Posts tagged khmer rouge
Between the years of 1975-1979, modern day Cambodia was referred to as Democratic Kampuchea. It was governed in whole by the Khmer Rouge, a political group with such devastating objectives that one in every four of the people it governed was murdered in order to try and obtain them. Attempting to try and understand these objectives in a contemporary context almost seems without warrant due to the graphic detail in which the behaviour of this pernicious regime has been documented.
It is assumed that the majority of tourists who come to Cambodia today are most familiar with the atrocities which were committed by the Khmer Rouge on their own people. The international news coverage at the time broadcast shocking images captured at the killing fields in Choeung Ek and the torture facility at Tuol Seng (or S21), juxtaposing footage that depicted piles of skulls with Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge. This was achieved while attempting to shed light on the situation and trying to find reasons for the mawkish vulgarity that occurred throughout the country, which was an exceptional challenge. However, one of the first things I noticed while strolling through the café laden streets of Siem Reap was the sheer volume of material, in both English and French, available on the subject. Street children, amputees and established merchants alike have small libraries of literature available on the subject in the form of books and pamphlets assembled by mostly foreign journalists and reporters who had first hand experience of the carnage. I picked up a copy of Francois Ponchaud’s ‘Cambodia: Year Zero’ and grappled with the contents of each page in between visits to the Killing Caves of Battambang, Choeung Ek and S21. Though I remain unable to grasp any form of what might even come close to justification, the book did shed light on the objectives behind the killings, objectives that could only possibly have been penned by despots and fools in the throws of deep and sinister lunacy.
Ponchaud’s book was written and published while the Khmer Rouge were still in power and so a whopping degree of uncertainty remains in each paragraph. The book itself comprises of annotated broadcasts from Radio Phnom Penh, which bring to mind the genocidal condemnation of the Tutsis by Radio RTLM in Rwanda during the early 1990s. It also contains reports from Cambodian refugees, interviews conducted by Ponchaud as well as his own first hand experiences as a French missionary and one of the last foreigners to have been deported from Cambodia during the siege of Phnom Penh. It not only deals with the sickening ease with which the regime evacuated each and every city in the country, but also the ideology behind this drastic and painful upheaval. It provides accounts of the daily working lives of the Khmer people and the often contradictory fashion in which the regime implemented its vicious ideas.
The Khmer Rouge set out to create an egalitarian society whereby everybody would work in accordance with the needs of the nation, however, ultimate power was unquestionably given to those in the possession of firearms. Families were separated from their homes in towns and cities and sent to settlements in the countryside where they would work in the fields and rice paddies. For former city dwellers, or ‘new people’ as they were referred to, this meant adapting to an entirely new way of life. The sick, the elderly and the handicapped were worked into the ground with supposed attempts at creating the strongest communist society the world has ever seen. This was to be achieved by building the country from scratch so that every field was farmed, every house constructed and, much later, every invention created for and by the Khmer people. This meant that all foreign medicine and inventions, including cars, were disposed of. There was to be no foreign intervention, no imperialist influence and no outside help granted to the Khmer people as they rebuilt their country on a brand new set of foundations that were strictly their own. This was Year Zero. (It should be noted that the Khmer Rouge did receive a great deal of foreign aid, but chose to neglect the majority of it, particularly medicine. Imported guns, mines and other weaponry as well as modes of transportation were still used by the regime. The underlying principles of Khmer self-sustainability and Khmer communal ownership in themselves were based on the ‘foreign ideas’ of Proudhon, Marx and, more influentially, Mao Zedong.)
The country was utterly uprooted, the refugees that were able to flee the country were later informed of how every citizen back home was forced to comply with the new regime and graft for the nation. It was to be a form of self sacrifice not dissimilar to Stalin’s premise that the first generation of the new way would indeed suffer for the cause, and this was no secret. Workers died in their thousands as they toiled in the fields and were given very little to eat or drink. For they were, essentially, a slave nation conscripted to back breaking labour for the benefit of future generations who would live in the historic Khmer fashion, based on the principles of Jayavarman II and his lineage who built and maintained the Empire of Angkor. This was the plight of the Khmer people who complied with the regime. This was the plight of the ones who survived, the ones who submitted to the Khmer Rouge in leaving their homes and their families. This was the plight of the uneducated, the peasants and the poor, for the remainder of the Khmer people, a different fate lay in store.
The country was in a state of turmoil. The French had departed in 1953, leaving King Sihanouk in charge of an independent Cambodia before it was devastated by American bombing and rattled by sporadic interference from the Vietnamese. Sihanouk was overthrown and moved to Beijing after a military coup in 1970 by the desperately unpopular Lon Nol, who the Cambodian people were happy to see defeated later on by the Khmer Rouge. The details of this power struggle combined with the aftermath of the Vietnam war and, as Ponchaud points out, an apparent tendency amongst Khmers to follow their leader’s instructions no matter how off the mark they are, made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to alter the social dynamic of the country so quickly. The fact that they recruited young and uneducated soldiers, who had been plagued by the fog of war their whole lives, also created an environment that allowed for the immense butchery of the remainder of the population. It was the butchery that grasped the headlines and the attention of the world.
Intellectuals, officials who had worked with the previous administrations, anti-monarchists, anyone even suspected of criticising the Khmer Rouge or who refused to comply with their idiocy was condemned. This meant that they were either executed on the spot or taken away to be tortured and then killed. Choeung Ek and S21 are testaments to those who came under this category.
There were over 31 sites dotted about Cambodia that were demarcated as ‘killing fields’, this also included the caves I mentioned in Battambang. In order to reach those caves, one has to climb up a steep hill past several pogodas and Buddha statues, taking in the breathtaking scenery and a backdrop of endless fields and rice paddies. A graphic painting stands at the entrance, depicting two soldiers slitting the throats of their victims and tossing them into a dark cave filled with skulls. The cave itself is black and petrifying, it is lit up by a golden statue of Buddha and coloured by rags representing the clothes of the victims. These rags hang anonymous on a wire that stretches from one side of the cave to the other. When I arrived there, a man opened up a cage filled with human skulls and sat at the foot of the Buddha statue with a begging bowl. The bones have not all been recovered and the authorities are still finding remnants of human detritus in the depths of this dark and frightening place.
Choeung Ek in the capital Phnom Penh is the main site in Cambodia which was opened to pay homage to the victims. The famous memorial stupa hosts seventeen levels lined with human bones and skulls that have been categorised but not identified. I took the audio guide tour and walked slowly around the killing fields that surround it. Mass graves mark the walking route where bones and teeth still appear on the ground as they are unearthed after the rainy season. There are still mass graves here that have not been exhumed. The audio guide provides further insight into Pol Pot’s regime and the events that took place at Choeung Ek. It relays stories as to how prisoners were transported there after being tortured at S21. Groups of up to three hundred at a time were taken there in trucks, by night, where revolutionary songs would play from speakers hanging on the ‘magic tree’ nearby. A generator would heavily rumble in the background to cover the screams of the prisoners as they were held to the ground before having their throats gashed open with either knives, hoes or the jagged wood sprouting off sugar cane trees. The combination of the revolutionary music and the rumbling generators is demonstrated on the audio tour and is the most disturbing thing I have ever heard.
S21 is located seventeen kilometres away in the depths of the capital. Before the Khmer Rouge took over the city, it was a school. It is divided into four buildings that were used to teach young children before the regime converted the classrooms into prisons and torture chambers. Metal bed frames remain in otherwise empty rooms with pictures of the remains of the victims found there hanging on the walls. It is terrifying. The rooms themselves are silent, making it almost impossible to imagine the screams of the prisoners as they had their flesh systematically removed with burning hot pliers and other tools in attempts to extract phony confessions. Other rooms in the facility exhibit black and white portraits of the victims, ranging from the infants to the elderly. The Khmer Rouge spared nobody they believed would stand in the way of their fanatical ideology, the boldest example of that being the ‘killing tree’ in Choeung Ek, which was used to batter the skulls of newborn babies so that they would not grow up and seek revenge for the deaths of their families.
It is a nasty experience, discovering the recent history of this otherwise beautiful and fascinating country. So why seek it out? The memorial stupa at Choeung Ek is a testament as to why this is indeed essential. Through trying to understand what happened in Cambodia and by visiting these gruesome sites, a greater level of sympathy is construed between the present and the past. What the Khmer Rouge did to their people should never be neglected or forgotten. The more that is uncovered concerning the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, the more likely that the people affected by this horrendous chapter in history will be remembered.
The Killing Fields, Choeung Ek
Skulls at the Memorial Stupa, Choeung Ek
A former classroom, a former torture chamber, Tuol Seng
