Cambodia: Will They Remember?

January 11, 2009
Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh, a city of 1.5 million, looks impressive on arrival from the Mekong. The Royal Palace with its red and gold gilded exterior and the characteristic dragon’s tails on each corner of the roof eclipses any other structure visible from the water.

The palace is the home of King Sihanouk who has a reputation as a chameleon, a betrayer of his countrymen during the time of the Khmer Rouge. In a word, he is an opportunist. For example, it is Sihanouk who has prevented the top level Khmer Rouge responsible for the genocide in Cambodia from being prosecuted. His Prime Minister, Hun Sen,( the real leader since the king is the titular head )blocked the UN’s intention of holding tribunals. He is quoted as saying: “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the twenty-first century with a clean slate.”

Some facts about the country. Cambodians, the majority of whom are farmers and fisherman, make, on average, $1-2 per day. The population, in stark contrast to Vietnam is only 13 Million. The historical period that put the country on the map was the Khmer rule from the 11-14th century that is reflected in the temples and artifacts of Angkor Wat, about 100 miles north of Phnom Penh in the Kampong Cham province. Cambodia was liberated from French rule on November 9, 1953. Since independence, the major industry ( still in its infancy ) revolves around women working in garment factories, and, since 1998, when Cambodia opened its doors to the world, tourism. There are reports of oil and natural gas resources in the Gulf of Thailand but in Cambodian-border waters, which seems to offer hope for some future income.

My take on Phnom Penh, with its two story colonial stucco, balconied houses, was that the Cambodians had built an impressive exterior in this urban center, but what about the infrastructure, the healthcare system, education—all of which are sorely lacking by all accounts. In Gargan's The River's Tale, he notes that there is reason to believe that every home in Phnom Penh has a weapon in response to some degree to the Pol Pot regime that devastated the country and created distrust in its people.

That regime is the crucial piece of recent history about Cambodia, the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot from 1975-1979. During those difficult years for Southeast Asia with the close of the Vietnam War, and the agression of the Vietnamese into Cambodia, the Red Chinese-backed Cambodian group, angkar, recruited illiterate or poorly educated adolescent boys as foot soldiers and ravaged every part of the country. Pol Pot gained a foothold after the king abdicated the throne, and the puppet government, supported and propped up by the U.S. to avoid a Communist takeover in the country, failed. (This is admittedly the Cliff Notes version of the period.)

The first major move of Pol Pot or Brother One as he was known by his troups, was to march into Phnom Penh amidst cheering crowds. Shortly thereafter, though, those same people, nearly two million of them, were not cheering. They were ordered to pack up and leave the city. The ideology of Pol Pot was simple: there is no religion, there is no family loyalty, and there is no property. The future of Cambodia, he told the people, was the return to an agrarian society. There was no need for art, literature, education. And, so, they went, many of them on foot, to the countryside, and started over. The old, anyone who resisted and the hospitalized were shot.

Pol Pot's credo is nothing new for a communist philosophy. But his cruelty to his own people was. 10,000 people were rounded up for no reason, tortured into making forced confessions about others just to stop the pain. Then, most of them were murdered. Political prisoners included journalists, educators, religious—the intellectuals were all killed, leaving this culture without the key artisans and intellectuals whose human richness advances generations by passing on their traditions and values and adding new ones.

The most famous of the prisons was in Phnom Penh. S21 was a converted three-story school with a wide central courtyard not far from the king's palace.

I went to S21 with a Cambodian guide, probably 30 or so,who was from northwest Cambodia, near Battambong. In the courtyard, near flowering trees today, he pointed out two poles about a foot in diameter each that stood ten feet off of the ground and connected by an iron pole that had two sets of shackles soldered to it. The young guide explained that prisoners who were not confessing to the liking of the interrogators were shackled to this pole by their wrists, their hands tied behind them unprotected from the searing sun, and enduring the agony of holding their entire body weight by their shoulders and hands for varying amounts of time.

When prisoners were processed at S21, they first had their photos taken with an assigned number. The S21 commandant, Kang Kach Ieu who kept meticulous records of prisoners. He had been educated under a program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, attended high school in Phnom Penh where he scored second on a national exam. He was teaching math in the capital when he became involved with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas and eventually became the chief interrogator--
and the man who signed the death sentence of all those who died in S21.

Now, these photos in faded black and white, line wall after wall of the former prison. Men, women, children—all have what we would call “mug shots” a straight on picture of their face and neck. But instead of the cocky, or drunken or lost look of any mug shot I’ve ever seen in the U.S., these pictures telegraph fear in numbing consistency.

I walked from wall to wall and it was clear from the eyes of every one that they knew that they were in for first horrendous pain, and starvation, and then, probably, death. Prisoners were kept in S21 an average of four months according to the guide before they were either dead from the torture and lack of food or else they were transported by truck to the Killing Fields made famous by the film of the same name.

(When Roth, our guide, spoke of the holocaust his eyes filled and his voice cracked just a bit. Two of his uncles were taken away. One returned years later, his life spared at the last minute before his execution because one of the Khmer found out he was a mechanic and could fix their equipment. He only returned in 1985. Roth's grandmother was blinded by the Khmer. Almost every family in Cambodia was touched in some way during the swift but deadly timeframe of little over three years that Pol Pot was in power.)

Prisoners were brought by truck to Choeung Ek, marched blindfolded to one of several pits and either bludgeoned with a pipe or shot, then pushed into the hole. Almost 9,000 people were exhumed. Today, there is a giant stupa (a mausoleum of sorts) that is filled to the brim with skulls to commemorate this holocaust. Nothing could have prepared me for this prison.

I took only one picture. It seemed irreverent. It felt exploitive. And, I suppose, it was too much, too overwhelming, to see this much depravity, this demonstration of man’s inhumanity. I took a shot of the courtyard just as a reminder that things aren’t’ always what they appear. The neat quad looked so benign in the midafternoon, the trees swaying in the hot breeze. This could have been any school.

But the images and torture chambers I saw stayed with me. I could see rooms with simply an iron bed, shackles soldered to the foot, and a battery used to administer the electric shocks that night when I closed my eyes. The poster size wall photo showed a dead prisoner left there after the quick exit of Khmer guards when Vietnam invaded in 1979—his skin draped over his protruding ribcage, blood on the floor, his mouth agape, eyes lifeless.

There was one image that will stay with me until my deathbed. It was a tight shot of a young woman, pageboy length hair, moonshhaped face, dark eyes. She was holding a three month old in her arms, cradling his head with one hand. But somehow her grasp looked loose, tentative. And her eyes were haunting. They were the eyes of the Madonna, Mary at Calvary. Her face showed the fear any mother knows when her child is in imminent danger. Her eyes were the eyes of one who is lost, the look of utter hopelessness.

Pol Pot, during his last interview in the 1990s, said that he was ignorant of what went on at S21. In fact, he insisted that he had no knowledge of the torture chamber at all. He went on to say: “ When I first heard about Tuol Sleng (S21) it was on the Voice of America (in 1979). Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition.” ( Vietnamese propaganda to defame him. ) He never admitted any guilt or remorse—even to the end of his life. But then neither did the the Nazi leaders at the tribunals in Nuremburg.

But what about the king? Or Hun Sen? Have they seen that young mother’s anguished photo shortly before her certain death and the death of her infant? Or felt the nearly palpable grieving that seems to envelop you as you walk from room to room. Why have they blocked prosecution of the Khmer leadership who are responsible?

Do they remember that one in five Cambodians died under the regime? Do they know that it could happen again in the midst of instability, corruption, and staggering poverty?
M.C.