Anyone

[smokingboot]

Anyone who could read. Anyone who could write. Anyone with more than one syllable in their name. Anyone who wore glasses. Any medic. Any teacher. Any dancer. Any factory worker. Any office worker. Anyone who spoke a foreign language. Anyone of foreign descent. Anyone who argued. Anyone who criticised. Anyone who disobeyed. Anyone who obeyed. Anyone.

Most of all the Khmer Rouge hated knowledge and intellect.The city people were forced to go into the countryside, the farming people were told to go and fish, the fishing people were told to go farm. If those people reached their quotas, the quotas were upped. Failures to meet quotas meant execution. No-one knows exactly how many died on forced marches along roads to nowhere, how many died of starvation and exhaustion, how many were killed just for the sake of it.

A man told us of his father who was informed by friends among the KR officers that the regime was coming to his village. If said friends had been discovered they would have been sent to places like Choeung Ek for being traitors. The man's father told his family to leave everything behind but the oldest pots and pans as they took to the roads, and he gave them all new very simple one-syllable names that meant things like 'big' and 'small.' They had to act as sturdily ignorant as possible, and if the KR wanted whatever, they gave them whatever without question.

The leaders wanted Year Zero, some fantasy agrarian reset, and for that a popular theory suggests they sought to whittle the population down to about 40,000 people perfect in dogma with no connections to the old ways, no thoughts, no analysis or critical thinking; just obedient brutes. They wanted to exceed Mao Zedong's 'great leap forward' with no intervening pauses and to be rid of the 'New People' (i.e those who joined the party after 17th April 1975) because they considered their lateness as a sign of reluctance/insincerity/lack of commitment. Eventually the creeping-to-raving paranoia that was such a tell of this regime became a universal snare; from officers to executioners who worked at the killing fields, all lived in fear of being denounced as traitors then killed and replaced, presumably because someone somewhere understood the need for secrecy. At Choeung Ek they played blaring music to hide what they were doing and sprayed DDT over all the corpses to cover the smell, as well making sure that anyone still alive in the pits wouldn't stay that way.

Many such sites have been discovered in Cambodia.

At Choeung Ek, most famous of the killing fields, there is a tree. Once there was a nail in it. If the nail is still there, one cannot see it for the trunk is covered with offerings, bright trinkets for little hands, shoes for very small feet. It was in front of this tree that Kang Kek Lew/'Comrade Duch,' leader of the government's internal security forces and overseer of S-21, broke down and confessed his crimes. He died during life imprisonment, having converted to Christianity, presumably with fingers crossed regarding Matthew 18:6.

Kek Lew's overseer was Son Sen, the man who designed the torture procedures at S-21, and was also intimately involved in their application, as well as, for added measure, ordering the massacre of 100,000 people in Eastern Cambodia 1978. Son Sen and thirteen members of his family including children were murdered on Pol Pot's command.

Saloth Sâr, known to the world as Pol Pot, was eventually imprisoned by General Ta Mok and died thereafter. There was reported evidence of strychnine poisoning, others claimed he overdosed on a combination of valium and other drugs so that he wouldn't be handed over to the Americans. Ta Mok didn't wait for an autopsy to confirm or deny. He and Pol Pot's wife had Pol Pot cremated, covered in rubbish on a pile of tyres.

I listened aghast to our Cambodian guide when he spoke of the Khmer Rouge; how do folk get past all that without being filled with burning hatred in their hearts? How to forget, never mind forgive?

'We don't want civil war,' he said, 'many of these people had no choice, many were young. We send them to temple to learn, and they do, they understand what they did wrong, they repent.' He was a quiet man but I had noticed his devotion, paying respects whenever we had wandered into the sacred, his way so unobtrusive that none of us ever felt preachy presence. I remembered our Vietnamese tour leader, an open extroverted guy saying, 'I can speak honestly to you, but it is not the same for Cambodian guides. People still disappear over there.' So what was I seeing then? Was this extraordinary compassion born out of faith and a deeper spiritual insight, or internalised mass trauma, fear, caution? Were my assumptions arrogant? Our Cambodian guide did not seem afraid or wary.

'The Buddha tells us not to take revenge,' he said, 'if I am angry, who loses sleep? Not the person I am angry with. And now,' he spread his hands a little, 'most Cambodians think we are in paradise.'

Paradise.

I looked at his gentle face illuminated with hope and sincerity, and I may have got the timing out a little or jumbled up conversations from before and after...but I'm almost sure this was the exact point when my heart broke.