Postcard from Battambang

This is Mr Kim Long or Kum Mien as he is known to his friends in the small and peaceful village of Kompong Ambril which nestles on the bank of the River Sangker not so far away from Battambang in Cambodia’s north east.

Mr Kim Long is an unusual man for a number of reasons. Firstly, in a country where the average life expectancy is 52 he has managed stay in robust, rude health to the grand old age of 77 and still does a full time job of work.

What, however, makes Mr Kim Long more remarkable is the fact that he is one of a tiny number of Khmer survivors from the French colonial army of Indochina. Having joined the French military in 1947 he was posted to Hanoi and then spent the subsequent seven years soldiering and seeing action fighting against Ho Chi Minh’s Communist troops in Northern Vietnam until the demoralised, tired and beaten French eventually pulled out of the region in 1954 and Mr Kim Long was discharged and left to his own devices.

By the early 1970’s when the Maoist Khmer Rouge began to threaten his village Mr Kim Long was already too old for active military service in Lon Nol’s army. Nevertheless, he knew a thing or two about killing communists and so picked up his rifle again to serve in Kompong Ambril’s village militia. He modestly admits that his best friend who is also still alive at the age of 78 and lives in the next village along the river was always the better shot.

Mr Kim Long kept his past history very much to himself during the Marxist Khmer Rouge years between 1975 and 1979 for to have served in the French Army would have made his immediate execution a certainty had the fact been discovered. Nevertheless and sadly his wife and children did not survive the Pol Pot period and this has left him alone with no family.

He is grateful though that, having been used as storage space by the KR, his village pagoda was spared from destruction and is therefore one of the very few wats in the province not to have been rebuilt since 1979.

It’s a lovely low squat building in the older Battambang style and quite unlike the newer more gaudy pagodas that have been built in recent years. The Buddha life scenes within the Wat also escaped intact and are less stereotypical than newer images of the Buddha’s life to be found elsewhere.

These days Mr Kim Long, whose military bearing remains intact, lives next to his beloved pagoda and serves as its diligent guardian and caretaker.

Sometimes he wonders if the French, for whom he risked his life, might owe him some sort of a military pension.

Maybe it has been assumed that nobody of his generation survived to ask for one.