SO FAST WERE the Khmer Rouge to crumble that the Vietnamese tanks rushed on a head before their supply convoys could catch up. Many ran out of fuel just outside Phnom Penh. Further west, Duch split the remnants of the Santebal into smaller groups. Taking charge of one, they launched hit-and-run attacks to slow down the Vietnamese advance and buy time for the rest of the Khmer Rouge to escape. Duch eventually fled to the Thai border.
Like the others, Prak Khan was sent off to harass the Vietnamese, but to little effect. The Khmer Rouge were heavily outnumbered and found themselves being pushed back further to the mountains and the border with Thailand. Prak Khan’s unit found themselves cut off and isolated. They decided to head further inland behind the Vietnamese. ‘By then the soldiers were very demoralised,’ he said. ‘There was no hope.’ Starving and alone they began to forage for food in the forests. They had nothing but the clothes they wore and slept on plastic sheeting on the ground in the drizzle. Exhausted, and with no support, Prak Khan gave himself up in Kompong Thom.
With the arrival of the Vietnamese the entire population had taken to the roads in an attempt to return to their shattered homes and villages. Dislocated and traumatised they wandered the entire length of the country in search of surviving family members.
Sokheang and Ho, who had fled Phnom Penh together, decided to split up and take their chances. Sokheang’s group managed to free themselves of those in command. They came across abandoned cooperatives where they found food and hungrily ate all they could. On one occasion they saw bodies in the fields near the forest. Eventually Sokheang joined the chain of people who walked along Route 5 and began to make his way west to the Thai border.
Vietnamese trucks and soldiers could be seen among the crowds along the road. Sokheang saw several bodies of Khmer Rouge in the ditch, victims, he was told, of revenge attacks by locals. After three years of brutality a vengeful and angry population had begun to take matters into their own hands. It was the first time that Sokheang understood the scale of the killing. ‘When people met each other their first question was, “How many of your family have you lost?” or, “How many survived?”‘ he said.
Not far away, along the same road, Haing Ngor, who later starred in The Killing Fields, watched as a crowd descended on a well-fed man in black after taunting him to say that he was Khmer Rouge. His elbows had been tied behind his back. More and more people struck and cursed him. The Vietnamese soldiers tried to intervene, but were unable to stem the raw hatred for this man. Haing rushed to kick him between the legs as hard as he could.
He collapsed in agony. The man was then made to walk a gauntlet of fists and blows, his face bloodied and swollen. A man ran toward him wielding a hatchet and cut him down with one blow. His head was cut off and stuck on a pole with a sign underneath, ‘Khmer Rouge–Enemy for ever’.
Sokheang continued by foot towards the western town of Battambang, where he spent the night under a mango tree in the pouring rain. By chance, he met his aunt. They decided to make a bid for the border.
While Sokheang made his way to Thailand, Ho and his family had been stopped by the Vietnamese and told to return to Phnom Penh. Gradually more people came to the city and camped in the empty buildings.
Three days after the fall of Phnom Penh, a new government was proclaimed. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea was made up of a number of Khmer Rouge defectors who had escaped the purges to Vietnam.
Ho found a room near Tuol Tum Pong market with his wife and daughter and began to look for work. At the market one morning, he saw women selling fried bananas wrapped in paper with handwriting on it. There had been no paper during the Khmer Rouge. Now, in the semi-derelict city, it was everywhere. Sheets of it blew through the streets. Children had begun to collect it. He picked up one parcel of bananas. He recognised the handwriting–it was the confession of a friend from Paris. When he asked where it had come from a little boy led him down the back streets to Tuol Sleng. He saw the razor wire along the wall and Vietnamese soldiers at the entrance. ‘I didn’t dare go inside,’ he said.
On his way home, Ho bumped into a friend who was now working with a Vietnamese colonel in the former prison. ‘My friend told me that there were many confessions of our friends,’ recalled Ho. ‘They were all dead.’ Ho asked his friend if any, by some slim chance, had survived. ‘I tell you,’ replied his friend, ‘they are all dead.’
The Vietnamese were amassing all the documents for a trial of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in absentia. A few days later Ho began work in the prison as an archivist, translating the documents. ‘I wanted to find out if anyone had survived.’ Over the course of several months he translated hundreds of pages. There he came across his own brother’s photograph. I asked him how he had felt.
‘I was overwhelmed. A terrible discovery. Before we didn’t know what had happened to other friends when they had disappeared,’ he said. ‘I threw up several times and I cried … I couldn’t stop. I felt utterly hopeless. It was the darkest period of my life.’ He cupped his forehead in his hand. ‘I felt responsible, I was naïve. I was angry with myself. I was angry with Pol Pot, but mostly with Ieng Sary.’ Ho had worked under Ieng Sary, the Foreign Minister. ‘He lied directly to us. I hated them for what they had done. I worked hard to move on.’
After several months working in Tuol Sleng, he made up his mind. It was time to leave Cambodia.
Under the direction of the Vietnamese colonel, the prison was reorganised as ‘The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crime’. A survivor, who later became the museum’s director, Ung Pech, was sent to Poland and Auschwitz to learn from its museum. There he saw the photographs of Jewish and other prisoners displayed next to great piles of shoes and clothing together with Zyklon B canisters.
Back in Tuol Sleng the archives were translated, organised, copied and filed by Ho and other assistants. The evidence was arranged for public display and the negatives were shipped to Vietnam for printing. As in Auschwitz, clothes were piled next to instruments of torture. Some of the walls of the single cells had been cleared to hang the mug shots on. Another survivor was commissioned to paint pictures of atrocities, and the map of skulls, which had been taken from the mass graves, was installed. The museum opened to the public in 1980.
Until the Vietnamese arrived in Cambodia few people had heard of Pol Pot. Duch had only seen him once or twice during congresses with hundreds of other cadres. But he knew who ‘Brother Number 1’ was. The cult of personality, so familiar to the Vietnamese in the form of Ho Chi Minh, had not yet featured in Cambodian communism. There were plans to begin one, hence the portraits and busts of Pol Pot found in the prison by Van Tay. Cambodians had only known the leadership as the Organisation and not who was behind it; most knew nothing beyond their cooperatives. Ironically it was the Vietnamese, one of the sworn enemies of the Khmer Rouge, who personalised the regime. Democratic Kampuchea became ‘the Pol Pot time’.
By drawing on the parallels with the Nazi death camps, the Tuol Sleng museum was organised as a deliberate attempt to distance the Vietnamese from their former allies the Khmer Rouge. They wanted to vilify the Khmer Rouge and its leaders still further as part of a propaganda war to justify their invasion. Visitors to the museum were encouraged to think of the Vietnamese as akin to the liberators of Europe’s concentration camps.
There was no text narrating progress from room to room. Visitors viewed the museum through a series of images and objects. The intention was to provoke outrage through a primarily sensory experience rather than to enlighten. The Cold War was at its height and, for many in the West, Tuol Sleng was a propaganda tool for a regime that had seized power through an illegal invasion.
All museums are manipulations. Apart from the map made of skulls created by the Vietnamese, the raw displays were graphic and chilling and, although inaccurate in form, were real in substance. The atrocious nature of the place itself was hard to contrive. The fact that visitors were being manipulated and that the information on display was there to serve a political purpose seemed to pale in comparison when faced with such overwhelming viciousness.
On the other side of the Thai border thousands of ragged and starving refugees were emerging from a medieval nightmare. Every day more people succumbed to disease and starvation and every day still more arrived. It seemed as though Cambodia was emptying itself of people.
On the border, the Thai military were on a heightened state of alert. Just across the frontier were 200,000 Vietnamese troops, one of the world’s largest and most experienced standing armies, and one with the full backing of the Soviet Union. Thailand’s army, by comparison, had a strength a little over 160,000. The American ‘domino-theory’ of Soviet expansionism seemed to have been fulfilled and now the feared Vietnamese could be seen across the Poipet bridge at the border. To complicate matters further, the Thai army was faced with a massive refugee influx from Cambodia that included Khmer Rouge soldiers. The Khmer Rouge had been closely allied with the Thai communist insurgency and had raided Thai villages, massacring their inhabitants just as they had done on the Vietnamese border. Now here they were, with civilians in tow, begging for help.
At first, unsure of what to do with these people, the Thai military panicked. In one incident, they drove more than 40,000 refugees at gunpoint over a cliff at the border and into minefields below in the largest forced repatriation since the Second World War. Hundreds, possibly thousands, perished.
Among the sick and the dying was the Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, Ieng Sary. He had arrived at the border barefoot and was met on the Thai side by Chinese diplomats, with clean clothes and a new pair of shoes. In January 1979, exactly a week after the liberation of Phnom Penh, a top-secret meeting was held at Utapao air base in Thailand. China announced they would cease support for the Thai Communist Party if Thailand would give the Khmer Rouge safe haven and provide logistical support for their war against the Vietnamese. Thail and then announced its ‘open-door policy’ of allowing the refugees sanctuary on Thai soil. A few days later a shipment of arms and ammunition arrived from China for the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia was to become the battleground for the containment of ‘Soviet expansionism’, and a war of attrition had begun that would continue for another nineteen years.
Within months, one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history began. The sleepy Thai border town of Aranyaprathet was transformed almost overnight, as the tragedy at the border offered opportunities for a wide array of individuals and organisations, including aid workers, missionaries, black marketeers, smugglers, prostitutes, academics, soldiers, activists, Thai, Chinese and American intelligence officers, journalists, Thai entrepreneurs–and of course photographers.
Cambodia, or more accurately the Cambodian border, had become something of a cause célèbre. Many of those journalists who had covered Vietnam had relocated to Bangkok and were now on the story. Few went to Phnom Penh–it was easier to jump in a car and drive from Bangkok than to enter the country to see where the majority of the population was. And Sakeo became the stop for many members of the press. Time magazine ran a cover story, ‘Death Watch in Cambodia’, reported entirely from the border. Many photographs from the time showed mothers cradling their babies in the classic Madonna-and-child pose. It was as if the photograph of Chan Kim Srun from Tuol Sleng that had troubled me so much as a teenager had re-emerged on the border as another icon of Cambodian suffering.
The response in the West to these images was unprecedented. John Pilger and David Munro’s powerful film Year Zero helped raise millions in the UK. One of the few organisations who went inside the country was Oxfam, who mounted an appeal in the UK. Money poured in. The children’s TV programme, Blue Peter, raisedastaggering £3, 500, 000 through Oxfam shops alone.
The Thai military told the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that they were moving 90,000 people from the border to a new location and instructed them to make the necessary arrangements. This new camp was to be outside Sakeo some sixty kilometres inside Thailand. What was less known was that the refugees were mostly Khmer Rouge soldiers and their families. The movement was now on the verge of total collapse. The plan to resuscitate the Khmer Rouge was put into effect and the creation of the Sakeo camp was central to that plan.
Conditions at Sakeo were appalling. The site had been ill-chosen and it flooded in the monsoon downpour. People were packed in tents in the mud, surrounded by large drainage ditches. Every day scores of people died from disease and malnutrition.
The camp was under the control of the Thai military and the UNHCR, with various relief organisations providing assistance.
The Vietnam-era singer Joan Baez visited Sakeo. President Jimmy Carter, who had described the Khmer Rouge as ‘the world’s worst violators of human rights’, sent his wife to visit the refugees. Roselyn Carter arrived with her entourage while the Khmer Rouge looked on. Photographers and cameramen jostled with Thai military escorts to get a better shot of the First Lady. A photo opportunity was dutifully produced in the form of the First Lady cradling a dying child. And then she, along with the press, was gone.
But while these shocking and dramatic scenes of thousands of starving refugees spurred people to help, they also created a misleading impression of what was really going on. Sakeo camp was not, as it may have appeared, a place of refuge–it was a place of control.
The Khmer Rouge kept a close eye on the population and the foreigners who worked there. There were reports of abuses of refugees by the leaders. One aid worker saw the Khmer Rouge push a man into a barrel and light a fire underneath. Another aid worker had to be transferred after a death threat. The man in charge was a Khmer Rouge commander named Phak Lim who was responsible for the purges in Battambang and Pursat. Accompanied by several bodyguards he swaggered around the camp with a megaphone, ordering those that disobeyed the Organisation to be beaten, tied up and left in the open or buried up to their necks.
The reality was not lost on everyone. As two aid workers, Linda Brown and Roger Mason, pointed out, ‘The Vietnamese had succeeded in isolating and weakening the Khmer Rouge into military impotence. The relief organisations were now resuscitating them.’ And much of this aid was coming from those with a vested interest in bringing the Khmer Rouge back to life. ‘The US government, which funded the bulk of the relief operation,’ wrote Brown and Mason, ‘insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed.’ With the relief effort being used to cloak the real intentions of the superpowers, the stage was set for the next chapter of the Cambodian tragedy as the Thai military, the US and China revived the Khmer Rouge.
The refugee population of Sakeo was trapped. The Khmer Rouge wanted to move the refugees back to the border and began to circulate forms to declare that they were returning to Cambodia voluntarily. Despite the protestations of some aid workers, the Khmer Rouge circulated warnings to the civilians of the camp. One of them went:
Those who go back first will sleep on cots.
Those who go back second will sleep on mats.
Those who go back third will sleep in the mud.
And those who go back last will sleep under the ground.
After the Khmer Rouge collapse in 1979, Cambodia lay in ruins. A third of the population was dead. Of 550 doctors, only forty-eight had survived; out of 11,000 university students, 450 were found; and out of 106,000 secondary-school students, only 5,300 survived. The country had no existing infrastructure to speak of. In Kompong Thom, Duch’s home province, only two schools out of 180 remained standing and roughly two-thirds of the temples had been destroyed. Mass graves were being discovered in every province.
It is generally acknowledged that during the 1,364 days of Khmer Rouge rule, two million people died as a result of their policies, approximately 1,466 people a day. By percentage of population, the Cambodian holocaust remains the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world, eclipsing the numbers killed in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Rwandan genocide put together. In that sense, the Khmer Rouge remain the most effective mass murderers in modern history.
The UN declared the Vietnamese invasion illegal and voted once again to have the Khmer Rouge occupy the Cambodian seat as the legitimate representatives of the Cambodian people. A resolution was then approved by the UN General Assembly which strongly appealed to all member states and humanitarian organisations ‘to render, on an urgent and non-discriminatory basis, humanitarian relief to the civilian population of Kampuchea’. Since the UN recognised the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate representatives of Cambodia, this didn’t mean much on paper. It meant even less on the ground.
The US placed an embargo which pushed Cambodia still further into the Soviet camp, in turn justifying Washington and Beijing’s support of the border and the Khmer Rouge. As a result, Cambodia was denied UN development aid. It was also banned from the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank and denied assistance from the World Health Organisation. Apart from convoys from Vietnam and the Soviet Union, and aid from a handful of western agencies in Phnom Penh, throughout the 1980s the people of Cambodia were completely isolated. And for every dollar that went inside the country, $160 went to the border, to the Khmer Rouge and to their allies. On their Khmer-language programme, the Voice of America urged Cambodians to come to the border and to ‘freedom’. By 1980, there were more than a million refugees scattered along the frontier.
Behind the scenes of refugee camps, an extensive and complex network of depots, logistical facilities and camps were established in the jungle that covered much of the ill-defined frontier. Large Thai military convoys rumbled from the coast, sometimes during the day, mostly at night. Artillery, tanks, ammunition and weapons from both China and the West were delivered and shipped off to secret locations inside Cambodia. This became known as ‘the hidden border’, a secret world out of reach of the aid organisations and the UN. One aid worker had been caught behind a convoy of these Thai trucks one night. For a split second the canvas tarpaulin of the truck in front flapped open and there, caught in his headlights, were Khmer Rouge troops tightly packed inside. An estimated 500 tonnes of military supplies were being shipped every month. The Khmer Rouge were soon to emerge as the most powerful fighting force on the border.
At this time there were reports that one camp along the forested frontier was being run by a Khmer Rouge cadre called Comrade Duch. He had apparently been given the name ‘the butcher’ because of his murderous reputation.
Eventually Sokheang and his relatives managed to cross the minefields and the border into Khao-I-Dang camp in Thailand. There they registered with the UNHCR for repatriation to Australia.
According to Sokheang, many Khmer Rouge responsible for killings did slip through the net. ‘I remembered one person who had been the chief of a cooperative living next door to me in the camp,’ he said. ‘He was accepted by the US without checks on his background.’ More than 230,000 were relocated to the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. Among the refugees were Khmer Rouge from Sakeo, perhaps even some of Duch’s killers from S-21.
In Khao-I-Dang camp, Khmer Rouge representatives tried to convince Sokheang to return and help in the fight against the Vietnamese. After eight months of waiting he and his relatives were sent to an internment camp not far from Bangkok. Before his interview with the Australian embassy personnel Sokheang was already having doubts. ‘I told them all my true history, that I was in Paris, I participated, I went to Bejing, I came to Cambodia by the Ho Chi Minh trail,’ he said. ‘I told them this intentionally so that they would fail me,’ he smiled. ‘But at the end of the interview,’ and much to Sokheang’s disappointment, ‘they said, “OK, good, no problem”.’
After several months of waiting for his application to be processed Sokheang made the decision to go back to the Khmer Rouge. He was then spirited away to a house in Bangkok where five other Khmer Rouge waited for him. There he was told how the Khmer Rouge were going to announce some cosmetic changes for international consumption, but really they were going to pursue the same policies. Several days later, Sokheang was taken to a secret camp inside Thailand twelve kilometres from the Cambodian frontier and back to the domain of the Khmer Rouge.
The camps where Sokheang was sent were collectively called ‘Thor–100’ (‘The New House’ and ‘The Old House’) and sat at the base of an imposing mountain. He was later transferred to a logistics-and-supplies depot just up the road. Here stockpiles for the front were kept. Every month Thai military trucks delivered more supplies from China. There were a few visitors, mostly Chinese and Thai, among them the Thai army commander-in-chief General Chavalit Yongchaiyuth, who later went on to become the Thai Prime Minister. It was a small island of Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia enclosed by barbed wire. Sokheang was given no work and no assignments; there was nothing for him and his comrades to do. Time crawled by. He was a prisoner of the revolution once again.
Yet despite his confinement, Sokheang knew that he fared better than most of the people on the border–he and his comrades had security.
Later back in Phnom Penh, sitting outside as we always did in the cool evenings, we talked of the various twists and turns his life had taken. Much of the time, political events had directly shaped Sokheang’s life and left him with few choices. But he did make one clear choice: to rejoin the Khmer Rouge who had killed so many, including three of his brothers. Why?
There was a pause as he stared out into the night. ‘This is a difficult question to answer,’ he sighed. ‘Firstly, I was single. I also believed that the Khmer Rouge would change.’
Did he really believe that they could? I asked.
‘It wasn’t question of whether we believed or not, it was a question of how to participate in the struggle against the Vietnamese invasion,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t support the presence of Vietnamese troops on Cambodia territory. I wanted to liberate my country even though I learned of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. But the invasion and occupation of Cambodia, I felt, was more pressing. There was a risk that my country, my nation and my people could disappear from the world.’
This hostility towards the Vietnamese and the fear that Cambodia would one day be overrun by either Vietnam or Thailand was ages old. There is a popular story widely believed to be true. During one of the many wars some Vietnamese soldiers captured three Khmer prisoners, buried them up to their necks and built a fire between their heads, placing a cooking stove on top.
As a minority, the Vietnamese had always been in Cambodia, mostly as fisher folk on the Great Lake. Unlike the Chinese, who assimilated easily, often intermarrying, the Vietnamese stayed apart from mainstream Khmer society, to the point, Sokheang told me, where Khmers weren’t welcomed into Vietnamese villages. Culturally, linguistically, racially, they had always remained as outsiders in Cambodia and suspicion ran deep. But still, this didn’t explain his return to the Khmer Rouge. This was all abstract, I argued, and it went against the fact of the deaths of his brothers.
‘I was quite sure that the Khmer Rouge had changed,’ he said pausing to swill his glass of beer. ‘More or less, at least about the killing of people–the innocent especially.’ I looked doubtful. ‘I’m not a “Vietnaphobe”,’ he said defensively, ‘but this is fact. Our history has taught us not to forget this. During the Vietnamese time, the regime was also communist or socialist and people’s lives were hard. Not like the Pol Pot time, but hard. Many rights were denied, everything was closely controlled.’
Although this was true, it was a far cry from the regimented and institutionalised brutality of the Khmer Rouge. However unpleasant the new regime and the occupation, the truth was that the invasion had halted a genocide. It was highly possible that the killing would have come round to Sokheang. Some of his friends had been taken to Duch. He later discovered that his name had been mentioned in at least three of his comrades’ confessions from the prison.
Whenever we talked of his decision to return, the answers were often the same. I couldn’t understand how such an experienced human-rights worker with a passion for uncovering the truth could argue this. It went against everything that Sokheang believed in. I began to question whether I had understood him at all. I had known Sokheang for several years now. He was a proud and stubborn man and despite all he had been through, still fiercely idealistic. This traditional antipathy towards the Vietnamese, I realised, produced its own internal logic. It enabled Sokheang and others to sideline and in some cases ignore what had happened under Pol Pot. It seemed Sokheang had thrown in his lot with the Khmer Rouge, and needed a way to rationalise that decision.
‘I understand my decision was questionable,’ he said folding his arms. ‘I wanted the problem to be solved by Cambodians, not the Vietnamese. If there was a multinational force, I would have fully supported that.’ Again I told him that not many people would understand him. By now the evening light had shrunk to the fluorescent light of our balcony. ‘This was the biggest mistake that I made,’ he said softly, leaning back, his arms still folded.
There was a loud metallic clunk as a large cicada flew into the fluorescent strip above Sokheang. It fell at our feet and buzzed frantically on its back, unable to get up. He gazed at the layer of insects in the pool of light, lost in thought. ‘I also thought the war wouldn’t last as long as it did,’ he murmured.
Did he ever consider trying to escape? I asked.
‘No, not at that time,’ he replied.
Why not?
He looked up. ‘Totalitarianism traps people,’ he said quietly, an almost pleading expression on his face. ‘The perception is there.’ Here camp life was little more than extension of life in the country when it was Democratic Kampuchea. ‘I believed that I would be able to return and be reunited with my family and my fiancée. If she was still waiting for me.’
Before Sokheang had gone to Paris he had fallen in love with a young woman who was a distant relative. No-one had known of their affair but they planned to marry when he returned from his studies. Then when Sokheang had met his aunt before heading for the border she told him that this young woman was nearby. Thinking Sokheang wasn’t going to return, she had married someone else. Sokheang was devastated. ‘It was such a shock for me, but I kept my thoughts to myself.’ When they met she wept openly, then secretly proposed that they escape to the border together. But he believed it was too late and quietly left with his aunt and cousins.
In 1982, it was announced that three factions on the border would join to form a coalition. The Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea was comprised of Royalists, remnants of Lon Nol’s republic, and the Khmer Rouge, with Sihanouk as head. It provided the necessary respectability to the Khmer Rouge, the ultimate beneficiaries of such support. These erstwhile enemies were united by one common goal: to roll back the Vietnamese invasion and oust their client regime in Phnom Penh.
After this coalition was formed Sokheang realised he was trapped and abandoned any hope of being reunited with his fiancée. In the same year, he married Van Heng, who had been a porter for Khmer Rouge troops and one of Ieng Sary’s cooks. The wedding, as was customary with the Khmer Rouge, was a sombre affair. After some speeches, they were given instant noodles and some soft drinks. And that was it.