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A factory in Phnom Penh. Cambodian companies have positioned themselves as low-cost, reliable manufacturers.
Cambodia has a couple of other things going for it: Angelina Jolie and a generation of young people determined to rebuild their country from the poverty of previous generations and heal the scars of the genocide.
The other spur to Cambodian tourism has a much darker cast. A few hundred thousand people visit the Killing Fields every year; there is another site open to the public in Phnom Penh, a former school where victims of the genocide were tortured before being taken to the Killing Fields. The communist Khmer Rouge took control of the country under a dictator, Pol Pot. An estimated 2 million Cambodians, many of them the educated professionals of Cambodian society, were killed.
In 2001 action-adventure film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie, was shot in Cambodia, and Jolie adopted one of her children, Maddox, from an orphanage in the country. She has become an advocate for Cambodians. Last fall she released First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, about the genocide, on Netflix.
After an event for rising Cambodian leaders at the private school Liger Leadership Academy, one of the Cambodian stars of Jolie’s film said working on it inspired her to start talking to her grandmother, who lost her husband in the genocide, about her experience. “She’s open to talking about it more and more.”
Sreyneang Oun plays a daughter of the family in the film — and has since developed a friendship with Jolie’s family.
For years, said Caroline Bell, leader teacher at the school, the genocide wasn’t spoken about in Cambodia. Now it’s become something young Cambodians feel they can explain to the world. “We try to get them to see there’s always gray area between victim and perpetrator,” said Bell. “Globally, it’s one of the two things Cambodia is known for.”
— By Elizabeth MacBride, special to CNBC.com
