BRUSSELS -- In the West, Cambodia is synonymous with the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. David Puttnam's film "The Killing Fields" seemed to tell it all. Towns and cities were emptied into the countryside and the population enslaved and brutalized. "Luckier" intellectuals were quickly murdered for merely wearing a watch. Those less fortunate were sent to the torture center of Tuol Sleng, where they suffered long and hard before the mercy of death came.
The country's agony was finally relieved in 1979, when Vietnam, fed up with Cambodia's endless military incursions into its territory, invaded and replaced Pol Pot with its own government of choice. This government slowly transformed itself under international pressure, physically and morally, into the Asian democracy in place today.
The reality, though, was rather different. The economic and social roots of Cambodia's brutal past, internal and external, shape the present. Today Cambodian companies sponsor Pol Pot's funeral pyre; the village stores sell Coca-Cola; and the country has the best elections that money can buy. Former Khmer Rouge figures are political candidates, and while a vicious anti-Vietnamese racism pervades America's favored party, the Royalist minority tries to hold the political process to ransom.