Horror and Anger Dulled by Time

Picture: Pol Pot walked in Beijing's garden in the 1980s.


Horror and anger dulled by time
Dec 1, 2007 KHMER ROUGE TRIALSBy John McBeth, Senior Writer The Straits Times (Singapore)
THE worst thing about the long-delayed Khmer Rouge trials is the way time has eroded the feelings of anger and horror people once felt, leaving us to stare almost ambivalently at pictures of those frail old leaders who turned Cambodia into a mediaeval graveyard.Former Communist Party of Kampuchea No. 2 Nuon Chea, ex-prime minister Khieu Samphan, foreign minister Ieng Sary and his wife, and social affairs minister Ieng Thirith sit there blithely protesting their innocence, nearly three decades after the collapse of a regime that killed 1.7 million Cambodians.Then there is Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the mild-mannered director of Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng detention centre, where 17,000 detainees were tortured to death - many of them victims of an internal purge against perceived pro-Vietnamese elements that racked Khmer Rouge ranks in 1977. These people are monsters, yet despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence of their crimes against humanity, there are still doubts whether the mostly Cambodian judges sitting on the United Nations-backed tribunal will return verdicts that may finally bring a measure of justice.Communist Party chief Pol Pot died in the jungles of north-western Cambodia in 1998, but not before he told journalist Nate Thayer: 'Look at me now. Do you think...am I a violent person? No. So, as far as my conscience and my mission were concerned, there was no problem.''I regret I didn't have enough experience to totally control the movement,' he went on. 'On the other hand, with our constant struggle, this had to be done...to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese. For the love of the nation and the people it was the right thing to do, but in the course of our actions we made mistakes.'It is important to remember those words because they are probably the closest we are going to get to understanding the motivations of a group of leaders whose radical ideology and mad ideas appear to have been shaped during the days they spent attending school in France.Those of us covering events from Thailand in the late 1970s wondered what manner of people these were who wanted to return Cambodia to Year Zero.My first face-to-face encounter with the Khmer Rouge was two days after the fall of Phnom Penh, when they showed up in a dusty convoy in the western border town of Poipet, led by a fleet of Mercedes limousines.I will always remember those young black-clad guerillas who ordered us back into Thailand at the point of their AK-47 rifles. It was their eyes, locked in what was known as the 'thousand-yard stare'. Hard, expressionless, chilling.I was to see their handiwork first-hand two years later, when they massacred the occupants of two Thai border hamlets north of Aranyaprathet, cutting the throats of children and tossing aside their bodies like rag dolls.And I was to observe them again at close quarters in 1979, when they retreated into Thailand ahead of advancing Vietnamese forces. As I raised my camera with its telephoto lens, a column of guerillas moving through roadside jungle simply dropped as a man into concealment.But most of all, any journalist covering the border in those days remembered the faces of the refugees. Not those in the camps, but those who had just come out of the nightmare and were spending their first few hours in a Thai police station. They had that same awful stare.There are two Cambodians I remember more than the others. One was a sun-wrinkled peasant farmer named Lamout Chhuon, the other a 21-year-old Khmer Rouge soldier named Chek Win. Together, in their own dispassionate ways, they seemed to sum up the horror of Cambodia.Mr Chhuon, then 38, had been among the entire population of a village of 268 people who slipped away one night while their guards slept, and headed en masse for the Thai border. Only 65 survived the four-day journey. Five of the farmer's eight children were killed along the way.Our mid-1977 interview lasted from midday to dusk, mainly because Mr Chhuon and his wife - looking physically broken and 15 years older than their ages - were so traumatised they could not understand why we were so interested in life under the Khmer Rouge.Those were the days when many Western academics were still claiming that what Bangkok-based journalists were writing about Cambodia was a lie, all of it part of a disinformation campaign engineered by the US' Central Intelligence Agency. How many times I have heard that in my career.One hour with this poor, uneducated couple would have told them all they needed to know. But they preferred their conspiracy theories and their idealistic view of the Cambodian revolution. None bothered to go to the border to talk to the refugees until after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and it became politically correct to take sides.Some of those same blind sceptics were later invited into Cambodia by the Vietnamese, and returned with what they claimed were the first exclusive accounts of the excesses of Khmer Rouge rule. They were three years too late. None of what they wrote came as a surprise.Take Mr Win, the Khmer Rouge soldier who had fled Cambodia to escape the purges. He told me matter-of-factly about his role in the slaughter of 70 officials of the old Lon Nol regime behind a school on the road between Siem Reap and the Angkor Wat temple complex.He said he had helped tie the hands of the victims before they were taken in threes out to the edge of a freshly dug pit and and beaten to death with clubs and hoes. When the executioners got tired, he recalled, the remaining 30 victims were killed with machine-gun fire.I recall how the hair on the back of my head stood up when I came across that school in 1995. A sign at the gate said it was the scene of a killing field. It was difficult to tell if the grave had been disturbed, but everything was as Mr Win had described.Again, how many times I had been told the refugees were not to be believed, that their stories were a fabrication. Perhaps later in the camps they may have embellished their accounts a little, but not in those first few days.For all the blood-letting that went on, surprisingly few refugees I interviewed had actually witnessed a killing. People would simply disappear during the night. In some cases, Khmer Rouge soldiers would lead someone away into the forest and return alone, their sandals spattered with blood.Their leaders, or at least a small handful, may finally be made now to answer for one of the worst crimes against humanity of the last century. But what has happened to all the followers who did their bidding?'There were low-level Khmer Rouge who wanted to assimilate themselves into society and were so afraid that they would be identified,' said Mr Im Vin, my Cambodian friend whose wife and family were wiped out in a massacre near the Mekong River town of Kratie in 1977.'They came out from the jungle and, instead of going back to their native village, they went to a different place so they could send their kids to school without being identified. They realised they picked the wrong side and I somewhat feel sorry for them.'That's what I mean. We were only horrified observers. My friend lived the horror. Yet here he is, living happily with his second Cambodian wife and three delightful daughters in Portland, newly retired from his computer job with Nike and seemingly freed from the past.'I hope we can get some sense out of this trial,' the former teacher e-mailed me last year. 'Not all the killings were the result of direct orders from the top because local cadres also took advantage of the situation to exact revenge on people they didn't like.'But while the top leaders may not have always given the orders, they surely knew what was happening and by not doing or saying anything to stop it, they were giving it the green light. I still hope the trial will shed at least some light on what was done by the regime.'Last May, Mr Vin took his girls to Cambodia to show them how he escaped to Thailand, where I first met him in the Ubon Ratchathani refugee camp so many years ago. At least they will gain some understanding of what their father and millions of his countrymen went through.Clearly, it was something he had to do.