Killing fields revisited

Cambodia’s upcoming war-crimes tribunal may bring justice, but it won’t erase painful memories

By Sam Smith

CAMBODIA: rebuilding

Pirun Sen is sitting in his narrow Sherman Street office, artifacts from his native Cambodia fighting for space against the stacks of papers that occupy his days with the Portland Public School system. He’s concentrating right now, staring off, trying to remember how many times he nearly died during the Khmer Rouge genocide that took the lives of almost two million of his countrymen, approximately 30 percent of the nation’s population, from 1975 to 1979. He’s up to a dozen.

There was the time, just before Khmer Rouge forces overtook the capital city of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, when a grenade blew the side of his house in around him. It was supposed to hit the Cambodian army headquarters that was across the street. Then there was the time — after the forced exodus from the capital when Cambodians were dispatched to labor camps to fulfill the communist dream of an agrarian utopia cooked up by the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot — when Pirun nearly died of malnutrition after a year in the fields. There was the time he argued with a Khmer Rouge soldier, an act typically cause for execution; the time he almost shared a fish a friend had caught (his friend was later executed for not bringing the fish to the communal kitchen); and the time he nearly dropped his guard and translated a pamphlet written in English for some Khmer Rouge soldiers, who would have realized at that point he had a college education and did not fit into Pol Pot’s vision of Cambodia.

“I just stop and think, Why are they asking me to do this?” says Pirun, 48, furrowing his brow under a thinning head of hair. “These soldiers were not educated, but they could trick you, pick up on things you say, and figure out who you really are.”

Pirun says he’s lucky, not just because he dodged so many bullets, but because the memories of that time have not driven him crazy and ruined his life like they’ve done to so many of his peers. They are memories of atrocities that, as author Henry Kamm, who covered the Khmer Rouge for the New York Times, put it, “made their country’s name a synonym for incomprehensible horror.”

Those memories are still so real for some, in fact, that a number of Portland’s Cambodian immigrants were too scared to talk publicly about their time in the Killing Fields for fear that Khmer Rouge elements in the United States might seek revenge. Although no murders have been linked to the Khmer Rouge in this country, some believe the 1996 shooting death of Dr. Haing Ngor, who portrayed Dith Pran in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, was carried out by the Khmer Rouge. Others point to things like the Khmer Rouge newspaper published in the large Cambodian community of Lowell, Massachusetts, as reason to believe their presence is very real in this country.

“There is a deep-rooted psychological fear among survivors,” says Rotha Chan, director of the Biddeford-based Killing Fields Survivors’ Society. “Getting people to overcome those fears and talk about their experiences has been one of my biggest challenges.”

Pirun says he is able to talk about the genocide because he has a family and a job that keeps him busy; he can turn back to his life after retelling his tales from the Killing Fields. The stories don’t consume him. But lately the memories of death and dying have come to visit him more often, as they have with many of Portland’s estimated 2000 Cambodian immigrants, because, nearly 25 years later, their tormentors may finally stand trial. In January, the legislature in their homeland agreed to a United Nations-sanctioned tribunal, where leaders of Pol Pot’s regime would be tried for crimes against humanity. The decision has caused quite a stir among Portland’s Cambodian population, as much for the justice that might finally be served as for the possibility that the tribunal will be a sham.

The UN has been attempting to establish a Khmer Rouge tribunal since 1997. Originally it had wanted to mirror tribunals currently prosecuting war criminals from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda: a court of international judges in a neutral country. But Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself, would not relinquish his country’s jurisdiction over the tribunal. The comprise that was signed by the legislature in January, but sent back for revision in February because of constitutional conflicts, calls for a trial held in Cambodia with a mix of national and international judges. This would be the first “mixed court” tribunal the UN has ever attempted.

Today, Cambodian courts are marked by institutionalized corruption. Like all educated professionals, Cambodian judges and lawyers were hunted by the Khmer Rouge and nearly all of them were killed. Pol Pot dismantled the country’s courts, along with medical facilities, schools, the post office, and other government agencies.

“There is no way a fair trial could be held in Cambodia,” says Pirun. “Cambodia, since 1979, has no proven record of the court system being independent. Political leaders always influence the justice system.”

And since a number of those politicians, like the prime minister himself, are former Khmer Rouge officers, the perception — if not the reality — is that a war crimes tribunal in Cambodia would be overly influenced by the government.

“There is a long history of the Cambodian judicial process being undermined,” says Mike Jendrzejczyk with New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Given that history, we’re dubious this joint tribunal can work.”

But time is running out. Pol Pot died in 1998 and some of his highest ranking disciples are on death’s door. If justice is to be served, most acknowledge, it is best served soon, whether that means a Cambodian or international court.

“If a tribunal happens in Cambodia,” says Pirun Sen, “it is better than nothing.”

HORRIBLE HISTORY: Chan’s poster tells the story of the murder of his family.

In fat black ink across the top and bottom of Chan Than’s poster reads: “Bitter and true story of Mr. Chan during Pol Pot regime There were 48 people in his family but 47 people were killed by Pol Pot soldiers and cruel torture before them died on June 1978.” The poster’s six panels, which Chan had drawn while in a refugee camp after fleeing the country, speak the unspeakable, the grotesque torture and death of the 50-year-old Portlander’s family. The poster is his way of ensuring that the next generation does not forget that, in often horrific ways, Cambodians once killed Cambodians.

Driven out of Phnom Penh, Chan’s family was taken by train to the Pursat province, in western Cambodia, where they were put to work in the rice fields. Believed to be former members of the Cambodian army, with whom the Khmer Rouge had been engaged in civil war for five years leading up to their capture of Phnom Penh, Chan’s family was marked for execution. It was only because Khmer Rouge soldiers were routinely transferred to other villages — or executed themselves if they showed even minor disloyalty to Pol Pot — that some members of Chan’s family stayed alive longer than others.

Chan’s parents were the first to go, and they occupy the first panel of the poster. In it there is a field full of dead bodies, skulls, and bones. In the forefront is a basket and a decapitated body laying off to the right. Told they were being taken to work in the vegetable field, Chan’s parents were instead executed for being formerly associated with the Cambodian army, which, in reality, they were not. When Chan went looking for them, he explains through an interpreter, he was only able to identify their bloated and decapitated bodies because of their proximity to the basket, which he knew was theirs.

The next panel shows two of Chan’s brothers, their arms tied behind trees, and lashes in a choke hold around their necks. The drawing shows Khmer Rouge officers eviscerating the men; Chan beats a hollow thud on his broad chest when he explains how they cut open his brothers. He says they were killed in full view of the field workers, an example of the brutality they might expect. And if the evisceration weren’t enough of a horror show, after opening up their bodies, the soldiers cut out the two men’s livers and ate them. Chan shakes his head back and forth as he tells this, as if trying to keep the insanity of these memories from gaining purchase.

In the third panel is Chan’s uncle, one soldier standing off to his left holding one of the uncle’s eyes, a second soldier is crouched, digging out the other eye with a knife. The uncle’s face is bloody and twisted in a scream. Chan says his uncle had complained to the soldiers that the meager ration of rice porridge he’d been given was not enough to sustain him after such hard work and long hours in the fields.

“Do you not see that you get as much as everyone else?” the soldiers asked him. Ensuring he would never see again, they cut out his eyes, and then doused the sockets with salt and red pepper. Chan’s uncle was left to stagger around the village until he died.

In the fourth panel, two of Chan’s sisters-in-law, both pregnant, are burned alive. In the fifth his cousin is killed. And in the sixth there is Chan himself carrying his youngest brother in his arms. As Chan explains, the tears finally stream down his face.

They were the only members of his family left alive. To stay in the village was to die. To leave, at least they stood a chance. They split up and ran into the jungle. Chan reached their meeting place; his brother was not there. Then there was a gunshot, and Chan snuck back. His brother had been captured, his head split open with an axe, and still breathing, buried in a shallow grave. After the soldiers left, Chan dug up his brother. He carried him, his brains spilling out of his skull. Somehow, his brother was still alive, but died soon after whispering for Chan to run away.

Chan wipes the tears from his cheek and shakes his head hard at the memory.

“How do you punish these people who committed the unthinkable?” asks Rotha Chan of the survivors’ society. “The crime was just so harsh, so hard to comprehend, there is almost no punishment that would fit it.”

Rotha would like to see the surviving architects of the genocide executed. That would most likely include Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s deputy; his head of state, Khieu Samphan; generals Ta Mok and Ke Pauk; Deuch, Pol Pot’s chief interrogator and jailer; and Ieng Sary, his foreign minister and brother-in-law.

But execution is not likely for these men. If a tribunal takes place, it will be in Cambodia, and there is no death penalty in the country. Further, Ieng Sary, 71, may not even be brought before the courts. A major sticking point between the UN and Prime Minister Hun Sen is whether Khmer Rouge leaders who have been pardoned by the Cambodian government could be tried. Sary was granted amnesty by Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996.

“In our discussion we were . . . in agreement that no one would be exempt from the scrutiny of the investigating judges and the prosecutors,” UN senior lawyer Hans Corell wrote in a January 9 confidential letter to the Cambodian government, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

UN spokesman Farhan Haq says they are waiting to see the revised legislation that is still in development to ensure it meets with their standards, including the right for prosecutors to pursue even those pardoned for their crimes. Haq stops short of saying the UN might pull out of the tribunal, but says he expects negotiations to continue with the Hun Sen administration.

 

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