Sakun's Kampot: A modern history of the Cambodian province of Kampot

By Jim Pollock and Sakun Po

A modern history of the Cambodian province of Kampot, told through the lives of the salt fields people of Chum Kriel.

Just outside of Kampot town is the district of Chum Kriel, which contains hundreds of salt fields, fringed with small, basic houses and rice paddies. This book tells the stories of some of the resilient, resourceful and courageous people who have made their lives there.

Based an both documentary research and individual interviews, Sakun's Kampot provides some answers to those who are curious about what the southernmost edge of Cambodia has been through during the last 200 years. Kampot province has been a land of bandits and pirates, insurrection and terrible brutality, pioneering agriculture and tribal enclaves, and colonialist endeavours and heroic resistance.

In particular, the book follows the extended family of Sakun Po through the twentieth century to the present, including the catastrophic 1970s, when civil war and the Khmer Rouge dominated the province.

Kampot is being drawn rapidly into the technological new millennium and this book seeks to ensure its rich past is not forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925952643

Book preview

2019

PREFACE

This book is first and foremost an attempt to knit together a history of Kampot, the southwest Cambodian border town and province, which has always played a central role in the life of this unique southeast Asian nation, and had become a unique place for me as a lifelong student of history. Lying close to the border with Vietnam, Kampot is a place of many histories which support the notion that life is always more interesting on the peripheries of countries, where ideas spread and morph, and cultures collide, often with violent and unpredictable results.

The stories in this book unfold a world away from the capital of Phnom Penh with its claustrophobic royal and colonial political intrigues. This is essentially a provincial narrative about the remarkable lives that ordinary Khmer people led in the villages of Kampot Province - in the rice fields, pepper farms, salt fields and around the ubiquitous phnoms (mountains). The jungle-clad slopes of these phnoms have allowed fugitives, outcasts and rebels - including the murderous Khmer Rouge - to hide away and bide their time before assaulting their peaceful neighbours.

This book is secondly a story of the living family and ancestors of one of the contributors to this book – Sakun Po. Sakun speaks fluent English, has been in a wheelchair for most of his life and is a true child of Kampot.

I feel that Sakun’s family can rightly be seen as part of a ‘tribe’ in the sense of the meaning given to it by Sebastian Junger in his wonderful, short treatise of that name. When a group of people have reason to look out for one another – and then subsequently survive because of it – they feel a strong connection to each other and the place that they share, which brings far greater meaning to their lives than if they had struggled on alone.

Sakun’s tribe is the people of the salt fields of Chum Kriel, a windswept, patchwork plain of paddies, palm and fruit trees on the outskirts of Kampot town. We will follow his family’s story from the early twentieth century, through the cataclysmic events of the 1970s and their harsh aftermath, up until today.

Memories of these times are still very much alive in the generation of the extended Po family which survived through this period. The stories in this book, obtained through dozens of separate interviews, are original stories, which we hope will add to a more complete historical narrative of the times.

Essentially all the interviews which form the bedrock of this book were conducted either by Sakun or myself, some in person and some through Facebook Messenger. In addition to his interviewing role, Sakun was crucial in finding interviewees, generating questions, translating into Khmer, prompting, cajoling, reframing, encouraging, empathizing and finally translating back to English for me to record and later transcribe into this book.

Most of this work was done in the shade of Sakun’s house and backyard trees, from his wheelchair using just his mobile phone, often while looking after his three-year old niece, after a long and exhausting week’s work at Epic Arts in Kampot town.

In order to link Sakun’s family to the events of nineteenth century Cambodia, we will seek to imaginatively recreate the lives of the generations of the Po family before his grandparents, using historical descriptions of the lives of others from that period. Sakun’s maternal grandmother was born in the 1910s and died in the early 1990s so he knew her. However, he and his family do not remember anything that the grandparent’s generation may have told them about their parents.

Given the ‘true Khmer’ ancestry of the Chum Kriel salt fields people, it makes the Po family story likely to be continuously linked to what most Khmer people in the province did – farm rice in the wet season and look for alternative income in the dry season (which salt harvesting latterly provided).

Sakun’s grandmother’s parents were born around the 1880s and lived through a violent insurrection in that decade which displaced and ended many lives in Kampot province.

Their parents would most likely have been born around the 1850s, which made them a few years old when the French declared the Protectorate of Cambodia in 1863. This means they were born under King Ang Duong (ruled from 1847 – 1860), who had a famous connection to Kampot as will be revealed later in the book.

Our story begins in the 1840s when pirates scanned the horizon from their lookouts in the coastal mountains west of Kampot. They would intercept sailing ships, steal their cargo, and kidnap or kill their crew, frustrating King Ang Duong, the last free Cambodian king. Kampot became the node through which Ang Duong sought to confront this challenge to connect his fragile and tenuous kingdom to the outside world.

Thirdly, the book forms a comparative study of how two very different Cambodian families experienced the civil war and genocide of the 1970s when the country dipped into the unimaginable horror of the Khmer Rouge regime or, as most Cambodians simply call it, ‘Pol Pot’ times.

About three years ago I co-authored a biography called If On This Earth There Are Angels with Addheka Sengbou, a remarkable and inspiring woman - my Khmer language teacher - who came from a family that joined the urban middle class just before Cambodia’s independence from France in 1953.

Addheka is just a few years younger than Sakun’s mother, Kimsee, and so their lives can be easily juxtaposed. Both can trace their family back to the early twentieth century, both lived through the tumultuous 1970s and both have survived to bear witness to the experiences of their people during Pol Pot times.

Addheka’s family was sent from Phnom Penh to the Pursat - Battambang border, about 150 kilometres away in the Khmer Rouge’s North West Zone several months after Pol Pot came to power. Kimsee’s family were settled within a few days of the 17 April 1975 revolution and spent the next four years in the South West Zone, less than 25 kilometres from their original home.

In Khmer Rouge parlance, Addheka’s family members were termed ‘neak thmey’; the ‘new people’ - city dwellers who were regarded by the Khmer Rouge as lacking the moral fibre those who toiled in the rice fields possessed. They were the enemy of the revolution and, as such, would have to constantly demonstrate their loyalty to the new way to avoid death through neglect or execution.

Sakun’s family although also classified as ‘neak thmey’ could be considered more as ‘neak moulathan’ - the old people - who had uncomplainingly worked at growing rice to feed themselves and others for many generations. The Khmer Rouge said these were the people for who the revolution had been made. The fate of the two families provides a sharp contrast in lived experience during this time – but both dealt with incredible hardship.

The late historian Michael Vickery wrote of what he called the ‘total standard view’ (TSV) of how Cambodia experienced the brutal Khmer Rouge. His thesis was the lived experience under the Khmer Rouge would have been different in various parts of the country and the TSV would be sometimes more and sometimes less accurate in describing that reality.

This book will look at the actual lives of people in Kampot Province during the period the Khmer Rouge were in charge. It is important to note that Khmer Rouge activity there actually started several years before the 1975 revolution and continued until 1999 – 20 years after they were removed from power in Phnom Penh.

This extra dimension to the book was never planned but during its writing became so compelling that it deserved a place in it.

Finally, this book is based on a wide range of reading and research. It is not an academic book, but aims at engaging and informing anyone with a love for Kampot and who has a curiosity about its past. For those who wish to pursue their own further reading, sources in each chapter are collected at the end of the book

Jim Pollock

September 2019

INTRODUCTION

Sakun Po and I first met in 2016 when he was asked by a common acquaintance to help me find someone who knew something about the history of Kampot. I had already been entranced by the river, which runs through the town centre, the mountains and the Indochina countryside beyond but wanted to find out about the people who had lived here, especially during the tumultuous decade of the 1970s.

Our friend, Rik knew of a couple of older Cambodian men who taught and demonstrated the playing of Khmer musical instruments in the cultural centre in town and thought that Sakun would know them too. If he did, he could translate for me as his English was apparently excellent.

Rik was excited to be the one to introduce Sakun to me as he assured me his friend was a movie star; he then proceeded to show me the video clip of Uptown Funk which stars Sakun and other Epic Arts dancers and performers. I was impressed and when the charismatic, highly intelligent, and friendly movie star arrived in his wheelchair accompanied by a couple of friends, I was humbled to be in his presence.

We got on famously and, in Sakun’s characteristic indomitable style, agreed to meet and talk with the old men from the music school, with a view to discovering more about the history of Kampot. I had never done interviewing like this before and did not really know what we were going to do, but both of us were keen to try.

We met a couple of days later and the two elderly musicians sat and told Sakun whatever I asked them about. I tapped away on my laptop quietly, fascinated by the detail they were giving us, until I started to realize that I didn’t really know what I wanted to find out. I knew I wanted to collect Kampot history but what was I actually going to do with it?

Because of this lack of a clear focus, ultimately nothing came of that day except a respect for Sakun’s abilities to be the man in the middle, the interlocutor, the translator and the connection to this elusive history. As a result I temporarily shelved the idea of interviewing and decided instead to start a Kampot history website, where I could collect and store material.

I had various motives: the site could attract visitors who could use Sakun as well as another friend, amateur historian and naturalist Ali, as guides; maybe others would tell me their stories and we could collect them on the website. For six months I drew upon the support of friends and family to put together the Kampot on the Edge website.

Then one day the penny dropped!

I had been asking around town to meet someone who knew the history of Kampot, all the while assuming there was someone who had this knowledge, and I could just pick their brains. I now realised that there was probably no one like that. This work still had to be done.

I also realized what I wanted lay in the memories of lots of people who had lived through those times and still lived in Kampot. Anyone in their twenties