Columnist’s visit to Cambodian killing fields jarring 35 years later

Published on December 10, 2013

By Jim Guy

This year marks 35 years since Cambodians endured the ruthless and murderous dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Beginning in April 1975, and lasting for three years, eight months and 20 days, ordinary Cambodians were terrorized by a paranoid Communist leader and his brutal regime.

Pol Pot was determined to eradicate the foundations of the traditional Cambodian culture and bent on severing all ties between Cambodia and the outside world.

By forging a unique "Cambodian road to socialism" Pol Pot and his accomplices followed that road with pitiless militancy after rising to power in the wake of North Vietnam's victory over the American incursion.

In just a few days in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge forcibly emptied Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city containing some three million inhabitants. Immediately these ragtag extremists began to forcibly assemble innocent Cambodians in what became known as the "killing fields."

After short periods of detention the captives were inevitably tortured and killed for reasons trumped up by their radical Communist executioners.

The black-clad teenage peasant zealots recruited by the Khmer Rouge randomly sought out millions who were "interrogated" and forced to confess to hideous charges they usually knew nothing about.

The Khmer Rouge killed all those with an education or anyone whose adherence to the new collectivized rural order seemed less than total. This was not a civil war waged among political enemies — it was a definitive holocaust quickly ignored by the international community.

World opinion showed characteristic impotence. Many in the West at first denied the evidence of torture, massacre and starvation disclosed by Cambodian refugees. Similar denials have been witnessed in Bosnia, Serbia, Rwanda and now Syria, where international action is coming too little too late.

The Khmer Rouge practice of "autogenocide" actually played no part in its downfall. What destroyed Pol Pot and his followers was their fierce national resentment against their former Communist allies in Hanoi. In 1977 the Khmer Rouge clashed with Vietnamese troops and shelled Vietnamese villages along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

In retaliation, more than 100,000 Vietnamese soldiers, fresh from victory against American troops, launched a blitzkrieg in December 1978 that crushed the Khmer Rouge armies, and occupied Cambodia. It took Vietnamese Communists to terminate a radical Communist regime in a neighbouring country.

Last month while in Cambodia I visited a number of the killing fields used by the Khmer Rouge to commit acts of genocide. There I met a survivor named Chum Mey, who in my view personifies the tormented history of his country.

He escaped death, and his survival provides a living documentary on this evil period in Cambodian history. Chum Mey survived gun fights and unrelenting rocket attacks by the Khmer Rouge. He lost his wife and four children during the brutal Communist period.

At one point he was dragged blindfolded into the Tuol Sleng prison, where more than 12,000 people were chained and tortured. Most were sent to killing field S-21, where I first met Chum Mey last month. Only a handful of these prisoners survived and those who did provide a rare glimpse inside the workings of this highly organized assembly line of killing.

It was Chum Mey's skill as a mechanic that saved him, when after 12 days of beatings and repeated electrocution, he was plucked from among the other prisoners and put to work repairing machinery and fixing the typewriters which his torturers used to record forced confessions from detainees.

Another prisoner survived because he could sketch portraits very well, one of which flattered Pol Pot because it was such an exact resemblance of the dictator.

Many Khmer Rouge members were never punished for their criminal actions, and simply melded into the general population.

In Cambodia there is a strong belief in forgiveness as found within the Buddhist philosophy. According to Buddhist teachings those killers will reap their karma, but not justice in the current definition of war crimes under international law.

But in 2003 the Cambodian government, in conjunction with the United Nations, established a joint tribunal to try some of the infamous leaders and major figures complicit with the Khmer Rouge.

As a result, the chief of the Toul Sleng prison, Kaing Guek Eav, known as "Duch," was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity. Others have been tried, found guilty and sent to prison.

The memory of these awful years has not diminished and likely never will. Cambodians want the world to know and remember what they endured. There is a lingering fear among Cambodians that this could happen again if they become complacent about their government. As one survivor told me, "We must be vigilant every day."

Jim Guy, PhD, is professor emeritus of political science and international law at Cape Breton University.