Top Quotes: “Survival in the Killing Fields” — Haing Ngor
Introduction
“Under Khmer Rouge rule, all private property was outlawed. Cooking at home was outlawed. Everything from work to sex to family life was tightly controlled. Everyone in the village was supposed to eat together at a central mess hall, called the common kitchen.”
“I had come to America as a refugee. With no experience in theatre or film, I had been hired to play a fellow Cambodian named Dith Pran in a film called The Killing Fields. I was aware of mistakes in my performance, just as I was aware of making many mistakes in my real life. Yet I had been nominated, along with several other experienced professional actors, for an Academy Award.”
Pre-Khmer Rouge
“The guerrilla rebels kidnapped my father. My mother collected money for his release. After she paid them, they set my father free but took her prisoner instead, so then Papa had to raise ransom money for her. When they were both free, corrupt soldiers of the other side — Cambodian officers of the French-backed government — arrested my father and put him in jail. They accused him of working for the guerrillas. After all, he had been seen leaving Samrong Yong every afternoon to visit them. Of course, the soldiers were using this as an excuse for getting ransom money.
I was sent to stay in Phnom Penh. While I was there, the rebels and the military took turns kidnapping my father again. My father hated paying ransom, but there was nothing he could do. He had nobody to protect him.
Like nearly all merchants, he was Chinese-looking, with pale-coloured skin and narrow eyes. This made him an easy target.”
“During the dry season the rivers shrunk to narrow channels at the bottom of their banks. In the wet season the water level rose and grew, until at the peak of the floods the water from the Mekong reversed course and actually flowed up the Tonle Sap River, filling the basin of the nation’s great freshwater lake, Tonle Sap.”
“The National Assembly had passed a vote of no confidence against Sihanouk.
Suddenly the food wasn’t tasty anymore.
I looked around the restaurant. Everybody was staring with disbelief at the radio. Overthrow Sihanouk? Impossible! I took the radio from its stand and brought it to my table and turned up the volume. We waited. Then the announcement was repeated, and the hope that we had heard wrong disappeared.
Sirik Matak and Lon Nol were behind the coup. They had the support of only a tiny minority, the Phnom Penh elite, which couldn’t become as rich as it wanted because Sihanouk and his family controlled all the top jobs. My journalist friend Sam Kwil, who was very well informed, told me that Sirik Matak and Lon Nol probably had help from the CIA.”
“The regime gave an order to all the teachers in the country. Huoy heard about it in her teacher training and became very upset. The teachers were supposed to tell their pupils that Sihanouk was a corrupt traitor. The pupils were supposed to repeat this to their parents. And this was where the backlash began.”
“Anti-Lon Nol demonstrations began. This time the demonstrators were not students but dark-skinned, tattooed farmers and villagers, wearing shorts and kramas and Buddha charms. Sihanouk was their god-king. Even if he could not be restored to power, they wanted his statues restored. They held signs, and some of them had knives and hatchets and machetes, but they didn’t have guns. They marched from Samrong Yong to Chambak, and in Chambak Lon Nol’s army opened fire on them with machine guns. The dead were carried away in hammocks tied at either end to thick bamboo poles. It was the same in the rest of the country. Near Phnom Penh, the soldiers opened fire on other demonstrators who were waiting next to a bridge. Up the Mekong River in the town of Kompong Cham, an angry mob seized one of Lon Nol’s brothers. They killed him, cut his liver out and forced a restaurant owner to fry the liver and feed the slices to the crowd.”
Origins of the Rouge
“Far more remarkable, he had joined forces with his former enemies, the Cambodian communists. For years he had persecuted them relentlessly, throwing them in jail, having them tortured, driving them out into the forests. He had shown them no mercy. He had given them their nickname, the ‘red Khmers’, or in French, les Khmers Rouges.
Like the coup itself, Sihanouk’s announcement was a sudden about-face and one that could bring no possible good to the country. For him to go over to the communists, even as a figurehead, would give the Khmer Rouge instant credibility. If he said to go to the jungle and join the communists, many Cambodians would obey, particularly the rural people who had worshipped him. They would do anything he asked. Perhaps even more than the coup itself, the date that Sihanouk joined his old enemies marked a turning point for Cambodia. It was the day when the country began its long, ruinous slide into civil war.”
“Until the coup, Lon Nol had been Sihanouk’s commander-in-chief. Sam Kwil, the newspaper reporter, told me, “The only reason Lon Nol was promoted was that Sihanouk knew he was stupid. Sihanouk didn’t see him as a rival.””
“Even after his fellow coup leaders deserted him and he lost the confidence of the people, the United States continued to support Lon Nol. The Americans gave him the money and weapons to fight with, and since they didn’t seem to care what he did with them, Lon Nol cared even less. His generals sold weapons to the enemy. They put extra names, or ‘phantom soldiers’, on their payrolls, and kept the extra pay. They built huge villas for their own use, while their men in the field went hungry for lack of rice.”
“The war brought a bubble of prosperity to Phnom Penh the likes of which we had never seen. We had never had so many parties, nightclubs, Mercedes, and servants before.”
“For every story we heard about Khmer Rouge atrocities there were several about the Lon Nol regime — mostly massacres of ethnic Vietnamese civilians, whom the Lon Nol soldiers seemed to hate even more than they did the ethnic Chinese. Every day we heard accounts of government soldiers stealing chickens and livestock from civilians in the countryside, or setting up roadblocks to collect bonjour. But we never heard of the Khmer Rouge stealing anything, even a piece of paper or a grain of rice. It was said that the guerrillas kept to a strict and honourable code of behaviour — no gambling, no abuse of peasants and, above all, no corruption. After the stench of the Lon Nol regime, the communists seemed like a fresh, clean breeze.
Besides, I knew people in the Khmer Rouge, even if I didn’t know them well: my secondary-school teacher Chea Huon, who after being released from prison vanished into the jungle; Aunt Kim’s son Haing Meng (Haing Seng’s older brother), who had gone off into the jungle in 1967; a few medical colleagues who had vanished after the coup. Huoy had a cousin from Kampot who was an officer in the Khmer Rouge, though she hadn’t seen him in years. Almost everybody in Phnom Penh had a friend or relative on the other side.”
“In 1973 the United States stopped its bombing flights over Cambodia, and after that supplied only weapons and money. By 1974 the Khmer Rouge had almost completely taken over the communist side of the fighting from the North Vietnamese. Most of the Khmer Rouge attacks were small-scale, a dozen killed here, two dozen there, but as they encircled Phnom Penh they ran into entire Lon Nol divisions and attacked in human waves. There were enormous casualties on both sides.
More and more frequently, as part of their psychological war, the Khmer Rouge attacked Phnom Penh itself. They used Chinese or US-made artillery. We could hear the artillery firing in the distance and then the explosions as the shells landed. They also used rockets, which were even more frightening because of the sound they made in the air, a c/ukclukcluk-c/uk-cluk c/uk c/uk, c/uk, c/uk, slowing down as it made its descent, and then pakkum! When the shells and rockets landed we ran outside to see what was hit; sometimes it would be a house in the next block, the neighbours already struggling to rescue the victims from the wreckage. Then, typically, the air force sent up its T-28s to stop the shelling, and we would see the little planes across the river diving toward treetop level and releasing bombs, then pulling up sharply and the string of explosions and the palm trees and houses highlighted in the flames and the black smoke billowing up. The government fought back, and its lower-level troops fought well, but each time the Khmer Rouge squeezed in a little closer. Takhmau, the town where my father had his lumber mill, fell to the guerrillas, and my father’s business closed forever.
As the roads were cut off for the last time, as the last armed convoy made its way up the river, as the merchants sent their gold and their daughters out of the country and as the planes made tight, spiralling takeoffs and landings at the airport, those of us who stayed tried to adjust. It surprises me now, but most of us pretended that life was almost normal. We made ourselves believe that Phnom Penh was a little island of peace and that it was going to stay that way.”
Leaving Phnom Penh
“At the top of the bridge, a bit out of breath from the exertion of pushing the Vespa up the grade, I heard a sudden murmur from the crowd and glanced over their heads. It was one of those events that happens faster than its meaning can be absorbed: a shiny new Peugeot on the far side of the river, driving down the riverbank. It drove into the water with a splash and floated forward slowly, until the river current spun it around and took it slowly downstream.
There were people inside the car. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out.
Gradually the car sank lower and lower until only the roof was above the water. We just stared, as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof.
A rich family committing suicide.”
“On the side of the wat, the Khmer Rouge had put up a military recruitment centre. They had written a message in chalk, reading: ‘If you were a Lon Nol soldier before, register your name here and go back to work for Angka. Angka needs soldiers on all levels. Also register if you were a military administrator. Angka will put you back to work. Professors, teachers and students will register later.’ Lon Nol soldiers in civilian clothing lined up to be interviewed. They looked glad. They hadn’t liked leaving the city without their possessions, not knowing where they were going. Now they had a purpose, a direction. Once more they would be serving their country and making a living. When they reached the head of the line, they gave their histories to interviewers holding clipboards. Former lieutenants pretended to be captains, and captains pretended to be majors, to get higher-ranking jobs with the Khmer Rouge. As the trucks arrived to take them off, the men climbed in, happy and smiling. They shouted, “Give the news to my parents! I go back to work for Angka!””
The Camps
“The purpose of our outing was to gather wild foods. In Cambodia we have a humorous saying about food: ‘Eat anything with two legs except a ladder, anything with four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane.’”
“Food was power. For all the talk about a revolutionary society in which everyone was equal, those at the top ate reasonably well and those of us at the bottom were chronically malnourished. Every day, when the gong rang for lunch, mit neary brought a vat of watery rice to a hillock in the fields and ladled watery rice into bowls for the new people. Meanwhile, the soldiers went off to the Khmer Rouge headquarters, the row of three houses near the railroad tracks. The rest of us had seen oxcarts laden with supplies pull up to those three houses. We saw the smoke from the cooking fires every day. We didn’t need to be told what was happening inside. But when the soldiers came back to the rice fields, licking their lips, looking well fed and content, they pretended not to have eaten anything at all.”
“We had no more family obligations. Children left their parents to die, wives abandoned their husbands and the strongest kept on moving. The Khmer Rouge had taken away everything that held our culture together, and this was the result: a parade of the selfish and the dying. Society was falling apart.”
“For Democratic Kampuchea, this meant being absolutely free of other countries — free of their aid and even of their cultural influence. We Khmers would make it on our own. By reorganizing and harnessing the energy of our people and by eliminating everything that distracted from our work, we would become an advanced, developed nation almost overnight.”
“They wanted us to renounce personal attachments of any kind, because those relationships interfered with our devotion to Angka. Children had to leave their parents, the elderly had to leave their sons and daughters, and if work assignments required it, husbands and wives had to split up too. From Angka’s point of view this was liberation, because it freed us from the time of caring for others and gave us more time to work.”
“The Khmer Rouge’s greatest strength was propaganda. They knew that a small lie can be caught and that a big lie is easier to get away with. Their system was so different from anything we had known before, and so complete, that we gave in without really knowing how to resist.”
“There was a medical clinic on the front lines. The nurses there used dirty needles and didn’t care one way or another if their patients died. At mealtime during a visit there, I heard one nurse calling out to another, Have you fed the war slaves yet? It was a chance remark, but it stuck in my ears because it explained the Khmer Rouge better than anything else. All the talk about being comrades in a classless society, building the nation with our bare hands and struggling to achieve independence-sovereignty didn’t mean anything. The Khmer Rouge had beaten us in the civil war. We were their war slaves. That was all there was to it. They were taking revenge. And on the front lines, day and night, they ran our lives with bells.”
“Marijuana smoking was an age-old tradition followed by a small percentage of rural men, and by a few others who had started smoking in Lon Nol’s army. The smokers themselves didn’t attach any particular meaning to the drug and neither did the Khmer Rouge, who didn’t bother outlawing it. When the marijuana smokers got up from their breaks they seemed to work even harder than before.”
“Muffled sounds of human activity came from the prison, and an unpleasant smell drifted toward me in the breeze. Some wrinkled black objects hung from the eaves of the roof but I was too far away to see what they were.
In about an hour a prison guard came out for me. He led me to a large grove of mango trees. The trees were tall and well formed, spaced at regular intervals. At the base of each tree sat a prisoner, tied to the trunk.
The guard and I walked down a row of trees. We walked past a middle-aged woman lying face down on a wooden bench with her arms and legs spread apart. Metal clamps secured her wrists and ankles to the comers of the bench. Her sampot or dress was torn, revealing her indecently, and her blouse was ripped with one of her breasts showing. As we went by she turned her head and looked at us with an unfocused stare.
Please save my life, she moaned in a low voice.
She hadn’t noticed that I had my arms tied behind my back, or that the other man was a guard. Red ants were crawling on her hands and her arms, and her fingertips were bloody.”
“When he left I turned around in a sitting position to look behind me and saw my missing fingertip with ants crawling over it. It wasn’t part of my body anymore and it didn’t frighten me.”
““If he lives there is no gain,”’ one of them muttered to the other, quoting a common Khmer Rouge expression.
“If he dies there is no loss.”
When they had rested they pulled me to my feet and I limped a few more yards to the next hillock.
‘Stop.’
I stopped again.
‘Do you want to go home, or what? Do you want to be reunited with your wife?’
I turned around to face them but kept my eyes lowered, like a servant does to his master. Yes, I said. If you allow me to go, I will. But if you don’t allow me, if you kill me, it’s up to you!
They untied me and removed the rope. Apparently I had given them the right answer. I had told them they had power of life and death over me. Hearing me admit this gave them almost as much satisfaction as killing me.
‘Don’t look back,’ they said. ‘Just keep on walking. Go home!’”
“‘The Khmer Rouge are crazy and uneducated,’ he went on. ‘To survive them you must be patient and very, very smart. Use your brain, son. Look around you. The canals they are building will fall apart when the rains come. You know that yourself, because you have worked in them. They will not hold up to the rains of Battambang. Everything the Khmer Rouge try to do will fail. And they do not have the support of the people. So plant your kapok tree, son. Be patient, be quiet and stay calm. One day, sooner or later, the revolution will be overturned. The regime will be replaced and we will be free again!’
I listened carefully. He was certainly right about one thing: the regime could not last forever.”
The End
“Looking back, it seems clear that 1977 was the year the regime began to crack. The Khmer Rouge had tried to reorganize the nation too quickly and radically for the structure to hold. The leaders themselves developed internal feuds, and the people at the bottom showed signs of discontent and even open rebellion.”
“The cracks began to show. One of the first signs was the increase in stealing from the ‘common gardens’ that provided vegetables to the kitchens. In 1975 and 1976, many new people had gathered wild foods, but few had stolen from gardens, because we were afraid of the sentries. In 1977, when I stole, I began noticing that I had more and more company. If I saw another shadowy figure walking around in the dark, it was almost always a new person. It was nothing we could talk about openly during the day; not yet, anyhow. But the night belonged to us. The soldiers didn’t like sentry duty anymore, and they wouldn’t go out on patrol except in groups.
Another sign was the talk about the Khmer Serei. Stories had travelled from one cooperative to the next of the freedom fighters based on the border with Thailand, less than a hundred miles away. There was so many rumours about the coming of the freedom fighters that people looked up in the sky, wondering when the helicopters were going to land.
I was still building houses on the back lines when the rebellion broke out. The leader was a man whose name was Thai. I had talked with him around a fire the year before and been sworn to silence. So had Pen Tip. Thai and a few handpicked men, a mixture of ‘new’ and ‘old’ people, one of them an assistant to Chev, killed half a dozen soldiers one night and stole their weapons. They went to work the next day as if nothing had happened, then killed a few more soldiers the following night. The third night they hijacked a train and rode it northwest toward Battambang City, intending to go west from there to the border with Thailand, to join the freedom fighters. It must have been a wild, dramatic ride. The Khmer Rouge announced they had killed Thai and his fellow rebels, and though I never knew for sure, in this case I tended to believe them. Thai should have hijacked the train the first night, when the Khmer Rouge were not on the alert.
A purge began on the front lines to frighten the rest of us. Every afternoon for about a week, soldiers tied up about a hundred prisoners and led them into the forests for execution. Huoy told me about it. She said Pen Tip kept an especially low profile and worked harder than he ever had before. But even though the rebellion failed, it had one lasting effect: it destroyed the mystique of the Khmer Rouge’s invincibility. Angka was strong but not omnipotent. Angka had lost face.”
“There were no attempts to cure what was wrong. The leaders of most revolutions would have realized that they needed the support of the people, but not Angka. Instead, the drive to restructure society went on, alienating us war slaves even farther — if that was possible.
There was, for example, the matter of marriages. The Khmer Rouge wanted to regulate and control sex, just as they tried to control all other basic human practices, like eating and working and sleeping. Earlier on in the regime, couples who wanted to get married had to get permission from their village chiefs. If the answer was yes, they could go ahead. If the answer was no, they were in trouble, especially if chlop found out they were having sexual relations anyway. In prison I had seen lines of young women being led away for breaking Angka’s puritanical rules of behaviour.
But at the same time that people were being killed for the crime of sex, and hundreds of thousands of others were dying of starvation and disease, the Khmer Rouge encouraged population growth. They told us that Angka needed more comrades to protect the nation’s borders and to join the struggle for ‘independence-sovereignty’.
The ceremony was announced in the morning over the loudspeakers. Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback, rode out into the fields to watch men and women at work and choose who to mate with whom. Some of the more clever single women insisted they had been separated from their husbands, and they were excused. But the rest obeyed. They had no choice. Whether the men and women in the couples knew or liked each other didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“In Khmer slang, ‘getting angry’ means getting an erection.”
“From what I heard, few of the husbands and wives really cared for one another. They certainly didn’t trust one another.They fought over food. There were a few instances of wives getting rid of their husbands by reporting them to the Khmer Rouge for stealing. Virtually no pregnancies resulted from these marriages, because the food rations were too low for the women to be fertile.”
“More Cambodian liberation soldiers appeared from the safety of the jungle nearby. They had not engaged in any fighting. More Vietnamese returned wet and muddy from the battle in the rice field. The Vietnamese were tense and angry. They waved pistols in our faces, motioning us to raise our hands. They asked, ‘Pol Pot? Pol Pot?’ I didn’t know what ‘Pol Pot’ meant, but I quickly told the Cambodian soldier that we were civilians and were just looking for something to eat. A few of us who could speak Vietnamese told the Vietnamese soldiers the same thing. We all had our hands raised and everyone was talking at once. It was obvious that the Cambodian soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were not on good terms. The Cambodian soldiers were outnumbered and were submissive but resented it. The Vietnamese looked down on them and on us. After translating, the Cambodian soldiers said we could put our hands down, but the Vietnamese went from one of us to the next, pointing their weapons and asking through interpreters whether we were Khmer Rouge.
The Vietnamese took our kramas and used them to tie our elbows behind our backs. Then they searched us, confiscating knives and hatchets and pouches of tobacco. They marched us off into the jungle and along a path.
I thought: Well, it’s happening again. They say they are liberating us but they have tied us up. Just like the Khmer Rouge.
They brought us to a Vietnamese military camp with tents in straight rows.”
“Signs had appeared along the highway, scrawled on paper or wood and fastened to trees. Such-and-such a person announced that he had survived and had gone east, to Phnom Penh. So-and-so wrote that she had lost her husband and her younger children; her older children, if they were still alive, should follow her west, to Battambang. Handwritten signs, messages of hope and despair.”
“A few minutes later word came back that a mine had gone off and that many people had been killed.
The line stopped. We stood where we were, suddenly afraid to move to the side of the path and sit down.
Then the word came back that the guides had all deserted us.
We waited for an hour, and then the line started moving forward again. I told Ngim to walk exactly in my footsteps.
We walked cautiously around a bend and came upon the site of the explosion. It was a blood-spattered scene, an arm hanging from a tree branch, part of a leg caught in bamboo. Ten or more dead lay by the side of the path, and many more were wounded. I made a tourniquet, removed some large pieces of shrapnel from wounds, tied makeshift bandages and advised the relatives on preventing infection. With no medical supplies, there was little more to do. It was a terrible way to die, or to be maimed, after living through the Khmer Rouge years and coming so close to freedom.
The mines appeared on either side of the path, sometimes in the middle. They had coin-size detonator buttons, white or rusted in colour. From the detonator buttons, trip lines made of nearly invisible white nylon thread led to tying-off points such as trees or rocks nearby.”
“They separated the men from the women, and the rapes began. In full view. The prettiest young women were raped again and again. The bandits who were not taking their turns kept their hunting rifles pointed at the rest of us. There was nothing we could do.
They didn’t rape Balam’s wife and didn’t search or molest Ngim.
We walked half a mile farther, then stopped when we saw more armed men. No rapes this time. When they finished searching us, we picked up what remained of our baggage and trudged on for another half mile, where we had to stop again.
From one tollgate we went to the next, and the next, and the next, until we were dazed. Sometimes the thieves spoke Thai and sometimes they spoke Khmer. They confiscated canes and the bamboo sticks from hammocks, in case there was gold hidden inside. They removed bandages looking for gold. They tore the clothes off a pretty girl seventeen years old. She had no gold to hide, but she struggled anyway, to protect herself. And because she resisted, they dragged her into the woods and shot her in the head.
Counting from Nimitt, including the two times we were searched by fake Khmer Rouge, we passed through thirty-seven tollgates. I lost my Vietnamese sneakers with the gold inside and the Zippo cigarette lighter I had carried with me since leaving Phnom Penh. At the last tollgate, when we had little left, they took knives, hatchets, shoes, hats, new clothes.
Everybody was numb. We were unable to accept that it had really happened, that our women had been raped, that our possessions were gone. In all our years under the Khmer Rouge, we had never been bodily searched, and few women had been abused.”
“A few weeks later, in June 1979, our names were called over a loudspeaker system. We went to see what it was about and found that a vehicle was waiting to take the entire family group to Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. Bewildered, we got in and were driven several hours to the Lumpini transit centre, a former army barracks with long, warehouse-like buildings, in Bangkok. Nobody explained to us what we were doing in Lumpini or why we had been taken there.
Nor did we know how close we had come to tragedy at Nong Chan. The day after we left it, 110 buses drove in, part of an unannounced programme staged by the Thai military. Buses came to the other border settlements too. More than 45,000 Cambodians climbed in, believing they were being taken to different refugee camps where the conditions were better. Instead, the buses took them around the northern slope of the Dangrek Mountains to another part of the Thai-Cambodian border near an ancient temple, called Preah Vihear. There, with rifles and whips, Thai soldiers forced the refugees down a steep cliff and back onto Cambodian soil. At the bottom of the cliff was a minefield. Hundreds died in the mine explosions, thousands of dehydration and disease in the following days. Of the survivors, some headed back across Cambodia for the border camps where they had been before — to be robbed and raped by Thais again on the way.”
Conclusion
“This much I do know: the destruction of Cambodia could have been avoided. What led to it was politics.
By politics I do not just mean the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge dealt the worst blow to Cambodia, but they did not destroy it by themselves. Outside countries lent a hand, most of them without realizing the effects their policies would have. It is a complicated story, going back many years.
To begin with, France, our former colonial ruler, didn’t prepare us for independence. It didn’t give us the strong, educated middle class we needed to govern ourselves well. Then there was the United States, whose support pushed Cambodia off its neutral path to the right in 1970 and began the political unbalancing process. Once Lon Nol was in power, the United States could have forced him to cut down on corruption, and it could have stopped its own bombing, but it didn’t, until too late. The bombing and the corruption helped push Cambodia the other way, toward the left. On the communist side, China gave the Khmer Rouge weapons and an ideology. The Chinese could have stopped the Khmer Rouge from slaughtering civilians, but they didn’t try. And then there is Vietnam. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Vietnamese communists used eastern Cambodia as part of their Ho Chi Minh Trail network, they were putting their own interests first. They have always been glad to use Cambodia for their own gain.
But sad to say, the country that is most at fault for destroying Cambodia is Cambodia itself. Pol Pot was Cambodian. Lon Nol was Cambodian and so was Sihanouk. Together the leaders of the three regimes caused a political chain reaction resulting in the downfall and maybe the extinction of our country.
On the outside these leaders were totally different. Sihanouk the royal populist. Lon Nol the right-wing dictator. Pol Pot the ultra-communist.”
“The Khmer Rouge boasted of their superiority. Others were ‘beneath’ them, like lower forms of life. That is why the Khmer Rouge didn’t think twice about killing or torturing. That is why beginning in 1977 Pol Pot made the incredible mistake of attacking Vietnamese territory and massacring their civilians. Like Lon Nol before him, Pol Pot actually thought he could win.”
“In 1928 in Kompong Thom Province, in north-central Cambodia, a boy named Saloth Sar was born. He was of mixed Khmer and Chinese blood, like me. His parents were well-to-do farmers who owned their own land. However, his family had a rather unusual connection to Phnom Penh. One of his aunts was a concubine in the harem of King Monivong, Sihanouk’s predecessor. Another cousin had an even more glamorous position, as the ranking harem wife. Through them, Saloth Sar’s older brother got a job working in the protocol section of the royal palace.
When he was about five years old, Saloth Sar was sent to Phnom Penh to be raised by his brother. He often visited the palace and learned to speak the royal language, a kind of ‘high’ Khmer with many complicated words and titles. He became a monk for several months, as most Cambodian boys did. He studied for six years in a temple school.
He was not a good student. He failed the exams that would have allowed him to enroll in the best schools. He went back to his family and then off to school in Kampong Cham Province. At age nineteen he finished his secondary education and returned to Phnom Penh to study carpentry. He made friends with students and graduates of the elite Lycée Sisowath, where I myself studied about twenty years later, and where Huoy taught a few years after that. One of his best friends was a bright young man and organizer of student protests named Ieng Sary.
Through connections, Saloth Sar got a scholarship to go to Paris, where he studied at a technical school, Ecole Française de Radio-électricité. A year later Ieng arrived in Paris, taking an apartment in the Latin They met French communist intellectuals, and long the two Cambodians started their own comn study circle. Others joined them, including a good-looking and rebellious young woman named Khieu Thirith, who was studying English literature at the Sorbonne. She married Ieng Sary. Later her sister Khieu Ponnary married Saloth Sar. The relationship between the four of them, the two sisters who married the two close friends, created the nucleus of the organization later known as the Khmer Rouge.
In Paris, Saloth Sar is said to have kept a photograph of Joseph Stalin in his room. He contributed articles to a Khmer-language magazine for radicals, signing himself ‘Original Khmer.’ For a man of mixed race, this was a strange pseudonym — probably an early sign of the racial fanaticism that marked his career. Certainly he was far more involved in politics than in his studies. After he failed three exams at the technical school, his scholarship was withdrawn. He returned to Cambodia, with a stop in Tito’s Yugoslavia on the way.
By the time of his return, war was under way in Vietnam, with the French colonial forces battling Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh guerrillas. Saloth Sar enlisted in an underground organization called the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which had been founded while he was in Paris. The membership was a mixture of Vietnamese and Cambodians. When he joined his cell in eastern Cambodia, he was dismayed to find that Vietnamese controlled everything and expected the Cambodians to serve them. He worked in the kitchen and hauled human wastes from the privies.”
“For the Cambodian communists, a long, hard period had begun. Sihanouk outmanoeuvred them at every turn. He abdicated as king, ran for prime minister as a prince and was elected easily. His foreign policy of left-leaning neutralism won him the friendship of China and the USSR, who gave him their aid and ignored the Cambodian communists of the ICP. Domestically, Sihanouk created an illusion of political freedom. He allowed the communists to participate in an aboveground leftist political party, the Pracheachon Group. He coopted their most respected communist intellectuals, inviting two of them from the Paris study circle to serve in his cabinet. At the same time, without any publicity, he conducted a ‘war in the shadows’. His secret police murdered communists without trials and without announcements before or afterward. Sihanouk even had the head communist, a man who knew all the rural networks, workin for him as a spy.
In Phnom Penh the communists’ situation was but not hopeless. The police didn’t seem to know the identities of low-echelon party members.”
“The Khmer Rouge would have been nothing but a half-forgotten, ragged band of guerrillas in the hills if it hadn’t been for the 1970 coup. When Sihanouk was overthrown, and then unexpectedly joined them as a figurehead, the Khmer Rouge became politically significant overnight. They got weapons from the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. They got training from North Vietnamese and from Cambodian communists who had lived in North Vietnam for many years. Peasants joined them because they thought they were joining Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge began growing rapidly. In this vulnerable period the North Vietnamese did most of their fighting for them.
The Khmer Rouge never trusted Sihanouk, and they kept him almost totally out of touch with their operations. He spent most of his time in Peking.”
“Six days after the takeover, on April 23, 1975, the commander-in-chief arrived by jeep in the capital. There was no parade for him, no celebration. The rank and file did not even know who he was. He kept his identity a secret. Saloth Sar, previously known as the ‘Original Khmer’ and Brother Number One, took his final pseudonym: Pol Pot.”
“Unfortunately Pol Pot the maker of policy was the same as Saloth Sar the mediocre student. He did not realize that Mao’s Cultural Revolution was already a disaster and that Stalin’s attempts had set the Soviet economy back by decades. He did not examine the idea to see if it was practical. It was senseless to build huge canal systems and dams without using engineers, but then Pol Pot was like that. He tried to make reality fit politics instead of the other way around.
During this period Pol Pot made no move to help his own family. At least one and perhaps both of the concubines related to him died in the countryside. His younger brother died of starvation. His older brother, who had taken care of him in his early days in Phnom Penh, survived the Khmer Rouge years without ever knowing that Saloth Sar and the head of Angka were one and the same.
If the reports are true, Pol Pot kept a string of houses in Phnom Penh. He moved from one to the next, never announcing where he was staying, to avoid assassination. He kept the lowest of low profiles, seldom appearing in public. Until September 1977 he didn’t announce that ‘Angka’ was the Communist Party of Kampuchea or that he was the nation’s leader. He had no children, none of the family life that most people think of as normal. His wife’s hair turned white; she went insane, and she was placed under special care.”
“The Khmer Rouge leaders lived in a section of Phnom Penh that had been cleaned up and restored for their use. Their public behaviour was quiet and restrained. They hardly ever drank liquor. They bathed frequently and wore clean clothes. They spoke in soft voices and hardly ever showed either happiness or anger. They didn’t do their own killing.
Except for their part of Phnom Penh, the city was empty. Where the open-air stalls had been next to the central market, banana trees were planted. Where the French cathedral had been there was only a flat field; every stone had been removed, and to outward appearances the cathedral might never have existed. The hulks of cars lay broken and rusting in piles around the city, and weeds grew everywhere.
Meanwhile, in an apartment in the Royal Palace, Sihanouk lived under house arrest. His story is strange and pathetic.
Sihanouk returned from Peking in September 1975 for a short visit, seeing only relatives. As the ceremonial President of Democratic Kampuchea, he then travelled to the United Nations, where he dismissed as ‘rumours’ the reports of violence and executions in Cambodia. Accepting his public statements, not knowing that Sihanouk privately believed that the reports were true, hundreds of foreign-trained Cambodians returned home to serve their country. Most were executed.
Sihanouk returned to the Royal Palace and house arrest. A year later he resigned from his ceremonial post. The Khmer Rouge kept him and his wife alive in their guarded apartment but sent five of his children and eleven of his grandchildren out into the countryside, where all of them died or were murdered.”
“To Pol Pot, the zone leaders and most other high-ranking party members were rivals and potential enemies. It didn’t matter that the men under suspicion were fellow veterans of a long and difficult revolutionary struggle. One of the first to go was Hou Youn, who had been a member of the communist study circle in Paris in the early 1950s and who advocated a less extreme reorganization of the countryside. Then came Hu Nim, another member of the study circle and later the Democratic Kampuchea minister of information; and Nhim Ros, commander of the Northwest Zone. The purge of the Northwest Zone was vertical, as many of them were, reaching down to lower and lower subordinates. Chea Huon learned of the purge in time and fled. But Chey and Uncle Seng were too late.
In most purges the leaders and their subordinates were not simply executed. First they were tortured and made to ‘confess’ to crimes they had never committed.”
“Unlike the rural prisons I was sent to, the S21 torturers kept detailed records. Their false ‘confessions’ and photographs of the victims exist to this day. Another difference with the prisons I went to was the S.21 population. Most of the twenty thousand who died there were not ‘new’ people but actual Khmer Rouge. Imagine what it was like for them to write out the first, honest version of their biographies — and then, after a few sessions, confess to spying for the CIA or Hanoi, confess to anything at all to stop the interrogators from beating them again or reattaching the electric prods. Before they died they must have asked themselves, like a scream that echoed inside their heads, ‘Why?’ Why was Angka doing this, when they had obeyed its rules? And they never knew why, any more than the rest of us did.
Nobody was safe from the purges — nobody but Pol Pot and a few he trusted, like leng Sary and his wife.”
“Pol Pot created enemies, and it is hard to say why. Perhaps he needed someone to blame when reality didn’t match his politics. Or perhaps he created enemies to destroy, like a man who is truly paranoid. Eventually he created so many enemies that the regime started falling apart. With the government unable to meet any of its production goals, he needed more and more enemies to blame, and finally he created his ultimate enemy: Vietnam.
At first the Vietnamese weren’t interested in fighting the Khmer Rouge. They were busy with their own problems, reuniting the North and South, ‘re-educating’ the masses, reviving their shabby economy. But the Khmer Rouge kept attacking their border, slaughtering their civilians, raping their women, killing infants. And eventually the Vietnamese decided to solve two problems at one blow: get rid of the Cambodian regime that was causing the nuisance, and bring fertile new territory under Vietnamese control. Vietnam is overpopulated. It has about sixty million people and a hard time feeding them. Cambodia is underpopulated. It has perhaps a tenth that many people and is capable of producing far more rice and fish than it consumes.
The Vietnamese invaded on December 25, 1978, with fourteen divisions and air support. Nothing could stop them.”
“As the Vietnamese advanced the Khmer Rouge retreated toward the caches of food and ammunition they had prepared in the mountains. They burned rice fields and rice warehouses to deprive the Vietnamese of food to eat. And as the two armies moved farther and farther west, civilians began to travel, and they saw with their own eyes the condition the country was in.
Cambodia did not exist anymore. Atomic bombs could not have destroyed more of it than civil war and communism. Everything that had been wrecked by the civil war of 1970–75 was unrepaired and further eroded — the flattened villages, the blown-up bridges, the roads cut with trenches, the washouts caused by the rains. Mile after mile of rice paddies lay abandoned and untended, pockmarked with bomb craters. The canals and dams the war slaves built were eroding to shallow ditches and useless mounds of clay. The towns and the cities were empty and abandoned. The temples had been destroyed. Rubbish and piles of rusting cars lay in heaps. There were no telephones or telegraphs, no postal services. In Phnom Penh itself there was little or no water and electricity and little functioning machinery of any kind. No typewriters. Not even pens and paper. There had been deaths in almost every family in the country.”
“Steadily, throughout 1979, the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge farther and farther west. Every time Pol Pot’s forces planted food, the Vietnamese attacked before it could be harvested. Here was kama: the Khmer Rouge, the cause of so much hunger and starvation, now had nothing to eat except the leaves of the forests. Khmer Rouge units fought each other for food and medicine. Cadre deserted, and some died from starvation.
Meanwhile, the faint trails I had followed to Thailand became highways. Thousands and tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of feet walked along the paths. With the increased numbers came safety from robbers and rapists. With rumours of free rice on the Thai border, soon confirmed by broadcasts over the Voice of America, the masses began the march to the west.”
“I had no sympathy for the Khmer Rouge of Sakeo. For them my heart was like stone. Let them die. Enemies forever. My sympathy was for the innocent civilians, like the old man from Tonle Bati, and others like him. It was not their fault that they were trapped in a place like this. I looked from the Khmer Rouge to the long-nose officials of the UNHCR and felt disgust. The UNHCR was supposed to protect refugees. That was the reason for its existence. But it had done nothing when the Thai government pushed forty-five thousand innocent Cambodians over the border and onto the minefields of Preah Vihear. Now it was setting up a camp to take care of Khmer Rouge. It did nothing for the victims and everything for the criminals. What was wrong with the UNHCR? Why couldn’t it help the right refugees?
The Westerners just didn’t seem to understand much about Cambodians. Even John Crowley had to ask me which people were Khmer Rouge. But at least he knew there was a difference, and he was trying to learn to spot it with his own eyes.
I could tell the Khmer Rouge at a glance. They were the well-fed ones, with healthy, round cheeks. They wore black clothes that were not ripped, and new kramas made of silk or cotton. But even without the clothes and the healthy bodies, their expressions gave them away. They looked at me with narrowed eyes and curled-back lips, and they turned disdainfully away.”
“The Tiger made me an offer. She would let me go to the United States if I worked with refugees first, as a doctor. She said there was a big influx of Cambodians on the border and that the Thais were going to open more camps like Sakeo. I told her okay.”
“The Khmer Serei were a disappointment. They collected bonjour, put up tollgates and fought each other for control of the black-market trade.”
“The population climbed to an official figure of 130,000, though the actual figure was higher. At its peak, Khao-I-Dang was the largest settlement of Cambodians anywhere in the world.
At night the camp was unsafe. There were revenge killings, robberies and rapes. Thai villagers came over the fence at night to sell goods, and Thai soldiers fired at those who wouldn’t give them bonjour.”
“For most of the refugees this was the first time inside an airplane. We were on a seven-hundred-seat Boeing 747 chartered from Flying Tiger Airlines. We filled every seat. Row after row, aisle after aisle, nothing showing over the seat tops but black Asian hair.
As soon as the plane took off from the runway, the airsickness began. Lots of noisy vomiting, sometimes in the airsickness bags, sometimes not. The children rushed to the side of the plane to look out the window, old women began praying in loud voices and H’mong babies squatted in the aisles and peed. One old Cambodian lady told everyone in a loud voice not to touch the seat-reclining buttons in the armrests in case it caused the plane to fall into the ocean.
I was the doctor on the flight and also the one who translated information into Khmer about fastening the seat belts, not smoking and using the emergency air supply. Someone else did the translating for Vietnamese and Lao. I got on the loudspeaker several times to remind the Cambodians how to use the lavatories. I told them not to be afraid. When they got inside the lavatories they should lock the door, because that would also turn the lights on. When they were finished with the toilet they should use the flushing handle. My advice didn’t do much good. Some of the Cambodians were so rural that they had never seen flush toilets before. I could see the confusion on their faces. They were afraid to ask questions, afraid to touch anything on the plane in case it broke and they would be blamed for it. But they were also afraid to disgrace themselves for soiling their clothes. Slowly, inevitably, as the hours passed and as their bladders filled, they edged nervously toward the lavatories. Inside, I am sure, most of them squatted in darkness with their feet on the toilet seat in Asian style.”
“I had changed my mind. If I could be in the film, I decided, in any capacity, I could help tell the story of Cambodia. And that was important because it was a story nobody really knew. Most Americans didn’t even know where Cambodia was. They had heard of Vietnam, but not Cambodia. Even in LA, non-Cambodian Asians didn’t know what had happened under the Khmer Rouge regime. If we told them they just nodded their heads and pretended to believe us so we wouldn’t lose face.”
“The Western media began running stories about The Killing Fields. Until that time relatively few people knew what had happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years — intellectuals and Asia experts had, maybe, but not the general public. The film put the story of those years in terms that everybody could understand, because it was a story about the friendship between two men.”
“Cambodia is now called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Heng Samrin, the former Khmer Rouge commander, is still the puppet leader. The hand inside the puppet is still Vietnamese. Vietnamese ‘advisers’ give the orders, and 150,000 well-armed Vietnamese troops make sure the orders are carried out.
Quietly and without formal announcements the Vietnamese have colonized Cambodia. They take huge amounts of fish from Tonle Sap, our inland sea, and truck it to Vietnam. They take our rubber and rice and other natural resources. They encourage Vietnamese nationals and Cambodians of Vietnamese descent to settle throughout Cambodia. Vietnamese men take Khmer women to be their wives, whether the women want it or not. Vietnamese crimes against Cambodians go unpunished. In the schools there is little study of Cambodian culture. Vietnamese and Russian languages are taught, and the brightest students are sent off to Hanoi or to Moscow for higher education.
Though the Vietnamese do not tie people up and throw them into mass graves, the way the Khmer Rouge did, their system of justice has much in common with that of the Khmer Rouge. They arrest people for making remarks against the regime, for listening to unauthorized radio broadcasts and for marrying without permission. They do not give the prisoners hearings or trials. The prisons are filthy and excrement-filled. Torture is common.”
“The previous phases of the war have left more than three hundred thousand people along the Thai-Cambodian border and in the remaining refugee camps inside Thailand. The Thais have closed most of the camps and would like to close the rest. The Western countries have tired of accepting Cambodians for resettlement. Unable to go forward, unwilling to go back, the people of the border live in huts. They eat handout food because they do not have the land or the security to grow their own. The boys become soldiers before they are men. In the hospitals and clinics, Cambodian staff and a few Western volunteers continue the job of medical treatment. The case load never ends: malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, rifle wounds. You see men who have stepped on mines hobbling about on low-cost artificial legs. You see refugees suffering from depression, from the trauma of losing their families and from the powerlessness of their existence as refugees. When I am in the refugee camp hospitals and I see that almost nothing has changed, I feel powerless too. Because nothing I have done, from my medical work to my acting in The Killing Fields to my fundraising, has been able to change the basic conditions along the border.”
“In the early 1990s, a few years after the original publication of this book, the political situation in Cambodia began to change for the better. With the fall of the Soviet empire, the Vietnamese communists lost their financial backing and withdrew from their neighbours Laos and Cambodia. In Cambodia a new political leader emerged, Hun Sen, of the Cambodian People’s Party or CPP. Hun Sen was no Buddha. He had lost an eye in combat while a battalion commander for the Khmer Rouge, and he left the Khmer Rouge just ahead of a purge. Still, the outside world judged him better than most of the other politicians, and with a lot of machinations Cambodia was reinvented as a constitutional monarchy, with Sihanouk as the ceremonial head of state and eventually with Hun Sen as the prime minister and sole day-to-day ruler.”
