A Problem from Hell. Samantha Power
I was sitting in this little dark house on the border, and suddenly twenty or thirty Cambodians appeared like ghosts out of the forest. They told me stories of such hardship and horror that it just hit me. Somebody afterwards said to me, “you know they rehearsed their stories.” But these Cambodians had just arrived from weeks on the road. They were lean, tanned. They had been wearing the same clothes for days. They were smelly, if I dare say it. And the one thing I knew was that they were genuine. Genuine. From that point on, I believed…
After he was jolted into belief by the smell of the distraught survivors, Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. “My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing,” he recalls, “and the Holocaust was the closest thing I had. This sounded to me like extermination—you wipe out a whole class of people, anyone with glasses, anyone with a high school education, anyone who is Buddhist. I mean, the link was natural.” Although there were similarities between the Nazis and the KR, he and others at the border gradually assembled an understanding of the specifics of KR brutality. They learned that in the new Cambodia freedom had become undesirable, dissent intolerable, and joy invisible. All facets of life had been mandated by Angkar, which made the rules. By the end of 1975, those who had once known enough to fear but had hoped enough to deny had come to accept the contours of the hell that had befallen Cambodia.
Refugees told them:
Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.
They could not feed themselves. In most areas the state supplied a tin or less of rice each day.
They could not learn what they chose. Only KR tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign languages signaled “contamination” and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.
They could not reminisce. Memories of the past life were banned. Families were separated. Children were “reeducated” and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their “bourgeois” pasts. “Cambodia,” a colonial term, was replaced by “Democratic Kampuchea.”
They could not flirt. Only Angkar could authorize sexual relationships. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.
They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silos.
They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, telephones televisions, cars, and books gathered in the central squares were burned.
And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph, and mail service suspended.
Work was prized to a deadly extent. Cambodians were sent to the countryside, where an average day involved planting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and then again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Communist cadres transported annual harvests to central storage sites but refused to distribute the fruits of the harvests to those who had done the reaping. Health was superfluous to the national project, and starvation and disease quickly engulfed the country. Upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge terminated almost all foreign trade and rejected offers of humanitarian aid.
“Enemies” were eliminated. Pol Pot saw two sets of enemies—the external and the internal. External enemies opposed KR-style socialism; they included “imperialists” and “fascists” like the United States as well as “revisionists” and “hegemonists” like the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Internal enemies were those deemed disloyal.81 Early on the Khmer Rouge had instructed all military and civilian officials from the Lon Nol regime to gather at central meeting posts and had murdered them without exception. Another child, Savuth Penn, who was eleven years old when the evacuation was ordered, recalled:
They shipped my father and the rest of the military officers to a remote area northwest of the city…then they mass executed them, without any blindfolds, with machine guns, rifles, and grenades…My father was buried underneath all the dead bodies. Fortunately, only one bullet went through his arm and two bullets stuck in his skull. The bullets that stuck in his skull lost momentum after passing through the other bodies. My father stayed motionless underneath the dead bodies until dark, then he tried to walk to his hometown during the night…The Khmer Rouge threatened that if anyone was hiding the enemy, the whole family would be executed. My father’s relatives were very nervous. They tried to find a solution for my family. They discussed either poisoning my father, hiding him underground, or giving us an ox cart to try to get to Thailand…The final solution was reached by my father’s brother-in-law. He informed the Khmer Rouge soldiers where my father was…A couple of soldiers climbed up with their flashlights and found him hiding in the corner of our cabin…The soldiers then placed my father in the middle of the rice field, pointed flashlights, and shot him.82
This was the kind of killing that journalists and U.S. embassy officials in Phnom Penh had expected—political revenge against those the Khmer Rouge called the traitors. What was unexpected was the single-mindedness with which the regime turned upon ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim Chams, and Buddhist monks, grouping them all traitors. Xenophobia was not new in Cambodia; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and (non-Khmer) Cham had long been discriminated against. But it was Pol Pot who set out to destroy these groups entirely. Buddhist monks were an unexpected target, as Buddhism had been the official state religion and the “soul” of Cambodia. Yet the KR branded it “reactionary.” The revolutionaries prohibited all religious practice, burned monks’ libraries, and destroyed temples, turning some into prisons and killing sites. Monks who refused to disrobe were executed.
More stunning still in its breadth, as Twining had gathered at the border, the Khmer Rouge were wiping out “class enemies,” which meant all “intellectuals,” or those who had completed seventh grade. Paranoid about the trustworthiness of even the devout radicals, the KR also began targeting their own supporters, killing anybody suspected of even momentary disloyalty. Given the misery in which Cambodians were living at the time, this covered almost everyone. As a witness against Pol Pot later testified, Brother Number One (as Pol Pot was known) saw “enemies surrounding, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath.”83 Citizens lived in daily fear of chap teuv, or what people in Latin America call being “disappeared.” Bullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.
The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”84 Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”85 It was far more forgivable to kill ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive, even if he was “guilty” simply of being less than overjoyed by the terms of service to Angkar.
Soon after the fall of Phnom Penh, Henry Kamm of the New York Times visited three refugee camps at the Thai border, none of which was in contact with the others. He wrote a long piece in July 1975, which the paper accompanied with an editorial that compared the Khmer Rouge practices to the “Soviet extermination of kulaks or…the Gulag Archipelago.”86 In February 1976 the Post’s David Greenway filed a front-page story describing the harsh conditions. “For Westerners to interpret what is going on is like the proverb of the blind men trying to describe an elephant,” Greenway wrote. “Skepticism about atrocity stories is necessary especially when talking to refugees who tend to paint as black a picture as they can, but too many told the same stories in too much detail to doubt that, at least in some areas, reprisals occurred.”87 Collectively, although all were slow to believe and none gave the terror the attention it deserved, diplomats, nongovernmental workers, and journalists