Geopolitics

DEATH OF A NATION

by JOHN PILGER (Sept. 30, 1979)

An lncredible human disaster has happened in a once peaceful and gentle land in South East Asia. Perhaps more than two million - a third of the population - have been killed by a fanatical regime whose apparent aim was to wipe out anyone and anything connected with the modern world and to return a whole nation to 'Year Zero': the dawn of an age of slavery, without families and sentiment, without machines, schools, books, medicine and music. The evidence of murder is plentiful...like the cracked skulls, dug from mass graves near Angkor Wat by villagers who had lost relatives. For four years there has been almost no contact with people inside Cambodia. It's borders were sealed...untll John Pliger of Britain's 'Daily Mirror' got in to file this report.

The plane files low. following the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, what we see below silences everybody on board. There is nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia stopped at the border. Whole towns and villages on the river bank stand empty: the doors of houses flapping open, cars on their sides, mangled bicycles in a heap, chairs and beds in the street. Beside tangled power lines there is the lone shadow of a child, lying or sitting- It does not move.

The endless landscape of South East Asia, the patch-work of rice paddies and fields, is barely discernible; nothing appears to grow except the forest and tall, wild grass. On the rim of large towns this grass will follow straight lines, as if planned; it is fertilized, we later see, by human compost, by the remains of tens of thousands of men, women and children. All of them murdered.

Cambodia, which I remember as the most gentle and graceful land in all of Asia, a land whose peace in a region of unrelenting war was unique, all but vanished from the head- lines four years ago; and what has happened there since has no parallel in modern times.

That may sound a sweeping claim, but it is true. Coming here is like happening on something unimaginable: a human catastrophe and crime without measure. For even Hitler's demonry did not involve the enslavement of the entire population and the systematic slaughter of all those "touched and corrupted by the 20th. century." Nor did Stalin's terror include the banning of all learning, all books all arts, all music and song, and the abolition of the family and all expressions of joy, love and grief, and the destruction of all machines.

All that has happened in Cambodia.

Out of a world-renowned royal ballet of some 500 dancers. a few dozen survive. Before 1975 there were 550 Cambodian doctors: there are now 48. The statistics are numbing. Cambodia's population in 1975 was roughly seven million. Today,between a million and a half and three million people are "missing." presumed dead.

As we make our final approach into the deserted airport at Phnom Penh, the capital, there is a pyramid of cars, overgrown by the jungle - some of them brand new four years ago - and ambulances and fire engines; and refrigerators, washing machines, hair dryers, generators, typewriters, as if an army of Luddites has tried to sweep them back in time. After April 1?, 1975, anybody who had owned things, anybody who had lived in a city or town, was under virtual sentence of death. Anybody with education or a modern skill was killed if his or her identity was revealed: doctors, teachers, technicians, skilled workers, even schoolchildren; anybody who knew foreigners. The images also numb. An emaciated child walks alone down the centre of a main boulevard that once was filled with traffic in a capital city that held two and a half million people; gangs of children scavenge in the garbage.They are mostly orphans and they are either infants or more than five years old; few of those born during the period of terror appear to have survived. Young adults are equally difficult to find; a generation has gone. lndeed this is now a nation of mostly children, isolated from the world and facing starvation of such intensity that not even a comparison with Biafra is adequate.

Who did this? How could it happen? In the spring of 1970, Cambodia's tranquility was terminated by the greatest saturation of bombing in history. This was the secret war launched by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger in violation of American constitutional law and in defiance of the U.S. Congress. Pilots were sworn to secrecy and their operational logs were falsified or destroyed. For three years the American public knew nothing about it. By 1975 the equivalent, in tons of bombs, of five Hiroshimas had fallen on neutral Cambodia. The military aim was the destruction of a mythical Vletcong base in Cambodia. President Nixon's aim was to show the Vietnamese communists how tough he could be: a policy he once described as the "Madman Theory of War".

The Madman Theory of War threw Cambodia into turmoil: the delicate balance of royalists, republicans and communists of varying shades was destroyed; and Prince Sihanouk, the peacock. jazz. loving ruler who had preserved this balance, was overthrown by the military. In the forests, a small group of fanatics, whom the Prince had called the Khmer Rouge and who were inspired by the maniac Red Guards of China's "cultural revolution" in the 1960's, intensified their revolution.

They declared 1975 "Year Zero,'. literally the beginning of the end of the modern world. The ideological aim of their revolution was to recreate a "pure" rural society, "classless and glorious." similar to that of the Khmer empire of the 10th century. Because there were so few of them they represented probably no more than 10 per cent of the people - this meant controlling the population by enslaving it and reducing it by half.

Their leaders were at first anonymous, deferring constantly to 'The Angkar," or "the organisation,' whose Orwellian "wisdom" justified everything, including mass blood-letting. But one man, called himself Pol Pot, emerged at the head. Little was and is known about him, except that he was one of a group of Cambodians who learned their politics in anarchist circles in Paris in the late 1940's. He claims to have been a Buddhist priest and a teacher: in fact, he came from a wealthy family and his dreams of a classless society ended with himself: Mao was his hero and he was to be Cambodia's Mao: an Asian pharaoh. He is in all probability a psychopath.

At 1.30 on the morning of April 17. 1975 the Khmer Rouge entered the capital. At one o'clock they ordered the city to be abandoned. There were to be no exceptions. The hospitals were emptied at gunpoint; doctors were forced to stop in midoperation. Dying patients were wheeled into the streets in their beds.

The hemorrhage of people lasted two days and two nights. When the Vietnamese army drove into Phnom Penh last January. ending four and a half years of terror. they found the city almost exactly as it had been abandoned on the first day of "Year Zero."

It is a hauning unforgettable sight. In the silent, airless humidlty, you enter a major city without people, as if in the wake of a nuclear war which spared only the buildings.

Houses, apartments. office blocks, the university, schools, hotels are deserted and open, as they were left when more thah two million people were marched away at gunpoint, most of them to their death. A medical diploma lies trampled on a front path; a tricycle is crushed on the pavement; traffic lights are jammed at red. Except in the centre, there is no electricity. There is neither sewerage nor drinking water: the drains and reservoirs remain polluted with bodies. At the railway station. trains stand empty at the platforms and half way along the track. Behind a pagoda is a pile of burned telephones.

From Year Zero there was to be no telephone, no post, no communications of any kind; and no money. My most vivid memory of Cambodia when I was last here was a land teeming with saffron-robed monks. I have not seen one; anyone found at prayer was automatically killed.

The barbarism was highly organized, with its chief aim to reduce the population to less than two million: to a single generation untainted by the old life.' "If you want to live," the Khmer Rouge told the townspeople. "you must surround your lives with silence. Hear nothing. know nothing. understand nothing." The rules were explicit. People would live in collective farms. in straw-roofed barracks without walls, so that they could be watched all the time. They would be fed according to how "productive" they were, and this usually meant a tiny can of rice twice a week.

An opaque-eyed woman, her grief locked inside her, tells me that she was forced to go into the fields at night leaving her six-month-old baby without a roof or food or care of any kind: in two days she returned to find the baby dead. Only the camp "controller" could sanction marriage and husband and wife were permitted to meet only once a month...

In a valley nearby the ancient temples of Angkor Wat in western Cambodia, one of the wonders of the world, there is a ribbon of tall grass that gives way to trenches which have been recently excavated. They are crammed with skeletons, with evidence of terrible head wounds: the hammer being the most common instrument of death. So far. the remains of 9,000 people have been found there.

Cambodia's Palace of Fear

Toronto Star. April 7, 1991

PHNOM PENH - Heng Nath's hair is prematurely gray and his eyes have a deep haunted look. "I always think that some day soon, I will die," the 45-year-old painter says. "I still feel the fear." Walking casually through a school playground on a sunny Sunday afternoon, that fear still has the power to torment. Nath suddenly shudders and starts to weep.

"For every day I was here, I heard and saw killing." he explains. "Even now, it is still fresh to me. It's with me all the time. My eyes see everything. My ears. hear everything. I live with death every night and every day."

The schoolyard, in the heart of a 'poor residential district in southern Phnom Penh, is deserted, silent and solemn. But for Nath it is filled with horrible memories that continue to haunt Cambodia. Originally known as Tuol Svay Prey, the old high school was taken over by the Khmer Rouge in 1976 and turned into a prison. Renamed Tuol Sleng - "Hill of the Poison Tree" - it became Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's department of death and Cambodia's central interrogation and torture centre. More than 200,000 people were imprisoned, tortured and murdered here. Nath is one of only seven prisoners who survived Tuol Sleng.

Now a civilian clerk in the quartermaster's department of the Cambodian armed forces, he used to work as a commercial sign painter in the northwestern city of Battambang. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, Nath was forced to abandon his business and his home and was sent with his family to work in a slave labor camp in the countryside.

For nearly three years, he planted rice, dug irrigation ditches, chopped wood and struggled to survive on three spoonfuls of thin rice gruel a day. In the camps, he saw hundreds of people die of starvation and disease.

One of his three children, an infant boy just 6 months old, died in agony only weeks after the family arrived at their first slave camp because the Khmer Rouge refused to give the child the medicine he needed.

"The famine I endured was as bad as the others," Nath says, dismissing those years as just another part of his country's tortured history. "All of Cambodia was in pain then. Everyone suffered." For Nath the pain became personal late in 1977 when he was suddenly arrested and accused of being a traitor. He still doesn't know why he was singled out or what he was supposed to have done wrong.

One evening, he. was just told to join a work party to collect firewood in the forest. Shortly after being marched away from his family, he found himself in a district police office, with his hands tied behind his back and a guard shouting abuse at him. He was interrogated and beaten and forced to write out his life history. When he pleaded with his captors to tell him why he wa there,they told him that Angka, the ruling organization of the Khmer Rouge, didn't make mistakes. He must know why he was arrested.

A week later, he was loaded into an army truck and driven to Phnom Penh, arriving at Tuol Sleng at 3 a.m. on Jan. 7, 1978. You could smell fear here," he says. "We all thought we were going to die soon. We were brought into a small room and photographed. They measured our height and they reviewed our records and then they chained us all together and locked us in a room on the second floor."

Pol Pot's torturers, like Hitler's Nazis, were sticklers for detail. They maintained meticulous records of the people they murdered, carefully photographing their victims both before and after interrogation. Today. Tuol Sleng is a macabre museum testifying to the Khmer Rouge's cruelty. The walls of some of the classrooms that were turned into torture cells are decorated with rows of photographs of the prisoners who died there. The faces are filled with terror and hopelessness. There are men with wide, staring, frightened eyes; weeping women clutching babies;a boy,who can be no older than 10,. with chains wrapped around his neck; teenagers with blood-smeared faces and a young girl squinting at the camera through the pain of a swollen face and a badly bruised left eye.

None of the pictures have names. Even now, their deaths remain sordid secrets. In the past, when Cambodians found a photograph of someone they knew, they often scribbled the dead person's name under the picture in a sad, lonely effort to mark their passing. But now a sign in the museum orders visitors not to write on the photographs. "We want to keep it as a documentary of Pol Pot," a government tour guide explains. Human emotion is still being crushed by a bureaucratic penchant for order. Nath can't look at the photographs. He still remembers the people and how they died.

When he first arrived at Tuol Sleng, he was held in a classroom, shackled by the ankle to a chain with 20 other people. Everyone had to lie down. Only one person could sit up at a time and no one was allowed to talk. They were fed a few spoonfuls of rice twice a day. "Some in my room were taken away to be interrogated," he says. "But only a few of them returned. The ones who did come back were beaten and bloodied. They bled from the nose, from the ears and from their eyes. Their bodies were covered in bruises. Every day, I saw people die."

There was nothing sophisticated about the beatings. The Khmer Rouge used the crudest of torture instruments - clubs, hooks, sharpened farm implements and whips made from coils of electrical wire. After a month, it was Nath's turn to be interrogated and he was certain he would die. Instead, the commander of the prison ordered him to start painting propaganda portraits of Pol Pot.

Nath didn't even know who the tyrant was. He'd never seen or heard of Pol Pot before. But he was given a photograph to copy ans for the next 11 months he spent 18 hours a day painting gaudy portraits of Cambodia's "First Brother". During that time, Tuol Sleng's tortures continued. Hundreds of victims passed through the prison and after being interrogated and made to confess to working for the CIA or the KGB or the Vietnamese, they were carted away and buried in mass graves in killing fields on thc outskirts of Phnom Penh.

From the store room in which he worked, Nath witnessed many of the killings. He caught glimpses of prisoners, who were too weak to walk, being carried to their deaths like pigs, strung up on bamboo poles. He saw women and children having their throats slashed with knives. He heard constant cries for mercy and pitiful pleas for a quick death. Some of the killings were organized to commemorate historical anniversaries observed by the Khmer Rouge. In other cases special days were set aside for executions - one day for wives, another for children, still another for factory workers or farmers. "It was horrible," Nath says, wiping tears from his face.

A year to the day after he was brought to Tuol Sleng, an invading Vietnamese army freed Nath from his hell. On the morning of Jan. 7, 1979, as he worked on his portraits, he heard gunfire and the sound of tanks on the street outside the prison. His Khmer Rouge guards rushed into the building and at gunpoint locked 13 other prisoners into his workshop. "They closed the doors and windows and we felt we were going to die," he says. "Then an hour or two later they came back and led us out of the city. They made us all walk in a line and they told us if we stepped out of line, they'd shoot us." At night, when his guards were suddenly thrown into a battle with a Vietnamese army patrol, Nath and four other prisoners escaped.

Years later, when the current government in Phnom Penh decided to turn Tuol Sleng into a museum, Nath was invited to paint a series of exhibits depicting the atrocities he witnessed. They are the last paintings he ever did. When he was finally reunited with his family in 1979, Nath found his wife working alone in a rice field near Battambang. "She was half mad," he says "As I walked toward her, across the fields, I could see by looking at her that all of my children were dead."