Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

*THE CORONATION of Cambodia 's new king, Norodom Sihamoni, took place last October. The new monarch replaced his ailing father Norodom Sihanouk (82) when the latter announced his abdication to the Cambodian people. The 51-year-old ex-ballet dancer has spent most of his life outside the kingdom, but willingly took over to reign over his 13 million subjects. Phnom Penh 's boulevards and intersections were adorned with fluttering red and blue Cambodian flags, while portraits of the shaven-headed king in a western suit were installed across the city. As religious ceremonies got underway, most Khmers seemed happy with the transition, and wished the new king a happy reign.

As many people familiar with the history of South East Asia already know, Cambodia suffered greatly under the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. Cities were destroyed and the whole country turned into a vast farming collective. Anyone who could read or write was executed as the entire middle class of the nation was wiped out. Even men and women who wore glasses were considered “dangerous subversives” and killed. Around 1.8 million perished as the ruling cadre created a peasant nation of farm workers. People were no more than ants in this world of ultimate communism. As banks and books were destroyed and money burned, the KR under Pol Pot declared 1975 to be “Year Zero” and cut the country off from the rest of the world.

Then in January 1979, the Vietnamese moved in. Using the Khmer Rouge massacre of thousands of Vietnamese villagers on the border as justification, their tanks and columns moved up Highway One, crossed the Mekong River at Neak Leung and in a five-day blitzkrieg, rumbled into Phonm Penh and put the KR to flight. The population was too enfeebled by the demagogic extremes of the recent tyranny to offer the Vietnamese army any effective resistance. The country was quickly overrun and Pol Pot chased to the border of Thailand . He died there three years ago.

Jon Swain writes in his excellent book, ‘ River of Time ': “If the Vietnamese had not attacked when they did, Cambodia might not have survived much longer. All that Pol Pot left behind was blood and ruins. His dream of raising a new Khmer civilisation, greater even than the Angkorian era, had turned people into a race of human ants, toiling for hours in rural rice communes on starvation rations of rice and gruel under the guns of young, hostile KR guards.”

The place of ultimate horror was the notorious prison at Tuol Sleng, formerly a school building. Classrooms were divided into tiny brick cells were prisoners were held in solitary confinement. Each interrogation room was equipped with an iron bed, to which they were chained, naked, with iron shackles, a desk and a chair provided for the interrogator; gallows outside to suspend the prisoners by their feet; and stone vats of water into which they were plunged head first. A double fence of barbed wire also ringed the prison. This was a needless precaution, since nobody ever escaped. After the invasion, the Vietnamese converted Tuol Sleng into a museum to justify their invasion and the overthrow of Pol Pot, which had actually been criticised by the United Nations.

Writes Swain: “Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge had a mania for documenting their deeds. Every prisoner who entered Tuol Sleng was photographed and forced to write a ‘confession' to which he/she attached a thumbprint and signature. The Vietnamese recovered the documentation, developed the films and displayed the pictures all in one room: row upon row of photos of guards, blank-faced, idiotic, cruel, ugly – and on the opposite walls, the photos of their victims, agony and terror on their faces as they awaited the end. Standing in the semi-obscurity of this cold, still room looking at the wall-to-wall images, I could hears the screams of the tortured; imagine the breaking flesh.

“Several westerners were also tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng. They were carefree young drifters sailing aimlessly through the waves of Southeast Asia on holidays of a lifetime. Then one day they strayed too close in their yachts to the Cambodian coast and were captured by KR gunboats. I wondered a lot about that moment of capture. There had been nothing in their lives of idle pleasure and youthful irresponsibility to prepare them for the terrors in store. As the gun-toting black-clad soldiers boarded, the tourists could not have imagined that they were going to be taken away to an extermination camp and tortured to death. Each was accused of spying against Cambodia (‘ Kampuchea ') and was forced to make a detailed confession of CIA involvement and training. Copies of their confessions, extracted by cruel torture, were found afterwards in the prison camp.

“In a desperate attempt to satisfy the spy hysteria of their torturers and save their skins, many western prisoners fabricated CIA activities for themselves, weaving them into real events into their lives. In his 4,000-word confession, New Zealander Kerry Hamill claimed that his father, supposedly a CIA colonel, recruited him into the agency. He described in considerable detail the CIA's plans to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime.

“James Clarke and Christopher Lance, both Americans, and Australians Ron Dean and David Scott, gave equally imaginative and fictitious accounts of their espionage activities in Asia . Dean's yacht, the 52-foot ketch ‘Sanuk' had been captured on 2 November 1978 while on its way to a Thai port to have a new teak deck fitted. He signed his confession on 21 November, after nearly three weeks of whippings, the bastinado (caning of the soles of the feet) and electric shocks to his genitals. By the time the Vietnamese reached Tuol Sleng, he and the other Westerners had been savagely murdered. They were repeatedly hanged by the feet, let down into vats of water and hanged again, to die at last of strangulation. All that Commandant Deuch (Kang Kek Leu) needed to justify having them executed in this inhumane manner was their signatures and thumbprints on their confessions, to show that he had caught ‘a nest of imperialist spies'.

“Also found at Tuol Sleng were the nine rules of conduct Deuch made his foreign prisoners obey while undergoing torture. The list of rules was titled ‘Regulation of Security Agents'. Here's how it read - Rule 1: You must answer in conformity with the questions I ask you. Don't try and turn away my questions. Rule 2: Don't try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas. It is strictly forbidden to contest me. Rule 3: Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution. Rule 4: You must immediately answer my questions without wasting the time to reflect. Rule 5: Don't tell me about your little incidents committed against the propriety. Don't tell me either about the essence of the revolution. Rule 6: During the bastinado or the electrization (sic) you must not cry loudly. Rule 7: Do sit down quietly. Wait for orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I order you to do something, you must immediately do it without protesting. Rule 8: Don't make pretexts about Kampuchea-Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor. Rule 9: If you disobey every point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of whip or five shocks of electric discharge.”

Cambodia is certainly a happier place since those four dark years of tyranny. But to date no former member of the Khmer Rouge has been forced to account for his actions. There has been talk of a Human Rights war-crimes type tribunal being set up to bring the former KR murderers to justice; but so far very little has been done. Perhaps the fact that Cambodia 's current political leader, Hung Sen, was a former member of the Khmer Rouge has something to do with that. One toadying biography has called him “the strong man of Cambodia ”. Other political analysts have referred to Hung Sen as “the Saviour of the Khmer nation from Vietnamese rule.”

Hung Sen favours building towards a prosperous future for his country. He desperately prefers to look forward rather than back. It is doubtful if he would ever allow his own actions in the past to be put under the scrutiny of an international court. That means all surviving former members of the Khmer Rouge are unlikely to be brought to book for their dreadful crimes against the people of Cambodia . For those who suffered under the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge, there is still no sign of justice. (‘ River of Time ' by Jon Swain, Vintage Books, 1998).

*THE TELEVISION news station Fox News always seems to favour the American right wing. The company has it's own slogan: “We report. You decide.” Following the re-election of George W Bush as president in November 2004, some people feel that a more accurate byline might be: “We distort. You deride.”

*QUOTES: ”If you sleep in a chair, you have nothing to lose – but a nap at the wheel is a permanent snooze.” (Rupert Bear)

“All men are fools, differing only in degree.” (Francois Voltaire, 1694-1778)

“Whilst we have youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-1894)

“As a military man, I believe in luck. But only so far as I can throw it.” (General George S Patton, 1885-1945)

“In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.” (Alexander the Great, 356-323 BC)

*SOME GROANERS to go with your morning coffee:

How do you catch a unique rabbit? You unique up on it.

How do you catch a tame unique rabbit? Tame way. You unique up on it.

How do crazy people go through the forest? They take the Psycho Path.

How do you get Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it.

What does a fish say when it hits a concrete wall? “Dam!”

What do Eskimos get when they sit on the ice for too long? Polaroid's.

What do you call a boomerang that won't come back? A stick.

What do you call a hunk of cheese that is not yours? Nacho Cheese.

What do you call Santa's helpers? Subordinate clauses.

What do you get from a pampered cow? Spoiled milk.

What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite.

What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches continuously? A nervous wreck.

What's the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.

Where would you find a dog without any legs? Exactly where you left him.

Why do gorillas have big nostrils? Because they have big fingers.

What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover ? The location of the dirt bag.

Why did the Pilgrims find that their trousers were always falling down? Because they wore their belt buckles on their hats.

What's the difference between a bad golfer and a bad skydiver? The bad golfer goes, Wack, “Dang!” The skydiver goes, “Dang!” Wack!

How are a Texas Tornado and a Tennessee Divorce the same? Somebody always ends up losing a trailer.

Hide and sick is a game played by most passengers on any ocean-going liner.

(My thanks to Len Agar for these)

*ACCORDING TO the informative website ‘Letsrun.com' the appearance fee paid to Britain 's Paula Radcliffe to compete in the New York City Marathon last November was an impressive 500,000 US dollars. I realise that this is chump change to the top Golfing pros, but it's a new record for any female athlete. Radcliffe was keen to race well again after failing miserably at the Athens Olympics, but this time she did not even have to finish the race to collect her sweetener. Personally, I have always preferred the principle of prize money to appearance fees. Athletes thus know that they will be paid by results, and not by reputation. But Radcliffe is world record holder in the women's marathon, and market forces govern modern professional sport. Anyway, she won the New York race in 2:23:10, and that may just have been the most important victory of her life.

*THE BOLDEST skyjacking crime in history took place in November 1971 over Oregon , USA . A man calling himself Dan B Cooper boarded a fight from Portland to Seattle and soon after take-off handed a stewardess a note demanding 200,000 dollars in ransom money plus two parachutes or he would detonate a bomb in his hand luggage. The flight was diverted, and the passengers let off in exchange for the cash, which was delivered to Mr Cooper in a holdall. He then ordered the flight crew to take off and fly at 10,000 feet and less than 200 mph towards Seattle . Minutes later, the pilots noted from cockpit instruments that a rear door in the aircraft had been opened. Cooper jumped out into the freezing night, with the money, never to be seen again. In 1980 fishermen found some 3,000 dollars of the cash (traced by serial numbers) in a lake on the flight path of the aircraft. The official verdict of the FBI is that Cooper was killed by his fall, even though it was slowed by two parachutes. But without a body, no one can be sure. And who was ‘Dan B Cooper' anyway? No one knows. The case is still open. (‘Cold Case Files', History Channel, UBC).

davidcox@loxinfo.co.th

SINGLE BLACK FEMALE

Seeks male companionship, ethnicity unimportant.

I'm a very good looking girl who LOVES to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping and fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand.

Rub me the right way and watch me respond. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me. Kiss me and I'm yours.

Call (404) 875-6420 and ask for Daisy.

Over 15,000 men found themselves talking to the Atlanta Humane Society about an 8-week old black Labrador retriever.

this month

regulars

stories

free ads

sports

golf

funnies

info

back issues