Killing fields revisited, continued

By Sam Smith

LUCKY SCAR: as a young boy, Rotha Chan was left to die from a deep wound below his knee. This saved his life.

Not only have the survivors of the Khmer Rouge never seen justice served, they’ve never even seen a monument erected to the memory of the dead, says Rotha Chan. Helping to fund that monument is one of the goals of his survivors’ society. The other is to document the oral history of that time.

Rotha’s own oral history of the Killing Fields began with a surprising lack of trauma, because to his 4-year-old mind, the people of Phnom Penh had turned out for a festival on April 17, 1975. The streets were crowded, and everyone was marching along to the fair, he thought. He was with his mother, grandmother, two sisters, and three brothers. As far as he was concerned, it was a festive day. And then he saw his first corpse lying on the side of the road.

He remembers that first dead body, and he remembers burying his grandmother on the second day of their exodus, after her tired body had given out. Many of the other details from these early days of the Khmer Rouge he only knows from his mother and two sisters. Like the fact that his father separated from the family as they were leaving the capital city, so when it was discovered he had served in the Cambodian military, only he would be killed, not his entire family. His mother also told him why he was the only one of her boys to survive the starvation and disease that took the lives of his brothers. At this, Rotha, now 29, pulls up the leg of his pants and shows a jagged scar just below his left knee.

“My mother tells me that saved my life,” he says.

It was soon after the family had been placed in a work camp in the Batdambang province of Cambodia, and young Rotha had fallen on a piece of glass, slicing his leg open to the bone. As young as he was, he was still old enough to be placed in the children’s camp and worked in the fields, but the Khmer soldiers left him behind to die of infection, and took his brothers and sisters.

When a country’s population is systematically decimated like Cambodia’s was, it is the unlikely turn of events, the flukes, and the lucky breaks that keep people in the category of survivor as they see thousands of others senselessly killed around them. Rotha’s lucky break was falling on a piece of glass.

Rotha was left in the village, and survived the injury, and was there when his brothers were brought back to the village to die after they had been worked and starved for months in the fields. He remembers watching them.

“Starvation isn’t a violent death,” he says. “The life just flows away from the body.”

Even though Rotha could conserve his energy by having avoided the fields, he was not spared the threat of starvation. Like many, he sustained himself on meager portions of rice and “anything that crawled on the ground.”

“If you have the choice between life and death,” he says, “you choose life.”

Rotha’s mother was a resourceful woman. She impressed on her children the need to conceal their middle-class background; many families were killed because children could be coaxed into talking. And although she married into a middle-class family, she had grown up farming, and could show experience when working the rice fields, further hiding their background. Rotha also suspects that his mother befriended a Khmer cadet, possibly fell in love; that cadet provided a pass to Rotha’s family to leave the village. They ended up at another village where workers were not treated as harshly.

The family was there when Vietnamese troops began penetrating deeply into Cambodia, pushing the Khmer Rouge back into the jungle. Rotha’s family ran from the village as shelling grew closer and into a bamboo forest full of thorns.

“If you want to run into a forest,” he says, “never run into a bamboo forest.”

From there, the family escaped across the Thai border, where they lived in a refugee camp for four years, before escaping to the United States in 1985, 14-year-old Rotha the man of the family.

 

I understand why Hun Sen try to postpone the tribunal,” says Pirun Sen, reflecting on the many years that have passed without a trial. “The former Khmer claim they are cooperating with the current government. They are separate, but are starting to integrate with current government. But not fully back because people still burning, feeling. Have to let the anger flatten.”

But now, most agree, even Hun Sen realizes his country is going to be best served if the tribunal happens, if not for justice’s sake, for the sake of his country’s infrastructure; Hun Sen has been courting the international community for economic aid, and realizes the tribunal is a sticking point with many, especially the United States .

“Oh, one more I forget,” says Pirun. He’s just remembered another near-death experience, this one from the Moung Roessei region of Cambodia, when he and a group of villagers tried to escape from their labor camp.

There were nearly 50 of them in all, but only two knew the area well enough to guide the group to safety. It was about 1 a.m., and the two guides traveled ahead of the pack. About two miles away, they fired a flare, and the others followed the signal, which took them to the base of a high dam.

Standing in the dry reservoir below it, all they could see was a cutout of the sky, none of the surrounding trees and jungle — and, unfortunately, they couldn’t see the next flare that was going off on the other side of the dam. With their guides gone, they had no idea which way to turn or how to navigate through the patchwork of Khmer Rouge posts that surrounded the area.

PIRUN SEN AND CHAN THAN: survivors.

At 6 in the morning, with the sun bright in the sky, they were easily captured.

Like all the regions of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, there was a central jail and execution site in Moung Roessei. While anybody could simply be killed where they stood, many were sent away to be terminated. And the executioner in this region was particularly infamous.

“The killer in that jail was just unbelievable,” says Pirun. “The eye on that killer was just green, like a giant eye. A different kind of person. No one could look at the eyes or the face.”

It is difficult for Pirun to describe the hopelessness he felt as he marched to be executed. He was aware that he was walking, he says, but not much more than that. He would look at others in his group, they would look back at him, but there was no feeling exchanged.

“I just feel like I have no more soul,” he says, “just like I was dead.”

Fifty people was much more than the executioner could handle at one time, and so Pirun and the others were taken to a separate building where they were left sitting outside. They would be taken one by one to be killed, they were told.

They were left sitting there until 7 that night, when a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers marched in from a nearby base. The soldiers told the jailers that none of the field workers were to be killed until tomorrow. If any of them were harmed, they said, it would be the jailers’ blood that was shed the next day. The soldiers counted Pirun’s group, so they could make sure they were all still there in the morning.

“At that time, anybody who had tried to hide, got out to make sure they weren’t miscounted,” Pirun says with a deep, heart-felt laughter.

In the same Cambodia that today has a former Khmer Rouge prime minister overseeing the punishment of Khmer Rouge leaders, under Pol Pot it was common that Khmer Rouge soldiers would be in charge of working, punishing, and often killing their own family members. In fact, to show any sympathy or favoritism toward a relative, to show loyalty to anyone other than Pol Pot, was to be executed yourself. It was an uncommon and subtle action, then, that saved Pirun’s life that day.

The soldiers returned to the group of villagers the next morning, counted to make sure they were all there, and told the jailer to release them back into the fields. As Pirun would come to learn, some members of that Khmer Rouge battalion were looking at their parents sitting there on the ground waiting to be executed. That those soldiers had not been brainwashed thoroughly enough to ignore such things, and that they had the wherewithal to let all 50 leave rather than just their relatives, thus hiding their true motivations, was another of the unlikely turns of events that kept some Cambodians alive through Pol Pot’s genocide.

 

Veasna Kem, 41, is like many of Portland’s Cambodian immigrants; she wants the tribunal — needs it, really, to help bring closure in her own mind — but holds out little hope that the country that left only herself and two siblings as the surviving members of her family will now meet any expectations she has for justice.

“The two million Cambodians who died under Pol Pot did not have any justice,” she says. “But many Cambodians living in other countries think it would be fair to bring it to international tribunal in Europe or America.”

Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) has met several times with Prime Minister Hun Sen and the UN to help facilitate negotiations over the tribunal. His senior foreign policy aide, Nancy Stetson, says a Cambodian-based tribunal is the only option.

“Look, this is a sovereign country, this is a functioning government,” she says. “It’s weary of [the tribunal] anyway, and the idea they would pick up these people and take them to Geneva was just not workable.”

Stetson says Kerry and the UN are very much aware of criticisms and the potential for the tribunal to be a “kangaroo court.” But, she says, there are enough checks in place to ensure that if the Hun Sen government attempts to undermine the process, there will be many to cry foul.

While the tribunal would be split into three courts, each with a majority of Cambodian judges, the presiding international judges would have, in essence, a veto power; at least one of them would have to vote with a majority of the Cambodians for a case to be dismissed.

Further, says Stetson, the human rights community will be keeping a close eye on the proceedings.

Demelza Stubbings, of Amnesty International’s Asia and Pacific Program, says Amnesty, a group that has campaigned for years to bring leaders of the Khmer Rouge to trial, has deep reservations about “the so-called mixed tribunal in Cambodia . . . which falls short of international standards and places an enormous burden on the weak and under-resourced Cambodian judicial system.” She says Amnesty is considering sending trial observers to the tribunal but warns that “whether international observers attend or not, the shortcomings in the law could not be addressed by such a presence. ”

“I understand the skepticism,” says Stetson. “But to assume automatically this won’t work, we won’t do that.”

Even assuming his country may step up to the plate and do what’s right, Pirun Sen says the outcome of a fair tribunal may be a return to war.

There is a tenuous accord between Hun Sen’s government and remaining Khmer Rouge loyalists. While former foreign minister Ieng Sary was granted amnesty after he and 10,000 armed soldiers rejected the Khmer Rouge and made peace with the government, there is no question that the loyalty of his followers still lies with him, not Hun Sen. If Ieng Sary is put on trial and jailed, Pirun Sen wonders, what will those 10,000 soldiers do?

“Will they feel restless? Will they hide in the jungle again?” he asks. “That is the kind of thing that is alarming to people.”

Susan Cook, director of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale, doesn’t share Pirun Sen’s concern. Reports from villages that maintain a strong Khmer Rouge presence, she says, show a lack of interest in returning to civil war.

“I think you’ll hear that concern here more than in Cambodia,” she says. “They are a little more distant from the reality in Cambodia now.”

On the other hand, Cook does give credence to Pirun Sen’s and others’ concerns that China may continue to be an obstacle in the tribunal process. She says the UN has intentionally tried to keep deliberations over the tribunal out of the security council, where China holds a seat.

“Their argument is that it’s a sovereign country dealing with a domestic issue,” she says. “But they know they wouldn’t look good if that period were looked at in detail. That wouldn’t be good for their international relations.”

But her argument that China has no interest in supporting a revitalized Khmer Rouge uprising doesn’t mesh with Pirun Sen’s vision of things.

“There is always someone out there trying to start trouble,” he says. “If you ask me if something like the Khmer Rouge will happen again, I think it will.”

Sam Smith can be reached at samssmith@hotmail.com. Page 2 | 1 | Back