In the Wake of the Khmer Rouge

Everywhere I go in Cambodia, I taste the thick residue of the Khmer Rouge.

The first time I recognized it was at Angkor Wat. Outside the temple, some boys served as my guides. They told me the stories of the engravings and apsaras. The boys paused in front of a hole in one of the stone walls.

“See that? That’s a bullet from the Khmer Rouge,” one of them told me.

A little later they stopped to inform me that the window behind us was a good place to take a picture. As I sat down on the ledge, the younger of the boys explained, that it had not always been there. The Khmer Rouge had cut a window in the temple to place machine guns. The temple had been a stronghold against the Vietnamese.

Inside the temple, I wandered alone for a long time. It was noon and the heat was intense. After awhile I sat down in the shadow of a tower and drank water. A Khmer man saw me there and called “alo,” which is the Khmer’s way of pronouncing “hello.” I called alo back to him. He took it as a sign that he was welcomed to join me, which he mostly was.

The man was in his late twenties and spoke pretty good English. He told me that he was studying history and wanted to become a guide at the temple. Before this he had been a Buddhist monk for ten years. 

I asked him about being a monk. He told me the reason he’d become one.

“After the Khmer Rouge there are no teachers. They all killed. There are some; some teachers volunteer, but in rural they teach the children under trees. Many people turn to the monastery to teach children,” he told me.

The man began to talk about the Khmer Rouge. He had been born in 1980, the year after the regime fell, but his mother and siblings had told him many stories about life during the Khmer Rouge. 

One story was about a 15 year old boy who was a leader in the regime. At night he would tie twenty or thirty people together and lead them into the jungle. He would make the people dig large pits and then would beat them to death with the shovel.

“Why didn’t the people fight the boy and then escape?” I ask the man who introduced himself as Ra.

For a moment I thought he didn’t understand my question because his face looked puzzled.

“The Khmer Rouge were everywhere. Where could the people go? Even if they fight and run away, there is nowhere,” he said.

Some people had tried to run, he told me. Some of them were able to escape into Thailand. But more had been caught and killed.

Pol Pot’s communist dream of equality meant the death of over two million people, Ra said.

“If you pick the rice too slow, you are sent to be killed. If you pick the rice too fast, you are sent to be killed. They wanted everyone the same,” said Ra.

After my visit to Angkor Wat I saw traces of the Khmer Rouge everywhere.

In the capital, Phnom Penh, many buildings and roads bear the neglect of four years abandonment. During the regime, the cities were abandoned, and all the inhabitants were driven like cattle to work in the rice fields. Pol Pot blasted the bridge across the Mekong to Phnom Penh to prevent people from entering the city.

By the fall of the Khmer Rouge, when people entered the city for the first time in four years, the jungle had crept into the streets.

The younger generation of Cambodia never sounds angry when they tell me about the Khmer Rouge. Often they sound ironical or sad.

At Children Surgical Center, whenever the doctors talk to me about the poor medical care of Cambodia, or the lack of leadership, the conversation invariably turns to the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge targeted anyone who was educated, meaning that doctors and leaders were wiped out. Also, the generation who grew up during and immediately after the Khmer Rouge had limited access to education. This means that a whole generation of people is not really qualified for any jobs other than trade work.

There are many brilliant Cambodian tailors, weavers and wood carvers. Their goods flood street markets. However, there are few locals who can confidently work as doctors, lawyers or teachers.

This means many job opportunities for qualified people from neighboring countries. Which is why, when people speak angrily about the Vietnamese immigrants, talk inevitably turns to the Khmer Rouge.

Most of the generation of people who were adults during the regime – the 50 plus – speak French, not English. I’ve met only one old man who spoke English well enough to tell me about his experience.

I was in Kompong Chom, a province north of Phnom Penh, accompanying a military medical mission. For dinner, an expatriate and I went to dinner one of the cleaner restaurants. A spry man with a leathery face came up to us and said alo.

“Are you from America?” he asked, and after listening to our replies he continued. “I’m in the Lonely Planet!”

He whipped out a copy and showed us his name; Vannat.

Vannat talked a lot. At first it was just friendliness, but soon he began to talk about the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know how we started on the topic. But at some point he told me that he had been incorporated into the regime and I told him I would be interested in hearing about his experience. From that point the words bled from him and I don’t think he really had control of them. He just talked in fragmented strings of coherency. When I asked him a question he would look at me in confusion, as if surprised I was there, and continue talking without answering me.

Vannat spoke of working in the fields all day and being rationed only one bowl of rice each day, at lunch time. His wife and he were separated; they saw each other only once a year for only four days. He saw many people die in the fields. He grew very ill. The Khmer Rouge sent him to a hospital, but all the doctors had been killed so no one knew how to take care of the sick. He had diarrhea all the time and his body swelled. He was wearing a ring and the ring cut his swollen finger. The wound got infected. Vannat made a face and wafted his hand over his nose to explain how it stunk.

“But have must to live,” Vannat told me.

He traded a ration of food for two tablets of medicine. Although he was still very sick he left the hospital a month after having arrived.

When he finally fell quiet I thanked him and promised to come back to talk to him again.

The doctors at CSC always ask me why the American government was so eager to stop Saddam Hussein when they didn’t stop Pol Pot who killed millions more. I don’t know, I tell them.

One doctor from Thailand talks with frustration about Cambodians’ unwillingness to assume leadership roles. He says that it’s a result of the Khmer Rouge. I’m not sure if he’s right or just frustrated.

I’m also not sure what the solution is to Cambodian’s problems. The Khmer Rouge destroyed the brightest and most capable of its people for the very reason that they were bright and capable. Besides just that, they destroyed the systems that society relies on. And besides that, they destroyed society’s understanding of these systems.

Cambodia has had to start over. After the Khmer Rouge it was almost literally year 0.

Imagine creating a bureaucracy. Now imagine creating a bureaucracy without capable, educated people. Now imagine trying to introduce a bureaucracy to a people that don’t even understand what a bureaucracy is. It’s impossible.

The only solution is to bring in foreigners. But that means that Cambodia remains impoverished and reliant on foreign aid. The best jobs go to foreigners while locals don’t develop the skills that they need to ever get good jobs. That’s not a sustainable system.

I’m not sure what the solution is to Cambodia’s problem or even if there is one.