Kingdom of the Monkey: war, graft and karaoke in 1990s Cambodia

By Jim Taylor

‘Kingdom of the Monkey’ is the extraordinary and vivid account of a country so captivating, yet so obscure in every way, that the deeper you go in the harder it gets to look away. Cambodia, 1993 – 2003: this is no tropical paradise; stay too long out there and soon nothing you may come across really holds the same power to shock or surprise you. It’s a time when all acceptable norms of humanity seem to be turned upside down. Even the last of Indochina’s civil wars, grinding on out in the countryside, presents as a mere sideshow diversion to the main events being played out in the free-for-all capital that is Phnom Penh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839785726

Jim Taylor

Jim Taylor is Vice Chairman of Harrison Group and one of the country’s leading experts on marketing, branding, and wealthy consumers. Doug Harrison founded Harrison Group in 1996 and develops branding strategies for some of the world’s most successful companies. Stephen Kraus has a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and leads Harrison Group’s training and wealth consultancies.

Book preview

Preface

This book was written two decades after most of the incidents recorded within occurred, and I accept that many of my observations are no longer representative of an entire nation. Most of the people living in Cambodia now were not born at the time of my earliest experiences and have grown up never really knowing how things were in the dark times, that their parents do not talk about.

My purpose in putting down in writing – so many years after I first became connected with the land and people of Cambodia – was mainly to identify incidents that affected me in some way or other. The day-to-day goings on that I experienced, just in themselves, would constitute an interesting and readable account of a South East Asian adventure – regardless of the real monumental events of that period in the history of the country.

I wrote the book, mostly from vivid memory, during a return visit to the Kingdom in 2018, and although I had retained a box full of newspapers and cuttings, collected during my time in Cambodia, this was at home in England and I didn’t have access to that material until I had completed the body of my work. I did wonder if I had been a little hard on the Khmers (and the foreigners I have written about) and feared I might have high-lighted an unbalanced account of a life very much removed from how the country can be experienced now, by Khmers and foreigners alike. However looking back through all the evidence, I can confirm that I have been far less harsh than I would have been if I had looked in that box before I started writing.

Please enjoy the book for what it is and believe me that things really were as I describe them.

Jim Taylor – January 2023

Part One

Chapter One

Seventeenth April

17 th April 1993 – it all started, for me, on this date – synonymous with the one date in Cambodian history that every visitor in the early nineties was aware of.

This practically insignificant, small country was famous for two things: the temples of Angkor and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge – that murderous regime took absolute power on 17th April 1975, beginning three years and nine months of the most extreme socialist experiment ever to have been imposed on an entire nation.

The Pol Pot years are well documented in many very well researched books, and I make no attempt here to add to their volume or gravity. The fact that I, by pure chance, found myself on a little plane heading for the capital (Phnom Penh) on the exact same date, eighteen years after day one of ‘Year Zero’ seemed to me to be more than a coincidence.

This place excited me the moment the door opened and I stepped out onto the airport tarmac, it was hot, a kind of heat that sinks into you like a fog. April and May are actually the hottest and most oppressive months of the year in that part of the world. I’d landed in jungle airports before: in the Amazon, with no facilities, just single-story concrete buildings, where you pick up your bags from a stack on the floor, walk through the simple formalities and you’re out on the street. This was a capital city; I had to remind myself, and a communist state. There was a difference though: UNTAC. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia had a mandate to basically take over the running of the whole country, and to prepare and supervise the first ever truly free and fair elections.

There were international soldiers and UN staff everywhere; it turned out that there were also CPAF (Cambodian Peoples Armed Forces) and PMs (Police Militaire) all over the city too, which had not disarmed, as would have been a necessary part of the deal. The DK (Democratic Kampuchea) as the Khmer Rouge were called, were out there in the countryside too, and they were extremely organised, far better than the government troops.

I’d not yet even seen the famous film, The Killing Fields, but I found myself sitting in a simple guest house restaurant that evening, the only one any fresh travellers knew about, talking and planning with a small band of other travellers who’d just arrived that day or the day before. An American journalist, a tall bloke with scruffy hair, a chequered scarf and a cast on his ankle, appeared beside our table and said he had been listening in and wanted to give some advice. He laid it all down to us naïve first timers, and the warnings he gave out had quite a sobering effect on the party. It didn’t click until years later, when I saw Al Rockoff’s picture somewhere, and I suddenly realised that it must have been him we’d been talking with that first evening.

Al Rockoff, was the journalist portrayed by John Malkovich in the film: he was there in seventy-five when Phnom Penh fell, so of course he was back for the next chapter.

It was the anniversary of the greatest tragedy in living memory, and nothing I saw that day, or ever, indicated to me that this very recent history, which had plunged an entire race back into the dark ages, was recognised or acknowledged by the vast majority of the people of that land.

Their liberation by the Vietnamese, beginning on Christmas Day 1979, had resulted in a decade of occupation, right or wrong. Then, with the war still dragging over out in the countryside and the Paris Peace Accords freshly signed, the country was swamped with 11000 UN troops, plus a similar amount of administrators and aid workers from all sorts of organisations, plus an unhealthy share of international criminals and misfits. The door opened for independent travellers a couple of months prior to the UN sponsored elections and I had taken one of those first few flights to the strangest land I would ever experience.

The classic kick-start version of the Honda C90 motor-scooter from the 1970s was the only way to get around – if you didn’t want to be sitting on a sack of rice on the roof of a clapped-out Peugeot, or in a trailer crammed full of assorted people and animals. The bikes were used as moto-taxis, or you could hire one for about three US dollars a day. I took to it like a duck to water: anything bigger on those roads would have been asking for trouble anyway.

There was a Swedish bloke called Jurgan, who’d come in from Bangkok on the same plane I got; well, we decided to hire a couple of these bikes for the day. The traffic was madness, not many cars, but Hondas everywhere you looked. It wasn’t jam packed like Saigon was, in fact there were no traffic jams at all, just a constant flow of mopeds weaving around the potholes at a sedate speed on any side of the road, going in any direction. There was no highway code whatsoever and no one used brakes, you just timed your manoeuvres and swerved to avoid objects, people and potholes.

We took a ride out onto Highway no.1, twenty or thirty kilometres into the countryside, following the Mekong River to the east, where I nearly had a head on with a Peugeot 404, while overtaking a moped pulling a handmade trailer full of people in colourful scarves and wide brimmed hats. This major highway, direct to Ho Chi Minh city, very quickly deteriorated into a broken tarmac causeway with steep brown clay banks either side, straight down into flooded fields full of water lilies. The road got so narrow that two Peugeots, loaded up – roofs, bonnets and open boots – with people and sacks of rice, could only just pass without going over. Nothing was safe and that was part of the thrill of the place.

The plan was to get to a place called Koki Beach, which was a riverside picnic hangout, with bamboo huts on stilts that sat out in a shallow channel of the Mekong. It was for well off Cambodian families to spend a Sunday, lounging around on bamboo mats, eating grilled catfish and looking pretty. We were surprised that there were well off ‘middle class’ families in a country at war, some of them arrived in newish Toyotas and the women had bows in their plaited hair. Those without a car were arriving on remorques (motorbikes pulling long flat trailers), there would be twenty people or more crammed onto these trailers, all wearing chequered scarves around their heads, or sunglasses and summer bonnets.

The next day we were up early for a ride out to Choeung Ek, and so we visited the Killing Fields, a group of open pits in the ground, where the bodies of thousands of victims had been exhumed in 1980 after the Vietnamese liberation. The ground was baked hard and bits of bone and cloth were evident everywhere. A stupa had been built nearby, with glass sides that contained the skulls and bones of the bodies that were dug up. I didn’t find it as sad, or so horrifying as I thought I would; it was a hot, sunny day and there were trees with green leaves, and small birds flew about. This was a place where people died, but those people suffered far worse than death, before they were ever brought here – for so many of them it would have been a welcome release.

We stopped at an open-fronted restaurant shack on the way back into town, for strong Vietnamese coffee and fried chicken with rice. It was a basic set up, with banks of wooden tables and mostly men sitting around drinking coffee and watching Rambo III on a wide screen TV, up against one wall. It was pretty dark in there, but the food wasn’t bad. When we came to pay, the cost was in riel (the local currency) and I counted out a pocket full of interesting looking paper notes, the price of two or three dollars.

A day later Jurgan and I were in a small Russian plane, which must have been a hand-me-down from the Soviet Union to the Vietnamese during the cold war, and passed on to Kampuchea Airways when it became less serviceable. It was a worn out Antonov turboprop An-24. With no proper air-con, this plane was hot inside to start off with.

The land was so flat, with many swampy lakes and the Tonley Sap itself was like an inland sea. As we started to lose altitude during this short trip, the upper quarter of the whole cabin filled with thick clouds of vapour. It was coming down from the luggage racks, as well as leaking in from the doors that didn’t seal properly. There was no safety equipment and I noticed at least one broken seatbelt.

Chapter Two

The Minefield Bar

I came to Siem Reap to see the temples of Angkor – which I did – the ones that were safe to visit at the time. Arriving in Siem Reap, it was immediately clear that we were in a warzone. UNTAC trucks, Toyota Land Cruisers and helicopters were very much in evidence in the daytime, CPAF everywhere at night.

The Khmer Rouge had recently pulled out of the election process and were stepping up attacks on the ethnic Vietnamese settlements, as well as targeting electoral staff, in the hopes of de-railing the whole process. The owner of our guest house told us, with a smile, that we could rent bikes and go out to the lake to see where the Khmer Rouge had slaughtered thirty-seven Vietnamese boat people. My journal at the time recorded some of my feelings and experiences:

These people are unreal, death and cruelty has been bred into them for so many years that most of them don’t understand humanity. We hired the bikes to go to the Rulos group of temples out on highway 6. We passed many people waving and saying ‘Hello UNTAC.’ Trucks full of people and bicycles, government soldiers hanging around with AK-47s and RPGs; they weren’t alert, just lounging around, with those chequered peasants scarves on like the KR wear. They looked lethargic and unperceptive of reality, it was a little scary.

We got to the first temple, Preah Ko, C9th. It was deserted, quite small, and fitting naturally into the vegetation around it. There was a dead snake on the road, long and thin and dark greenish-brown with yellow stripes down both sides. We rode on along a dirt track to the next temple; it was called Bakong, incredible. The heat was thirty-seven to forty degrees (that’s about 100f) in the shade, with a breeze. There were many Buddhist monks in their saffron robes, who came out to stare and accept cigarettes. Then there were the handful of locals living outside the weed choked swampy moat, drawing water from a well. They were all wearing kramas (those chequered scarves) on their heads, round their necks or waists.

There were no souvenirs or soft drinks, no entrance gate, sign posts, guides, nothing. Just this wonderful complex of statues, carvings, walls, towers and platforms; all this was surrounding the main pyramidal structure, totally in its atmospheric element. We rode off south-east on a dirt-track, with homes dotted along on either side, but back from the road. All the children shouted, ‘Hello, Hello, Hello,’ waving and jumping up and down as we passed, it was so funny.

We reached Roulos town, really a small lineated village of wooden stilt-houses either side of a dry riverbed. We stopped the other side of a bridge and the children flocked to us. It was so beautiful, and so sad that their country is entrenched in violence, insanity and hopelessness. Statistically, unless the war ends, many of these children will become involved in one way or another. On the way back to town some people shouted at us, some smiled or waved and some just gave cold stares. They could be supporting either side, we don’t know, but we didn’t want to break down along that road.

Back in town we came across a group of British soldiers and I hadn’t even known that we were out there; I did like to see that familiar camouflage pattern. They told us that highway 6 is mined every night. We have learned that all sorts of robberies and killings go on all over the country every day. Only last week, on one night four Vietnamese restaurants in Phnom Penh were hand-grenaded. There are regular pogroms against the Vietnamese refugees to drive them back down the Mekong, and the Khmers don’t give a shit. Several UN people have been murdered; two only last week. Also there are disgusting looking frogs in the bathroom.

The Paras had dropped us some info that a place called the Minefield Bar was where to be of a night time. We took a recce in daylight and it was right on the first hundred yards of the road to Angkor Wat, just opposite the run-down Grande Hotel D’Angkor. We turned up on our rented mopeds, at a wide dusty parking lot with just a couple of white UN Land Cruisers parked outside. The sign was garishly painted with pictures of mines and bombs exploding, sort of a weird ad. Being as it was still daylight, there were just a couple of off-duty soldiers sitting at the bar and two or three Khmer girls, joking around or just looking at themselves in a mirror. The place was run by a self-styled mercenary from New Zealand and I wrote in my diary at the time: The man is addicted to war and death and has a psychological need to surround himself with it.

Graham told us a lot of psycho war stories about his life in the Special Forces. I don’t know if it was bullshit or not, but we did know he had become a Buddhist monk in Thailand before getting himself to Cambodia. Anyhow, he had to have been crazy to ride a Honda 750 sports bike from the Thai border straight up to Siem Reap, through a war zone, on a mined road only fit for trucks.

The walls of the bar/restaurant had been hung with flags and insignia, bits of mortar bombs and shrapnel, plus war slogans and some blown up photos that had been taken of the aftermath of recent attacks. One of these was a big picture of a local bus with the front ripped away, after it had hit a mine; there was debris everywhere, and a caption underneath that read, Spot the foot.

Along with the local working girls, there was a young European woman behind the bar, the girlfriend of a Royal Marine called Stuart, who was quite a decent bloke – Helen, her name was, and she had grown up in Swaziland; she said she was helping out in return for some wages and free lodgings. Helen was no bar girl, just an adventurous hippie type. Her real address was Shark Bay in Sinai, where she lived with her mother, if I remember right, and I believe they owned some camels.

In the evenings that place was full of UN soldiers, administrators and journalists, and staffed by a bunch of quite demure taxi-girls, with limited communicative vocabulary. Dire Straights was playing and Victoria Bitter was a dollar a can.

While we were in there, we learned there had been a mortar attack at the Angkor temples about four km down the road and we watched the CPAF APCs rumbling down that road past us, as we held our beers and lived for the moment.

I stayed in that town for about a week and we used that place as a hang-out, getting friendly with some of the regulars: British Paras and Marines, a couple of Brits in the French Foreign Legion and soldiers from South America, New Zealand and Australia. At first it was a bit intimidating in there, but it felt safer inside than out. The CPAF were on the streets every night, drunk and brandishing their weapons; it was the same equipment the commies had left over from the Vietnam War: Kalashnikovs, RPGs and Chinese handguns.

Graham was, surprisingly, quite a reasonable bloke for a psychopathic war junkie. He talked a lot about Rambo-style tactics and implied he had been involved in Vietnam. I suppose he was just old enough to have been around for the very late stages, maybe he had just watched all the films, I don’t know. We were pretty sure he was hard as nails anyway. He lent Jurgan a flash unit for his camera, to use when we went to the stones, and gave a lot of advice out to travellers. After I’d been a week in town he talked me into approaching UNTAC, to try and get a job as an election observer so I could get a visa extension and stay around.

The Mine Field Bar was a great place anyway: serving steak and chips, decent coffee and Victoria Bitter. The girls were mostly easy-going freelance ladies; I didn’t realise that at first, because they didn’t really look or act like hookers and the soldiers that came to the bar were mostly just there for the bragging and the drinking.

Marie was a friendly girl with a sad story she never told; I took her out one day to the town market and bought her a bicycle, for no reason other than she said she’d never owned one. She was so happy, it was money well spent and we became friends, nothing more, and that’s all I had wanted. We visited the crocodile farm together, with her sitting side-saddle on the back rack of the bicycle, and then I took her on my moped out to the ancient walled city of Angkor Thom. Actually only the four massive gates and a small part of the complex inside could be visited; as most of the site was covered in jungle trees and scrub, no one knew where all the mines would be, so it wasn’t safe to just go out and explore. I remember, as we approached the northern gateway, there were several Cambodian soldiers loitering around it. Marie was terrified and made me turn back, I didn’t know at that time how bad the good guys could be. We went out past the airport road and she took me to visit her family’s home; it was a wooden shack on stilts on the edge of a rice field. She had no parents; she told me they’d been shot. There was just a blind old grandmother, an aunt and a load of siblings who were reliant on her. It was hard to take it all in.

Helen thought it would be nice if Marie and I went with her and Stuart to the ancient Angkorian reservoir called the Western Baray, on a day out for a picnic and a swim, so it was all planned. Well, word got out and the whole bar load of taxi-girls decided to come too, that wasn’t the plan, but it was quite funny. They all went bathing in their clothes and some were wearing evening dresses with flowers in their hair. For a country that had been at war, one way or another, since the sixties and culturally isolated from 1975 to 1991, it was not surprising that fashion and mannerisms would be a bit behind the times. It was way more than that; women’s ‘Sunday best’ clothing harked back to the French 1930s fashions for high class Paris ladies.

It was like a beach at the Baray, and we played around in the warm shallow water while local drinks sellers came with plastic cold boxes and snack foods of roasted nuts and black beetles. It was a nice day all in all; easy to forget that we were right out there in the middle of a war-zone hotspot, where people were getting killed every single day and night.

I did apply for a job as a UN volunteer, where the role would be driving about to polling stations and overseeing the voting process. The electoral authority said they would hire me, as they were two UN staff short: they had been shot on the road by soldiers the previous week. I sat in on one meeting with the international team and was so excited about the proposition of sticking my neck out to try and do some good in the world; it felt exhilarating and I would gladly take the risk.

Walking back late from the Minefield Bar with my head full of plans, I took the wrong street in the dark; Cambodia didn’t have street lights. A group of Khmer soldiers roused themselves from hammocks in the garden of a French colonial building. They came scrambling out shouting challenges and I heard the AKs being cocked. If I hadn’t been drunk I would probably have been pretty nervous, but as it was, I just calmly waved an ID card, said ‘Okay, UNTAC’ and walked back the way I had come. I couldn’t sleep for quite a while when I got back to my room.

The next day I got into a Hercules transport plane; I was being sent to mission HQ in Phnom Penh to register for the UNV role. I expected to be back at the Minefield Bar in a few days and meet the gang again, but I never did.

I got to the head-office with my letter of recommendation from the Siem Reap electoral department, and strolled in carrying a feeling of destiny. I was knocked for six when told I needed to fill in an application form, which would need to go by post to Geneva. I would apparently not expect a reply until July, which would be two months after the elections!

I was going to go straight back to Siem Reap, but the KR had launched an offensive right into the town. There had been evacuations and all commercial flights were off, due to a plane coming under fire whilst in the air, as well as the damage sustained to the airport itself during the attack. I would have risked travel overland or up river if there was a job for me when I got there, but I wasn’t going to do it just for the thrill.

Chapter Three

Train to Sihanoukville

I hooked back up with Jurgan again and we travelled on the roof of a train for fifteen hours, all the way through southern Cambodia to the port town of Kampong Som (otherwise called Sihanoukville) The ticket cost