DANGEROUS OUT THERE
‘Record Number of Peacekeepers Fail to Stop Wars’. That’s the title of a page 1 article in a recent edition of the Cambodia Daily. The article isn’t quite as nonsensical as it sounds; the gist of it is that, though the UN has deployed a record number of peacekeepers to trouble spots worldwide, a record number of clashes have broken out; from ‘Dirty Little Wars’ to conflicts tottering on something quite a bit more fearifying.
Cambodia’s leader, Hun Sen, has got a powder keg in his dirty grabby little girly hands too. No ‘Blue Helmets’ have yet been dispatched but Hun Sen has certainly dispatched a handful of civilians. Aside from general dissatisfaction and unrest and the bald-faced certainty of ballot-box stuffing, he has other specific mosquitos whining in his ear. The garment workers are up in stones: they are striking, off and on, over their pitiful salaries. They managed to force the unions (many of whom are aligned with Hun Sen’s CPP) up from 71 to 80 to 95 and finally to 100 dollars per month. The last 5 bucks cost 5 lives. They’ve promised $160 (les promesse du putain!) by 2018, but 4 years more of living, traveling to and fro, and working stacked like cordwood in un-ventilated sweat bunkers with a growling tummy somehow seems unsavory to them. So they are protesting and they are getting shot. It bears mentioning that these threatening protesters are almost all women, poor, and 85 pounds wet. They also crank out a lot of clothing. This is, for example, one of the world’s chief dispersal centers for yoga pants. People like Vancouver’s own ‘Chip’, the CEO and founder of LULULEMON, the one who built a 37 million dollar palace along the most expensive strip of real estate in Canada, would have us believe that he’s a gift to the Cambodian economy, as he employs so many people…
Hun’s heavies, for their part, can’t figure out who killed the workers – it wasn’t them. ‘We never shoot at a target to take a life… so we don’t know who killed them.’ All the garment workers were shot in the head or chest, so the Military Police, The Army and The Hired Goons are off the hook. Hun’s elite thugs are heavy indeed; they are tricked-out with the finest and most expensive gear and present a very daunting spectacle (think Robocop). Even their shields are joltingly electrified. In a way though, the fancypants killers are not the most threatening. Like all paranoid despots, Hun has a floating army of civilian-clothed hirelings who joyfully inflict a world of damage. They tend to use home-made staves and even slingshots and are readily identifiable by their uniform attempts to be anonymous. They all wear full-coverage motorcycle helmets and are not afraid of bundling the more active activists into minivans – possibly forever. So the smart peeps know that the real heat often comes in flip-flops and a 20 dollar moto helmet. For every 5 dead there are 20 or 30 injured; that’ll be the helmet guys, and how do you start pricing degrees of injury? Not in dollars or sense.
Hun’s got another little pest on his hands and that’s the multitude of people that have been rendered homeless by his cold-blooded landgrabs. The evictees are rising up too and they are pissed off. The goons come in handy for this as well. Almost surprisingly, they can multi-task. One family at Boeng Kak (a reclaimed lake bottom right in the middle of Phnom Penh) who were resistant to relocating had an open mouthed sack filled with 3 very alive cobras thrown into their hut in the middle of the night. It goes on, and this brings me to the more domestic side of danger.
Cambodians have a special flair for violence. They are also some of the most warm-hearted, smiling, congenial, familial and hospitable people I’ve ever encountered, along with, say, Kenyans and Filipinos, and they too are prone to spasms of lurid violence. There must be a term for this.
‘Man Killed Over Stolen Duck’, in this case 9 drunks were tooling by on, probably, 2 scooters, and they raucously invaded the yard of a humble villager and grabbed his lone duck by the neck and scissored back over the bamboo in order to get to a live fire and cook up a late-nite snack. The two guys inside the hut heard the not-so-stealthy home-invasion and ran out, jumped on their moto and gave chase. Once they caught up, guy 1 was decapitated by and guy 2 is in desperate condition with his head stove in by the same axe that the drunks just happened to be packing. No arrests have been made, and it’s not known whether the duck is dead or not.
‘Man Murders Wife With Ax, Commits Suicide’. His and hers quarrel. Booze-fueled. He hit her til she was mostly dead, then set her alight, then used the ax(e) to cut his own neck terminally after lighting the house on fire. The 5 kids are OK, they had beat it once the arguing started. The axe seems to be the weapon of choice, which surprises me. It could be regional. Up in the North, where cassava is the chief crop, I’m sure the machete comes into play. For crimes of passion they often resort to acid.
Down in Sihanoukville, in a bar, a difference of opinion erupted between a small gaggle of drunken cops. The cops had different stripes (there are 20 different cops and security types here, all packing. One group had obviously watched more action films as they were able to divest the other side of both pistols and shoot the unfortunates ‘through the roof of the mouth’. In the bar.
This is certainly not a diatribe against violence in the region. It’s fair to say that life is getting cheaper everywhere: ‘Asphyxiation By Underwear’, ‘A 33 year-old Oklahoma man has been charged with killing his stepfather by giving him an “Atomic Wedgie”, that caused the victim to suffocate in his own underwear.’ There was alcohol and, well, Oklahoma involved. Death by bacon strips.
