WE arrived in Phnom Penh from Bangkok in early April. I had recently seen the movie Killing Fields and expected to arrive at a small airport teeming with gun toting soldiers, but the only uniformed guards were the immigration officers. In fact for the next week we hardly saw any armed policeman or army officer. Many European and Japanese tourists lined up for the visas, which were given at arrival for $25. Times had changed for this war-ravaged country. Until recently Cambodia was a troubled land where the tourists feared for their safety. The place was infested with landmines and only the foolhardy or extreme adventurers ventured into the country. Today it is a tourist destination known for its ruins at Angkor and tragic happenings at the Killing Fields.
It is usually warm and sultry even in spring. The wind picks up humidity from the Ton Le Sap lake, the air is languid and mood of the city indolent. But April of 1975 was different. There was hope in the hearts and joy on the faces of people. Khmer Rouge forces of Pol Pot were at the city gates. For five long years Cambodians had suffered the excesses of General Lon Nol and his marauding troops; the liberators were now closing in on the capital. April 17, 1975 is etched in the memory of all those who saw the first tank of the Khmer Rouge roll into the city. They lined the roads to glimpse the saviours, relieved that emancipation was at last here and the long night of suffering was to end. As I stood on the balcony of the Foreign Correspondents Club across the river I imagined the reporters from Paris Match and the Le Monde who watched bewildered as the rag tag army marched below them. The new government issued an edict declaring 1975 as “Year Zero”. The rule of Khmer Rouge had begun.
But the celebration ended even before it began. Two weeks later the new government, of Pol Pot, ordered all civilians in the cities to stop work at once and head into the countryside to live with the masses and learn from the peasants. Currency was abolished and all communications with the world was severed. Hospitals were emptied and factories locked. Millions streamed out on the back roads with no destination and no food. Once again, the nightmare had begun. Pol Pot, an avowed Maoist was determined to transform Cambodia into a peasant dominated agrarian society.
We had heard that much of the atrocities were committed in this city. Our taxi guide offered to show us where the carnage happened. I did not want to be depressed on a vacation but the history of Cambodia is a story of genocide and I had to understand the suffering of these people to feel their ethos. The taxi went past the bustling Russian market and meandering through narrow and dusty streets, stopped in front of a school building.
Tuol Sleng primary is a typical school in the southern district of Phnom Penh with large classrooms and high walls enclosing a large playground with slides and swings. On April 25 the classrooms were full and there was laughter in the air and hope in the hearts. Once again life looked beautiful. They had no way of knowing that in a few hours their world would come crumbling down.
Just before lunch a general announcement asked all children to keep the books down and leave the school. The teachers were asked to stay behind in the classes and wait for further instructions. Before the last child was out of the gates, Khmer troops took over the building. There would be no need for a school anymore. There would be no children to teach.
A large sign was hurriedly painted announcing the new premises of “S-21”. The troops of the dreaded security office 21 had secured the building for conversion into a torture centre. Ironically the director of the new security centre was a former schoolteacher Duchy. There were some reports on Western television of a mass exodus, but the focus was on Saigon where a day earlier, Americans had abandoned Vietnam. There were unending replays of scenes of thousands on the US embassy roof waiting to be evacuated. To the world the forced Cambodian egress was soft news; the American defeat was what mattered.
It is more than 25 years since Tuol Sleng school closed its doors for the children. Even today the building looks like any government school here in Karachi but the walls look taller because the barbed wire reaches higher than some trees. Our taxi driver was old enough to remember what had happened then. “The guards enjoyed torturing their victims,” he said. “But there was no one in the city to hear their cries. Every night a truck would cart away the dead and the dying and many more prisoners were brought in to fill their places. The Khmer troops picked up their victims: intellectuals, teachers, doctors, students and anyone suspected of having anti-communist leaning. A few Pakistanis also were victims along with the majority of Cambodians. An Australian news reporter was particularly targeted and his travails carefully documented by his tormentors.
The infamous school is now Museum of Genocide to which come tourists to see the inhumanity of man against man. Duchy, the Khmer Rouge director of the S-21 like the Nazis at Auschwitz, maintained near perfect documentation of the prisoners. Every victim was photographed and numbered before and after torture. Today the walls are plastered with these photos. The classrooms still have the torture tools exactly as they were discovered and graphic blowups show charred and maimed bodies in all forms of contortions. A particularly poignant photo shows a woman on the electric chair with her wailing baby in her lap. A lone bust of Pol Pot stands in the corner and many Cambodians vent their anger by spitting on it and spraying black paint over it.
It is estimated that more than 17,000 people were incarcerated here before their final solution. The killings went on for three years and the dead and the dying were transported every night to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek about 20 kilometers from Phnom Penh.
In 1979 the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and when the first battalion marched into the city there were only dogs in the street to welcome them. When the Vietnamese soldiers tore down the gates of Toul Sleng there were just seven survivors. The captors had long vanished with Pol Pot into the jungles near Thailand.
Pol Pot once known as Big Brother One is remembered as one of the most brutal and savage revolutionaries in the history of mankind. For three years he unleashed a genocide few in Cambodia will ever forget. By a conservative estimate over two million perished. The entire nation lost its will to live. Choeung Ek was the scene of mass burials and even today the graves are left open just the way the Vietnamese found them in 1978. They unearthed more than 10,000 bodies, some still with blindfolds on and hands tied at the back. A monument to the dead stands in the Killing Fields stacked with skulls all the way to the top. It mourns the genocide of a nation which even today has not fully recovered from its sufferings and torments.
As for those who are responsible for the killings, most have been given amnesty and absorbed in the armed forces of the present government. Hun Sen, the present prime minister, is a former Khmer Rouge member who has forgiven many top commanders directly responsible for the atrocities. Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, made an apology of sorts to the Cambodian people and was pardoned. Pol Pot’s foreign minister Ieng Sary, the chief architect of the genocide, was pardoned by King Sihanouk and lives comfortably in the highlands.
Today, every village in the country has Khmer Rouge gang members but the government is adamant to let the sleeping dogs lie. After 30 years these are peaceful times, and the powers that be do not want a mass trial. In 1998 Pol Pot died peacefully in a jungle and only after his death have people believed that the war is finally over.
Bowing to international pressure the Government of Cambodia has recently accepted to appoint a tribunal to investigate the genocide. They have agreed to two international and three Cambodian judges on the panel. The tribunal will only charge a handful of senior commanders. The lower level cadres have been excluded from the trial. Youk Chhang, the director of Documentation Center of Cambodia, will provide evidence to both the prosecution and the defence but feels that prosecuting all those responsible will be like putting the entire country on trial. This will open festering wounds and no one wants another civil war. “We are a shattered country,” says the Director. “We must rebuild by putting it back together piece by piece, person by person.”
Today an uneasy peace has settled on Cambodia and the people relish the calm and prosperity it brings. We saw not tears but welcome smiles and greetings from the locals.
The country is shambles and mired in abject poverty, but one feels a pervading calm and stoicism in the Cambodians.
Each year the ruins of Angkor Wat draw a million or more tourists to the country. They witness the painful legacy of Khmer brutality and the agonizing suffering which the Cambodians endured. The shadow of genocide still hangs heavy on Cambodia but the people now want to set aside their bitterness and move on. The heart is heavy and the road to prosperity long.
WE arrived in Phnom Penh from Bangkok in early April. I had recently seen the movie Killing Fields and expected to arrive at a small airport teeming with gun toting soldiers, but the only uniformed guards were the immigration officers. In fact for the next week we hardly saw any armed policeman or army officer. Many European and Japanese tourists lined up for the visas, which were given at arrival for $25. Times had changed for this war-ravaged country. Until recently Cambodia was a troubled land where the tourists feared for their safety. The place was infested with landmines and only the foolhardy or extreme adventurers ventured into the country. Today it is a tourist destination known for its ruins at Angkor and tragic happenings at the Killing Fields.
