Where the past is killing the future

With widespread poverty and children working in appalling conditions, Cambodia - once regarded as a beacon of southeast Asia - is struggling to escape its brutal past at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, writes Kathy Sheridan

The images that linger long after are not always the most obvious ones. It may be something as innocuous as a row of large, empty sacks lined up neatly outside a classroom window in Phnom Penh, or photographs of people's faces.

Inside a makeshift schoolroom, poorly-dressed children, many barefoot or in ill-fitting shoes, are chanting their lessons. A few cast frequent, anxious glances towards the window. Yards away, garbage lorries are grinding up the rough roadway to the vast, municipal dump site of Stung Meanchey.

As soon as school is out, the purpose of the sacks becomes clear. A 12-year-old child, Srey Pich, and her friends retrieve their sacks, take out the hooked implements inside them, and trudge up the roadway towards the dump. There is no chance of getting lost. The school is on the edge of the dump. A foul stench that invades the pores, lingers for days and which no amount of scrubbing will eradicate from shoes, heralds its presence.

Up here, the detritus of human existence, layer upon layer of it over several kilometres, oozes from countless millions of gaping plastic bags. Rotting food and other unknown substances ferment into a putrescent soup in the intense heat and humidity. Flies swarm over steaming heaps. Srey Pich and her friends use their hooks to sift through the waste, looking for anything that is reusable or recyclable. It takes a long time to fill a big sack when you are small and reduced to looking for plastic spoons and aluminium cans after the full-time human scavengers have been there before you. If she's lucky today, she might make 50 cent.

Another lorry arrives to disgorge its putrid contents.

In scenes plucked from an apocalyptic vision, it is not flies but human beings that swarm towards the new arrival; running, pushing, crying, slipping on the rotten slurry underfoot, falling perilously close to the huge spinning wheels of the truck, straining towards the new plastic-bundled treasure trove. The lorry driver trundles slowly towards an unpredictable dumping point, gathering more human scavengers on the way. Those positioned nearest the back of the dumpster when it stops get the "best" of the contents. There is no art to it, only desperation. It's not the drivers' fault that people sometimes die under their wheels.

Srey Pich, who in another life might have been a young model, says she has seen many accidents, where small children have been killed. More than once, she gently pulls this writer from what she perceives to be danger. How this way of life is affecting her psychological and physical well-being can only be guessed at. Her parents were forced to sell their land in the provinces due to illness and move to Phnom Penh with their seven children. Their "home" now is a shack. All the children, down to the tiniest, work as "scrap collectors" on the dump.

The teacher at the dump school, Phala So, implores the mother to consider their education. "To let one study is enough. We have to eat; we are sick," says the mother firmly. To her family, the few hours that Srey Pich spends at school are a luxury. Like many young Cambodians, she is keen to learn English, which is seen as a ticket to a better life in a country with a rapidly burgeoning tourist industry. But the obstacles are formidable. The government has fine aspirations towards education for all, but the truth is that many children have to pay to go to school. We asked the children in the dump school - run by the Vulnerable Children Assistance Organisation (VCAO), a charity set up by a group of Khmer Rouge orphans for abandoned, younger children - how many were there because they had to pay for state school; half put up their hands.

Naly Pilorge, the director of Lichado, an outspoken Cambodian human-rights organisation, notes that a huge challenge is to get the right calibre of people into teaching. "The standard and quality of education is so low. Some teachers feel bad about looking for payment [ from students] but they have no choice. They have to work in other jobs to survive. So who do you get that's left over?" According to the UN Development Programme, half the country's children never complete their primary education.

IN THE MEANTIME, Srey Pich, on the cusp of womanhood, is well aware of how she appears to outsiders. "I am very ashamed that I have to do this," she says tearfully. Not surprisingly, her health is also at risk: she suffers from fainting spells and severe headaches.

While Asia has become a byword for organised child labour, sexual exploitation and sweatshops, Srey Pich and her family are a classic example of a more mundane truth; child labour starts in the home and is generally unintended. The child has to work if the family is to survive. It is why charities such as Plan International (which, with co-funder RTÉ, is responsible for the Storybook documentaries) target help at communities, rather than individual children. Cambodia has a history that makes it particularly challenging.

"Child labour is an attitude of mind here," says Paul Joseph Manacherry, from the International Labour Organisation (ILO). "Families have done it for generations and you are trying to change a mindset . . . Not an easy task in a country that has suffered the worst nightmare, where human resources were massacred."

Part of the innovative Plan International/Animo Productions approach to the Storybook series was to paint a broader canvas, to set each country in context. In the case of Cambodia, it begins with the fabulous temples of Angkor Wat - a UN heritage site and tourist magnet, both immensely promising and threatening for Cambodia's future and its cultural legacy - and moves on to Phnom Penh, a bustling city with fading echoes of a French colonial past, and the site of the "Killing Fields" and the terrifying Tuol Sleng, a former high school that became the Khmer Rouge's interrogation and extermination centre during its genocidal onslaught on its own people.

Of all the mass murders and crimes against humanity in the 20th century, the four-year Cambodian genocide, with its two to three million victims - a fifth of the population, dead by murder, exhaustion or starvation - is among the worst. When the Sorbonne-educated Pol Pot came to power in 1975, in a country riven with international meddling, his vision of an agrarian utopia entailed emptying the cities, driving city dwellers into the countryside, the abolition of money, private property and religion, and the setting up of rural collectives. Parents were separated from their children and children taught to "betray" their parents. The first in line for extermination were the "intellectuals", a term that embraced anyone with an education, however slight. A person could be condemned for wearing glasses or for knowing a foreign language.

THE KILLING FIELDS of Cheng En, once a small orchard, dominated by the iconic skulls behind glass, is now a silent, peaceful place, teeming with butterflies, where schoolchildren come for educational tours. Small wooden signs denote items of interest, such as "the Killing Tree", where children's brains were smashed and their mothers bludgeoned to death. Pieces of bone and scraps of clothing are still emerging from the earth, and lie strewn around the craters that contained mass graves. Only two-thirds of the graves have been exhumed. Many bodies lie under the lake at the edge of the monument.

But by far the eeriest of the Khmer Rouge legacies is Tuol Sleng, the KR's centre of security, torture, rape and murder, in the southern suburbs of Phnom Penh. A sixth of those killed there were children. Children, girls and boys aged 10-15 were also trained and selected by the regime to work there and were said to be exceptionally cruel.

The exhibits in Tuol Sleng need little interpreting. Instruments of torture lie where they were found, in the cells fashioned out of classrooms. Anyone familiar with the CIA's defence of "waterboarding" (or "simulated drowning") as a torture technique will find the 30-year-old blueprint in a cell here, a "bed" with crude shackles for arms and legs. The near lifesize photographs of the victims, often pictured before and after torture, will haunt the visitor long afterwards. These men, women and children knew they were going to die. Of the tens of thousands who passed through this place, only a handful survived. It is impossible to avoid their eyes or to look away.

Untold damage was done, and not only to that generation.

"The Khmer Rouge distorted the mindset of a nation," says the ILO's Paul Joseph Manacherry. "This country has been brutalised. The Khmer Rouge period was a period when human resources were massacred, so you have really a country where human resources were at a minimum at one point in time."

"We have lost three generations in this society," says Naly Pilorge. "Families were split up, children were separated from parents and siblings. The adults received the most abuse - they were killed and tortured. Their children were brought up by the [ Khmer Rouge] organisation and were encouraged to denounce the 'traitors', including their parents. Those children are now in their 30s and they have children. But because they did not have parental guidance, they have not been able to transfer this to their children." Somewhere in the "hand-to-mouth, live for now" attitude of that thirtysomething generation is a mindset that is also suspicious of education. After all, the educated were the first to be exterminated.

TODAY, WHILE ITS neighbour Vietnam marches confidently into the future, the kingdom of Cambodia, once regarded as a beacon of the region, remains one of the poorest countries in the world, heavily reliant on foreign aid, riddled with corruption, and with a patchy commitment to democracy and free speech.

The fact that Cambodia has struck oil is not viewed as undiluted good news by foreign observers. In fragile democracies, the only restraint on governments can be reliance on foreign aid. Already in Phnom Penh, a city into which the UN poured millions of dollars, and one still riddled with NGOs, the chasm between rich and poor is extremely apparent.

Ordinary Cambodians speak of their country with shame and anger. The procrastination in bringing the men responsible for the genocide to justice, and the collusion of world powers in thwarting such attempts, mean that an international criminal tribunal, which was finally established last year to try former leaders in the Khmer Rouge, has a steadily reducing number of witnesses and defendants to call on. Many of the leading perpetrators have passed on, unpunished, dying of natural causes in old age.

Meanwhile, Srey Pich still slaves on the dump to earn 50 cent a day, no less a victim of Pol Pot than her parents and grandparents, and yet a vulnerable young hostage to Cambodia's uncertain future.

Cambodia, presented by Kathy Sheridan, the third of the Storybook documentaries in association with Plan International, co-funded by RTÉ and produced by Animo Productions, will be screened on RTÉ1 on Thursday at 10.45pm