Lost tribe bypassed by history

Romam Chhung Loeung, a 50-year-old former Khmer Rouge soldier, with his family in Lout, the village they fled 25 years ago. Picture / Reuters

It was an old truck tyre, warped beyond repair, and discarded in a remote rainforest in southern Laos that eventually bore the tribe of lost soldiers out of the Stone Age into the 21st century.

Clad in strips of bark and woven leaves, the ragtag band of Khmer families who fled the killing fields of Cambodia 25 years ago trekked out of the malarial thicket in crude sandals hacked from the rubber tread.

They had no idea the tyrant Pol Pot was dead, that the Vietnamese Army was gone or that the civil war that had forced them into hiding was long since over.

They had shunned all strangers as potential enemies, and the distant sound of a hatchet or shotgun would drive them deeper into the forest.

Eventually, they were left completely disoriented in the dense foliage, their ammunition depleted. Tigers and bears prowled around their temporary camps, and landmines were a more worrying menace than even the poisonous snakes.

With their clothes only a distant memory after a quarter of a century as hunter gatherers in the deep jungle, they ran into bewildered police officials in Laos who handed them to United Nations authorities.

They were whisked across the frontier to Cambodia and an emotional reunion with family members in Ratanakiri province.

Romam Chhung Loeung, now middle-aged, was a reluctant Khmer Rouge fighter. He was among the dozen refugees who bolted from Lout, a village in the farthest northeastern corner of Cambodia, when it was overrun by Vietnamese troops one afternoon in 1979.

His relatives were astonished this week when he turned up with all the lost villagers, plus some 22 new offspring who were born in the wild.

Unlike about 1.7 million of their countrymen who perished under the Khmer Rouge, the group had managed to avoid execution on the killing fields or death through starvation or torture.

"I cannot remember how many huts we built during those years," Romam said, as he recounted their life on the run to his old neighbours.

The women had packed only a few tools away in their hastily assembled bundles of clothing so long ago. They took crockery, pots and knives, but were mostly loaded down with packets of rice and salt.

Weapons became useless once all the ammunition was spent, but knives and machetes were kept sharp for decades. Torch batteries went flat within weeks, and the group lit fires caveman-style, conserving a smouldering ember in a leather pouch to start the next blaze.

Lek Mun, who was barely 15 when he ran away from the village, recalled how Vietnamese soldiers had emptied their automatic rifles into the trees around Lout, aiming at Khmer Rouge guerrillas who they believed were in the upper branches.

"I saw three people killed. Would you stay in an area like that? No way," Lek Mun, now 39, said. "All we cared about was survival. We ate anything we could swallow - red ants, mice, snakes, birds, even tree roots."

It was common for Cambodian villagers to flee from advancing soldiers as the last gasp of the Cold War played out behind the Bamboo Curtain.

And many Cambodian refugees were forced to survive on grass and rodents. But these plucky refugees from the village endured far more than the usual weeks or months on the run.

Before long, this cautious group lost track of time. Warplanes and bombing sorties were replaced by the vapour trails of distant airliners after Vietnamese troops pulled out of Cambodia in 1989.

Ten years later, the Khmer Rouge's Brother Number One, Pol Pot, died of old age in a lavatory near the Thai border.

But the runaways knew nothing of these changes.

Medicine quickly ran out, and the group was left to improvise with herbs and leaves, desperate to remember the specific folk healing techniques to speed up a woman's birth contractions or ease the symptoms of infants suffering from dengue fever. Wounds and scrapes quickly went septic in the heat.

"We ate bird meat but kept the seeds from the bird's crop to plant," one old-timer said.

These improvised jungle gardens were sparse, and quickly abandoned when it was deemed time to move on, so the hungry refugees supplemented their diet with meat by using primitive snares fashioned from vines, or stones and slings.

Children born while their parents wandered in the jungle have never encountered anyone outside their little group until now, when the eldest are in their early 20s. Intermarriage became the norm, and sometimes produced sickly infants.

"I had to leave because I wanted to die in a better place "explained Lek Mun, a sinewy man with tired eyes.

It was up to the elder Khmer Rouge cadres to lead their band back into civilisation. They walked towards the hum of traffic and into the arms of the Lao police. No one had dreamed that they had crossed into another country during their wilderness years.

Once back home, the prodigal villagers were greeted with a feast of rice wine, pork soup and ripe papaya.

Some of their relatives said they had never given up hope.

"I felt that they were out there in the jungle, but I could not reach them. I feel so sorry for them," said grandmotherly Nong Konthap, 60.

There is plenty of news to catch up on.

Cambodian elections, first held in 1993, paved the way to reconciliation in a society weary of civil war. Prime Minister Hun Sen, who ruled Cambodia with an iron fist for years, now shares power with the royalist party. A new monarch, King Norodom Sihamoni, has replaced his father, King Norodom Sihanouk, on the throne.

Facing the brave new world, Mun Kayang, a refugee in his early 20s, said he felt as though he had moved from darkness to light.

"I want to thank the old people who were brave enough to lead me out of the jungle. Otherwise, I would never have known what a car looked like."

- INDEPENDENT