Never Again?

Today, the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, has a population of about two million, but only thirty years ago the city was an empty ghost town. All the people were driven out of the city by the ultra communist Pol Pot (a student of Mao Tse Tung and Hitler) and his evil Khmer Rouge regime. They were attempting to form a Communist peasant farming society, but it eventually resulted in the death of 25 percent of the country’s population from starvation, overwork, and executions.

After the Vietnam War, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the city and the people cheered in the streets thinking that good things were finally coming for them. But just three hours later their cheers turned into tears as they were told they must leave the city at once and literally walk to the countryside to become peasants. The Khmer declared it “Year Zero” and said that society was about to be “purified.” Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world. Whole families were split up and many of the older people and hospital patients who were forced to walk from the city to the country died on the way. During this horrific regime nearly three million people died—two million were killed and another million died from starvation.

The vast majority of those killed were people who were educated. Pol Pot’s regime feared they would band together and start an uprising. He wanted only uneducated peasants who would work the land.

I learned much of this information when our tour group visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Ironically, this former school was turned into a prison in 1975 and became the largest center of detention and torture in the country. Classrooms were converted into prison cells where people were shackled and beaten.

Thousands of black and white photos were taken of all the prisoners and are now on display here. It is an eerie and disturbing sight and it is hard to comprehend such madness. But sadly, we have seen senseless killing like this before with the Holocaust, the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and several African nations such as Rwanda.

Prisoners were interrogated about their education and line of work. The soldiers had three simple ways of finding out a person’s education:

1. If they wore glasses they must be educated and need them to read.
2. If they had smooth hands, they must be educated because if they worked in the fields, their hands would be rough.
3. If they had light skin, they must be educated because if they worked outdoors, it would be darker.

The Khmer Regime theory was to “destroy weeds from the roots” and they would find and kill all family members of any educated person. As the insanity increased, children at the camp were brainwashed into hating others and even their own families. Soldiers would tell them that they “had seen their parents and they didn’t want their children back.” Eventually the children became angry and bitter and blindly became part of the regime. They were turned into prison guards and soldiers, torturing and killing their own.

Our tour guide for the day survived this awful time. His father and five siblings were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He was sent to work in a farm and would work sun up to sun down with only one meal break.

Between 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 people held at this prison were taken to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek known as the “Killing Fields.”

It was actually the Vietnamese who liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Pol Pot retreated into Thailand with the remnants of his Khmer Rouge army and began a guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments, which lasted over the next 17 years. After a series of internal power struggles in the 1990s, he finally lost control of the Khmer Rouge. In April 1998, 73-year-old Pol Pot died of what appeared to be a heart attack following his arrest, but before he could be brought to trial by an international tribunal for the events of 1975-79, leaving the people of Cambodia to never really get the justice they so rightly deserve.

The night after our tour of the Killing Fields, we were invited into the home of our local guide. He nobly runs a small school in the first floor of his home tutoring local children in English. He lives above the classroom with his wife’s extended family (of forty-five people) in the customary Cambodian tradition. We sat on mats on the floor and had a wonderfully filling meal of fish, chicken curry, spring rolls and noodles with beef.

This sweet and soft-spoken man told us more about the evils of the Khmer Rouge and how most were never really persecuted for their horrible actions. Several former Khmer Rouge leaders astonishingly remain a part of the current Cambodian government today, known as the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). In fact, the current Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was a former Khmer Rouge captain. And so are several members of his cabinet—the Minister of Finance, the Head of the Senate and others. We are told it is undoubtedly one of the most corrupt governments in the world where the number one goal is always self interest rather than the interests of the people. Our guides told us stories of the corruption despite the fact that, although they are no longer ‘communist, incidents still happen to those who speak out against the government—mysterious car crashes and deaths.

Some examples of the corruption: If a tourist gets robbed and goes to the police to fill out a report they most likely won’t really help except to ask for money, knowing the tourist has insurance and will need to report. Also, we are told that the medicine and drugs at pharmacies in the country are typically not safe and in many cases are fake or expired pills. Nearly all the temples we visited are not supported by or restored by the Cambodian government, but were sold off to other countries instead like Japan, Switzerland, and India. Even the “Killing Fields” were sold off by the Cambodian government to a private Japanese company.

The dusty, pot-holed main route from Siem Reap to Bangkok is still not paved. Our guide explained that Bangkok Airways has a “deal” with the Cambodian government. The airline pays Cambodia fifty million dollars a year to not pave the road so tourists continue to buy the airline ticket between the cities instead of driving the bumpy ten hour drive. Our tour, of course, took the road less paved and drove instead of flying. It was the bumpiest, sports-bra requiring, four hour drive I’d encountered since the start of my trip in Costa Rica.

There are many human rights watchdog groups with their eye on the Cambodian Government, but unfortunately for now, the people’s unofficial slogan is: “Free, but never fair.”