History: Beautiful and Brutal (Part 2)

Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1863, and then gained independent in 1953.  Communist fervor was sweeping the world, with Mao’s Zedong’s revolution to the north followed by the Vietnam war raging to the east.  In 1970, the King of Cambodia was deposed in a coup.  A civil war raged for the next 5 years, until one side emerged victorious:  the Khmer Rouge.  

Pol Pot was educated in Paris and became steeped in Marxist-Leninist philosophy.  He became leader of Khmer Rouge and “Brother number 1” when they seized power in 1975.  He idolized an agrarian society based on collective ownership and self-sufficiency.  It was implemented through a murderous domination that no one escaped.

The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced everyone to move to farming collectives in the countryside.  They singled out the educated, the artists, the leaders, and the minorities for immediate extermination.  The others just took a little longer.  The urban class knew nothing about agriculture and couldn’t meet the unrealistic quotas demanded of them.  They were accused of sabotage.  The sentence was death.  The starving collectives would sometimes find wild berries or roots to eat.  They were accused of capitalist intent.  The sentence was death.  Mobs will eventually turn on themselves and purge from their ranks former leaders who fail new tests of political purity.  Many of the Khmer Rouge who unleashed the monster became swallowed by it.  Again, death.

The Khmer Rouge ruled for 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days.  In that short time 2-3 million people died, 25-30% of the entire population. 

The regime was paranoid, suspicious, and ruthless.  There were at least 150 torture prisons established to hold enemies and extract “confessions” used to identify their next victims.  The most famous of these prisons is Tuol Sleng, known as S-21.  It is now a genocide museum.  

I booked a tuk-tuk driver for the whole day.  It only took about 30 minutes to get there and the open-air ride was relaxing and peaceful.  We pulled up to a building nestled in a busy neighborhood.  It was originally built as a school and had beautiful trees and grass in a center courtyard.  I stepped in the entrance and was immediately confronted by the gruesome history of this place, with a sign listing the rules for prisoners:

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.

2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.

9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

 

After the sign, I turned left to begin walking the corridors.  The lower rooms had bars added to the windows.  These were for interrogation.  Metal frame beds were still standing where they were left.  The bodies were gone, but photographs hung in the rooms as stark reminder of what was found.  It was the rotting smell of corpses that led the invading Vietnamese army to discover Tuol Sleng.  Some of the prisoners had been killed only hours before.  

Everyone was interrogated.  You were arrested on suspicions and tortured until you confessed to exactly that.  Electric shocks, beatings, and waterboarding were standard.  They also pulled out fingernails, poured on alcohol on open wounds, burned with searing hot metal, and hung people with their hands and feet tied together behind their back, sometimes outside as a warning to others.  You can still see dried blood on the floor and walls.  They got confessions.  Apparently, a shockingly high number of people who were arrested had been secret agents for the CIA and the KGB and the North Vietnamese, probably all at the same time.  

Outside the interrogation rooms, life wasn’t much better.  I walked up the dark stairway to the second floor, which was the housing area.  Large rooms held groups of prisoners all chained together.  They got four spoonsful of watery porridge twice a day.  Every couple of days, a hose was sprayed in the room for a few minutes to clean them off.  They weren’t allowed to talk to each other.  They slept on the cement floor with no mat and no blanket, and mosquitos tormenting them at night.  Down the hall, small cells had been created in the other classroom.  They were about two feet by four feet.  Often, two prisoners would be housed together, each chained to the floor.

Several of the rooms held wall to floor pictures of the prisoners where were held in S-21.  A researcher of genocides noted how regimes are consistent in meticulously document their atrocities.  I looked at the faces and studied their eyes.  Who were they?  Where did they come from?  What was their life like before they arrived at this prison?  A few of the stories were told in more depth, but most were anonymous, a face to represent the realness of what happened in the prison, but still distant and unknown.   

 More than 20,000 passed through the prison.  Only seven survived.

Most prisoners from S-21 were taken to a small village nearby called Cheoung Ek to be killed.  Mass graves were dug to accommodate the loads of prisoners that would come through each night.  They mounted speakers and played patriotic songs loudly to cover the screams of executions.  Ammunition was expensive and scarce.  They usually beat the prisoners to death.  There’s a tree by the edge of one grave that was used to bash the heads of babies.  It was ruthless.  And it happened every single night.

There are more than 20,000 mass graves from the genocide.  They are collectively known as the Killing Fields.  

Today, the area looks like a park.  I walked the paths through the grass and there was a peaceful beauty in the palm trees and flowers.  But the grass is uneven, with mounds and depressions attesting to the horrific history that made these fields a cemetery.  The remains of nearly 9,000 people have been found.

When heavy rains come, pieces of clothing or bones will work their way to the surface.  Park officials ask visitors to notify them so they can add these to the memorial stupa at the entrance.  The tower is stacked with bones and skulls.  The skulls are labeled male or female, approximate age, and the tools used to kill them.  The stacks went up and up, and each one had been a living, breathing, person, not that long ago.  There are more than 5,000 skulls in the memorial.  

The revolution that had promised utopia and equality and perfection had unleashed a ghoulish nightmare, except it was real and you couldn’t wake up from the torment and loss.  Everyone was affected.  They are still affected.

Only 5 people were indicted for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, beginning in 2007.  Kang Kek Iew, “Comrade Duch”, oversaw S-21 and was the sole perpetrator to expressed deep regret and remorse, and take ownership for his decisions and actions.  He cooperated with the investigation by providing details and histories.  He had become a Christian in 1995 and was astounded that the message of forgiveness could extend to someone like him.  He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.  Comrade Duch and two other people are the only ones who have served time in prison.  Pol Pot died in 1998, at home with his family.

As I got in my Tuk-Tuk to go back home, I started thinking about history, from the grandeur of Angkor Wat to the gruesome genocide of the Khmer Rouge.  People are capable of great things – sublime beauty and appalling evil.  The potential coexists in every person.  The builders of Angkor Wat left a visual legacy of greatness.  The destroyers of the Khmer Rouge left a murderous scar of devastation.  But then, other people came to build again.  It has taken many years.  It has taken hard work.  No one will see the results of their efforts, like at Angkor Wat, but rebuilding people has a much longer, a much deeper impact.  It takes a relentlessness in love, in dedication, in determination that the people in Cambodia deserved better, that the country could flourish, and lives could have hope.  People who saw a need and were compelled by love to act.  And they are still there, working, rebuilding, and making a difference.