ambodia and Laos were the stepchildren of the Indochina wars, dragged into the all-consuming flame.
Here in the Cambodian capital the schoolhouse called Toul Sleng is kept as a monument of Man's inhumanity to man.
For Tuol Sleng was a Khmer Rouge torture chamber in which thousands were killed by a Communist movement more extreme than any that had gone before. The blood stains on the floors of the interrogation cells have faded now, but the crude instruments of torture are still there, as they were when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979. So are the rows and rows of photographs - blank staring faces of those who know they are about to be executed with expressions of unspeakable sadness.
Twenty-five years ago, on April 17, 1975, the ill-conceived, US-supported Khmer Republic, which had overthrown Prince Norodom Sihanouk's neutral kingdom, collapsed after five years of fighting, and Cambodia descended into a long night of horror.
These once-bustling streets were emptied as the Khmer Rouge - a peasants' revolt led by Marxist school teachers - turned Cambodia into a vast slave labor camp. Normal family life ceased to exist, young children were trained to spy and report on their elders, and even the ability to read and write, if discovered, identified one as a class enemy and was punishable by death. In Cambodia, Asian Communism exceeded Mao Zedong's China in cruelty and national self-destruction.
During those spring days of 25 years ago, Phnom Penh and a few smaller cities were completely surrounded by the armies of the Khmer Rouge. It was a no-quarter war with even cases of cannibalism reported.
The Mekong River, by which little sand-bagged freighters used to make their way up from the South China Sea, was closed to shipping by rocket attacks from both banks. Occasionally the Khmer Rouge would lob rockets into the refugee-swollen city, sometimes hitting a crowded market or, on one memorable occasion, a schoolyard in which, after a moment's silence following the initial blast, the cries of children sounded like screaming birds.
Phnom Penh never imagined what the Khmer Rouge had in store, and there was little of the panic that Saigon experienced that very same month of April in 1975.
By 1979, the Vietnamese, who had grown tired of having their borders attacked by Khmer Rouge, overran the country. But Cambodia was to become Vietnam's Vietnam, and for 10 years the Vietnamese were worn down by a guerrilla war.
As the Vietnamese withdrew, civil war continued between the Vietnamese-installed government of Hun Sen and the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge allied with rightists and monarchist elements supported by the United States.
A peace treaty in Paris in 1991 was supposed to end the conflict in Cambodia, and UN-supervised elections followed in 1993. Sihanouk was restored as king, but the winners and losers who formed a coalition government soon fell out and more fighting ensued. It was not until a second election in 1998 that Cambodia finally settled into a wary peace and began to recover.
The tiny kingdom of Laos, up the Mekong from Cambodia, was also supposed to be neutral. President Eisenhower had warned an incoming John Kennedy that Laos would become a major crisis, but Kennedy agreed to a neutrality that, in the end, nobody respected. The Vietnamese communists needed the Ho Chi Minh trail in eastern Laos for their war in the south, and the Americans responded by having the CIA organize Hmong hill tribesmen to fight them. A twilight war ensued in the mist-covered mountains while American planes based in Thailand dropped thousands of tons of bombs over the trail.
The 1973 peace accords, which were supposed to end the Indochina war, created a coalition with the Laos Communists, but after Saigon fell, Laos was taken over by the Communists without resistance. The monarchy was abolished and those of the bourgeoisie who did not flee to Thailand were sent to reeducation camps where many died of disease and neglect. The king was also taken into custody and never seen again.
Today, Vietnamese political influence vies with Thai commercial interest for dominance in Laos. It seems odd now that Laos would ever have loomed as large as it did on the geopolitical stage. The political rivalries of Laos that should have remained at the comic opera level became infused with the politics of the East-West rivalry.
