Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

"What happened to your family?"

  "My father survived because he was a farmer. He was lucky. He knew how to make sugar from palm trees."

  Sopheap's father would have been shot. But in the midst of the terror and starvation, the regime introduced "dessert day." Rice soup was all that was available for people, but on dessert day, three times a month, it was decreed that the soup was to be sweetened with palm sugar—cane sugar was unavailable. Sopheap's father was able to provide homemade palm sugar. So he was not shot.

  "I was sick," Sopheap said. "My body was swollen big. I almost died. It was a terrible time. You've seen the museum and the killing fields?"

  ***

  THE KILLING FIELDS Sopheap meant were only ten miles from the city. The place was locally known as Choeung Ek. It was one of many. There were 343 other killing sites spread across Cambodia, and numerous torture prisons too, from the Khmer Rouge period, 1974-1979. By then the United States was tacitly supporting the Khmer Rouge government, because of our humiliation at having been driven out of Vietnam. By allowing the Chinese to arm Pol Pot, we could hobble the Vietnamese, who were fighting the Khmer Rouge with Soviet artillery along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

  I rode a tuk-tuk through rice fields in brilliant sunshine to a grove of trees where birds were singing. In this peaceful place, formerly an orchard and a Chinese cemetery, twenty thousand people were murdered over the course of three years. An open-air museum, it was shaded by tall trees, its largest structure a tower with stepped shelves containing some nine thousand human skulls. Many of the mass graves were still strewn with remnants of the victims' clothes. Most of the prisoners had been beaten to death with shovels, hoes, and pickaxes—among the cruelest and most painful deaths imaginable. Splits and cracks were visible in many of the skulls, from the force of a blunt ax head or the blade of a hoe. The skulls, young and old, male and female, said a great deal about who they had been and how they'd died.

  When Vietnamese soldiers liberated Phnom Penh—against the wishes of the United States—129 mass graves were found here at Choeung Ek, one of the graves containing 450 corpses.

  The victims were mainly people from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, who had been tortured into confessing that they'd been spies or counterrevolutionaries. Many of them had been Khmer Rouge soldiers who'd fallen under suspicion, or been casually ratted on, or who'd just been unlucky. They were clerks, teachers, landlords—education was equated with wealth ("such people oppressed the poor")—or they were hapless bystanders who'd been pounced on for no good reason. Most were urbanites, termed "New People," considered inferior to peasants because they hadn't fought and suffered. According to David Chandler in Brother Number One (another pirated book I bought on a Phnom Penh street corner), they were mocked with the saying "Keeping you is no gain, losing you is no loss." These enemies of the state were driven in trucks the ten miles from the prison, twenty or thirty to a truck—frightened, starved, blindfolded, sick from torture.

  When the truck arrived, the victims were led directly to be executed at the ditches and pits, a little sign at Choeung Ek said. Because the execution methods were so crude—it was not possible to club more than three hundred people to death and also bury them on any given day—a backlog of doomed people built up, and many of the prisoners had to wait in locked huts for their turn to die, listening to the screams from the edges of the pits.

  A sign on one tree said, The killing tree against which executioners beat children— and it explained that these children, the offspring of the despised privileged class of doctors, lawyers, and teachers, were swung by their heels and their skulls smashed against the tree.

  Pathways linked the mass graves with the trees and the shrines—small platforms on poles, like bird feeders—where the clothes and sometimes the bones of the victims were stacked. On this hot sunny day, just the sort of day on which the killings took place, these platforms were thick with buzzing flies.

  This tree was used as a tool to hang a microphone which make a sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed, another sign said on a tree at the edge of one of the mass graves.

  I was stunned and depressed by the visit to Choeung Ek. I had also begun to read the Philip Short book, which was not only a biography of Pol Pot but also a chronicle of Cambodia's recent history. One of Short's themes was how, today, the genocide was being marketed to advertise the virtue of the present government, which wasn't virtuous at all. He also emphasized that it was important to look closer at Khmer culture to understand the deep roots of this violence. The apparent anarchy was "a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality that defies easy generalization."

  Writing of "the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between," Short said that the killing fields were less an example of Pol Pot's excesses than the sort of behavior that was endemic in Khmer society. "The peculiarly abominable form [the ideology] took, came from pre-existing Khmer cultural models," he wrote. "Every atrocity the Khmer Rouge ever committed ... can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor [and] in paintings of Buddhist hells"

  It was self-serving for the United States to call it genocide, Short wrote, for after all, we had helped bring Pol Pot to power. And the existence of these museums of Khmer Rouge slaughter was also a way of suggesting that Cambodia had reformed, which was untrue. The present government was "rotten" and "utterly corrupt," and many men in it had been in the Khmer Rouge and had not repudiated their past crimes.

  Horrible as the killing fields were, this museum of atrocities distracted attention from the corruption of the present regime. Far from being an aberration, they were an example of Khmer culture run riot. A French missionary had called the terror "an explosion of the Khmer identity."

  But Pol Pot had lit the fuse. All his life he had the Khmer smile. No one ever knew what he was thinking or feeling. Few people knew his real name. He was born Saloth Sar, and over the years he changed his name at least a dozen times. "The more often you change your name, the better it confuses the enemy," he said. What Pol Pot did not say was that the name changes reflected his multiple identities. He'd had a privileged upbringing, some of his childhood spent at the royal palace. His colonial education allowed him to travel to France in 1949, where he was known as a bon viveur, if a bit secretive, and eventually as an anticolonial ideologue. He discovered Stalinism. He became a utopian socialist, a leveler, unsentimental, but in the Khmer way, capable of preaching extreme violence.

  On his return to Cambodia in the 1950s he allied himself with the anti-French forces and rejoiced in the French retreat. The Vietnam War emboldened him, as the American bombing had, by winning more converts to his cause. Because of his Chinese support, he had powerful reasons to be anti-Vietnamese. He kept to the rural areas, strengthening his army, at a time when the United States was currying favor with China. In his five-year civil war, he fought a weakened, unpopular, and crooked government. Half a million people died in this war of attrition. Seeing that the end was near, America's man, Lon Nol, left for Hawaii with a million dollars from Cambodia's central bank. Cambodians were relieved, believing they might at last have a stable and independent government. No triumphant processional by the new leadership entered the fallen capital. Pol Pot waited for days and then slipped into the city in darkness.

  As an expression of his weird idealism, Pol Pot declared Year Zero—a clean slate—and abolished money. That alone was the cause of much of the chaos that ensued, because food took the place of currency and was hoarded and fought over. Food became scarcer, and soon starvation and malnutrition were universal. Books were burned and ministerial files dumped in the streets. Phnom Penh was emptied of its population. City dwellers, sent into the countryside, were unprepared for this rustication; most left their homes with as many of their belongings as they could carry; a great number died on the way to remote areas. The whole nation reverted to chaos, a kind of madness and primitivism ch
aracterized by machine-smashing and virtual slavery. Hardly anyone laid eyes on Pol Pot, since he was obsessively secretive, an enigma even to his followers.

  No personality cult attached to Pol Pot. No pictures of him appeared anywhere. There were no songs, no poems, no sayings, no anecdotes about his life. Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan was inescapable; Pol Pot in Cambodia was unfindable. No one knew where he lived. He gave no speeches and published very little under his own name. He owned no property. He had no personal wealth. His austerity extended to government events. At one celebration to mark the party's anniversary, only orange juice was served, and the entertainment was Albanian films.

  Outsiders demonized and denounced Pol Pot, by this time known as Brother Number One, but no one really knew who he was or what he stood for. In a way he was a classic geek, and like many geeks, a paranoiac.

  His ideas remained obscure or oversimplified, but his paranoia percolated into the leadership—to soldiers, the police, prison guards, torturers, to everyone who had power. His reclusiveness and indecision helped create a tyranny that became random and improvisational; no one, neither the frightened populace nor the empowered soldiers, knew what they were supposed to do. Having a weapon helped, for if you had a weapon, you had power. A weapon might be something as simple as an ax or a hoe or a pitchfork. Kampuchea, as the country was known then, became a slave state where, in less than four years, a million and a half people were killed as enemies of the state.

  Pol Pot was undone by the invading Vietnamese, who deposed him and installed their own man, Heng Samrin, in 1979. In the same year, wishing to see Vietnam weakened in the so-called proxy war (the Soviet Union was still Vietnam's best ally), the United States supported the right to a seat for the exiled Pol Pot's blood-soaked delegation to the United Nations.

  ***

  IT GAVE ME THE CREEPS to read all this while I was staying in Phnom Penh. Some of the worst of the killing had occurred while I was taking my Railway Bazaar trip, and then writing it, complaining that it had been impossible for me to visit Cambodia. Little did I know what was happening here—but not many people on the outside knew much, or cared.

  I had gotten this far in my reading about Pol Pot when I visited the torture prison at Tuol Sleng, known as S-21. The former Ponhea Yat High School, in a respectable residential area of Phnom Penh, had been converted to a prison—a natural conversion, since large schools of classrooms are designed for confinement.

  The building itself looked like any three-story high school, the same brickwork, the same proportions. Inside, some classrooms had been divided into small wooden or brick cubicles for prisoners awaiting interrogation; other classrooms served as torture chambers. Some torture took the form of shackling a person to an iron bedstead, where he or she was shocked with electricity, beaten with clubs, stabbed, and made to confess to crimes against the state.

  "The role of S-21 was not to kill but to extract confessions," Philip Short wrote. "Death was the finality, but it was almost incidental."

  Obeying an obsessive if ghoulish sense of order, and so as to create a paper trail of traitors, all prisoners at Tuol Sleng were photographed before they were tortured, their names and ages and histories recorded—where they'd lived and worked, details of their families and education, the names of their friends. Far from being mere prison numbers or statistics, they were presented in the round, as utterly human. Their faces were fixed in terror, shocked, fatigued, very ill; oddly serene or dead-eyed; old women, young women, old men, wide-eyed boys, young children. Mothers too, many a woman holding her baby, posed in an agonizing pietà, both of them about to die.

  Of the fourteen thousand people who passed through this prison, all were tortured, and all but twelve were murdered. The horror of their plight was evident on the upper floors, where outside the classroom cubicles a veranda was hung with barbed wire. A sign explained: The braid of barbed wire prevented the desperate victims from committing suicide.

  Even though I knew that this torture prison had been turned into a museum by a sanctimonious government that itself violated human rights (corruption, embezzlement, torture in police custody, land seizure, and extrajudicial killings), I was horrified—who wouldn't be?—by the pathetic faces of the thousands who'd been killed.

  One hot day I went through the bare dreary rooms and splintery cubicles, past the displays of doomed faces and the portraits of child soldiers, some as young as ten, and the glass cases labeled Instruments of Torture, most of them farm implements—mattocks, axes, clubs, machetes, shovels. Like my visit to Dachau, it was a cruel example of inhumanity, of sadistic and pitiless murder. "No other country has ever lost so great a proportion of its nationals in a single, politically inspired hecatomb," Short wrote, "brought about by its own leaders."

  Though all of this was appalling, the worst moment for me came out side in the sunshine, in the courtyard of the prison, which had been part of the old school's playing field. It was a gallows, three sections, with hooks on each section, looming over three large-mouthed ceramic barrels. The sign on it said, Prisoners were hung upside-down [by their feet, from ropes on the hooks], until they lost consciousness. Their heads were then dipped into the jar of water. By doing so, the victims quickly regained consciousness and their interrogators could continue their interrogations.

  A week before I visited Tuol Sleng, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked about similar American practices, known by the laughable euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." These were being used on suspected terrorists in American military prisons. In the torture called waterboarding, which was also used at Tuol Sleng, a hooded prisoner was strapped head-down on a slanted board and such a powerful volume of water poured over his face in a continuous stream that he was briefly suffocated, convinced that he was drowning. And Cheney was questioned about simple submersion, as with the torture jars I was staring at.

  What did the second most powerful politician in America think of this way of extracting confessions, this "dunk in the water"?

  "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said, and the president backed him up. "It's a very important tool."

  The traveler's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma, and elsewhere—the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again."

  ***

  MUCH OF MY KNOWLEDGE of recent Cambodian history had come from books, so I decided to find an eyewitness in Phnom Penh.

  Heng, a man of about forty-five, spoke English well. Before the Khmer Rouge took over, his father had been a lieutenant in the army and his mother had run a small business in Kampot, about sixty miles south of Phnom Penh, on the coast. They had a good life and a comfortable house. When the Khmer Rouge invaded Kampot in 1972, Heng, who was just a boy, and his parents moved to the capital. Two years later, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.

  I asked him, "In the beginning, were the people afraid or did they think, 'This will only last a little while'?"

  "My father said that he heard that the Khmer Rouge wanted all the people to be equal," Heng said. "Others said the Khmer Rouge soldiers were like wild animals. That frightened us. When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh they told all the people to go away without taking any property, because it would just be a few days. My parents asked them where to go. Khmer Rouge soldiers said, 'Any direction. It's up to you.'"

  "Were your parents threatened?"

  "Yes. If people didn't leave, the soldiers would kill them. My parents decided go back home to Kampot. It took almost a whole day to travel only fifteen kilometers from
Phnom Penh, and we saw corpses almost everywhere by the road. They smelled very bad. It is really difficult to find words to explain all this. When we arrived near Takeo, some thirty kilometers from Phnom Penh, a lady said to my mother, 'Please cut your hair.' My mother had very long hair. 'And throw out your money. If Khmer Rouge soldiers see your hair and money you will be dead.'"

  "What did Cambodians think of the soldiers?"

  "They were so afraid, because soldiers could kill them at any time, anywhere. Khmer Rouge soldiers thought of people as their enemy." He paused and said in a softer voice, "Even now, ninety percent of people are still afraid of soldiers—I mean, government soldiers."

  "Did you or your parents know of what terrible things were happening in Tuol Sleng torture prison or at Choeung Ek killing fields?"

  "No, we didn't know anything about that," Heng said. "We did not even know the day, the month, or the year. You know, there were hundreds of prisons like those throughout the country."

  "What sort of a person was Pol Pot?"

  "He had graduated from a French university. If he had been a weak student, he would not have got a scholarship, so it means that he was a smart person. It is very hard to judge Pol Pot. For me, I think the situation during that time is similar to the situation in Iraq. The situation in Iraq before the invasion of American troops was—well, some good things, some bad things. But after America invaded, the situation got much worse."

  "You mean Bush is like Pol Pot?"

  "Maybe. But I don't mean Bush is a bad person. The problem was that he did not understand what Iraq people wanted. He cannot govern those people. When Pol Pot took over the country, the situation became chaos. For me, there was almost no single person responsible for Cambodia during that nightmare."

  "Do you think he was heartless, or cruel, or vengeful?"

  "I do not think so. I think he was a big boss that had no influence on the staff. I mean, that his people could do anything that they wanted to."