. The shattering rattle of an AK47 in full flight soon became audible over the noise of the tuk tuk engine, and was close to deafening by the time we pulled up at the wooden post and corrugated iron shack known as the Thunder Ranch.

A Khmer soldier strolled up to our tuk tuk and gestured for us to take a seat inside. We did so, and were handed a laminated menu that started with a Sprite and ended with a hand grenade. The idea of gunning down livestock was pretty repugnant but I have to admit, I’ve always wanted to shoot a gun and couldn’t take my eyes of the array of weapons displayed on one wall of the hut. I pondered over the weapons on offer – Bonny and Clyde-style Tommy guns, GP machine guns identical to Rambo’s and a rocket launcher just like the one the Real IRA shot into the front of the MI6 building a few years back.

As I sat there wondering what to go for, mostly 20-something tourists were gleefully blasting away at targets from firing positions just in front of me while more still arrived to do the same.

The prices were astronomical by Cambodian standards but reasonable beyond that. I eventually decided to have a go at a Spaz military shotgun and that Irish favourite the AK47; and the price came in at $70. When our soldier was escorting me towards the firing position I forced myself to ask about whether it was true that people shot animals here. He squinted at me for a moment while slowly scratching his stubbly chin. “You want to shoot some animal?” he asked with a suggestively raised eyebrow. “Not today,” I said, knowing the answer that was coming. “I was just wondering if you could still do that here.” “Oh no,” he replied with a shake of the head. “This stop long time ago!”

Thida began chatting away in Khmer to the guy and she later told me that he assured her that if I wanted to give it a try some other time I could secure the services of a chicken for $20 or a water buffalo for $100.

After some cursory instructions on how to load the shotgun a paper target was pinned up, I was handed some ear protection and it was time to act like a big kid. The gun, although heavy was a lighter than I expected it to be. The first shot obliterated the target and although the recoil, the smoke and the noise were slightly disorientating, it was enjoyable. I moved onto the Chinese-made AK47 and started blasting away but while the novelty value was sort of cool, I was bored before I got to the end of the clip. I did however, discover that AKs are not designed for left-handers. My weapons tutor leaned over to cock the gun when it jammed, but because my left hand was on the trigger my head was to the right of the barrel – so the empty bullet shell that popped out when he pulled back the hammer (which was red fucking hot) pinged me square in the eye.

I wrung some information about how long the range had been up-and-running, the number of visitors it gets and the amount of ammunition it goes through from our helpful Cambodian Commando before taking a few photos and heading back to the tuk tuk. I could certainly see what the attraction was but felt there was something distasteful about playing around with guns in a country that suffered so badly from their misuse. The tourists were still rattling away as we sped back down the dirt track to the main road, much as they would every other day. At least I reasoned, it would eat heavily into the country’s massive weapons stockpile.

I was less than 24-hours into my stay in Phnom Penh and reasonably happy with my progress on the guns-in-Cambodia article I was working on. I’d put the issue of waking to a city half under water behind me and was cutting across the dilapidated suburbs in the back of a screeching tuk tuk in the direction of S-21; a school-turned-Khmer Rouge detention centre. I was somewhat alarmed however, by the fact that I now had a driver called Sonny and an interpreter/guide called Thida in tow. If I continued to make friends at such a rate I’d have an entourage that would put 50 Cent to shame by the end of my stay.

After the perilous three-wheel journey across Phnom Penh’s battered roads we pulled down a side alley and up to a totally innocuous, if somewhat worn, three-storey building. S-21 however, which now serves as a Cambodian genocide museum, was anything but.

When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975 the school was converted into a prison for people considered politically suspect. Initially, members of the US-backed Lon Nol regime which the Khmer Rouge had defeated were the main targets for detention, but as the years past and the Maoists bedded in, men, women and children seen as being in anyway unorthodox or counter-revolutionary were herded into S-21. Those arrested were tortured into naming their co-conspirators when generally, no conspiracy existed. Desperate for an end to their torment they named anyone and everyone who came to mind, giving the cadres a new batch to round up. The systematic and studiously recorded torture of the inmates in S-21, also known as Tuol Sleng, was too much for practically everyone taken in and most didn’t survive more than a few months. Out of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned only twelve are known to have survived.

Myself and Thida left a sheepish Sonny waiting outside and started our tour. Many of the former classrooms in the building featured a photograph of what was found in that particular room when the Vietnamese Army finally drove the Khmer Rouge out of the city and S-21 in 1979. In many cases, you would walk into a room that had a metal bed in it. On the wall, there would be a photo of that same bed only with a partially decomposed individual strapped to it.

Other rooms featured crude brick partitions that divided them into tiny cells were prisoners were kept chained to the floor. Thida did her best to explain what was around me but when we went into a long hallway which featured photographs of thousands of terrified and ultimately doomed prisoners, some little more than babies, she just lost it and started crying her eyes out.

The sun was beating down and birds were chirping away in the shrubs and bushes in the building’s courtyard, but there was a chilling, claustrophobic feel to the rooms we walked through. I’d seen more than enough and to Thida’s obvious relief, we headed back to Sonny’s tuk tuk. The two Khmers couldn’t get away from the place fast enough and it was clear that the events of the Khmer Rouge days still cast a long shadow over Cambodia’s people.

It seems incredible then that even today, former Khmer Rouge leaders are in positions of power right across the country. The current Prime Minister Hun Sen is a former KR strongman and has held power for much of the last 30 years. He even managed to secure a healthy majority in an election held just last month.

Happily, international pressure has led to at least some leading figures being brought to book for the things they did during their time in control of the stricken country. Among those taken into custody and awaiting trial under the country’s Genocide Tribunal is Kaing Guek Eav or Duch; S-21’s prison director. Today, Cambodian prisons are notoriously harsh and the conditions prisoners suffer are extreme. I’m not sure what sort of handling Duch is at the mercy of right now but after seeing what he and his cadres dished out to thousands in S-21 in the 1970s, it’s unlikely it could possibly be as bad as it should be.