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Stories from the Past
Khmer
Rouge veteran recalls reign of terror
Anlong Veng
today: For Dom Chhuny, April 17, 1975, was a day
of joy and disappointment. He was 24, a guerrilla fighter, and
like all other Cambodians over age 40, he clearly remembers the
day 25 years ago when the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge movement
marched into Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Mr. Chhuny heard
about the takeover on army radio and rejoiced. During the
previous four years, the peasant's son had often risked his life
in the struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed military regime of
Gen. Lon Nol. Now it had happened. The Khmer Rouge had won. The
only thing that bothered Mr. Chhuny was that he had not been
among the victorious troops who marched into Phnom Penh. Three
days before, he had been wounded in the left arm by a grenade. So
he spent the historic day in a guerrilla hospital a few miles out
oftown. But it didn't really matter, anyway. "Everybody at
the hospital was happy and cheerful. We laughed and celebrated.
Some people were singing. At night, somebody lit candles,"
Mr. Chhuny remembers.
In liberated Phnom Penh, people were also
celebrating. The Khmer Rouge were welcomed with flowers and
happiness. Everybody thought this was the end of the civil war
and all their suffering. They were wrong. The celebration ended
abruptly less than 24 hours later, when the Khmer Rouge terror
apparatus swung into action. Under the threat of heavy machine
guns, all Phnom Penh's 2 million inhabitants - including the sick
and wounded - were ordered to leave town immediately. People with
connections to the fallen regime were executed on the spot. In
the following days, the process was repeated in all the country's
major towns. Many people died during the forced marches under a
merciless tropical sun. It was only a foretaste of what was to
come. During the next three years, eight months and 20 days,
Cambodia was turned into a nightmare realm of death, fear and
terror. At the end of this period - engineered by Pol Pot
(pictured left) and his Khmer Rouge to expunge all foreign
learning and influences and return Cambodia to its pure, ancient
past - at least 1.7 million people had died of starvation,
disease, exhaustion and, in at least 200,000 cases, summary
executions.
Today, the
legacy of this terrible era persists throughout the country.
Victims are marked forever by their ordeals, some physically, all
mentally. The last Khmer Rouge leader, Gen. Ta Mok, was only
arrested in March last year. He is one of only two of the
movement's top leaders ever arrested. In many former Khmer Rouge
zones, old guerrillas continue trying to adapt to a life without
coercion and propaganda. At the hospital, Mr. Chhuny and his
comrades heard about the forced evacuations of cities and towns.
It didn't sound good. "But we didn't care. We were young
soldiers. We were just happy to have won," he said. Two
months later, when his wounds had healed, Mr. Chhuny discovered
the realities. While he had been hospitalized, the Khmer Rouge
top leadership had begun transforming Cambodia into its vision of
an agrarian utopia. Under the name Democratic Kampuchea, the
country had become a vast labor camp where people worked up to 16
hours a day planting rice, cutting trees and building dams and
irrigation canals. The incompetence of the new rulers and their
fanatical belief that the war-shattered country could be
self-sustaining meant that food became constantly scarcer.
Cambodia exported rice to China while its people starved.
The
secrecy-obsessed leadership was referred to as Angkar - the
Organization. Most people never found out who they were, but it
was said "Angkar has as many eyes as a pineapple,"
meaning everyone was being watched. Paranoia in Angkar's top
ranks created a fearsome national security system that directed
the arrest, torture and execution of thousands of "internal
enemies." Many never knew what crimes they were accused of.
Young children were brainwashed to spy on their parents.
Religion, money and private property were forbidden. With 2,000
others, Mr. Chhuny was enrolled in a mobile work force that was
dispatched to various communes where their labor was needed.
"It was very hard. During that time, I had nothing but a hoe
and a basket to carry earth," said Mr. Chhuny. In 1978 he
was called back into the army. Pol Pot had begun attacking
neighboring Vietnam, seeking to restore Cambodia's ancient
borders - particularly its control of the Mekong Delta - and all
forces were needed in the fight against the "Vietnamese
aggressor." Battle-hardened and better armed Vietnam gave
short shrift to the Khmer Rouge forces. In two weeks, the
Vietnamese defeated them, crossed into Cambodia and sent Pol Pot
and his cadres fleeing from Phnom Penh into the jungles. By Jan.
7, 1979, it was all over for Democratic Kampuchea, but not for
the Khmer Rouge.
Over the
next decade, the guerrillas fought a war of raids and ambushes
against the Vietnamese-installed regime in Phnom Penh. The Khmer
Rouge - allied with loyalists of Prince Sihanouk, who had been
ousted by Lon Nol, and Sihanouk's former prime minister, Son Sann
- were sheltered by their Thai neighbors. The alliance received
military supplies from China and was fed and backed by the United
States and other Western countries. It kept Cambodia's seat in
the United Nations while Cambodia's Hanoi-backed rulers were
internationally isolated. Mr. Chhuny remembers fleeing into the
jungle around Kompong Cham in eastern Cambodia. Later, he made
his way north and linked up with comrades along the Thai border.
In 1990, the guerrillas managed to take the town of Anlong Veng a
few miles inside Cambodia. He has been here ever since. And
despite the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement, the 1992 arrival of the
U.N. Transition Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest and
most expensive mission by the United Nations ever, and
U.N.-supervised elections the following year, nothing much has
changed in this remote town over the years. Soon after their
withdrawal from the peace process in the spring of 1993, top
Khmer Rouge leaders made Anlong Veng their headquarters. And
while mass defections began to thin the guerrilla ranks
elsewhere, Anlong Veng held strong.
Not until
the summer of 1998 did the cadres here finally give in to war
weariness and defect to the Cambodian government. Pol Pot, who
had been overthrown by Ta Mok the previous year and held in house
arrest on a nearby mountain, died on April 15, 1998 - of a heart
attack, the Khmer Rouge said - and his body was cremated in the
jungle without an autopsy. Today, Mr. Chhuny is the second deputy
chief in an Anlong Veng that has been integrated into the rest of
Cambodia, at least formally. Lacking much contact with Phnom
Penh, the town struggles alone to shake off a past that until two
years ago consisted of strict rules, oppression and compulsory
hatred of imagined enemies. At the school, for instance, where
1,200 children attend classes every day from Monday to Saturday,
the 17 teachers are the same ones who taught when the town was
run by underlings of Pol Pot and Ta Mok. Then they taught slogans
like "bad smelling meat and any enemies within our lines
must be absolutely destroyed." Another given then was that
to become a good leader, one had to study hit-and-run warfare.
Now the curriculum has been changed to subjects like math and
geography. This year is also the first that the children haven't
had to perform guerrilla tasks after school hours. Before, those
under age 10 had to collect bamboo and sharpen it into punjee
sticks, while those older had to carry the sticks to the front of
the never-ending battle against government troops.
Khmer Rouge
practices are hard to shed for residents of Anlong Veng. Only
recently have a dozen small wooden huts sprung up along the dusty
main road, creating the first market the town has had in years.
Before, people had to sneak across the border to Thailand to buy
even simple household items, which had to be smuggled back to
their homes. The town is still not completely at ease with the
recently introduced market economy. Most shop owners are
newcomers because few former Khmer Rouge have had the courage to
set up shop. Mr. Chhuny acknowledges numerous problems with the
social integration of Anlong Veng, but negotiations between Phnom
Penh and the United Nations about setting up a tribunal to try
former top Khmer Rouge leaders worry him more. He doesn't know
much about it, but worries he may be arrested, too. "But if
that happens, I know I have friends here who will protect
me," he said, referring to the town's more than 20,000
former guerrillas, for whom the war is still not very far away.
FACES
BEHIND THE GENOCIDE - The top leaders of Cambodia created the
Khmer Rouge reign of terror but later met separate fates: Pol
Pot - He was Brother No. 1 and since the 1960s had been
Khmer Rouge supreme leader with almost sole power over all
decisions. Ousted in an internal coup in July 1997, he died under
mysterious circumstances in the jungle near Anlong Veng in April
1998. Nuon Chea - Brother No. 2 in the communist
hierarchy, he was the most secretive leader and knew the most
about the purges, torture and executions in Cambodia. Nuon Chea
defected on Dec. 25, 1998, and now lives peacefully in a remote
villa near the Thai border. Khieu Samphan -
Nominal president of Cambodia, he was for many years the
"moderate" face of the Khmer Rouge. He may have been
behind some purges. Khieu was the top Khmer Rouge negotiator at
the peace talks in Paris and a frequent visitor to the United
Nations. He defected in December 1998 and now lives with Nuon
Chea at Pailin. Ieng Sary - Cambodia's foreign
minister, he was aware of concentration camps for returned
Cambodian intellectuals and purges among them. Ieng Sary led the
first mass Khmer Rouge defection in August 1996 and was granted
amnesty by King Norodom Sihanouk. He lives in a luxurious villa
in Phnom Penh. Son Sen - Cambodia's defense
minister, he was responsible for security and had at his disposal
several torture and interrogation centers. He was murdered in
June 1997 on orders from Pol Pot. Ta Mok - He
was the military leader of Cambodia's Southwestern Zone, whose
cadres were used for purges in other parts of the country. He
later became top military leader of the Khmer Rouge and arrested
Pol Pot in July 1997. The last top Khmer Rouge leader captured,
he was seized in March last year and is now imprisoned in Phnom
Penh. "Duch" - He was the director of
the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where at least
14,000 people were interrogated, tortured and later executed.
Seven survived Tuol Sleng. "Duch" (Kaing Khek Iev)
later converted to Christianity and worked for an American
humanitarian group. He surfaced last May and is in a military
prison a few streets from Tuol Sleng awaiting trial.
In
the Years Of Dying - Human bones bear mute testimony to Pol Pot's
Cambodia : Survivors give their accounts
Phnom Penh
- Year Zero begins, April 17, 1975. After a civil war that kills
600,000 and topples the 1970-75 Lon Nol regime, Pol Pot and his
Khmer Rouge fighters roll together Mao Zedong's Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution into a vision of utopian rural
society. They clear the cities. Their workers are "new
people" without any history or culture. Soldiers burn dollar
bills as cooking fuel. Children are co-opted into spying,
controlling, murdering their parents and elders. Until the
Vietnamese invade on Christmas Day 1978, more than 1,300
Cambodians die daily in fields, ditches, torture centers - at the
hands of other Cambodians. The survivors are mostly beyond tears.
The catharsis continues.
The
Daughter - Meas Bopha's father
was a doctor, working at the Russian Hospital. As the forced
marches that emptied Phnom Penh in 1975 began, he was confronted
by some young soldiers and produced his identity card. "They
said: 'Thank you so much, please step this way,' " recalls
Bopha, then 9. The doctor took two steps and was shot in the
back. As he fell, he turned to his wife and daughter, imploring
them to flee. The soldiers shot him in the head while Bopha's
mother tugged her away. Her parents had just returned to Phnom
Penh after visiting relatives in Canada. Cambodia had been
ravaged and the capital was swollen with refugees, but they
wanted to be home. It was around Khmer New Year and the long
civil war appeared to be drawing to a close. Two days later the
Khmer Rouge arrived. "They told us to take clothes for three
days," says Bopha. The 80 km trek northeast to Kompong Cham
took 16 days. Soon, Bopha was separated from her mother and
surviving on her wits. The youngest of seven children, she
changed her name, denied everything about her comfortable, happy
childhood and told anyone who asked that her father had been a
barber. Three times she was marked for death. Once, her judge was
a 12-year-old boy who coolly ordered the bludgeoning of two other
children in front of her. The trio's crime had been to scream
when they discovered a corpse stuffed into the hollow of a tree.
Today Bopha is 34 and a partner in a promising Internet business
in Phnom Penh. She lost three of six siblings to Pol Pot.
The Worker - Ker Hun, 55, and his wife Chea Sam Oy,
45, live outdoors in the shade of a large tree on a plot of
state-owned land beside the Tonle Sap. As in 1975, Hun ekes out
an existence as cyclo driver. His wife sells food to workers on a
nearby construction site. "It's not a good life," he
admits. "But I am not afraid of robbers - there's nothing
for them to steal." In 1975 the couple and their three
children were sent to Kompong Cham. The family survived intact -
a rarity. "They saw my feet and my hands," says Hun.
"I think they did not kill me because they believed I really
was a cyclo driver. But all of my brothers and sisters were
killed, and all my wife's relatives too." In the Lon Nol
period, cyclo drivers were often rounded up and forcibly
conscripted. "Nobody does that today," says Hun.
"We have much more freedom, but it's been a sad life."
He and his wife now have eight children, the youngest just 12.
Hun's daily toil is to make $2.50 for their rice.
The Scholar - Sok Siphana, 40, is a secretary of state
at the Ministry of Commerce. He has a law degree from the U.S.,
wears a bow tie and suspenders, and usually brims with
confidence. Sitting in his office, he fights back tears. "We
all survived," he says. "I owe the whole thing to my
mother. She had some jewels that she managed to trade for rice.
She saved us." Theirs was one of 183 families resettled
about 140 km north of the capital in Kompong Thom. Only three
families survived intact. One of five children, Siphana could
have avoided the horror if he had taken up a scholarship to
France. "I refused to go," he says - even though
rockets had started thumping down in the city early that year.
Siphana, who spoke better French than Khmer and wore glasses -
traits that could have meant death - spent nearly four years
digging ditches. A sister's husband had worked for the U.S.
Agency for International Development and the couple was evacuated
just before the city fell. "I took them to the U.S. embassy
and even touched a helicopter," says Siphana. A few days
later, he was forced to flee. As he went along his journey,
Siphana picked up four discarded books: a Harraps French-English
dictionary, a James Bond thriller, a book on Freud and the
memoirs of a Romanian refugee. Each day he would tear out a page
of the dictionary and use it to wrap lunch scraps. "It was
an escape to another world," he recalls of his secret
reading. "I didn't realize I knew English so well until I
got to the Thai border." After the Vietnamese arrived,
Siphana's family urged him to go to the Thai border to scout the
situation. On his first day there he was found by an official
sent by his sister from the U.S. embassy in Bangkok.
The Orphan - Noy Chhomya, 34, was the youngest of
seven children. His father worked in the Ministry of Commerce and
his mother was a teacher. A brother who was a pilot was the first
to disappear in 1975. Chhomya's father died the following year
from overwork. The boy was taken from his family and put to work
collecting buffalo dung and digging dikes. His other two brothers
and three sisters were either executed or starved to death. He
believes his mother died from grief in 1977. "I felt very
lonely, but I struggled to survive," Chhomya says. "I
have numerous bitter stories relating to the Khmer Rouge, but I
try to bury them. I face them only for building my life in the
future." In 1979 Chhomya was one of thousands of Pol Pot
orphans who straggled back to Phnom Penh. Now a teacher, he earns
$30 a month and recently married a colleague, Ros Tila, who
wasn't orphaned. They live in a two-room house at the Rose One
Orphanage, which they share with 57 other orphans. Many of them
work in schools, hotels, nongovernment organizations, even the
police force. They draw strength from their shared past
misfortune. The orphanage once housed more than 500 children.
Today the area is earmarked for redevelopment. Power and
electricity already have been cut, and the orphans face the
prospect of their surrogate family being dissolved.
The Mother - The widow Yem Yon, 57, lives quietly in
Daun Sor (the Village of White Old Ladies) just outside the
capital. In 1975 she was pushed out of the city to Kandal
province, then to a commune in Pursat province. "I was seven
months pregnant and treated like a slave," Yon says. Put to
work digging irrigation ditches, she was given only rice meant
for pigs. "We could not avoid the killing," she says.
"My boys were sick and forced to work. It killed them. My
husband once went to beg some rice and they used the plate to
beat him over the head." Her husband vanished. Of her seven
children, five died from overwork and two from sickness. "My
children were put in a hole with 24 other bodies," she says.
"Others were thrown away like dead cats." Yon was
accused of being rich because her husband had been a soldier who
chauffeured a customs official. She says they weren't wealthy,
justcontent. "We had a very happy family life. My husband
used to let me go for picnics on the riverside." She had no
inkling of the disaster about to engulf her. "I was very
surprised by the Pol Pot regime - I never dreamed of anything
like it. I have had a very sad life since 1975. If somebody dies,
I don't cry anymore. I have cried enough."
The
Merchant - Bouy Kok, 68,
describes himself as a dignitary at the Champuskaek Pagoda near
Phnom Penh - arguably Cambodia's richest temple. Lists painted on
the blue walls honor donors who have contributed anything from $2
to $70,000. Prime Minister Hun Sen donated $11,000. Many visitors
believe that the pagoda is a font of wealth and good fortune.
There are two schools for 1,000 children on the grounds. Kok, who
was a prosperous fish merchant in Lon Nol times, knows all about
the pagoda's dark past. The grounds were used as a detention
center. In the middle, a shrine with glass windows brims with
skulls and bones from the 18,000 people Kok and others believe
were executed and dumped in the killing ground at the back. Less
than a kilometer away, Kok survived. "I tried to work very
hard at farming," he says. "I was waiting to die."
Five members of his family simply vanished. "I do not know
what happened to them. Every class of person was in the camp:
children, officials, monks . . ."
The Monk - "A lot of people died inside this
pagoda," confirms its abbot, the Venerable Am Lim Heng, 35,
a respected Pali scholar. He was a child in Kandal province whose
family somehow survived intact. "I just knew that bad things
came from the Khmer Rouge," he says. "Many people had
to live on rice gruel and their bodies swelled up. A lot of those
who died here were Chinese. There were also some Westerners, but
their skeletons have been taken away." The abbot finds it
hard to explain why Cambodians now flock to the Champuskaek
Pagoda. "After 1979 many were scared to enter, but nobody is
anymore," he says. "They come to be blessed. We keep to
the old ceremonies as this is important for the older people. A
lot of people believe that by visiting they will prosper. People
from all political parties come. The Buddha is for
everybody." As he wraps swatches of betel, the abbot
carefully avoids political questions. But the bones outside beg
them. "We wanted Pol Pot alive to ask him about the
killings," he explains. "Buddhist tradition is to
cremate, but if we did that now there would be no evidence. The
dead have already been reborn and are grown up. What they are now
depends on what they did in their previous lives. This is an
unusual case."
The Cadre - People don't forget such things. Few can
forgive. When Vietnamese troops swept through the country in
early 1979, chasing Pol Pot's cohorts to the Thai border,
ordinary Cambodians turned on low-level cadres. Some were bound
and hauled up coconut palms, then dropped headfirst to the
ground. A witness in Moung Aussey, Battambang province, reports
seeing 2,000 corpses, including piles of Khmer Rouge
footsoldiers, in the months following the Vietnamese arrival. Yet
many escaped untouched. Bopha, the doctor's daughter, knows that
Penh, the sadistic killer of one of her brothers, is now a rice
farmer living peacefully in Kompong Cham. At 15, Penh had been a
provincial chief. His revolutionary credentials were confirmed
when he murdered his mother. Before the rout, another young
cadre, Yong, 14, presented himself as a suitor for Bopha. Her
mother, living nearby, was appalled. The youth controlled 20
villages and could extinguish each and every life as the whim
took him. He, too, had earned his stripes through matricide. With
the Vietnamese invasion under way, Yong was seized by villagers
and tied to a stake. They slit him open and pulled out his liver.
"He never cried out," says Bopha. She is still puzzled
by that. Finally, the villagers cut off his head and impaled it
on a stick.
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