In memory of ...

On the eve of the day 33 years ago that the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh, emptied the city and took Cambodia back to Year Zero, I saw this article from a couple of days ago and felt it was worth repeating here in memory of all those Cambodians who disappeared during the Khmer Rouge regime that took charge on 17 April 1975.

Ith Chhun of Phnom Penh before the revolution: Gone but not forgotten - by Donald Kirk (World Tribune)

The young man approached me with a simple enough offer as I strolled through the grounds of the Royal Palace near the banks of the Tonle Sap in Phnom Penh all those years ago. Did I need a guide; maybe an interpreter? The response was easy. Sure, why not? The price was right too – less than the equivalent of US$1for a one-hour look around as music tinkled from a pavilion and dancers rehearsed a ballet for Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s entourage.Those were “the old days” when Cambodia was, as Prince Sihanouk liked to say, “an oasis of peace”, at least as seen by correspondents visiting from the far more dangerous war in Vietnam. My guide, Ith Chhun, had learned English from Christian missionaries, and made just enough to support himself by showing people around the palace grounds. He was happy to interpret for me for interviews in Phnom Penh and around the country. Cambodia then was on the verge of the war that Prince Sihanouk had hoped to avoid by staying “neutral” while the North Vietnamese set up bases near the Vietnam border. He was travelling from Europe to Moscow and Beijing when he was overthrown in March 1970 by his U.S.-backed prime minister, Lon Nol.

As the war spread, Ith Chhun interpreted for an article I wrote for The New York Times Magazine on the terrible Cambodian army and for stories for the old Washington Star on battles down deceptively tranquil roads. One morning, as we drove towards the South Vietnam border, we discovered the bodies of 90 Vietnamese, men, women and children, mowed down by Cambodian soldiers as anti-Vietnam hatred ran wild. Later, after I got back from writing a book on the widening war, I went down roads that seemed serene and secure, turning back when old men and women warned Ith Chhun the Khmer Rouge were nearby. While journalists were getting killed on forays from Phom Penh, I reported for the Chicago Tribune on villages terrorised by Khmer Rouge executions and on high-level corruption in the capital.

These memories flashed by as I read recently of the passing in New Jersey of Dith Pran, the Cambodian interpreter who became famous from the film The Killing Fields. Dith Pran worked mainly for The New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg. When Schanberg was away and Ith Chhun was with his family in some outlying town, Dith Pran worked for me and others. He and Ith Chhun were among a small group of interpreters taking the same risks, setting forth with journalists in old Mercedes-Benz cars from the Hotel Royale in Phnom Penh. I was in New York when Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge, in April 1975, two years after America had stopped bombing Cambodia and left U.S.-equipped government soldiers to fend for themselves. I read about the evacuation of Schanberg and others from the French embassy, feared for Dith Pran’s life and was immensely relieved when he showed up in Thailand after four years surviving in a jungle ruled by the Khmer Rouge.

I wondered, though, what had happened to Ith Chhun. Stories of slaughter in the countryside, during the three years, eight months and 10 days of Khmer Rouge rule, reminded me of the kidnappings and executions that peasants had told Ith Chhun and me were going on in the early 1970s while scholars were writing that nothing bad would happen when the Khmer Rouge took over in an “agrarian revolt”. I thought of Ith Chhun concealing any knowledge of English, throwing away his glasses, books and notes, and joining the peasantry as their new masters drove them from the cities into the fields. As a Christian in a Buddhist society, Ith Chhun would have been more vulnerable than even the Buddhist monks whom the Khmer Rouge killed off as they destroyed pagodas and shrines.

When I returned, in May 1985, after covering the 10th anniversary of “the fall” of Vietnam, I ran into people in markets, repair shops and drink stands who remembered me. Some pointed to scars on their bodies where they had been bound and beaten. They all told of the loss of relatives and friends. I asked about Ith Chhun, revisited the palace, heard from drivers who thought maybe they had heard about him but weren’t sure. The last time I was there, six years ago, no one remembered him. I wondered if his bones were among those piled up in “the killing field” that visitors see outside the capital – a sampling of all the places where people were bludgeoned or strangled by guards to whom shooting was a waste of bullets. It was as if he had never existed, had vanished in a time of killing when 2 million people like him had died, their images faded in flickering memory, nameless and forgotten.

• Donald Kirk wrote two books on the war, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, and Tell it to the Dead: Memories of a War.

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I also came across the Hansard version of events taking place at the time in the British House of Commons in London. It records that on 17 April 1975, the then Foreign Secretary James Callaghan had this to say:
'The House will recall that our chargé d'Affaires in Phnom Penh arranged for an RAF flight on 11th March to evacuate all those British subjects who wished to leave. The Embassy was closed and the chargé and his staff left Phnom Penh on 21st March. As far as I am aware, there are six British subjects still in Cambodia, four of whom are members of a Scottish medical unit working for the International Red Cross. I am glad to say that they were reported safe early this morning, and as far as I am aware the two others have not been harmed.'

When asked that Britain be among the first to recognise Prince Sihanouk's new régime (the Khmer Rouge), the Foreign Minister replied thus:
'There is a long-standing policy based on our view of international law that a Government are entitled to recognition when they enjoy with a reasonable prospect of permanence the obedience of the mass of the population and the effective control of the greater part of the territory concerned. As far as I know, Prince Sihanouk and the Prime Minister of the Royal Government of National Union in Cambodia are still in Peking. But I am urgently studying the question of recognition as soon as it is clear what is the effective Government.... As regards the general situation in Cambodia, I think that all of us want to see a legal and orderly Government established in that country. I trust that that will be so.'

In hindsight, how naive and clueless he, and the British government, appear to be.

Note: The British Embassy was closed in March 1975 a month before the Khmer Rouge take-over. In May 1975 the UK recognised the government of Democratic Kampuchea and diplomatic relations were established in 1976. However, the Embassy was not reopened and no British diplomats visited Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. Britain was the first country to publicly condemn the violation of human rights in Cambodia by raising the issue at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in March 1978. After clearer evidence of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge emerged, the British Government formally withdrew recognition of Democratic Kampuchea in December 1979.