Long-lost Khmer guerillas rediscover civilization

LOUT: When Vietnamese troops overran his village in 1979, Romam Chhung Loeung, a Khmer Rouge guerrilla, had no option but to flee with friends and family into the dense jungle of northeast Cambodia.

Twenty-five years later, the group emerged from the forest in clothes made of bark and leaves, unaware that the war was over, the Vietnamese had gone and Pol Pot was dead.

In an extraordinary tale of human survival, the refugees lived on whatever scraps they could find in the jungle, fearful of any contact with humans, who they believed were the enemy, slugging out the final chapter of the Cold War in Indochina.

"Whenever we heard gun-shots or people chopping trees, we would move to another site," Romam Chhung Loeung said after a tearful reunion with relatives in Ratanakiri province, around 400 kms northeast of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

"I cannot remember how many huts we built during those years," he said. Another refugee, Lek Mun - 15 when he fled, now 39 - recalled with horror the day the Vietnamese stormed his village as part of the invasion to oust Pol Pot and his ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge, the regime behind the "Killing Fields" genocide in which 1.7 million are thought to have died.

Soldiers sprayed the forest with machine-gun fire, believing retreating Khmer Rouge guerrillas were hiding in the trees. "I saw three people killed. Would you stay in an area like that? No way," Lek Mun said.

YEARS ON THE RUN: When they fled, the four families, numbering a dozen in total, carried what they could - guns, clothes, knives, rice, salt, pots and pans. But as the days stretched to weeks, months and then years and supplies dwindled and disappeared, they were forced to live like animals off the forest.

When their clothes wore out, they went naked. When the first of the group's 22 children were born, they made garments out of leaves and bark to protect them from the cold and the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that infest southeast Asia's jungles.

In the darkness beyond the light of the camp-fires lay other dangers - tigers, bears, snakes, or landmines left behind from the Vietnam War. Roots and leaves from the forest floor were their only medicines; animals snared in jungle creeper traps, their only meat; wild fruits their only dessert.

"All we cared about was survival," Lek Mun said. "We ate anything we could swallow - red ants, mice, snakes, birds, even tree roots." "We ate bird meat but kept the seeds from the bird's crop to plant," said another refugee at a village party celebrating their emergence into the 21st century - albeit in one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries in Asia.

GLIMPSES OF MODERNITY: For those born on the run, the only glimpses of modernity were the distant vapour trails of commercial aircraft streaking across the skies long after Hanoi pulled its troops out of Cambodia in 1989.

"When I was there, all I saw were bears, snakes and deer but now I see lots of different things," said Mun Kayang, a pallid youth in his 20s. Like others born into the group, the only other humans he knew were in his immediate vicinity. As the children grew older, intermarriage was commonplace.

Gradually, as their numbers swelled to more than 30 and health deteriorated, the group's leaders yearned for a return to humanity. Only then did they realise they were lost in the trackless wastes of forest along the Cambodia-Laos border, criss-crossed a quarter of a century earlier by the myriad paths of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

"We wanted to get out but no one could lead us," said Lek Mun's wife, her five month-old-baby - the latest of her five children - asleep in her arms. Finally, in early November - more than five years after the death of Pol Pot - they found a truck tyre which they cut into "Pol Pot sandals", the make-shift shoes worn by the guerrillas.

A few days later, they were picked up by police in neighbouring Laos and taken back to Cambodia under the auspices of astonished officials from the United Nations High Commissiosner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"I had to leave because I wanted to die in a better place - not sad in the jungle," Lek Mun said. Stunned relatives immediately threw a party of rice wine, pig soup and papaya to welcome back loved ones from beyond the grave.

"I felt that they were out there in the jungle, but I could not reach them. I feel so sorry for them," said 60-year-old Nong Konthap, after recounting about Cambodia's landmark elections in 1993, the beginning of the end of decades of civil war. Mun Kayang, a refugee in his early 20s, said he felt as though he had moved from darkness to light. -Reuters