Killing Fields, etc. Cambodia

I want to warn you in advance that this post is extremely upsetting.   Our guide's father lost his entire family during the 3+ years of the killing fields and our guide chose this job to be able to tell his story and that of the victims to as many people as possible.   His dad survived and took him 1/2 year to go on a treacherous journal 60 km to find his family.  He had to avoid land mines, bullets, and bones all over.

 Before I traveled to Cambodia, I knew about the horrific genocide in the late 1970s when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia.  I also remember when Pol Pot was captured (and died the next day, supposedly from "suicide.")  But I also remember being curious that I had not heard anything about the instigators of the genocide being held accountable.  On this trip, I learned that many of those people live "normal" lives today in their villages, in the bigger cities, and in high positions of government. I also learned that after  1979, many Cambodians still died from starvation, land mind explosions, illnesses (from lack of medical care), attacks, etc. and there were no records of those people who died so that all in all, close to half of the 7,000,000 people in Cambodia in 1975 did not survive into the 1980s. And according to our guide, the UN supported the Khmer until 1991 as they were not happy that the Vietnamese (supported by the Russians) had a lot of power in Cambodia (as they had conquered the Khmer when they were attacked by them.)   And even though after 30 years a tribunal has been established to hold the perpetrators/participants of the horror accountable, very little has been done, in part because many of said perpetrators have high positions in government today.  It is understandable that many people in Cambodia today are angry and very frustrated about this situation.

The politics in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s were rather complex and you can read about them elsewhere.  The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which was formed in 1968.  The party was in power from  April 17, 1975 to 1979, in which time through their actions brought about the death of about 35% of the people of the country. 

But thanks to Marcy, I just read the entry on Pol Pot in Wikipedia and saw how the Khmer controlled most of the rest of the country outside of Phnom Penh and started testing his radical ideas on the Chan minority and also on other Cambodian cities.  I've put the key parts from Wikipedia at the end of this blog entry.  

The people were happy to welcome the Khmer solders on April 17 to Phnom Penh.

Khmer Rouge soldiers marching into Phnom Penh

Welcomers of soldiers

Last edition of paper showing arrival of Khmer soldiers.  Look how young they are.

Onn the first day, all the people of the capital Phnom Penh were evacuated from the city, including those very ill in hospitals, etc. They were not allowed to wear glasses or take anything that was of the "modern" world.. They were told to pack for 3 days at most.  Men, women, and children were all separated.

Most walked out of the city.

  The Khmer ideology combined Marxism with extreme versions of nationalism and xenophobia. The main focus was toward a purely agrarian society, and anyone with any education was considered tainted.

 

Families were separated.  Children were sent to places apart from their parents, even very very young children.  . The urban folk were sent to the countryside, and those who were not tortured and killed outright died of overwork, disease, and starvation.

Adults from the city working in the rice fields

children working too, many barefoot

Working at least 12 hours a day often, under harsh conditions with little food

Soldiers watching to see that all worked hard

Machines were considered decadent.  People worked like animals.

   Money was abolished and banks were destroyed; 

Books were burned;  teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered to make the agricultural communism a reality.  All religions were banned.

At least 2.2 million people of the 7,000,000 in the country were killed from 1975 to 1979 when the Khmer were in power.  Another million at least died in the next few years, making a total of 50% of the population which was wiped out.  That other million died form starvation and continual attacks by the Khmer.  Pol Pot and his group continued to fight from the jungles until 1998 when Pol Pot was captured and "found dead" the next day.  His body was burned with rubber tires.  He never talked about what he had done. 

Although there has been an attempt the past decade to bring those to justice who are still around, very little is taking place, and many leaders of the country had inportent roles in the Khmer leadership in 1975 to 1979 including the Minister of Foreign Affairs who was in charge of a prison where thousands died.

Pol Pot studied in France with many Communists including Mao and Ho Chi Min in the 1940s.  After returning to Cambodia, he took many trips to China.  In the 1950s he taught in school, and was very supportive to the poor students.  He taught Marxism in school.  When he fled to forests by Angkor,he continued to teach students and over 40,000 followed him.  It is a long and complicated story. 

We went to three places that memorialized that horrific genocidal time.  First we went to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek (http://www.killingfieldsmuseum.com/).  This was one of 353 killing fields in Cambodia.  Many people were brought there after having been tortured elsewhere and were weak and confused.  Most were educated

The soldiers of the Khmer were all very young, boys and girls, for the most part.  They were trained to do their jobs.  And they were very good and killing.  Bullets were too valuable and not used to kill the citizens.  Most were hit with axes, wood, or other implements.
Below are pictures that I took of the killing fields exhibit. They speak for themselves for the most part.

One of the few survivors as therapy drew pictures of events at the killing fields.  Here is one of his drawings:

          Arrival from truck, half naked and blindfolded

 People were brought her blindfolded.  Many had been horrifically tortured already and could barely walk.  They heard others being killed.  Often there was a long wait as so many were there to be killed. Many of the executioners were ages 12 to 14.  One woman, age 12, killed her mother because she had stolen some food.   This was just one of 353 killing fields, most in the area surrounding Phnom Penh, where over 20,000 mass graves have been found, so far..

Our guide was very graphic in his description of the horrors here.  Sugar palm tree fronds had sharp edges and were used as weapons here to chop off heads.  People were buried in mass graves.  One found in 1980 had 450 people. The grave was 10 to 16 fe  et deep in different parts.  The people murdered were found blindfolded, some naked or just in underwear.  Their clothes had been used to bind their hands and blindfold them.

One of many mass graves

 Note the strong bracelets on the posts in the lower left, Buddhist symbols to remember those that lost their lives here.

DDT was sprayed in the mass graves to reduce the stench.  

Killing a blindfolded man through beatingb

Picture of skulls and bones recovered from this grave site

Piece of standard black clothing found in graves

Killing tree against which executioners beat/threw children to death, colored ribbons are in their memory

Bone fragments found in 1980

 Below:  "Magic" tree from which a loudspeaker was hung.  It made loud sounds to cover up the moans and screams of dying people while they were being killed.

 We moved on to some other rooms that had exhibits and explanations.  For example, every once in a whole, the Khmer would hold mass weddings when they would match up men and women, have a ceremony, and marry the couples, many of whom had not met until that moment.  It was to repopulate the country of pure peasant children.  Some of the couples who survived did stay together.  Our guide's father and mother were part of a group like this of 200 boys and girls who were quickly married.  His father was 19 and mother 17 and had not known each other--were just put together.  Our guide was born in the first year of the Vietnamese era in Cambodia.

Clothes men and women wore, all black except for scarves they often used to protect themselves form the sun and as towels.  Sandals were made of old tires.  Many people were barefoot.   Everyone looked alike, so as to not show any class distinction.

The Khmer Rouge kept excellent records of the people they killed including the foreigners.  Our guide found it amazing that foreign governments didn't make huge complaints about the missing members of their countries, especially foreign diplomats.   Above is David Scott, and Australian and also a Lao professor.

A stupa built in recent years in memory of those murdered in the killing fields

After seeing this Killing Field, we took a short break and stopped at the English school that our guide had created to help local child get a step up in education.  He stopped at the request of a number of our participants.  It was a welcome break after the horrors of the Killing fields.

Then we went to a five-building former school (Chao Ponhea Yat High School) turned into a torture/execution center in Phnom Penh during the Khmer genocidal reign.  It is now the S21: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  You can see the website at:
http://www.tuolsleng.com/history.php
  When Pol Pot was in power, between 20,000 annd 30,000 people were questioned under torture and then murdered in grotesque ways, often together with their families so that there would be no one to seek retribution later.  The Wikipedia article does a thorough job describing daily life in the prison, interrogation upon arrival, horrific forms of torture, medical experiments, etc.  You can see it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum

21 people were found tortured to death when S21 was liberated in 1979.  One was a women.  They are all buried in the white graves in the middle of the courtyard here.  Amazingly, there were four survivors.  Barbed wire surrounded the school.  There were so many people in this prison that some times buildings across the street were used, as seen below. 

Bricked in cell with chain anchor at bottom attached to prisoner

's leg

smaller totally darkened room made of wood

 

The Khmer numbered each prisoner and took photos of them.  Most had their hands tied behind their backs, often with wires.  Some also had one of both legs chained to their wrists, thus their chests stood out.  If the prisoner was not wearing a shirt, the number was pinned to his skin.

Children in this series of photos too

 We also saw a picture of a woman and her child.  The woman had been a former Khmer guard who somehow had done something wrong.  She knew what was in store for her and her child too.

Was the man in the middle an Australian official?

Many foreigners were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered at this center including close to 500 Vietnamese, many Indians and Pakistanis, 30+ Thai, several from the US, New Zealand, Australia, England, France, Great Britain, and a few other countries. 

  

I could not take more photos nor go through all of this museum.  It was overwhelming, so I sat outside and the tears began to come.  Since I am intimately connected to the events of the Holocaust, I could begin to fathom the horrors of this Genocide.  The worst thing however is that so very few of the Khmer Rouge who caused these atrocities have been accountable.    Only one high-ranking Khmer Rouge has ever been tried for his crimes and that was in 2009.  His nickname is "Duch" and he is now an Evangelical Christian who voluntarily surrender and has expressed remorse for what he did.     Money has been allocated for trials and a tribunal but the corruption in the court system and government has caused problems and delays. An article appeared in Time in Feb. of this year (2014) about this that you can access online: 
 http://time.com/6997/cambodias-khmer-rouge-trials-are-a-shocking-failure/

I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the events of Cambodians under the Pol Pot regime read the book "First They Killed My Father" and the sequel "Lucky Child," by Loung Ung, a survivor the horrors who was 5 when they began.  The Seattle library has copies of the books.  The first is autobiographical and written from the point of view of the young child and she went through the horrors.  The second continues her saga in the US and that of her sister in a rural village in Cambodia until both finally reunite in 1995.  Both books are compelling.    FYI, I just read that First They Killed My Father has been selected for a major  promotion on Amazon’s Kindle Big Deal for March 13-31.  During this period, the book will be discounted for $2.99.

Even after the Khmer attacked Vietnam in 1979 and the Vietnamese, with a superior army, fought back and sent the Khmer soldiers fleeing to the jungle, the Khmer continued to fight. In the late 1970s, it was safer to have been from villages, but as things built up again in the cities, the villages became less save as the Khmer attacked the isolated villages, stole food, pots, etc.  and took the sons to be soldiers. Our guide told us thatwhen  Pop Pot was finally captured in 1998,  at that time the government told the Khmer and others that they could keep their land if they stopped killing people.  They were also given money to turn in weapons and told that if they were found with weapons, they would be killed.

In 1991, the Communist world because weaker, so there was a change in the West toward attitudes toward Vietnam and countries they support. 



P. S.  A little bit more about our guide's family's experience after 1979.

As I had mentioned, our guide's parents were married in one of the mass marriages that the Khmer set up to repopulate the country with young rural people.  Our guide was born one year after the Khmer fled to the jungles.  Our guide first studied with his dad under a tree.  He also taught other children, and did it as a volunteer. .   There were no books or writing tools to all was oral. Children sometimes wrote with charcoal.  His dad gave him one pencil (a treasured item).  He later had more schooling by going to a Buddhist temple and staying there as a novice to study. 

Now schools are again much better, with buildings, some computers, a garden, sports (soccer and volleyball.)  Children wear uniforms and many bike to school.  Our guides younger brother received a scholarship to study in Japan for university.  However, he had to study basic subjects for two years more because the education in Cambodia was inferior still.

He told us that the medical situation is still inferior to what it was in 1975.  His mother needed to have heard surgery but Cambodia did not have doctors to do what she needed.  Thailand did, but it was too expensive, so they saved money and went with his mother to Vietnam to have the surgery.

It was also recommended that we watch the video:  Cambodia:  The Bloodiest Domino
I found it at:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBtJJeyZc80
I just watched it.  It is old but brutally frank.  It ends before Pol Pot was officially caught and "died" the next day, but after he was tried by his peers for killing one of their own (due to his paranoia) and not for leading to the deaths of more than 2,000,000 Cambodians.


From Wikipedia--Pol Pot and the Khmer in the earlier 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_pot#Control_of_the_countryside
The Khmer Rouge advanced during 1973. After they reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Sar (the original name of Pol Pot) issued orders during the peak of the rainy season that the city be taken. The orders led to futile attacks and wasted lives within the Khmer Rouge army. By the middle of 1973, the Khmer Rouge under Sar controlled almost two-thirds of the country and half the population. Vietnam realized that it no longer controlled the situation and it began to treat Sar as more of an equal leader than as a junior partner.
In late 1973, Sar made strategic decisions that determined the future of the war. First, he decided to cut the capital off from contact with outside sources of supplies, putting the city under siege. Second, he enforced tight control over people trying to leave the city through Khmer Rouge lines. He also ordered a series of general purges of former government officials, and anyone with an education. A set of new prisons was also constructed in Khmer Rouge run areas. The Cham minority attempted an uprising in order to stop the destruction of their culture. The uprising was quickly crushed, Saloth ordered that harsh physical torture be used against most of those involved in the revolt. As previously, Saloth tested out harsh new policies against the Cham minority, before extending them to the general population of the country.

The Khmer Rouge also had a policy of evacuating urban areas and forcibly relocating their residents to the countryside. When the Khmer Rouge took the town of Kratie in 1971, Sar and other members of the party were shocked at how fast the liberated urban areas shook off socialism and went back to the old ways. Various ideas were tried in order to re-create the town in the image of the party, but nothing worked. In 1973, out of total frustration, Sar decided that the only solution was to send the entire population of the town to the fields in the countryside. He wrote at the time "if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?". Shortly after, Sar ordered the evacuation of the 15,000 people of Kompong Cham for the same reasons. The Khmer Rouge then moved on in 1974 to evacuate the larger city of Oudong.
Internationally, Sar and the Khmer Rouge gained the recognition of 63 countries as the true government of Cambodia. A move was made at the UN to give the seat for Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge; they prevailed by three votes.

In September 1974, Sar gathered the central committee of the party together. As the military campaign was moving toward a conclusion, Sar decided to move the party toward implementing a socialist transformation of the country in the form of a series of decisions. The first being to evacuate the main cities, moving the population to the countryside. The second dictated that they would cease putting money into circulation and quickly phase it out. The final decision was that the party would accept Sar's first major purge. In 1974, Sarhad purged a top party official named Prasith. Prasith was taken out into a forest and shot without being given any chance to defend himself. His death was followed by a purge of cadres who, like Prasith, were ethnically Thai. Sar's explanation was that the class struggle had become acute, requiring a strong stand against party enemies.

The Khmer Rouge were positioned for a final offensive against the government in January 1975. Simultaneously, at a press event in Beijing, Sihanouk proudly announced Sar's "death list" of enemies who were to be killed after victory. The list, which originally contained seven names was expanded to 23, and it included the names of all senior government leaders along with the names of all officials who were in positions of leadership within the police and military. The rivalry between Vietnam and Cambodia also came out into the open. North Vietnam, as the rival socialist country in Indochina, was determined to take Saigon before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Shipments of weapons from China were delayed, in one instance the Cambodians were forced to sign a humiliating document thanking (North) Vietnam for shipments of Chinese weapons.

In April 1975, the government formed a Supreme National Council with new leadership, with the aim of negotiating a surrender to the Khmer Rouge. It was headed by Sak Sutsakhan who had studied in France with Sar, and was a cousin of the Khmer Rouge Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea. Sar reacted to this by adding the names of everyone involved in the Supreme National Council onto his post-victory death list. Government resistance finally collapsed on April 17, 1975.