A Walk Past the Mass Graves

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Early in the morning of that April day, Communist troops drifted into Phnom Penh and the other major Cambodian cities like clouds of poisonous gas. It was the end of a brutal, five-year civil war between the Khmer Rouge and the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic. Giddy residents welcomed the Communists with cheers and flags. But almost immediately the Khmer Rouge began herding at gunpoint the city’s 2 million residents into the streets and from there into the countryside.

They started with the hospitals, forcing gravely ill and wounded patients out of their beds to hobble into 100-degree heat. Murder of a Gentle Land, by journalists John Barron and Anthony Paul, published two years later, relates how relatives or friends pushed the beds of patients unable to walk, holding up bottles of dripping plasma: “One man carried his son, whose legs had been amputated. The bandages on both stumps were red with blood, and the son, who appeared to be about twenty-two, was screaming, ‘You can’t leave me like this! Kill me! Please kill me!’ ” Thousands were shot or beaten to death, and many more died of dehydration or dysentery in the evacuation, with corpses dotting the sidewalks and ditches as crowds shuffled down the major boulevards.

The sign was clear, in English, and made an entirely reasonable request: “Please don’t walk through the mass grave.”

I was visiting Choeung Ek, memorial site for Cambodia’s infamous “killing fields,” last December. It was the execution grounds for the Phnom Penh prison called Tuol Sleng, where the Khmer Rouge tortured some 14,000 prisoners into ridiculous confessions of spying for the CIA or the Vietnamese. Underneath stands of chankiri trees, the path meandered beside grassy depressions and sandy hollows where thousands of bodies had been dumped after people’s heads were bashed in or their throats cut.

A little further along were the “killing trees” against which cadres had smashed the heads of infants, and a bit beyond that was a tall Buddhist stupa. Inside I came face to face with hundreds of human skulls on shelves in cases with glass on all sides. Visitors can look through the cases to the sunlit grounds, or up to see the shelves of skulls, one after another, rising to the ceiling.

With me was Radha Manickam, now 62, who survived the Khmer Rouge’s brutal attempt to create a Marxist agrarian utopia between 1975 and 1979. His father and six of his seven younger siblings were among the 1.7 million people the Communists murdered as a matter of policy and with stupefying violence. Mao and Stalin killed more people, but no other regime in modern history has killed nearly a quarter of its own citizens.

April 17 marked the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Communists. In Phnom Penh today, two top officials of the Khmer Rouge regime, already convicted last summer on human rights charges, are on trial for genocide: Nuon Chea, known as “Brother Number Two,” and Khieu Samphan. (Pol Pot, leader of the revolution, died in 1998.) It’s a good time, then, to remember what happened.

Early in the morning of that April day, Communist troops drifted into Phnom Penh and the other major Cambodian cities like clouds of poisonous gas. It was the end of a brutal, five-year civil war between the Khmer Rouge and the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic. Giddy residents welcomed the Communists with cheers and flags. But almost immediately the Khmer Rouge began herding at gunpoint the city’s 2 million residents into the streets and from there into the countryside.

They started with the hospitals, forcing gravely ill and wounded patients out of their beds to hobble into 100-degree heat. Murder of a Gentle Land, by journalists John Barron and Anthony Paul, published two years later, relates how relatives or friends pushed the beds of patients unable to walk, holding up bottles of dripping plasma: “One man carried his son, whose legs had been amputated. The bandages on both stumps were red with blood, and the son, who appeared to be about twenty-two, was screaming, ‘You can’t leave me like this! Kill me! Please kill me!’ ” Thousands were shot or beaten to death, and many more died of dehydration or dysentery in the evacuation, with corpses dotting the sidewalks and ditches as crowds shuffled down the major boulevards.

Cambodia went downhill from there. Over the next weeks the Communists emptied the cities, cut off communication with the outside world, and turned the country into one big labor camp. The plan was to grow and export enough rice to purchase modern, industrial equipment, so they put millions of people to work. Some dug irrigation canals and dikes with hoes and baskets, and others planted, tended, and harvested the crops by hand. They lived in “cooperatives” and ate in communal kitchens, while the cities stood abandoned.

It’s difficult to explain the horror of life under the Khmer Rouge. It wasn’t just the starvation-level rations that left so many vulnerable to wasting diseases or the brutal field work from before dawn to long after dark, followed by hours-long propaganda meetings.

There was also the totalitarian control over people’s lives; the constant fear of being dragged off and murdered for some tie to the old society or some imaginary crime; the abyss of isolation because sharing anything personal was dangerous; the overwhelming feeling of helplessness as the Khmer Rouge with shocking speed smashed all the institutions of Cambodian society: family, religion, business, government—everything.

Manickam, a member of the country’s ethnic Indian minority who had become a Christian in 1973, saw all of these things firsthand. He spent the first months of the regime digging canals and much of the rest working with plowing crews. He witnessed cadres cut the liver out of a live prisoner tied to a tree and then cook and eat it as the man died, screaming. He was hauled out of bed to help dig a hole in a termite hill and then watched the soldiers saw through prisoners’ necks with a palm branch and kick the corpses into the grave.

But perhaps Manickam’s wedding gives the best picture of day-to-day totalitarianism. In April 1977, village cadres called Manickam in from the fields near his cooperative for a chat. “Comrade,” they said, “we want you to get married.” With the population in free fall, Angka (the name of the revolutionary organization) determined that the workers needed to produce more loyal revolutionaries. Angka would train the children to ensure they developed the proper revolutionary fervor. “Angka is your father and mother now,” they would tell the kids.

So local officials arranged mass forced marriages all over the country. At about 90 pounds, Manickam knew he was in no shape to get married. Plus, as a Christian, he knew he ought not marry an unbeliever. He protested mildly to the cadres and complained bitterly to the Lord. His father and most of his siblings had died by then. “If you make me do this,” he prayed, “I’m not going to be a Christian anymore.”

On the appointed day he showed up and joined a line of 19 grooms across from 19 brides. They all filed into the communal dining hall. But the woman across from Manickam took one look at him, shrieked, “Not that one!” and dashed from the room. Manickam was relieved. Had he, as one of the “New People” evacuated from a city, tried that, he’d have been summarily beaten to death. The woman, however, was “Old People,” one of the country folk who had supported the Khmer Rouge’s march to power. She went unpunished.

This happened three more times. One woman refused the match because Manickam was “too dark.” An attractive girl paired with him was, at the last minute, given as a reward to a crippled old soldier. And the third bride ran away the night before the wedding.

Next year came a new round of weddings, and the cadres called him back: “Comrade, we want you to get married.” If he didn’t, they warned, he’d get his own plot of ground—three feet by six.

As Manickam recounts, he went back to his rice field and prayed desperately that he would get married; his life depended on it. In late June 1978 the entire village, over 1,000 people, gathered in the communal dining hall for another group wedding ceremony. The partners made their vows to Angka, not each other. Each couple, including Manickam and his new wife, Men (pronounced “Main”), pledged with as much enthusiasm as they could fake to raise seven tons of rice per hectare per year (three would have been incredible, seven was absurd).

Manickam and Men became leaders of a new “model village” made up of the couples in their ceremony. Part of Manickam’s job was to meet with a cadre to skulk under the village’s stilted huts at night, eavesdropping to make sure the new couples were fulfilling their revolutionary marital duties. This disgusted him, and he tried to drift ahead of the cadre so he could whisper warnings up through the floors.

After a month of losing sleep, Manickam became seriously ill and could hardly walk. Perhaps his malaria flared up. He staggered out to ask his supervisor for a day off and received the standard answer: No work today, no food tonight. He didn’t care—there was hardly any food anyway—and lay down in his hut.

About noon Men came in unexpectedly. They hadn’t spoken much, but she brought him a couple of cakes of rice dust (in better times rice dust was animal feed). “Thank the Lord,” he breathed when he saw the food. Men’s eyes grew wide. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.

Manickam panicked. Religion had been outlawed, and she should turn him in immediately. He started to shake and raised himself off his mat. Please, he begged in whispers, because spies were everywhere, yes, I’m a Christian, but don’t turn me in, don’t tell anybody.

Then he looked into her eyes, really for the first time. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She leaned close. “That’s okay,” she whispered, “I am too.”

Men turned out to be the daughter of a well-known evangelical pastor in Phnom Penh. Together, they survived the remaining months of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ended when the Vietnamese invaded in January 1979, after Pol Pot’s repeated provocations. They then escaped to the refugee camps in Thailand and eventually settled in Seattle, where they raised five children.

Today Manickam has a ministry to Cambodian churches in the Pacific Northwest and in Cambodia. The country is still suffering the aftereffects of the Khmer Rouge, whose overweening confidence in their ideology led them to launch a mind–bogglingly tyrannical social engineering project. Determined to create the “new socialist man,” Pol Pot and his cronies believed that they could shape human nature in any way they chose—that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature.

But Christian orthodoxy teaches that people are not blank slates; rather, they are creatures made in the image of God, but also sinners. Because human nature is real, there are limits to the malleability and perfectibility of human institutions. One of the things that weakened the Khmer Rouge was many peasants’ refusal to deny their family ties or their faith (which for most was Buddhism). The Communists tried to exert more and more control over their victims, leading to more and more violence, but the effort was futile.

In the decades since the atrocities, many, notably those on the political left, have dismissed the Khmer Rouge as homicidal maniacs, but in truth they were good Communists applying the principles of Maoism with the speed and violence of Stalin. Brother Number Two spoke some years ago with the makers of a Cambodian documentary called Enemies of the People. Why, he was asked, did all those people have to die? After some stonewalling he finally blurted out, “If we had let them live, the party line would have been hijacked!”

Exactly. In the name of building utopia, you can justify mass murder. 

Les Sillars teaches journalism at Patrick Henry College and is writing Manickam’s story, Intended for Evil, to be published next year by Baker Books.