Remembering the Khmer Rouge

Skulls at Choeung Ek

It is pretty much impossible to visit Cambodia today and not find reminders of the Khmer Rouge genocide. The Cambodian people do not want to forget, and they want the world to know what happened in their country between 1975 and 1979.

The trajectory of Cambodia's history was largely downward from the middle of the 15th century when Siamese forces defeated the Khmer empire, the most powerful in Southeast Asia, and destroyed the capital at Angkor Wat. From then until the 1860s, Cambodia was continually subjected to invasions by Vietnamese from the east and Siamese from the west, until France agreed to protect the kingdom in exchange for pretty much total control over politics, economics and social life.

Cambodia gained independence in 1953 and enjoyed a relatively prosperous period until the late 1960s, when the war in neighboring Vietnam coupled with increasing corruption in Phnom Penh led to the overthrow of  King Norodom Sihanouk by Lon Nol, who may have had the secret backing of the U.S. Sihanouk had alienated the U.S. and many of his own military leaders by allowing North Vietnam to use bases and roads in eastern Cambodia to supply its army and Viet Cong allies fighting in South Vietnam.

The U.S. and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 gave new life to the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge guerillas. The next five years were a period of civil war that ended when the Khmer Rouge, backed by North Vietnam, marched triumphantly into Phnom Penh and were greeted as liberating heroes.

Within a matter of  days, the Khmer Rouge turned Phnom Penh and other cities into ghost towns, telling the people that the U.S. was about to bomb them and moving them to the countryside for their own protection. But little time passed before the real motives of the Khmer Rouge became clear: the eradication of everything modern and the establishment of an agricultural utopia.

Many of the evacuees were put to work in agricultural communes to grow rice for export. The result was that thousands of people with no rural life experience or agricultural knowledge were literally worked to death, many of them starving in the midst of  rice fields that yielded grain for export, not to feed the Cambodian people.

The agricultural communes also served as places to identify enemies, who were forced to "confess" and were then executed, usually by bludgeoning, and thrown into mass graves. To the Khmer Rouge, enemies were educated people, teachers, government workers, business people, foreigners, as well as ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Thais, Christians, Muslims and Buddhist monks. 

S-21 Prison

More than 150 execution centers were established around the country. One of those was the Chao Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh. The school's five buildings were converted to a prison and interrogation center and renamed S-21 soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power. 

Over the next four years, an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 people were imprisoned at S-21. They were tortured and forced to confess to being enemies of the Khmer Rouge and to give up the names of family members and friends, who were then arrested and subjected to the same treatment. Nearly all were eventually executed either at the prison or at designated killing fields outside the city.

Condemned prisoner at S-21

Graves of the last 14 victims

Today, S-21 is a museum dedicated to exposing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Many of the tiny cells have been left as they were, as well as some larger cells that held high value prisoners, such as high ranking former government officials. Barbed wire still rings the compound and hangs as lattice nets outside the classroom buildings that became cell blocks. An exercise bar that became a gallows to hang prisoners upside down and dip them into large pots of fetid water stands at the end of a small cemetery where the last 14 victims were buried when their decaying bodies were found by the Vietnamese Army after the downfall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

Khmer Rouge photos of their victims

Like other genocidal regimes before them (the Nazis, for example) the Khmer Rouge were dedicated record keepers. They transcribed and filed the long confessions they coerced from their victims. They also photographed their victims, some of them both before and after they were executed. They also photographed each other. Those portraits make up some of the most haunting exhibits in the museum, eyes filled with fear and confusion staring back at us through the decades, begging not to be forgotten.

Also on display are leg irons, rusting springs that served as

Shackles at S-21

beds for high value prisoners and the ammo boxes they had to use as toilets in their cells.

Somehow 11  people managed to survive imprisonment at S-21. 

Chum Mey, Survivor

One of those is Chum Mey, who was destined for execution until someone found that he could repair a typewriter. Chum Mey's biography, "confession" and some of the facts about S-21 have been collected into a small book called "Survivor." Chum now spends his days sitting at a table within the former prison compound, selling and signing copies of his book and answering questions from visitors.

I wonder if he can answer the question, "Why?" 

Most of the prisoners from S-21 ended up being trucked about 17 kilometers out of the city to a former longan orchard now called Choeung Ek that the Khmer Rouge used as one of its infamous killing fields. Here there was no pretense of growing crops. The sole purpose of Choeung Ek was to dispose of the prisoners of S-21 and other interrogation centers.

The stupa at Choeung Ek

Most of them never even spent a night at Choeung Ek. They were taken from the trucks to the edge of pits, put on their knees and bludgeoned. If they did not die from the blow to the base of the skull, their throats were slit and they were pushed into the mass graves. Occasionally, near the end of the regime, the trucks brought so many prisoners that some had to be housed overnight in a windowless shed before being taken out to die.

Not even the smallest children were spared. They were usually swung head first into the trunk of a tree. And the executioners were not much older than children. Many of them were teenagers who had been coerced to hate and betray their own parents in the regime's effort to sever all ties to the past.

Victims of Khmer Rouge

It is estimated that more than 17,000 people were killed at Choeung Ek. Nearly 9,000 were later exhumed from 86 of the 129 mass graves. The other graves remain untouched. More than 8,000 skulls are displayed behind plexiglass in a 62 meter high stupa at the center of the site, and a sign in English reads: "Would you please kindly show your respect to many million people who were killed under the genocidal Pol Pot regime." No one know just how many people died of starvation, disease and brutal murder, but estimates range from 1.7 to more than 2 million.

Opened mass grave at Choeung Ek

At Choeung Ek, the exhumed graves are now small ponds. Quiet paths wind through the peaceful, wooded site. Visitors walk silently past signs describing the facilities that once supported the mass murders here. Life just outside the killing fields is almost disturbingly normal. Working rice paddies surround the site, and canoes are pulled up on the shore of a small adjacent lake. Egrets spear small fish in the pond.

When our group returned to Phnom Penh after our visit to Choeung Ek, we spent the afternoon and evening wandering around the bustling and festive waterfront park that overlooks the merger of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers.

Men played sei dak with remarkable agility. Women lit incense and left offerings of lotus blossoms and freed birds to carry their prayers. Street vendors hawked fruit, candy, lotus seeds, rice and balloons. Young men with cameras offered to take photos of tourists in front of the Royal Palace.

My photos from that afternoon do a fair job of capturing the vitality of the park. But one photo keeps jumping to the front of my mind. A woman squats on the ground, her arms around a small boy. His gaze is upward, toward some nearby men playing sei dak, curiosity in his eyes.  She is looking straight ahead, but does not seem to be looking at anything. I find it easy to imagine that she sees a past of cruelty, death and hopelessness, a past that is not that long ago. Her arms hold the boy between her knees, her body and her memory protecting him. He does not resist, but I think he sees himself one day playing sei dak like the men he is watching.

His chances are good, if Cambodia and the world never forget what happened there between 1975 and 1979.