Halfway down the Danube

Ta Mok: A Handshake Away

From the Washington Post:

"Ta Mok, known as "The Butcher" for his brutality as military chief of the communist Khmer Rouge, died July 21 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, his lawyer said. He was believed to be 80.

"Ta Mok had been in and out of consciousness since last week at the military hospital in the capital, where he was being treated for high blood pressure, tuberculosis and respiratory complications, attorney Benson Samay said. Ta Mok had been in government custody since 1999."

What caught my eye: the name of the lawyer.

This requires a brief digression into Cambodian history. If that bores you, skip the next few paragraphs.

Cambodia, late 1978. The genocidal, psychotic Khmer Rouge regime is preparing for war with Vietnam.

This is a Very Bad Idea. Vietnam has six times the population of Cambodia. It has tanks, heavy artillery, and warplanes, and an army of a million battle-hardened veterans. But the Khmers Rouges are insane, so they're gearing up for war.

For genocidal dictator Pol Pot, preparing for war does not mean stuff like "improve training" or "buy more equipment". No. It means "purge and kill". As long as the comrades are ideologically pure, they can easily defeat the Vietnamese deviationists. Didn't the Khmers Rouges defeat the old Khmer Republic, even though the Republic had artillery and tanks, and the help of the US Air Force? But to ensure purity, it's first necessary to ruthlessly root out weakness and treason.

Pol Pot's chosen tool for this was Ta Mok. Mok had already proven himself in the Southwest District, where he had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. His nickname was "The Butcher", and he deserved it. Everyone but Pol Pot was terrified of him. He was sort of the Beria to Pol Pot's Stalin.

Ta Mok was every bit as bad as his boss, if not worse. Moral comparisons begin to break down here. Pol Pot set policy, Ta Mok carried it out, nearly two million people died. Who was more evil? It's a meaningless question. But while Ta Mok is not a household name, he makes the short list of the 20th century's greatest killers.

So Pol Pot sent Ta Mok to the Eastern District, the frontier region with Vietnam, to prepare for the coming apocalypse.

Eastern District had been through a few purges already, so a few of the local Communist leaders were bright enough to see what was coming. Two of them included a division commander named Heng Samrin, and a young cadre officer named Hun Sen. As soon as Heng and Hun heard that Ta Mok was coming, they ran. Ran across the border, to the enemy, to Vietnam.

Ta raged, and killed hundreds of officers and Party members, and thousands of helpless peasants.

A few months later, the Vietnamese attacked. The Khmer Rouge army collapsed. In six weeks the Vietnamese were masters of the country. Pol Pot, Ta Mok and a few other Khmer Rouge leaders fled across the western border into Thailand.

The Vietnamese installed a puppet government with Heng Samrin in charge. But Heng turned out to be weak and ineffectual, so after a few years they replaced him with the younger, more energetic Hun Sen. That was in 1985. Hun Sen has been running Cambodia ever since.

The remaining Khmers Rouges lurked across the border in Thailand through the 1980s, but in the 1990s they began to disintegrate. Pol Pot died in 1998, under mysterious circumstances -- it's quite possible that Ta Mok turned against him and had him killed. Then Ta Mok himself was captured in 1999.

This was something of an embarassment for Hun Sen's government. A lot of former Khmers Rouges found their way back into power under Hun Sen. Why not? They were his former comrades, after all. And he had pragmatically agreed to let all the lower and middle ranking Khmers Rouges back with no worse than a tap on the wrist. Only a handful of names -- the inner circle of the leadership, the most notorious killers and torturers, the worst of the worst -- were banned, and those only because of international attention.

Hun Sen's solution was simple: he kept the bad guys locked up, but never brought them to trial. Trial would be bad; they might name names, and they'd certainly bring back memories. No, better to keep them under confinement until they could simply die of old age.

Fast forward to early 2006. I'm in Phnom Penh, and I have an interview with Benson Samay. He's the guy who has the complete monopoly on all notary activities in Cambodia. That may not sound like much, but Cambodia is a country of thirteen million people, and -- in theory -- every major contract, including every sale of land, must first be reviewed by Benson Samay.

I remember coming back from that interview and saying, damn, what a total sleaze.

Huge, ghastly building right in the middle of downtown, mansion and office combined, a jarring combination of Chinese temple and Roman villa. An office full of heavy, expensive furniture, valuable-looking sculptures, Chinese rugs, American bric-abrac.

Samay was jittery and didn't want to talk about details; I had the impression he half regretted granting an interview, and didn't want it to go on too long. He wanted to brag, but didn't want to answer questions.

I had no idea about his clientele.

But of course it makes sense. Samay got his monopoly by being close to Hun Sen. I have no doubt Samay's job was to keep Ta Mok out of a courtroom until he died of natural causes. And he succeeded.

-- I find a lot of stories referring to Samay as Ta Mok's lawyer. Oddly enough, Samay doesn't seem to be, well, a lawyer. Nobody can say where he got his law degree. And the Cambodian Bar Association kicked him out in 2001.

Not that this matters. Hun Sen's Cambodia is a spectacularly corrupt country, and the Prime Minister's favor is a more important qualification than any degree. Ta Mok died in bed at the age of eighty. Benson Samay is rich and getting richer. Hun Sen has been in charge for twenty years, and looks good for many years to come. Cambodia goes on.

And that's all.

Can't get there from here

In comments to my last post, Colin Alberts asked about international rail travel in the Caucasus.

Short answer: not much.

Back in the Soviet days, there was a pretty good integrated rail network. The region is very mountainous, but the Soviets loved that sort of thing -- big-ticket, concrete-intensive civil engineering challenges got them excited. So they blasted tunnels, threw bridges, and ran rail lines all over the place. By the time they were done, you could go from any town in the region to any other town fairly quickly. You could go to Istanbul, or -- in a roundabout way -- to anywhere in the Middle East. And, of course, you could go to Moscow.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed.

Armenia went to war with Azerbaijan, and the border closed. Snip.

Turkey supported Azerbaijan. That border closed too. Snip.

There used to be a rail connection between Armenia and Iran. However, it passed through Nakhichevan, which is part of Azerbaijan. Snip.

That left Armenia with no international lines except a single one going north to Tbilisi, in Georgia. From there you could still go on to Russia. Except that Georgia had its own problems: a civil war with the breakaway province of Abkhazia. With Russian support, Abkhazia ended up winning the war. The Georgian-Abkhaz border closed. The rail line from Tbilisi to Moscow ran through Abkhazia. Snip.

So what now?

Armenia still has its own internal rail lines. Many of them have fallen into disuse. Total rail-miles travelled dropped by 90% in the 1990s. They're up since then, but are still nowhere close to Soviet levels. There's no more commuter service; there are still a few inter-city passenger trains.

There is one international passenger connection: an overnight train to Tbilisi. If I understand this right, it's literally one single train that just goes back and forth, completing one trip every two days.

From Tbilisi you can change trains for Azerbaijan. But not for Moscow or for Turkey. There is no rail link between Georgia and Turkey.

(That last may change. Azerbaijan and Turkey want a rail connection through Georgia. Armenia absolutely hates this idea; Georgia is blowing hot and cold. Negotiations have been under way for a couple of years now. They might reach agreement later this year, or next year, or never... it's not clear.)

There is a lot of freight traffic on the Georgia line. Some large percentage of Armenia's imports and exports go by rail, and they're all going on this one line.

Road links are better, but still not great. The borders to Azerbaijan and Turkey are officially closed to road traffic. There's one two-lane road going to Iran; I'm told that it often closes for a couple of months in the winter, from snow in the high pass. So, the only serious international connection is through Georgia again.

To drive from Yerevan into Turkey -- legally -- you must first drive to Georgia (about 3-4 hours) then west across Georgia to the border (another 3-4 hours). Say 7 hours altogether. This is rather ironic given that the Turkish border is only about 25 km (15 miles) from here; when I look at Mount Ararat, I'm looking over the border into Turkey.

Anyway. One of these days I'd like to try the trains. Pure curiosity...

A minor incident

Some idiot attacked my parents and my sister on the Chicago El. I say 'idiot' for a number of reasons, not least because this person started a fight over her own bad manners, nor that she attacked them with a CTA person in the next car, but mainly because she let my parents get the drop on her, with the result that this crazy woman ended up with her legs pinned to the floor of the car by my mom, and her arms held behind her back by my dad.

Anyway. It's funny (although my sister got a hank of hair pulled out, interceding). But, gentle readers, you would not believe how angry it made me. I have not been that angry in a long time. And, as some of you may have figured out, I'm already kind of an angry guy. I've repressed it, most of the time. (Now it comes out as 'pissy'! Woo.)

"But," as Carrie from Bad Mama said, "you haven't maimed anyone." Which is a common career path for very angry people from our neck of the woods. I did unconsciously twist an innocent coat-hanger into a small metal ball while brooding about this incident, which freaked the hell out of me. The proximate cause of this post.

I believe I've mentioned before that I dislike being angry? There are some bloggers who thrive on it, who go out of their way looking for reasons to be outraged. Apparently their lives are that inane! Junkies.

Me, I like other things. The anger is secondary.

Also, the troll magnet? It's hereditary.

To Arabkir Station

So I took a walk along the train tracks.

The tracks run right past our house, just on the other side of our street. They're not very busy. There are just two scheduled trains per day, around 8 in the morning and 8 at night. They're reasonably punctual, which is nice: when the morning train passes, it's time for me to dress for work; the evening train comes right around the boys' bedtime.

Walking along the tracks was more interesting than you might think.

First impression: something slightly wrong. It took me a long time to figure it out. The tracks were too far apart. Russian train gauge, four inches wider.

Second impression: garbage. The tracks are a popular spot for fly dumping. Walking along them is just a long walk past refuse of every sort. It doesn't smell that bad -- I would guess most of the organic stuff gets scavenged by rats, crows and dogs pretty quickly -- but, wow, is it ugly.

In addition to the garbage, there's also a lot of junk. People dump things like old ovens and washing machines along the tracks.

Third impression: the tracks are in crappy shape. The sleepers were originally wood, but many have rotted away, or burned in brushfires. Some have been replaced by concrete sleepers, but many have not. The track bed is in visibly bad shape. Signs have fallen over or been vandalized; signals are obviously long dead.

I had vaguely noticed that the trains weren't very fast -- maybe 50 km (30 mph) tops. Now I know why.

We live in Arabkir (pronounced ah rab PKEER), which is a neighborhood that used to be a separate village. We're up on a plateau about 3 km from the center of town and maybe 100-200 m higher. From our hosue to central Yerevan is all downhill.

The tracks come up from the central station and make a big S-curve as they climb the steep slope above the city. If I followed them down long enough, they would take me right into the middle of Yerevan.

I didn't get that far. Partly this is because walking along train tracks is harder than ordinary walking, and I didn't feel like keeping it up for four or five km, even downhill. But mostly it's because it was depressing. Interesting, but depressing.

The constant garbage, of course. But also, the tracks went past abandoned factories, now rusting and empty. It was evening, and windy. The red light of sunset gave the rusting metal a peculiarly dark and dreary look, while the wind sent plastic bottles jumping and bouncing along the ground. Although the tracks ran through a densely populated neighborhood, there were few people around, and the wind blocked the sound of traffic. I could have been alone in a city left empty by some catastrophe.

And then there was the station. After maybe 2 km of walking: a platform, with stairs going up.

Once this had been a suburban stop for commuters. These things are pretty similar the world over. There was the little white building with a ticket window, and some business -- perhaps a small cafe -- around the back.

All dead now. The stairs were disintegrating and the railing had disappeared. The ticket window was shuttered. The station had obviously been closed for years, and was slowly surrendering to decay. Armenia's economy imploded after independence -- war, blockade, loss of their old markets. I suppose the commuter rail service was a casualty of that time.

It's not that Yerevan is generally in a state of depression. Far from it. The downtown is a maze of construction; cranes everywhere, and concrete dust hanging hazy in the air. Just a few hundred meters from the abandoned station is the top of the Cascades, a mammoth project that will connect the center of the town with the upper suburbs via a complex of stairs and escalators.

But there was something so unutterably dreary about the dead station that I couldn't go any further. I turned off the crumbling, garbage-strewn tracks and took another way.

And that was my walk along the railroad tracks.

Laffer blogging

Noel Maurer is a genius.

Sure is quiet

Claudia and the boys are in Germany, so I'm alone in the house.

It's quiet.

Days are long and bright and hot; I spend most of them in my office, which is air-conditioned. When I come home, the house is cool and dark inside. In the evening, odd gusts of wind rattle the tin rood and throw dust at the windows. Nights are clear and the summer stars seem low and close.

Here's a poetic image you must have seen a hundred times: "The fruit hangs heavy on the vine". Well, our house has an arbor in the front, with grape vines twined around it. Now they're full of grapes, still green and hard but getting bigger every day. I was coming in the door one day and I realized I had to dodge around these dangling vines. They were trailing down in loops from the arbor, pulled down a little lower every day by the weight of the grapes. The fruit is hanging heavy on the vine. And it's going to get heavier yet.

Congratulations, whoever won!

Wow, YouTube is fast. The highlight clip from the Eurovision Amateur Theatrical Free Throw Contest.

Digital camera blog beg whatever

Recently came into a small chunk of change from a spokemodel gig -- not a joke -- and was wondering about a good cheap digital camera. I am so out of the consumer electronics loop. Assume that the primary user will be a miserly idiot savant who likes industrial landscapes and interesting women. And uses Windows, if that matters.

(We will return to regular guest-blogging shortly. On deck: Noel Maurer.)

Walking, reverb, collapse

One recent headache: one of the holes for one of the pegs of one of the shelves holding my art books decided to split, causing shelf after shelf to pancake downward in a manner immediately familiar to all New Yorkers.

Fortunately, there were no casualties, not even the strange but cute little doll in a glittering rubber dress that a certain commenter gave me, which I had put on one of the shelves, although her handbag was flung for yards in the collapse.

But the aftermath turned my "to read" pile topsy-turvy. And it was an odd thing, how the first two books I read in the rebuilt pile paralleled each other: Patrick Leigh Fermor as a young man walking through Europe, down the Danube valley towards Constantinople in the 1930s; Harry Partch as a composer whose grant ran out, homeless on the open road on the West Coast in the 1930s. Hallelujah I'm a bum.

Fermor's book, A Time of Gifts, is one of the great travel books. It has lauds enough. I'll quote from Partch's Bitter Music, on the comparative musicology of homeless shelters:

The various manners of shelter reveille range from the comical to the heavenly.

In Stockton a man walks about through the aisles tapping a sweet, soft gong. The transition from the luxury of sleep to the garish day is gently provocative. He walks about for approximately ten minutes. He seems to be the impersonal augury of better things. He is persuasive.

This reveille is paradisian.

In Sacramento the agent of awakening whacks each bed with a stick, unceremoniously. The result is not even impudent. But it is in harmony with 'most everything else about the Sacramento shelter.

It is disgusting.

In Redding an old man gently taps each somnolent protuberant behind with a broom handle. I was very sorry to be awake when I discovered this. I couldn't help wishing to experience the sensation of such an awakening.

This is a highly paternal reveille.

In Portland an attendant who is a stupendous basso profundo comes to each tiny room (four bunks to a room -- the men are not in large barracks, as in the other shelters), stands in the door, and roars:

"Time to get up! Oh, it's time to get up! Oh, it's time to get up!"

Partch notates this on a staff. I live for details like that.

This agent is not only profound -- he is the essence of modesty. He assumes that his voice alone is not enough to wake the dead (bums sleeping after coming off freights can only be described as dead), and carries a club with which he delivers one Herculean crack on each bed.

It shudders.

I cower: "Well, that's over!"

The words have hardly sounded from my lips when he reappears. As though every man there were not now as wide-eyed as he ever hopes to be, De Profundis repeats the performance.

I get up quicker than I ever did in my life and stagger out. I take no chances on his coming back. On my way to the dressing room, I hear more reverberations from hell:

Oh, oh, oh; oh, oh, oh; oh, it's time to get up!"

More notation, and it's a descending scale to the depths of Avernus.

Those who don't know it now never will.

My only word to describe this reveille is demoniacal.

More cheap election irony

From "The Haitian Political Situation and Its Effect on the Dominican Republic: 1849-1877," William J. Nelson, The Americas, vol. 45, no. 2, (1988), page 227:

The Dominican Republic, which has once again exhibited the fragility of its political institutions by taking over two weeks to ascertain a winner in its last presidential election...

This paper also uses the phrase, "one of the worst politicians in all of Latin American history". No, it's no one you're likely to know.

Incidentally, if you were writing a short summary of Trujillo's reign, would you put Trujillo's Rwandan-style machete massacre of several tens of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans in 1937 at the forefront (worst act of a despicable man), in the middle (chronologically), or as a passing aside twenty pages later (Jared Diamond)?

Guest-blogging with Leon Maurer, part one

HDTD readers may know Noel Maurer as an occasional commenter and guest poster here. Some of you may even know that he and I have been working on a project together. But most of you don't know Noel's dad Leon; and you should. The word 'raconteur' was devised to describe him. I remember sitting spellbound at a diner on Broadway, listening to the man's tales. He was a young man in World War Two:

Did I tell you the story of how I was picked on by the gumba Mafiosi tough guys when I first arrived in the company and had to beat up a punk twice my size to get my reputation as someone to contend with in the company? Besides the supply sergeant named Goldstein, I was the only other Jewish guy in outfit, but they soon forgot all about that. The rest of the outfit were Midwesterners and Southerners whom I got along with easily. The gumba guys later became my buddies too when I told them all about Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Brooklyn mob that were my Dad's high school buddies.

But maybe we should start at the beginning. Mr. Maurer?

Well, the story goes like this...

It was around February 1944. There I was, hanging out at the overseas staging camp in Newport News, Virginia, waiting for a bunk on the next departing ship.

I had just finished a twelve-week course of combat training at Jefferson Barracks, in St. Louis, Missouri. Besides the usual tough infantry training, with all the usual gripes familiar to any soldier today who has gone through modern infantry basic, the only highlights I remember -- besides crawling under barbed wire over a field of mud with .50 caliber machine gun bullets flying a foot or two over my head -- was learning how to do body building exercise using "Dynamic Tension" or "isometrics" as they call it today, in lieu of weights and apparatus...

It was taught to me by a farm kid from upstate New York who had a body like Schwarzenegger that he said he got by swinging an axe, throwing bales of hay on trucks, and following the teachings of Charles Atlas. He said he wanted to train me when he spotted how, after a long obstacle course, on the way back to the barracks, I paused at a high bar, and being a gymnast since I was about 14, did a front kip up and over, with a soft dismount that he said looked as smooth as a cat when I landed without losing a beat right back in my place in the column...

And lastly, there was assisting Sgt. Calhoun (who was a buddy of mine from Signal Corps School) in building an 8-foot scale model of a Japanese Zero that, along with recorded sounds and explosive ground charges, was to come zooming down over the tops of the trees on unsuspecting rookie squads supposedly on a scouting mission in enemy territory.

We did a great job, and it was very scary for the rookies; but fun for us, watching them scatter or stand gaping as the Zero swooped down from the tree tops, hanging from a pulley cable system we rigged, spitting fire from the two fake guns in the wings. The guns actually were flashlights, each with a spinning plastic toy 4-blade wind propeller with one blade: an orange filter, one yellow, one clear, and one red.

The alternate mixture of red, white, and yellow flashes were very effective as firing machine guns; and the squids in the ground which blew little puffs of dirt under the soldier's feet, along with the sounds of the plane engine, the wing guns firing, and a series of ground charges in soft dirt on the sides of the road simulating bomb drops made the whole show (which took less than a minute) so realistic that it became a standard part of the combat training, after we set up a cadre crew to handle the backstage work, before we were transferred out for shipment overseas to combat duty.

(BTW, Calhoun's son contacted me some years ago after his Dad died -- he found me through Google which led him to my online resume. I told him this story, and he was as flabbergasted by it, as he was when he found that his Dad and I were buddies, although he got assigned to D Company, and I rarely saw him after we got to Italy.)

Anyway, back at the ranch -- the waiting around for a week or so, with nothing to do and no place to go but to the commissary, since we were not allowed out of the camp or near a telephone to call home: it was the usual 'hurry up and wait' that was par for the course in the Army.

When we finally got the call to board, we found ourselves on a troop transport ship called the General Anderson. It held about 9,000 troops in bunk room holds, four cots high, with very narrow corridors between the bunks. When we got on board, there was a sign that said "volunteers wanted" pointing to a room on the bridge deck. My buddies and I decided we might look into it, since we heard the volunteers ate in the ship's crew mess, and maybe even had separate bunkrooms with the Navy crew.

When we got there, the jobs were listed on the bulletin board. The one that caught my attention was the "incinerator squad." I was curious, and dragged my friends over to the desk where a sailor was waiting for volunteers. I thought that might be a good job, since the sailor said it would take us out of the stuffy and crowded army bunkrooms below, and let six of us sleep on the top deck, in a separate bunkroom, next to the big smokestack which had the incinerator at its base. We also would have the full run of the upper bridge deck, and would get good Navy style food in the crew's mess.

Since the ship was to make the crossing without an escort, following a random zig-zag course, it was absolutely essential that all the garbage was incinerated at extremely high temperatures so as to prevent any smoke, and not leave any debris behind that could indicate a trail or that a ship had passed. Incidentally, because of this zig-zag, we were told that the normal 5 day straight line crossing would take at least 9 days. We knew then that we were on our way to North Africa, and could look forward to passing under the Rock of Gibraltar. That alone convinced us that it was good to be on the topmost deck, and we immediately volunteered.

So I went up to the incinerator with my buddies and the petty officer in charge of incineration for our basic training. And, boy, was that interesting. For one thing, the incinerator was kept at about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and when you opened the door to throw in the garbage, the draft from the 60 to 70 foot stack was so strong you felt like it would suck you in. In fact, when we opened the incinerator gate, we had to make sure that the outer hatch door was closed so the incoming air was through the built-in side slots. If we forgot and left that hatch open, the draft from behind us could easily blow us into the incinerator.

The incinerator door was almost four feet wide, so we could easily throw in two-foot square corrugated board cartons full of garbage. You can imagine how careful we were to batten down the hatches before starting work.

Anyway, besides the cheek warming we got when the gate was opened for a garbage toss, coupled with the sweat we poured out in the hot room, the gig was a cinch... since most of the day we could loll around on the bridge deck, schmooze with the Navy crew, and watch the porpoises racing the ship.

After nine days of that, we finally arrived in the Straits of Gibraltar. I had my view of the Rock and the monkeys before landing in Algiers. From there, we were transferred to a truck convoy, and whisked off to the gigantic staging area camp in Oran to await our replacement assignments for duty in Southern Europe.

More to come: Leon in Oran.