The uniformed police officers inside the Thai Embassy grounds were literally hugging the perimeter wall at the edge of the compound’s manicured lawn.
Standing in a line of small trees, the officers were hard to see in the fading light and the smoke and mayhem of the increasingly overrun Thai diplomatic territory.
Though shouldering an AK-47 rifle, one of the officers was a picture of poise as he concentrated completely on smoking his cigarette while skinny, yelling teenagers ran past on their mission of destruction.
The only resistance the embassy offered for anyone who cared to enter was the small climb over the iron railings that faced Norodom Boulevard.
Apologetically, the officer said he hadn’t been told what to do by superiors. And look around, he said, what could he do?
The officer had a point.
But knowing the track record of Cambodian police and military police officers for forcefully evicting, pummeling, beating, water-cannoning, shocking and even shooting rowdy demonstrators, it all seemed a little bizarre that teenage boys now ruled the Cambodian capital.
Hordes of young men—and they were young—were tromping the short distance to the entrance of the embassy. They ranged in age from rueful 10- and 11-year-old boys still wearing school uniforms to teenagers and young men in their early 20s, the type more commonly seen wearing sharp shirts and haircuts weaving through rush-hour traffic on their motorcycles.
It was around 6 pm. The embassy building was not yet on fire, but the scene was mayhem, very systematic mayhem. In the embassy’s lobby great shards of glass were crashing to the marble floor from several floors above as young men methodically smashed the glass paneling that lined the staircases and the central stairwells above.
Fires had been set to piles of documents and computers stacked in small pyres inside offices and hallways leading from the lobby.
One in the mob had ingeniously punctured a large fire hose affixed to a wall, and an arch of pressurized water was spurting across the reception area.
The young men were a picture of industriousness as they busily smashed, wrenched, ripped, scattered, dented and torched.
In one office, a teenager bounced a computer monitor off the ground. In the opposite office, which must have been involved with visa applications, filing cabinet doors and desk drawers were ripped back and inside young men had found bundles of foreign passports.
Instructions were being shouted to burn everything.
Encapsulating the stupendous effort the young men were putting into their work was the sight of a lone teenager swinging a chrome pole at the marble-paneled walls in the lobby. Each impact left a spider web of masonry destruction behind. On every floor of the embassy, the scene was the same.
Then the rain of glass shards falling from above turned to a torrent as the fire hose on the wall burst completely, sending a cannon of water upward that knocked out what was left of the smashed glass panels.
Tucked behind the embassy building, the Thai ambassador’s residence was being torched. To the side of the compound, the embassy’s garage was under siege as Cambodian staff of the embassy begged the youths not to destroy their vehicles.
Many of the cars already had their windshields smashed, and the men were fighting a losing battle in their talks with the belligerents. Eventually the cars were set on fire and rolled to the embassy gates.
More lateral-thinking members of the mob were now carefully timing their arrival and departure from the embassy as computers were being thrown from the upper floors and were crashing randomly to the ground outside.
A few scattered gun shots rang out from Norodom Boulevard that sent the mob running to exit the embassy compound. But when nothing followed, efforts to attack the building redoubled and, finally, the gated entrance onto Norodom Boulevard was torn open and the crowd rolled in like a wave.
Firetrucks and an armored personnel carrier were swamped outside as the youthful revelers danced under Cambodian flags. A dozen or so riot police with batons, shields and tin hats stood self-consciously. Two NGO workers from Germany even joined in the anti-Thai revelry.
In their mid-20s and already residents for several months in the country, the German couple said they supported the Cambodians in their dispute against Thailand. A military police colonel saw the humorous side of things as he recorded the scene on a small digital videocamera.
As smoke emerged from the right-hand side of the embassy roof, elements of the mob who appeared to be older, better dressed and driving the newest motorcycles moved out, imploring others to follow. A convoy of around 20 motorcycles formed and moved west up Mao Tse-tung Boulevard to the offices of the Shinawatra group.
Shinawatra staff were still inside when the first riders arrived. A guard pulled a fence across the entrance but couldn’t stop the rocks smashing the front windows.
The staff fled from the front office as the mob entered the reception area and began to ransack. Later people could be seen jumping from the roof of the Shinawatra building to the building next door.
The better-dressed mob element appeared to be in contact by telephone. One speaking excellent English, who said he was a student at the National Institute of Management, photographed the destruction with his top-of-the-line digital, photo-capable mobile telephone.
He was able to tell reporters the play of events for the rest of the night, so it was just a matter of reporters arriving and waiting for the rioters.
After Shinawatra was attacked the next office was to be Samart near Phsar Thmei, then down to the Royal Phnom Penh Hotel and, probably, back up to burn down the Juliana Hotel which had only been smashed by the mob earlier in the day.
One man tried to loot a piece of computer equipment from the Shinawatra office but was stopped by a youth who took it from him and smashed it on the ground.
An older man, in beige police-style pants, was also seen discouraging the youths from burning the building down, indicating that they should just burn the mountain of computer equipment and desks being stacked on the street outside.
Next stop was the Samart building. It was already an inferno by the time the group who had thrashed the Shinawatra office arrived. Shortly after, an advance party set out for the Royal Phnom Penh Hotel on Sothearos Boulevard, but arrived so early that they left again.
It took another 30 minutes before the main body of attackers began arriving.
Looking from the street into the hotel’s glass-windowed restaurant, unsuspecting guests were still being shown to dinner tables by uniformed waiters.
The dining guests first knew the hotel was under attack when their automobiles were set on fire in the small car park in front of the hotel reception. Dinner guests could be seen putting down menus and raising from their tables, but urgency only intruded when a rock came crashing through the restaurant’s window.
The youths swarmed the restaurant, smashing all in their way, and with surprising speed set the hotel on fire. Electricity shut down and then, shortly afterward, the looting started. By all accounts, that started in the wine cellar.
Armed with cudgels of all descriptions and bottles of stolen wine, beer and the odd lampshade, the mob’s appetite for destruction rocketed skyward as they questioned hotel guests and foreigners in a bid to find Thai nationals.
The now 500-strong motorized mob now planned their next strike, which all agreed would be the Juliana Hotel.
People lined the streets waving and cheering on the mob.
The mood was triumphant and jovial. Ironically, the apparently fever-pitched nationalistic mob drove several times past the apparently unguarded Vietnamese Embassy on Monivong Boulevard.
Jan 29 was strictly a Thai affair.
The night ground on and the mob swelled.
But the approach roads to the Juliana Hotel—located not too far from the home of Director General of National Police Hok Lundy—were heavily protected, just as, the mob was to find, the Hotel Inter-Continental.
A barrage of tracer fire from AK-47s and heavy machine guns atop two or three APC’s stopped the horde in its motorcycle tracks at the Olympic Stadium.
Regrouping, the mob made three more approaches from Kampuchea Krom Boulevard, Charles De Gaulle Boulevard and Phsar O’Russei but were met with very convincing salvos of above head-level tracer fire that sent the teenagers scurrying.
Thwarted, but not sated, the mob headed in the direction of the Inter-Continental, where the Thai Airways office is located.
But that too had apparently special protection, and the hundreds of motorcycles approaching in one solid mob up Monineath Boulevard was met with the most intense and sustained gunfire of the whole night.
A blanket of green-blue and red-colored tracers were sent into the night sky and the mob withered. Moving back down toward Charles De Gaulle Boulevard, the hundreds-strong mob was thwarted by a lone police officer with an AK-47 who scattered the lot with a few shots in the air when they stopped to smash a shop sign near his home.
The mob dispersed in terror, probably proving in that one incident that the whole night could have been checked if the authorities had seriously decided upon it.
Almost on the dot of 12 midnight, some six hours after the majority of the rioting began, five large military trucks carrying dozens of well-armed national military police officers confronted the main body of the motorcycle mob on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard.
Blocking either end of the road, troopers jumped from the trucks and grabbed several rioters and their motorcycles and threw them on the back of their trucks.
In the face of the no-nonsense military police, the mob’s $9 million-per-hour rampage dispersed in less than 15 minutes.
