In transit to Phnom Penh

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 16

In transit to Phnom Penh

VICTORIA BRITTAIN, of the “Guardian,” on the transformation of Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City

As the weekly Air France flight from Paris rolled to a stop on the empty tarmac of Tan Son Nhut airport, the last 500 metres was a race with a beaming greyhaired lady on a bicycle, the long white panels of her traditional Vietnamese dress fluttering in the wind — the airport supervisor Madam. Ho. Today, the authority of this once graceful figure has replaced the jungle of tanks, military jeeps, sandbagged gun emplacements, squads of heavily armed Thleu soldiers, American advisers, and assorted crooks and fixers shouting contradictory orders against the scream of planes constantly taking off, which characterised Saigon airport during the war. Ho Chi Minh City, and the once-weekly Red Cross charter plane to Phnom Penh which waits for the Air France arrival from Paris every Thursday, is the one Western air link with Kampuchea — still the most isolated country in the world. ■ The baking hot air terminal has only two groups of passengers. The Red Cross’s passengers are instantly recognisable as a sub-branch of the International air community. They have the characteristic pallor and patience of Westerners used to pitting themselves unsuccessfully against another culture. A very old Vietnamese-Chinese man lying on the floor being tended by a young woman doctor is the focus of attention for the other passengers. These extremely well-dressed, mainly Chinese business families with mounds of excess luggage and wearing a large number tag on their lapel, are the legal side of the boat-people. More than 100 people a week leave on the outgoing Air France flight under the Orderly Departure Programme overseen by the Red Cross. The doctor looks as though she doubts the old man will last to Arizona. Madam Ho was still beaming three hours later when she an-

nounced to the assembled passengers for Kampuchea that there would be no plane until the following day and the intervening 18 hours would be spent in a hotel near the airport. The plane-load of Phnom Penh-based Westerners, used to Indo-China on its own terms, are too inured to mysterious changes of schedule to even whisper irritation. The Tan Binh hotel on the outskirts of the capital was hosting a large wedding reception that afternoon. The hotel foyer was taken over by a photographer posing the bride in white lace and a bouquet of red roses, with a four-generation family group. Behind them, in a pool let ‘ into the floor, goldfish as large as trout swam after pieces of lettuce or mint thrown by the guests spilling over six long tables in the restaurant. Neither there nor in the crowded gaiety at the disco which throbbed romantic Vietnamese songs and French pop through the Tan Binh later in the night did two dozen Westerners arouse a flicker of interest. Of all the stunning contrasts between the Saigon of the early 1970 s and Ho Chi Minh City none is more telling than between the inescapable spectacle of female degradation the United States Army created, and these self-confident, beautiful girls dancing innocently with their families. But a chance visit to the Tan Binh by a former corporal in the Vietcong provided a surprise opportunity to taste contrasts throughout the city, even without a visa. The bespectacled tubby figure peering round the crowded restaurant was unmistakable even after 12 years. In the closing months of the war in 1973 and 1974, as the Thieu regime fell slowly to pieces, jovial Corporal Phuong Nam was the journalists’ contact in the military delegation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G.), based behind massive fortifications at a camp at Tan Son Nhut airport. Western

correspondents were bussed out to visit the P.R.G. for a briefing once a week, and could see them too at the formal parties of the Polish and Hungarian military teams who monitored the “ceasefire” which no-one believed in. It was a small world in those days. ■; Since that time, when the journalists’ convention was to pretend not to notice that “they” had won, and the P.R.G.’s politeness was such that they pretended that too, Phuong Nam has shed his military uniform. Phuong Nam is still an official before whom rules can melt away, and he has an antique black car. Driving into town, the returning visitor is stunned by its silence and emptiness. Hooting, smoke-belching military vehicles and Hondas used to clog every artery. Now only . traditional cycle-rickshaws glide silently past the old Presidential Palace — now a museum — and the big red Catholic Cathedral. The Majestic, overlooking the beautiful wide river, is full of Soviet tourists buying Vietnam’s answer to ginseng, a lethal drink made out of deer horn. Ho Chi Minh City is now one of the few Asian cities where walking to shops and apartment blocks is an unmixed pleasure for a tourist. Under the last regime no-one walked much because the hordes of orphaned or abandoned child beggars, uprooted, starving Montagnard women, and drug-addict amputees in military uniform were simply too frightening. In the airport restaurant Phuong Nam ordered iced soda water and fresh lemon with crumbly Vietnamese biscuits made of coconut and soya. It was just like the refreshments offered after the weekly press briefings in the military airport just across the tarmac so many years ago. And, as the Phnom Penh plane rewed its engines, the former corporal drew out a photograph taken in that guarded compound during a modest Christmas celebration in 1973 — himself with your correspondent.