Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge and the Khmer People

I recently watched an excellent documentary on the fall of Saigon.  It was in April 1975 and,  after years of war, the dramatic end was as swift as it was chaotic.  The images of helicopters airlifting the last Americans, as well as desperate South Vietnamese trying to join them,  was symbolic of America's disgraceful exit.  The super-power was defeated. Its arrogance, misunderstanding  and misadventure in Vietnam resulted in the death of millions and near total destruction of the country.

After the last American ships left the coast, Indochina fell into darkness in Western consciousness.  At about the same time, in neighbouring Cambodia, (a victim of the Vietnam war that was also bombed relentlessly and had its own political turmoil)  a new form of society emerged with the absurd ideology of the Khmer Rouge.   Their leader Pol Pot,  an intellectual educated in France,  decided to empty the cities and began his radical social reform with the goal of creating a purely agrarian Communist society.  The Khmer Rouge forced millions from the cities to the countryside to take up work in the fields. Over the next three years,  hundreds of thousands of people were killed through political purges, forced labour and in starvation resulting from massive crop failures that followed. The word genocide re-appeared to describe the reality of the country.  One of the appalling methods of the Khmer Rouge was the use of children, who were separated from their parents and were indoctrinated to torture and execute them.  It is estimated  that over two million were killed, their bodies dumped into mass graves in what became known as the "killing fields".

The Sino-Soviet split was reflected in the two South East Asian nations, and after three years of Pol Pot's murderous regime, the Vietnamese (Soviet backed)  invaded Cambodia (backed by China)  in 1979 and sent the Khmer Rouge fleeing to the western jungles.

Seeing that film and re-examining several books I had read in the past,  reminded me of two trips I had done,  one to Vietnam in 1991, the other to Cambodia in 1998.   There had been some difficult negotiations in Cambodia at the time, between the various political groups vis-à-vis the government, which resulted in many armed skirmishes in and around Phnom Penh.  Consequently, there were few tourists there when I arrived and the massive boom in tourism, particularly to the famous temples of Angkor Wat,  had not begun until a few years later.  When I visited the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, in a suburb the capital, I was the only person there after passing through the gate.  It was a secondary school converted into an interrogation and torture centre.  An estimated 20 000 Cambodians were interrogated and eventually killed at Tuol Sleng.  The Khmer Rouge were meticulous in their recording of prisoners and everyone who passed through was photographed before they were made to "confess" their crimes before they were eventually tortured then killed.  When the Vietnamese forces rolled through Phnom Penh, the retreating Khmer Rouge abandoned Tuol Sleng without destroying much of the evidence of the horror that was taking place in the old high school.  The Vietnamese backed government kept the prison as it was and renamed it the Genocide Museum.

Hundreds of those photographs are displayed on the wall.  This one above was at the entrance, blown up large.   I remember standing in front of it for a long time, a wave of sorrow and sadness passing through me.  It's not often for me to feel anything remotely related to ghosts or spirits however,  I did feel a sort of real negative energy from that place.  I was mesmerized and haunted by all those photos, hollow expressions of fear and resignation to an unspeakable fate.

The revulsion of it was amplified in the knowledge that it was previously a school and also that I was completely alone in the entire building, no guides or other tourists.   There were chalkboards with absurd rules that the prisoners had to follow.  I stood in what was a torture room, still stained with blood on the tiled floor, a rusty bed frame with a single shackle and chain.   A few kilometres away  in the village of Choeung Ek, lies another grim reminder of that dark episode in Cambodia's history,  part of the killing fields were most of the bodies from Tuol Sleng were buried in mass graves.  Skulls are displayed in a commemorative stupa.  

"To keep you is no benefit.  To destroy you is no harm."  This was one of the Khmer Rouge's mottos, in reference to what they called the 'New People', usually urban civilians. They controlled every aspect of their lives, how Cambodians acted, what they wore and to whom they could talk to.  The Vietnamese-backed government was installed in 1979 and the nightmare of what had happened in 'Democratic Kampuchea'  (the short lived re-named country controlled by the  Khmer Rouge) had ended.  

In 1998,  anyone over 25 years of age, had lived and remembered those years of terror and virtually no family was not affected by those tragic events.  Being there, at that time, one could not help but think of the recent history that had unfolded in the country.   I remember thinking that it was quite a mind fuck meeting some local Cambodians.  On the surface, like other countries in the region with the similar geography and culture,  Cambodians seemed to be friendly and busy getting on with daily routines.  It was, and still is, a poor nation with all the difficulties of the developing world.  However, one noticed too that they were a little skewed in their perception of life and even just regular interactions with people, there seemed to be at times a vacant,  almost shell shocked attitude towards everything.  

This is not the case now, with over half the population born well after those years of war and atrocities.  The monuments of Angkor Wat were indeed impressive, reflecting a time, long ago,  of a complex society with a developed knowledge of astronomy, architecture, art and agriculture.  It was Hindu with an overlapping influence of Buddhism,  in which the following centuries, the Khmer people eventually chose as their main religion. 

Beautiful 'Apsaras' -  relief carvings on the walls of the temple complex. 

The massive stone heads of Buddha at the Bayon temple.

The atrocities of that era faded away, time passed and people got on with their everyday lives, like they do everywhere after war  and human suffering.  Twenty years later,  apparently Cambodia is a beehive of activity, not unlike its neighbouring countries with booming development in its cities.  Not surprising with China being the massive engine fuelling economic projects in the entire South East Asian region.