Cambodia's Khmer Rouge era saw more than 1.5 million people die. The long awaited trial of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia passed a significant milestone this week, with the ground rules for the legal landmark finally being set. But the setting up of the court has come at an agonising slow pace. It is more than 27 years since the genocidal regime was ousted, following the deaths of at least one and a half million people. 101 East's Teymoor Nabili hears from those that suffered during the Khmer Rouge era and discusses the trial's impact on Cambodia with some of the leading experts on the country.

T

Pol Pot

As political factionalism grew in Cambodia, Sihanouk began to crack down on his opponents, including Communists. The Communists fell into two groups: Vietnamese-trained veterans of the independence struggle, including former Buddhist monks and their peasant followers; and younger urban radicals such as Pol Pot. While the former were major targets of Sihanouk's repression, Pol Pot and his followers were left largely untouched because of their privileged backgrounds and French education. This group gradually assumed leadership of the Communist movement. After Pol Pot became secretary general of the Workers' Party of Kampuchea (later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or CPK) in 1963, the party made a concerted effort to seize control of Cambodia.

By 1966, the American escalation of the war in neighboring Vietnam began to have a destabilizing effect on Cambodia. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) forces, made up of Vietnamese Communist guerrillas, established logistical bases and supply routes in Cambodia. While Sihanouk attempted to keep his country out of the Vietnam War, his political repression increasingly drove veterans of Cambodia's anti-French struggle back into dissidence, where Pol Pot's CPK drew them into its plans for rebellion. The CPK launched a revolt against Sihanouk in 1967. Sihanouk termed the rebels Khmer Rouge (French for "Red Khmers"), so-called after Cambodia's predominant ethnic group, the Khmers. Communist insurgency campaigns continued until the Khmer Rouge took control of the government in 1975.

In 1969, embroiled in Vietnam, the United States began a secret B-52 bombardment of Cambodia in an effort to knock out strongholds of the North Vietnamese and NLF. A year later Sihanouk was overthrown by U.S.-backed General Lon Nol. The Vietnam War spilled across the border, and the conflict tore Cambodia apart for five years. During the secret bombing American planes dropped 490,000 metric tons (540,000 tons) of bombs, killing about 100,000 Khmer peasants by August 1973, when the bombardment ended (see Secret Bombing of Cambodia). Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge, aided by Sihanouk and the North Vietnamese, who did not want a pro-U.S. Cambodian government, battled Lon Nol's government for control of Cambodia.

Genocide

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. The Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, combined extremist ideology, ethnic animosity, and a disregard for human life to produce murder on a massive scale. As hundreds of thousands of people slowly starved in the rice fields, a select number met their fate inside Khmer Rouge interrogation centers. The most famous of these centers, codenamed S-21, was located in the abandoned suburban Phnom Penh high school of Tuol Sleng ("hill of the poison tree"). To the Tuol Sleng neighborhood, S-21 was known simply as konlaenh choul min dael chenh - "the place where people go in but never come out." Over 17,000 prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed there - only a handful survived. For S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE, two survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters - prison guards, interrogators, a doctor and a photographer - return to the site, which now houses a genocide museum, to excavate the past. The singularity of the film lies in a confrontation between the survivors, who want to understand what happened so they can warn future generations, and the jailers, who seem stupefied as they re-live the horror to which they contributed. Poeuv, a prison guard, started at S21 when he was 12. He describes his daily task of preventing the prisoners, driven mad by their suffering, from breaking free of their handcuffs and jumping out the window. He and the other former guards sit, wearing embarrassed smiles, trying to explain why they did what they did. They evoke the slogans ("the sublime blood of workers and peasants" and "pulling out the weed at the root"), and recall the murder of entire families. When Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh was 11, his sisters and parents were murdered by the regime, and he was sent out to a labor camp. In 1979, he made it to France and managed to win entry to IDHEC (the leading French film school). "I wasn't born in the cinema world, but I had to find a way to tell this story." Although holding the Khmer Rouge accountable is important, where does one draw the line? Panh says he would like to see the highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders, who are still alive, put on trial. But he knows that, ultimately, a tribunal won't solve anything, it won't bring his parents back to life. What is more urgent is to help Cambodians work on their personal memories. He hopes his films will be a stimulus for just that, "It is a question of who we are, where we come from, how we explain ourselves to our children." And it is important not just for Cambodians, but for all of us.

April 1995. Cambodia is a still deeply scarred by Pol Pot's holocaust. More than a million people may have died during his reign. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot were at the heart of the circumstances which brought the USA into the Vietnam War - one of the cruellest of the Cold War disputes. This feature paints a picture of a people still struggling to forget the devastation of Pot's own special brand of social reform. Mental illness is rife and neighbour still fears neighbour.

Following the indictment of five former Khmer Rouge leaders, is justice about to catch up with Pol Pot's men? Khieu Samphan, one of the men charged, explains why he's not afraid to stand trial. Khieu Samphan (born July 27, 1931) was the president of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as the country's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, though Pol Pot was the group's true political leader and held the most extensive power. He is of Chinese-Khmer ancestry.[1] A prominent member of the circle of leftist Khmer intellectuals studying in Paris in the 1950s, Khieu Samphan studied economics and politics there. His successful 1959 doctoral thesis, "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development" advocated national self-reliance and generally sided with dependency theorists in blaming the wealthy, industrialized states for the poverty of the Third World. He was one of the founders of the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), out of which would grow the left-wing revolutionary movements that would so alter Cambodian history in the 1970s, most notably the Khmer Rouge. Once the KSA was shuttered by French authorities in 1956, he founded yet another student organization, the Khmer Students' Union. Returning from Paris with his doctorate in 1959, Khieu held a faculty position at the University of Phnom Penh and started L'Observateur, a French-language leftist publication that was viewed with hostility by the government. His first important conflict with the anti-Communist Cambodian authorities came the following year, when L'Observateur was banned and Khieu was arrested, forced to undress and photographed in public. After the coup of 1970 overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, the Khmer Communists, including Khieu Samphan, joined forces with the now-deposed monarch in establishing an anti-government coalition known as the Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchéa (GRUNK). In this alliance with his former enemies, Khieu served as deputy prime minister, minister of defense, and commander-in-chief of GRUNK military forces. (However, Pol Pot exercised real control over the latter.) In fact, Khieu's appointment to these posts and residence inside the country were instrumental in allowing GRUNK to maintain that it was not just a government-in-exile. During the years of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), Khieu remained near the top of the movement, assuming the post of president of the central presidium in 1976. His loyalty and closeness to Pol Pot and apparent dedication to the former's harshly doctrinaire vision of the revolution meant that Khieu survived the bloody purges of the last few years of Khmer Rouge rule. After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and subsequent fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Samphan led a rebel government which accorded a level of international recognition until 1982. In 1985 he officially succeeded Pol Pot as leader of the Khmer Rouge, and served in this position until he surrendered to the Cambodian government in 1998.

He was a reporter for the New York Times whose coverage of the Cambodian War would win him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. But the friend who made it possible was half the world away with his life in great danger... This is the story of war and friendship, the anguish of a country and of one man's will to live. # Plot Outline An American citizen is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody "Year Zero" ethnic cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million "undesirable" civilians. # Plot Synopsis: Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times journalist convering the civil war in Cambodia. Together with local representative Dith Pran, they cover some of the tragedy and madness of the war. When the Americans forces leave, Dith Pran sends his family with them, but stays behind himself to help Schanberg cover the event. As an American, Schanberg won't have any trouble leaving the country, but the situation is different for Pran; he's a local, and the Khmer Rouge are moving in.

Killing Fields

ISBN 1-84119-793-9 Constable & Robinson Ltd.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment Preview