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Fighters, Hunters and
Spirits
By Brian Mockenhaupt
The Cambodia Daily
Kong Hean became a Khmer Rouge soldier 21 years ago, at the age of 14,
fighting a guerrilla war in the mountains of southwestern Cambodia. He
has been hunting tigers, deer and boar for nearly as long. For
conservationists searching for wildlife in the Cardamom mountains, this
makes him an invaluable member of the expedition.
"We couldn't do this job without the guides," says Steven Swan,
a mammal researcher.
The best guides can walk through the jungle at night and never lose their
way. They know where elephants and tigers walk, where monkeys scamper in
the trees.
Kong Hean drinks a cup of water in the morning and one in the late
afternoon, never during the day. When he goes to the jungle to hunt—a
trip that can last for up to a month—he takes nothing but a hammock and
a gun, the same two things he carried as a Khmer Rouge fighter. Food and
water he finds in the jungle.
He knows the jungle well, perhaps better than anyone else in the area.
Logging companies have offered him up to $800 per month to guide them to
the biggest trees, but he declined. He doesn't like what the logging
companies do to his forest, how they try to keep him from hunting there.
Conservationists eventually would like to train hunters like Kong Hean
to be rangers, patrolling the forests for poachers and teach their
neighbors about wildlife. "Instead of going into the forest to hunt
and collect, they can use this knowledge to save things," Swan says.
Along with knowledge of the forests and its animals, locals share strongly
held beliefs in the mountain spirits. In the central Cardamoms, the
mountain protector is named Gay Mao, or Old Woman.
"Hunters are very clever," says Meng Monyrak of the Ministry of
Environment. "If they want wildlife, they will ask Gay Mao."
Gay Mao keeps the forest in balance, locals say, by sending only old,
sick or bad animals to be killed. If hunters offend Gay Mao, they must
apologize. "If you do something wrong in the forest and make the
spirits
mad, you must make an offering and pray," says Van Chan, a hunter
from
Thmar Baing.
As the local story goes, Kong Hean acted badly in the forest—though he
would not say what he did—and a spirit was sent into a tiger to attack
him. He escaped, but had to run through the day for many kilometers.
When the Ministry of Environment plant team came to the Cardamoms, they
asked Gay Mao that no tigers, bears or elephants approach them. "We
are scared," says Meng Monyrak.
Khmer Rouge fighters are said to have found favor with Gay Mao because
they respected the forest and did not regularly hunt tigers , elephants or
monkeys—animals believed to be protected by spirits.
"The Khmer Rouge killed people but they preserved nature. This regime
does not kill, but it destroys everything," says Van Chan, a local
guide.
But the conservation ethos apparently has its limits. In Pursat province,
villagers in a former Khmer-Rouge area hunt tigers with landmines, placing
dead deer on the mines which explode when the bait is dragged away. This
blows up the tiger, but the bones can still be retrieved. They sell for
$200 per kilogram.
The techniques can be brutal. But as conservationists working in the
Cardamoms discovered, the villagers are both practical and hardened.
Their stories of life in the mountains range from the fantastic to the
disturbing.
On a mountain in the Mt Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary, far from the nearest
village, the expedition team was running low on food and discussing how
soon they would have to return to base camp. "I guess we'll all have
to
put our names in a hat to see who we eat first," Swan said.
"I've had human heart before. It's good," said one of the
guides, a
former Khmer Rouge fighter. He insisted he did not know what he was
eating at the time, but only learned later from friends. Swan found the
exchange unsettling.
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