Marc into the heart of dark

I have seen the future!
On my travels to the end of the road into the jungles of north eastern Cambodia – formerly the area where Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now reigned in his Inner Station over his hill tribe army in a lawless campaign that echoed Joseph Conrad’s modern classic parable on the savage and bloodthirsty European colonialism of the 1890s in the Belgian Congo – I found myself amidst a tribal people shattered by the repercussions of what is generally referred to as “sustainable development”.

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On my reasearch trip for a Canadian documentary I set out to find the ‘last of the elephant men’ – protagonists of the Bunong hill tribe, who have always lived with domestic elephants. (Last of the Elephant Men, produced by InformAction Films Inc., directed by Daniel Ferguson). Yet, now as the jungle is being cut down the Bunong culture’s demise is imminent.

Only two years ago, the trip from Phnom Penh to the provincial capital Sen Monorom took several days in the rainy season. Today a tarmac superhighway gets you there in 6 hours. “And with the road comes civilization?” I ask the oldest man in Pou Ra Tang village. In a tired voice he replies:” We Bunong have a saying: The Chinese displace the Khmers, the Khmers displace the Bunong, the Bunong displace the ghosts.” Sadly this saying has become symptomatic for the current apocalypse the locals have to face. More and more new settlers arrive and push the Bunong deeper into the jungle where they have to make amends to the spirits of the forest in order to ask for permission to cut trees and build a new home. However, the newcomers represent only a minor threat to the community within a larger framework of threats that become apparent as the village elder continues: ”I used to catch one elephant right after Pol Pot in 1979 when the Vietnamese came. I then tamed the elephant for 6 months. The KR didn’t allow us to catch elephants. They had previously taken all the elephants from us and had used them for their logistics. Before the KR I owned 8 elephants. After Pol Pot we didn’t have any tools anymore to catch elephants, so I only did it one time in 1979. I was a teenager when the French came to Cambodia. I used to work in road construction for 18 years and learned to speak a little French. The French built the first road. They built military bases and started to make business. The road was good. The French were friendly; they gave us clothes and food, medicine and jobs. Then the Japanese came briefly and overruled the French, but they didn’t really intervene in our daily lives that much. Sihanouk ruled Cambodia then.
Many years later I saw the first airplane in my life. At first we thought this is a god. When it spew fire we got very scared and fled to the jungle. In this village three people were killed by the plane. Then the Khmer Rouge came and explained that the god was in fact the Americans who were dropping bombs on us. On the other side of the mountains, in Vietnam, our Bunong brothers fought on opposite sides, some with the Vietnamese Communists, some with the Americans, there was no choice. But we managed to survive. Under the KR everything was socialized, all property was owned by the whole community, we all had to eat together. They recruited our young and put everybody to work in the fields. If you didn’t comply you were killed. From that time on we were not allowed to wear our traditional clothes anymore. But we managed to survive somehow. After the KR the missionaries came back and many Bunong converted to Christianity. Over the mountain from my village lies the so-called Christian village where all villagers have converted. Some of them cut down the spirit forest, because they don’t believe in the spirits anymore. That is a big problem. The forest is our life, our culture. How can we live without the forest? All the wild elephants that are left stay in the forest. But now the foreign plantation companies cut down all the forest on a large scale to grow rubber. It will bring bad luck to the village if we don’t protect the forest. We Bunong people and the elephants are like brother and sister. If we catch an elephant it becomes a full member of our family. Our major task as Bunong is to live and work with elephants; people in the rest of the world might have other tasks – to live with technology and machines – for us it is elephants. Also, an elephant doesn’t need any roads.”

The socio-political situation of Cambodia’s recent past is a case study of the human condition: A problem from hell that was driven by greed for power and money by all sides at all times. Now, 60 years after Colonialism was abolished we have come full circle: In the name of globalization, a hungry neocolonialist West and China are back with giant plantation companies that buy up huge parts of land that was previously stolen from the people by the military/government. Almost all the jungle has been cut down already; last year 200,000 hectares were cut down in Mondulkiri Province alone. The locals are put to work in the plantations again, but unlike 60 years ago they now come out of “free will” and are not to be labeled ‘slaves’ anymore – only to be fired from the job again in a few months time when the rubber trees have grown bigger. In no time they will be left without the jungle, without elephants, without land, without a job and finally without food. In the meantime, the little girl at the end of the world can watch Animal Planet on the TV set that civilization has brought her when it took the animals and the jungle. Is that Progress?
Mondulkiri is the future. The place is beyond exploitation. It is the next stage of a globalized, burnt out Third World – the product of an all-out capitalism without regulations or functioning legal systems on the grounds it is scorching. In the end, only the red, red dust remains.

The endgame scenario of this is that the Cambodians will become the onlookers outside of the fence watching how robots on giant plantations grow bio-diesel for foreign countries on their land. Food prices will have become so expensive that some are starving while they watch our fuel grow. It is the ultimate Oil for Food program.