On the Cambodian genocide

A first-time visitor to Cambodia is inevitably presented with two things: the splendor of the ancient temples of Angkor, which form the country’s prime tourist attraction, and a horrific recent history of genocide. In the 1970s, under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, a fourth of the population was killed. How to write about this? What to say, where to start?

First, a short summary of history. In the 1970s, the Cambodians were suffering from civil war, hunger, and spillovers from the Vietnam war. In 1975 the communist party Khmer Rouge came to power under the leadership of Pol Pot. He wanted to erase history and ‘reset’ the country: the day of the takeover was declared as the first day of “Year Zero”. Cambodia was to become a traditional agricultural society. People from the city were considered New People and were forced to move out and work on the countryside, generally in terrible conditions.

The communist party’s ideal of classlessness and radical equality meant that everyone with some kind of education had to be eliminated: teachers, doctors, monks. Reasons to be killed included being able to speak a foreign language, having soft hands, or wearing glasses. “It’s better to kill an innocent by mistake than to spare an enemy by mistake,” said Pol Pot. Of course, most ‘enemies’ had no idea what they had ever done wrong. And to be sure there was no one left to take revenge, their family members and children were also killed.

In less than four years, 2 million people (estimates differ) died from hard labor, starvation, or execution. It is an unfathomable number. As an individual human being, you know maybe dozens or hundreds of people. What does a thousand people mean? A hundred thousand? A million? This magnitude of human suffering is too abstract for us to understand. Maybe the only way to get some idea of what happened is through the stories of individuals, told on the sites where it all happened.

In Phnom Penh I visited Tuol Sleng, a former high school which the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture prison. A grim site. The audio guide first takes you to the interrogation/torture rooms: empty classrooms with in the middle a metal bed frame. On the wall in every room, a photo of the last prisoner who died there, tortured to death by the Khmer Rouge before they fled the place. In the courtyard, fourteen anonymous graves of the last victims of Tuol Sleng.

Then, building after building, classroom after classroom, horrendous detail after detail about what happened here. Brick walls dividing classrooms into tiny prison cells, torture instruments, experiences of survivors. Like in Auschwitz, walls full of portraits of prisoners testify to the desire of dictatorial regimes to document their activities. The audio guide spoke of a bureaucracy of death: if everyone has their own task – taking pictures, measuring the new arrivals, writing down their (invented) confessions – it distances people from the total responsibility.

Among the people who died there were two men from New Zealand who were unfortunate enough to sail into Cambodian waters in 1978. They were tortured to release information about the CIA. In documents that were later found back, one of them “confessed” that Colonel Sanders of KFC was one of his superiors, stated his family’s home telephone number as his CIA operative number, and mentioned family friends as supposed members of the CIA. A Cambodian survivor of the prison recounts that he had never heard of the CIA, but under torture managed to give the interrogators as many as 60 names.

The numbers of people killed at the prison soon outran the space available to bury them. The Khmer Rouge started to transport prisoners to an area outside of Phnom Penh, called Choeung Ek. People were brought here with the sole intention to be killed. Like Auschwitz, today it is a silent and almost peaceful place. The mass graves are still visible. In between them now arises an impressive memorial building with thousands of skulls of victims – thousands. And this “killing field” is only one of hundreds in Cambodia. Hundreds.

But again, more than numbers, I think that every visitor of such sites finds themselves struck by specific stories, touched by details that for some reason penetrate so profoundly that it makes you shiver. For me it was imagining a mother seeing her child being smashed to death against a tree before being thrown in a mass grave together. It was the audio guide recreating the last sounds people heard before they were killed: loudly played revolutionary songs and a diesel generator, meant to muffle their screams. And it was the child looking for his mother running through the prison after the Khmer Rouge were driven out, only to find the bodies of the prison’s last victims, now buried in the courtyard.

And these stories, multiplied – not by ten, not by hundreds, thousands, but millions.

The impact this left on the country is unimaginable. Every one in four people had perished. All knowledge and expertise was lost. How to rebuild a country? How to heal? One part of the answer is presented by the memorial building at Choeung Ek, the skulls displaying history in all its horror, while the audio guide for that stop emphasizes that the Cambodian Day of Anger is now called the Day of Remembrance. “After your visit, you too will be a keeper of memory,” I was told at Tuol Sleng. Certainly, visiting these places isn’t easy, but we can’t afford to forget what humanity is capable of.