Cambodia Struggles to Confront Its Past

In his darkest unpurged memories, Nob Seng can still see them coming on that fateful April morning 25 years ago, an army of sandal-clad peasant soldiers dressed in black, some of them just boys no taller than the rifles they carried, marching single file, silent and grim, into Phnom Penh to change the course of Indochina’s history.

Nob Seng was a policeman that day, April 17, 1975, and he did not know what to make of the spectacle. The Khmer Rouge guerrillas he watched from the door of his home were a mystery. No one knew who led them or what their goals were. But surely, he remembers thinking, these young soldiers had to be the harbinger of something good.

They had fought with the blessing of Cambodia’s revered prince, Norodom Sihanouk, and their presence apparently meant the five-year civil war against Lon Nol’s unpopular, American-backed regime was over. So Nob Seng went into the street and waved a white flag of welcome, said “Good luck” as they passed, and recited to himself a Buddhist prayer of thanks.

“I was happy for only an hour, maybe two,” Nob Seng, 65, recalled. “But even when they said we had to leave Phnom Penh because the Americans were sending in B-52s to level the city, I did not understand we had stepped into a nightmare. I just thought we’d be gone for three or four days.”

By evening, the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, a city of 1.4 million, was well underway. The swelling tide of men, women and children poured north on Montivong Street, out toward the countryside and the shadows of night. Those who faltered were shot. It was the start of a 44-month reign of terror that would claim the lives of an estimated 1.7 million people, about one of every five Cambodians. A quarter of a century later, it still haunts this troubled kingdom.

The fall of Phnom Penh marked not only the start of Cambodia’s darkest hour but the beginning of the end of the United States’ failed Indochina mission.

Five days earlier, Ambassador John Gunther Dean watched as the American flag was lowered and folded at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Within the hour, he left on a helicopter as the Khmer Rouge advanced.

Two weeks after the fall, on April 30, North Vietnam’s Communist troops stormed into Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, as U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin fled in a chopper, the American flag in his lap. A Communist government also took power in 1975 in Laos, the third country in France’s former Indochinese colonial grouping and the last of the dominoes to tumble.

Half of the 11 million people in Cambodia today were born after the fall of Phnom Penh. But only in the past year or two have Cambodians started to confront the Khmer Rouge’s Orwellian attempts to create an ultra-Communist agrarian society. It is a past that many young Cambodians do not believe ever happened.

“I’d like to know more about that period,” said Ky Buny, a 17-year-old student. “But my teacher says it’s still too sensitive, too political, to talk about. I know a lot of my friends don’t think the killing was done by Cambodians. Maybe the Vietnamese, they say, but not the Cambodians. Maybe it was American propaganda. I’m not really sure.”

Nor are the Cambodians sure whom to blame. Should it be Cambodia itself, which gave birth to the murderous Khmer Rouge? Or the United States, which expanded the Vietnam War into neutral Cambodia and later diplomatically supported the Khmer Rouge to curry favor with China? Or China, which armed the guerrillas? Or Thailand, which gave them sanctuary? Or Vietnam, which forged an alliance with them, only to invade Cambodia in 1978 to unseat the government and make Hanoi the country’s new de facto ruler? Or maybe all of them?

“The world can’t just wash its hands and say: ‘This was Cambodia’s holocaust. Cambodia is to blame,’ ” said Kao Kim Hourn, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace. “What happened here could have happened anywhere. It was part of global politics. The reasons were both internal and external.

“But we’re still haunted by the genocide because we haven’t been able to put the events to rest psychologically, morally, politically, socially. Coming to grips with what happened is something we have to do. Until then, every issue in Cambodia will continue to be somehow linked to the Khmer Rouge.”

The events themselves have been well documented. Led by Pol Pot, a French-educated former teacher and lover of poetry, the xenophobic Khmer Rouge tried to create a pure Cambodian society free of foreign influence and educated elitists by turning the countryside into a series of concentration camps for forced farm labor.

The leaders, it turned out, were ultranationalists who took their inspiration from Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution in China.

Wearing eyeglasses or speaking a foreign language or holding a professional position was reason to be killed. The Central Bank was blown up, and money was abolished. Libraries were leveled, statues of Buddha destroyed. Torture and execution claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, starvation and disease even more. Teachers and monks were slaughtered by the hundreds. Pol Pot created a new calendar, declaring “Year Zero,” and renamed the country Kampuchea.

“Did I lose members of my family? Of course. Everyone did,” said retired railway worker Va Seoun, 65, who was marched out of Phnom Penh in 1975 and spent three years working 14-hour days on construction gangs. “My wife, she lost everyone. Ten people plus. My four children were killed. There were times you’d just tell yourself, ‘If I could only die, it would be a blessing.’ ”

The nightmare is finally ending. Pol Pot died, and the country held national elections in 1998. Khmer Rouge followers defected en masse between 1996 and 1998, and Prime Minister Hun Sen integrated them back into society with the promise of amnesty.

The Khmer Rouge has ceased to exist now, and Cambodia, a wounded and impoverished country where almost 20% of children die by the age of 5, is trying to heal a generation of scars.

“It is difficult to know what the future holds,” said Chea Ou, 75, a former civil servant who was marched out of Phnom Penh in 1975. “Should the Khmer Rouge leaders be tried? Could the Khmer Rouge be reborn? These are questions for politicians to answer. I just know I can never forget or forgive. And I know the young generation”--he nodded at two young monks nearby--”can never understand the suffering we went through in this period. Only we understand.”

No one has been punished for killing 1.7 million Cambodians. But one Khmer Rouge leader, Ta Mok, a one-legged guerrilla nicknamed “the Butcher,” is under detention along with several lesser figures. Hun Sen, himself once a low-level Khmer Rouge officer, is negotiating with the United Nations for the establishment of an internationally acceptable war crimes tribunal.

Many Cambodians favor a trial to bring the guilty to justice. Others don’t want to dig up the past, believing the best way to bury their memories is simply not to speak about the horrors of the Pol Pot era. There is consensus on only one point: However it is achieved, what Cambodia most wants and needs is the most elusive goal of all--closure.

For a recent piece reflecting on the 1975 fall of the capital, the Phnom Penh Post, an English-language biweekly, asked Hun Sen for a comment on the suffering Cambodia had endured over a generation. He replied, “History is history, and it cannot be changed.”