Simon & Rosie's Travel Journal: The Khmer Rouge

'Have you got the passports?' Rosie says to me, hurriedly getting dressed, a look of white panic on her face as I dart around our window-less hotel room, grabbing the remainder of our cash reserve, our travel insurance documents and anything else important I can shove into my rucksack before we flee downstairs and into the Cambodian night. We scramble along the hotel corridor and another huge explosion rocks the building to the sound of yet more screams from the marketplace outside. And then we hear a ripple of automatic gunfire...

For dramatic effect, I'm going to leave that there and take you back in time by ten hours to nine o'clock yesterday morning. It's a technique used by many writers but by explaining this to you, you will hopefully sense the ultimate humorous conclusion to which this somewhat troubling opening paragraph will lead, after going through some pretty tough and difficult subjects. So, Rosie and I were happily rattling through the streets of Phnom Penh in the back of a tuk-tuk towards the edge of town and the most well known of Cambodia's many 'killing-fields' - the execution grounds used by the infamous Khmer Rouge during their hellish rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

Very simply, the turbulent history of Cambodia is as follows - The French pretty much colonised the whole of this part of the world during the 1800's (ish) and in Vietnam and Cambodia, we find ourselves surrounded by little snippets of French influence; the food, the architecture, the towering presence of Catholic churches beside Buddhist shrines and a few older inhabitants who still speak French. The French arrived in Cambodia in 1863 and with the use of their warships, ended up taking control of the place by 1864.

Territory was handed around for many years, with various power struggles between neighbouring Thailand, Vietnam and Laos muddying the picture somewhat - oh and China got in on the act at some point too. World War II blurred an already confusing picture of South East Asia into a messy and multi-angled abstract that only books as thick as bricks will fully explain. But, in 1941, the French placed a Cambodian Prince on the throne, assuming him to be naive and pliable to their own political needs. However, in 1953, the by now well established King undertook an exercise (the 'royal crusade') to seek his country's independence from the French, which they won (by diplomatic means, I think) in the same year. By 1955 the King was tired of the whole pomp and ceremony of royalty, and promptly abdicated - opting instead to form and run the People's Socialist Community as a 'normal' citizen and as such, was elected with ease. Things carried on no problem. The Cambodia of the 1950's and 60's was a pretty stable place.

Then the USA decided that it needed to help neighbouring South Vietnam in exterminating the "evil" communists of the North who were seeking to liberate the South. After bombing and burning and destroying huge chunks of Vietnam along with it's population, they turned their attention to Cambodia where many communist's had taken refuge. US B-52 planes carpet bombed the border regions, killing thousands and dragging Cambodia into the war. Cambodia was also having it's own problems with tensions rising between various rebellious groups and internal powers. In 1970, while on holiday in France, the former king (now socialist leader) was overthrown in a coup organised by the General of his own army (Lon Nol) who had formed an alliance with the Cambodian communist party and their own private army - aka the Khmer Rouge, the red Khmer. The very next month, US and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in an attempt to flush out the remaining North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in hiding - as if a military coup was not enough to deal with!

General Lon Nol, now facing increasing demands and unwelcome pressure from the communist Khmer Rouge (with whom he had colluded), was provided with military and economic aid by the US in order to fully quash the power he had given them to begin with, and so a Cambodian civil war ensued.

In April 1975, Khmer Rouge troops rolled in to Phnom Penh (the capital) to the cheers of a joyous population who saw in their arrival the end of the violence. How wrong they were. Within days, the destruction of their entire world began.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot, and in his taking of the country, he was able to put into action his own deluded plan for society. In short, he wanted to implement collectivism, turning the country into an agrarian cooperative - i.e. a giant communist farm, with every man, woman and child put to work for the good of the society as a whole. It's basically communism pushed to the very extreme, where individualism is destroyed and the population becomes nothing but a machine. To do this, he recruited an army - made up primarily of young boys and men from the countryside; uneducated, poor, easily manipulated and very much open to the prospect of work and wages.

So, three days after their arrival in the capital, the Khmer Rouge put their plan into action and ordered every living soul in the cities to leave their homes and march out to the countryside where forced labour camps awaited them. Men, women, children, babies, the pregnant, the disabled - all forced into the streets at gunpoint with the threat of immediate execution for any kind of disobedience. Families were split apart, children torn from the arms of their crying mothers, husbands and wives separated and siblings divided - for each person to then be sent to whichever part of the country the regime required them to be. Currency was abolished, as was religion, the postal service and any contact contact with the outside world. To fully implicate his radical re-structuring of society, Pol Pot set in motion the removal of any citizen who did not fit in with his senseless plan. During the next four years, the Cambodian people were sent to hell and back, and the stories we read during our visit, written by the very people who survived it, were simply horrifying.

Seeing society as nothing but a tool for production, Pol Pot also did not believe in education. All schools and universities were closed down and turned into prisons or warehouses, and thus began the genocide. Teachers, intellectuals, anyone who spoke a foreign language, musicians, even people who simply wore glasses or whose hands were deemed "too soft", were simply taken away and murdered. Brutality reigned, and paranoia among the regime was rife. People began disappearing, dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and tortured into signing false confessions - of being a C.I.A. spy, stealing a banana, not meeting their production quota or just not working "hard" enough - any tiny act of disobedience - death was generally the outcome. Sadly, once a single family member was targeted, this often signed the death warrants of any relatives. Also, many prisoners were tortured into naming friends or colleagues, who would in turn be arrested, tortured and, ultimately, executed. Pol Pot had some horrible slogans: "You are no gain if you live, no loss if you die." and "If you want to kill the grass, you must kill it's roots."

We also visited a former Khmer Rouge prison in Phnom Penh. Built in the 1960's, Tuol Sleng High School was closed and converted into a centre for torture, incarceration, interrogation and execution. Renamed Office 21, or S-21, it was now known to the locals as Tuol Sleng Prison. On the ground floor, large airy classrooms, some of them still with their chalkboards and number lines on the walls, had been turned into desolate, harrowing spaces, with a single steel bed and leg irons still in place where they were left when the Khmer Rouge fled the city in 1979. These were the torture and interrogation chambers - electric generators, whips, pliers and batons being some of the tools now on display. Upstairs, rows of hastily built walls, with cement oozing out between the crooked bricks, formed tiny dark cells in long rows along the exterior walls of the classrooms, some with faded plastic containers and ammunition boxes still in place (acting as the prisoner's water container and toilet). The long outdoor corridors which overlooked what was once a playground were wrapped in high walls of barbed wire to prevent prisoners jumping to their deaths from the upper storeys. It is estimated that during their almost four year rule, the Khmer Rouge imprisoned somewhere between 17 and 20 thousand people in S-21, and this was only one of many such prisons. Most of them are thought to have been executed, with only seven known survivors having lived to tell their tale of the brutality that went on inside.

Staring back from the prison walls today are photographs of the thousands of people who suffered and died there. The Khmer Rouge were astute in their record keeping and one can only imagine what those people had been through before arriving at the prison and having their photographs taken. Some clearly had their hands bound, some had ropes and chains around their necks and some had been beaten. I was most affected by those who were smiling, so naive to what was awaiting them, and no doubt naive to the reason for their being there, so false were the accusations often made by the regime.

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Having left the fumes and noise of the city, our driver turned off of the main road and onto a quiet dirt road, driving us for a mile or so, past tiny wooden houses, grazing cows, banana groves and rice fields, until we saw the memorial tower of The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center - The Killing Fields.

In a picturesque orchard, once used by the local Chinese population as a cemetery, the Khmer Rouge built a camp. Sealed off from the villages around it by tall fences on three sides and a lake on the forth, those living around the camp thought it was nothing more than a training camp for combatants and a centre for revolutionary meetings and speeches. Not until the liberation of Cambodia did the world see what truly went on inside. Today, a moving audio tour guides you around the site. Starting at 'The Truck Stop', the point at which, at one stage, several trucks a day would arrive crammed with blindfolded prisoners, dragged straight from their homes or sent from the S-21 prison in town. A second post marks the location of the building in which they would all be processed, their names taken and cross referenced with the prisoner lists sent from their superiors. Later, the names would be ticked off a third time, once they had been executed.

To begin with, the guards would drag the condemned straight to the edge of large hand dug ditches, with their hands bound and their eyes covered. When knelt at the edge of their own grave, the slaughter would begin. Often carried out at night, beneath the glare of bright neon lights hung from trees, the roar of a nearby diesel generator and the howling of haunting revolutionary songs (to hide the screams of the dying from the nearby community). Expensive bullets were replaced with steel batons, axes, hatchets and hammers - even razor sharp sugar palm bark was used to slit throats. Men, women, children, even tiny babies, wiped from existence. Pol Pot believed that the families of those put to death should also face the same fate, to prevent them from seeking revenge. "If you want to kill the grass, you must kill it's roots."

We listened to all of this through our headphones, standing in silence at the edge of a wide, grassy grave site, its surface still pitted and bulging, the soil still shifting and changing as the bodies beneath decay and heavy rain unearths new fragments of bone and clothing. We saw ourselves the splintered fragments of a thigh bone sticking out of the damp soil. It is estimated that around 2 million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge - around one third of the population. 17,000 of them died at Choeung Ek.

So what happened to the Khmer Rouge? Tired of infringements along its border by the Khmer Rouge army, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas day 1978 and a week later Cambodia was liberated from its evil dictatorship. The world could finally see what Cambodia had endured. Genocide, famine, disease, the destruction of a society and its cultures. Vietnam pushed the Khmer Rouge into the jungle and installed its own pro-Vietnam government. Although the people were free from the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, a long civil war ensued. Even China got in on the act by invading Vietnam from the North as revenge for invading Cambodia (its long term financial partner) although the battle hardened Vietnamese ended their attempt within seventeen days.

Having lost the war against communism in Vietnam, the US (and therefore its many allies) could not support their actions in Cambodia - opting to support political back-patting rather than human rights and morals. The United Nations, therefore, did not recognise Cambodia's new government, and as late as 1992 the now somewhat guerrilla movement of the Khmer Rouge still held a seat at United Nations conferences - until the monarchy was restored and the Democratic National Union Movement was formed. As the twentieth century drew to a close, thousands of Khmer Rouge members surrendered their arms to the newly appointed government. Pol Pot died aged 82 in a straw hut in the jungle, not having faced any consequences for his actions, although various bodies were soon established to punish the surviving senior leaders of the regime.

Three of four of those responsible for the atrocities of the late seventies are still alive and are on trial in an international court. All well in to their 80's, one must ask what punishment could now be served upon these frail men and women that could even begin to match the brutality they were personally responsible for.

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But what of the tale of the evening after our visit to these harrowing places? Well, with our minds filled with such chilling images and with the ghosts of the Khmer Rouge era, a time so close to our own, still haunting the streets and the minds of Phnom Penh, a ground shaking explosion, louder and deeper than anything I'd ever heard, violently shook the walls of our little hotel room, compressing the air around us to the apparent screams of people in the darkened market square outside. We froze with fear. A country so unstable for so long, and with peace and safety having only been enjoyed for just over a decade, had the ghosts of the Khmer Rouge come out from their hiding places, were we to be thrown into the start of yet another civil conflict? We flew down the staircase, our hearts pounding, our voices trembling. 'Hello?' I called as we neared the ground floor, expecting to see the market in flames and the aftermath of a car bomb in the street outside. Lent coolly against the open doorway, our hotel's owner stood looking out into the night sky. Beyond him, and high above the rooftops, a giant firework display was underway, marking the end of a week long celebration of the former King's birthday. The blood returned to our faces which were by now grinning wildly with relief. We stood there and enjoyed the show, half dressed, laden with rucksacks rammed with documents and personal belongings, with my money belt slung over my shoulder. A tropical storm had also started rumbling towards us from the horizon, electrifying the silvery sky behind the rainbow explosions of the fireworks.

Perhaps a reminder not to expect the worst from this still developing nation, the end of such an emotional day certainly left us with a deeper respect for the Cambodian people who cheered and clapped with every glittering blast of the firework display, although no doubt the wounds of the Khmer Rouge are still very much a part of their lives.

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To find out more about the Khmer Rouge, the first two parts of this CNN documentary are a good start:
Part 1
Part 2

'The Killing Tree' - it's trunk used for murders too brutal for me to write here

The Buddhist Memorial Stupa at Choeung Ek - filled with layers and layers of skulls, thigh bones and other large bones excavated from the site from 1980 onwards.