Irish Examiner
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
EVEN if you arrived in Cambodia knowing absolutely nothing of its recent history, it would only take a few hours before you noticed something disturbing.
You see, in Cambodia, a strikingly high proportion of middle-aged people have some kind of disfigurement. War, repression and disease have taken a terrible toll. A leg lost through a landmine, an arm to leprosy, a pair of eyes gouged out by the Khmer Rouge, scarcely anyone over 40 seems to have escaped. By all accounts, however, the worst injuries were inflicted on people’s minds.
Growing up in the late 1970s, Cambodia was for my generation what perhaps Biafra had been for the one before and Dachau had been for the one before that: the epitome of humans suffering at the hands of other humans. Now those who can forget, do so, as Nhim explained to me. Quite unreasonably cheerful, he sits outside a Parisian-style street café every night in Phnom Penh selling string bracelets. These he weaves together in various national colours to supply the burgeoning tourist trade in what the “in” crowd know as simply “PP”.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say Nhim is placed outside that cafe every night. You see, Nhim doesn’t have legs. In fact, he only has one arm comprising just two fingers and a thumb. But there he sits every night bantering with travellers on their own version of the Ho Chi Minh trail and development workers strolling up and down the edge of the Mekong with their delicate Cambodian girlfriends.
Somehow, using those last three remaining digits and his teeth, he can turn a few threads into a reasonable approximation of most national flags to wrap around one’s wrist. That’s difficult enough if you’re Irish or French; somewhat trickier for American or British customers.
Figuring I wouldn’t be the first, I enquired about the lost limbs. It turned out Nimh had been doubly unlucky. He had lost his legs in the early ’70s when one of the walls of his family home had fallen down during a US-backed aerial bombardment of supposedly Khmer Rouge infested villages in Cambodia’s far west. He found his way to Phnom Penh to beg on the streets until a friend carried him out when the Khmer Rouge took over and ordered the city’s evacuation.
Stepping on a landmine, his friend had been killed but Nhim somehow survived albeit minus yet another limb and a couple more fingers. A French NGO established by the exile community had set him up in the bracelet trade which he sells to help meet the cost of his lodgings at the sheltered hostel he returns to late each evening when an aid worker picks him up as the last drinkers melt back to their boutique hotels. “It could be a lot worse,” he chortles without so much as a twinge of self-pity.
Nhim’s story brought to life for me what, until last week, I had only read about and seen depicted on screen in the film The Killing Fields. If you haven’t seen it, the movie tells the true story of American journalist Sydney Schanberg’s attempt to learn the fate of his Cambodian interpreter whom he had to leave behind after the fall of PP to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Like Nhim and almost everyone else Schanberg’s interpreter, was sent by the Khmer Rouge to the countryside to somehow help boost the country’s production of rice. There he endured appalling privations until finally he fled to Thailand.
The film, like my little chat with Nhim, is also about what has come to be known as the Cambodian holocaust, the gruesome so-called “Democratic Kampuchea” period when Pol Pot and his followers ran the country. During this reign of terror, the population of Phnom Penh — previously over 2 million — fell to just 40,000, mainly officials, soldiers and a few diplomats from the small number of countries with which Kampuchea had relations.
Somewhere between a million and 3 million died either directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge or from the famine and disease which raged as a consequence of their “back to the land” policies which actually had the effect of taking Cambodia back to the dark ages.
Not surprisingly, anyone who could get out did so. Many of the literate were not so lucky. Speaking a foreign language or wearing spectacles were taken as signs of a capacity for independent thought. These potential criminals were rounded up until such evidence as could be forced out of other prisoners was gathered together. Many were taken to Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21, an interrogation and torture centre that used to be a high school in the southern part of Phnom Penh. Some 15-20,000 were detained there. When the Leninist Vietnamese arrived to rout the Maoists of the Khmer Rouge, it is said just seven prisoners were still alive in Tuol Sleng.
S-21 today is a museum. The walls are still blood-stained. Everywhere there are hundreds of photographs of Pol Pot’s victims — including, I was surprised to learn, a few Westerners unfortunate enough to be in Cambodia in 1975.
Many, if not most, of those who died in or passing through S-21, however, were former cadres of the increasingly paranoid Communist Party of Kampuchea to give the Khmer Rouge its proper name. Extraordinarily detailed interrogations were undertaken during which detainees were encouraged to report on the treacherous activities of their colleagues, friends and family — even their parents.
The prisoners were then shackled to the concrete floors, forbidden by notices (pasted on what had been blackboards used for teaching) to speak to each other.
Each morning, prisoners were inspected to ensure they had not discovered some means of committing suicide. Unsurprisingly, false confessions were not hard to extract, so severe were the tactics deployed. Electric shocks were commonplace. Some prisoners were left hanging by their legs all day or forced to eat their own excrement. A few women even suffered the crudest of mastectomies. Incidentally, all of the high command at S-21 had themselves previously been schoolteachers before the revolution.
After a few weeks of interrogation which led, in some cases, to reports lasting hundreds of pages about those suspected of thought crimes, the prisoners were “smashed” to use the Khmer Rouge’s euphemism.
Initially corpses were buried near the prison; later they were transported to Choeung Ek, just outside the city, were they were bludgeoned to death with hoes, axes or bits of scrap machinery so as to save bullets. As many as 100 were piled into each mass grave. Frequently beheaded before burial, their stacked skulls are perhaps Democratic Kampuchea’s best-known symbolic legacy. Certainly, the sight left me unable to sleep.
Even walking around the fantastical royal palace with its floor of solid silver, it was hard to blot out those skulls. How could such hideous violence take place in a country of such apparent serenity?
Yes, the corrupting influence of twisted ideologies had something to do with it. But so did the rest of mankind’s enormous capacity to look the other way.
The world is focused on Libya today. But tens of thousands still die every month in a war in Congo.
Who cares? Who even knows?
EVEN if you arrived in Cambodia knowing absolutely nothing of its recent history, it would only take a few hours before you noticed something disturbing.
You see, in Cambodia, a strikingly high proportion of middle-aged people have some kind of disfigurement. War, repression and disease have taken a terrible toll. A leg lost through a landmine, an arm to leprosy, a pair of eyes gouged out by the Khmer Rouge, scarcely anyone over 40 seems to have escaped. By all accounts, however, the worst injuries were inflicted on people’s minds.
Growing up in the late 1970s, Cambodia was for my generation what perhaps Biafra had been for the one before and Dachau had been for the one before that: the epitome of humans suffering at the hands of other humans. Now those who can forget, do so, as Nhim explained to me. Quite unreasonably cheerful, he sits outside a Parisian-style street café every night in Phnom Penh selling string bracelets. These he weaves together in various national colours to supply the burgeoning tourist trade in what the “in” crowd know as simply “PP”.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say Nhim is placed outside that cafe every night. You see, Nhim doesn’t have legs. In fact, he only has one arm comprising just two fingers and a thumb. But there he sits every night bantering with travellers on their own version of the Ho Chi Minh trail and development workers strolling up and down the edge of the Mekong with their delicate Cambodian girlfriends.
Somehow, using those last three remaining digits and his teeth, he can turn a few threads into a reasonable approximation of most national flags to wrap around one’s wrist. That’s difficult enough if you’re Irish or French; somewhat trickier for American or British customers.
Figuring I wouldn’t be the first, I enquired about the lost limbs. It turned out Nimh had been doubly unlucky. He had lost his legs in the early ’70s when one of the walls of his family home had fallen down during a US-backed aerial bombardment of supposedly Khmer Rouge infested villages in Cambodia’s far west. He found his way to Phnom Penh to beg on the streets until a friend carried him out when the Khmer Rouge took over and ordered the city’s evacuation.
Stepping on a landmine, his friend had been killed but Nhim somehow survived albeit minus yet another limb and a couple more fingers. A French NGO established by the exile community had set him up in the bracelet trade which he sells to help meet the cost of his lodgings at the sheltered hostel he returns to late each evening when an aid worker picks him up as the last drinkers melt back to their boutique hotels. “It could be a lot worse,” he chortles without so much as a twinge of self-pity.
Nhim’s story brought to life for me what, until last week, I had only read about and seen depicted on screen in the film The Killing Fields. If you haven’t seen it, the movie tells the true story of American journalist Sydney Schanberg’s attempt to learn the fate of his Cambodian interpreter whom he had to leave behind after the fall of PP to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Like Nhim and almost everyone else Schanberg’s interpreter, was sent by the Khmer Rouge to the countryside to somehow help boost the country’s production of rice. There he endured appalling privations until finally he fled to Thailand.
The film, like my little chat with Nhim, is also about what has come to be known as the Cambodian holocaust, the gruesome so-called “Democratic Kampuchea” period when Pol Pot and his followers ran the country. During this reign of terror, the population of Phnom Penh — previously over 2 million — fell to just 40,000, mainly officials, soldiers and a few diplomats from the small number of countries with which Kampuchea had relations.
Somewhere between a million and 3 million died either directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge or from the famine and disease which raged as a consequence of their “back to the land” policies which actually had the effect of taking Cambodia back to the dark ages.
Not surprisingly, anyone who could get out did so. Many of the literate were not so lucky. Speaking a foreign language or wearing spectacles were taken as signs of a capacity for independent thought. These potential criminals were rounded up until such evidence as could be forced out of other prisoners was gathered together. Many were taken to Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21, an interrogation and torture centre that used to be a high school in the southern part of Phnom Penh. Some 15-20,000 were detained there. When the Leninist Vietnamese arrived to rout the Maoists of the Khmer Rouge, it is said just seven prisoners were still alive in Tuol Sleng.
S-21 today is a museum. The walls are still blood-stained. Everywhere there are hundreds of photographs of Pol Pot’s victims — including, I was surprised to learn, a few Westerners unfortunate enough to be in Cambodia in 1975.
Many, if not most, of those who died in or passing through S-21, however, were former cadres of the increasingly paranoid Communist Party of Kampuchea to give the Khmer Rouge its proper name. Extraordinarily detailed interrogations were undertaken during which detainees were encouraged to report on the treacherous activities of their colleagues, friends and family — even their parents.
The prisoners were then shackled to the concrete floors, forbidden by notices (pasted on what had been blackboards used for teaching) to speak to each other.
Each morning, prisoners were inspected to ensure they had not discovered some means of committing suicide. Unsurprisingly, false confessions were not hard to extract, so severe were the tactics deployed. Electric shocks were commonplace. Some prisoners were left hanging by their legs all day or forced to eat their own excrement. A few women even suffered the crudest of mastectomies. Incidentally, all of the high command at S-21 had themselves previously been schoolteachers before the revolution.
After a few weeks of interrogation which led, in some cases, to reports lasting hundreds of pages about those suspected of thought crimes, the prisoners were “smashed” to use the Khmer Rouge’s euphemism.
Initially corpses were buried near the prison; later they were transported to Choeung Ek, just outside the city, were they were bludgeoned to death with hoes, axes or bits of scrap machinery so as to save bullets. As many as 100 were piled into each mass grave. Frequently beheaded before burial, their stacked skulls are perhaps Democratic Kampuchea’s best-known symbolic legacy. Certainly, the sight left me unable to sleep.
Even walking around the fantastical royal palace with its floor of solid silver, it was hard to blot out those skulls. How could such hideous violence take place in a country of such apparent serenity?
Yes, the corrupting influence of twisted ideologies had something to do with it. But so did the rest of mankind’s enormous capacity to look the other way.
The world is focused on Libya today. But tens of thousands still die every month in a war in Congo.
Who cares? Who even knows?
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