River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Many times in the past four and a half years, I had been stabbed with nostalgia and regret. Now I was here at last. I sat at the little bar drinking a glass of imported beer. The heat and the unhurried pace of life suggested nothing had changed. The beer was cold, and the girl who served it was soft and pretty and spoke French. The ceiling fan whirred gently. The same faded photographs of the Angkor temples hung on the walls. With eyes half-closed and senses lulled by the tinkle of a gamelan in the background, it seemed for a moment as though I had never left.

  I was jolted sharply out of this reverie: Sitha, the girl behind the counter, suddenly began to weep. Soon she was pouring out the story of her exodus from Phnom Penh, the destruction of her family. Her sorrow made me feel awkward and clumsy. A couple of the old hotel staff who had survived also came in, their hair white and eyes sunken – older, thinner, sadder. One by one, they shook my hand, embarrassed. I was equally embarrassed, at a loss for words, and could only hold their hands affectionately, give them a hug, and clumsily hand them some money, then turn away. They all wanted to know what had happened to Monsieur Loup, the old proprietor, who had been evacuated to France, but I could not help them. My hold on reality was slipping.

  For hours, I walked the streets as if in a spell, looking at the city. The bonds were not broken, but they were fraying. The sense of belonging was missing. The golden past could not be reborn. The magic was going. Nothing, it seemed, was left; nothing at all. The two Phnom Penhs were separated by a few years in time but for ever in mood. Around me was a wasteland of decaying and melancholy buildings and a distraught and traumatised people, desperately trying to rebuild their lives. Phnom Penh had visibly contracted; there was sadness in every face. But none of the faces I saw was familiar; they were all new people. After the Vietnamese invasion had freed them from the tyranny of Pol Pot, they had rushed into Phnom Penh from the countryside and moved into whatever home they could grab. Most had no concept of living in an urban community.

  The moment I stepped off the main boulevards I entered another, subterranean world, like passing from sunlight to darkness. These side streets had once been frantic places, and now they were the graveyards of the modern civilisation, as it had existed before the Khmer Rouge had rejected it. Rusting cars, lorries, buses and refrigerators lay among the stinking piles of refuse. Many of the old traditional houses, with their great wooden floors and their carved roofs, had been torn down in a frenzy of destruction, as symbols of the petite bourgeoisie. Everywhere there were swarms of flies, the smell of decay; and pigs, dogs and chickens were rooting in the dirt.

  In the city centre, not a single shop was functioning or open; the cavernous market was deserted. The interiors of many houses had been looted. The pavements and drains were broken. Hopeless groups of people crouched on the pavements and against the walls, bartering for a few handfuls of rice, suffering etched on their faces. In places, people with rickety limbs moved like zombies searching for their loved ones or scraps of food. It was nothing to duck into the doorway of a hut and be confronted by diseased and malnourished children, flyblown or with eyes glazed over by approaching death. Among the shapeless bundles outside Phnom Penh railway station was a woman clasping a new-born baby, which was dying, and a brace of orphans whining in hunger. How that faint sound of whining carried in the wind and penetrated my ears.

  Clearly, not much had improved in the year since the Vietnamese army had first rolled into Phnom Penh and found it silent and deserted; the central bank blown up, its banknotes – now worthless – scattered everywhere, the colonnaded shops and villas looted and smashed, the factories at a standstill, the streets knee-deep in broken furniture and rubble. Unless one was there, one could not realise how desperate it was. In Phnom Penh at this time, there was still no paper to write on and few pens to write with. The ministries, such as they were, had hardly a typewriter among them and almost no means of copying a document. There were no telephones to make appointments. There was no proper postal system. Letters for the provinces were carried by truck drivers travelling upcountry. There had been no money since the Khmer Rouge abolished the currency. Those who had a second shirt or sarong, even a second pair of sandals, were lucky. The Monorom Hotel had no knives and forks and so could not serve even breakfast; I was asked to bring some cutlery from Bangkok on my next visit, so that they could open a restaurant for us. All had been destroyed; an entire country had to be rebuilt.

  I poked around in the old British embassy, where several families were squatting amid the wrecked filing cabinets. Someone had been digging up the garden – looking for buried money and jewellery, my guide suggested – though why there should be any hidden there, I could not imagine. The Khmer Rouge had burned the books. I went back to the Bibliothèque Nationale, next to the Hôtel Le Phnom, which had opened its doors a few days previously, following a closure which had lasted nearly five years. It was a distressing sight. Once, it had been full of beautiful books about the antiquity of Cambodia. These had all been destroyed, but the English novel was represented by two books – George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Little Women – incongruously together on the shelf. There were no monks. The pagodas were empty. This was the joyless Phnom Penh I had come back to.

  A couple of days later, I found my first real friend from the past. I found So Pheap. I was walking down a street near the post office and a woman in ragged black pyjamas stopped her bicycle in front of me and said shyly, ‘Jon, is it you?’ As I nodded and rushed over, I detected in her sad face a silent reproach. The Khmer Rouge had turned So Pheap from a delicate copper-skinned beauty into a rough peasant girl. Her hair was clipped short, her skin had coarsened in the sun, her rubber-sandalled feet were torn and her beautiful hands covered in sores. She was ringed by sorrow and quivered with emotion.

  ‘Maman morte, bébé morte,’ she said, with a look of utter sadness. We arranged to meet later that evening outside the hotel. I hoped to be able to give her some money. But then my interpreter appeared, and she stiffened, gave me a last imploring glance and cycled away, terrified she would be denounced to the communist authorities for addressing a westerner. And though I searched and searched the streets of Phnom Penh for days afterwards, I never found her again. Another door closed on the past for ever.

  Chantal’s fumerie was now in a Vietnamese army special security zone fenced off with barbed wire. My efforts to visit it were firmly rebuffed by a hawk-faced sentry. Nothing could be done and I did not insist. In the street behind it was Tuol Sleng, the lycée which the Khmer Rouge had operated as an extermination camp. Its doors had been a portal of death for 16,000 murdered people. In past days, when it was a lycée, I had often glided by in a cyclo on my way to sneak a quiet afternoon’s pipe at Chantal’s, and I remembered the girls and boys with their satchels of books, sauntering down the rough road in the sunshine on their way home at the end of a school day.

  I spent many bleak hours inside Tuol Sleng, now converted into a museum by the Vietnamese to justify their invasion and overthrow of Pol Pot. But the vision of evil lingers in my mind: classrooms divided into tiny brick cells where prisoners were held in solitary confinement; each interrogation room equipped with an iron bed, to which they were chained, naked, with iron shackles; a desk and a chair provided for the interrogator; gallows outside to suspend the prisoners by their feet; stone vats of water into which they were plunged head first. The prison was ringed by a double fence of barbed wire – a needless precaution; nobody escaped.

  In the cells, the invading Vietnamese had found the rotting remains of fourteen tortured prisoners. A year later, brown blotches of blood still stained the floor; decaying mounds of evil-smelling clothing stripped off the victims by the guards revealed the human agony of this dark place.

  Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge had a mania for documenting their deeds; every prisoner who entered Tuol Sleng was photographed and forced to write a confession to which he attached a thumbprint and signature. The Vietnamese had recovered the documentation, developed
the films and displayed the pictures all in one room: row upon row of photos of guards, blank-faced, idiotic, cruel, ugly – and on the opposite walls, the photos of their victims, agony and terror on their faces as they awaited the end. Standing in the semi-obscurity of this cold, still room looking at the wall-to-wall images, I could hear the screams of the tortured, imagine the breaking flesh.

  One of the photographs was of the camp guards, their wives and children, all in black garb. In the middle of the back row, distinct with his preposterous protruding ears, was Kang Kek Ieu, alias Comrade Deuch, the prison director. Comrade Deuch was the very same Khmer Rouge cadre who had interrogated my friend François Bizot during his captivity near Oudong in 1971. Now he had turned up here in a photo like a bad penny. Deuch’s signature was found repeatedly on the death warrants. In one, I saw he had ordered the purging of an entire Khmer Rouge battalion, including two nine-year-old soldiers, because it was thought disloyal. ‘Kill them all,’ he wrote above his nightmare squiggle and the date.

  Deuch’s interrogators delighted in their work. The ingenuity of their methods of torture chills the mind. Confessions were extracted by means of whips, chains, water baths and poisonous reptiles. Many of the prisoners were ranking Khmer Rouge cadres; as the regime devoured its own, they were executed as spies and traitors.

  One of the victims was Hu Nim, the Khmer Rouge’s Information Minister. He had been one of the earliest revolutionaries, a top leader and confidant of Pol Pot; he was accused by his comrades of collaboration with the Vietnamese and of having CIA connections. Sent to Tuol Sleng on 10 April 1977, he was tortured. After four days, a first pathetic confession by Hu Nim was handed to Deuch by Pon, his interrogator. A note was attached: ‘We whipped him four or five times to break his stand, before taking him to be stuffed with water.’ Eight days later, Pon reported back to Deuch: ‘I have tortured him to write it again.’ On 6 July, Hu Nim was executed.

  I felt indifferent to his suffering and death. He was not a victim in the way the others were victims. He was now on the receiving end of what his terrible organisation had done to thousands upon thousands of ordinary Cambodians. I got a grim satisfaction from the realisation that there was retributive justice in Cambodia after all. He did not deserve human pity.

  The pictures of the other victims are blurred in my mind, but I still see one – a big black-and-white blow-up of Hu Nim’s wife, a single tear glistening and rolling down her cheek, her eyes bulging in white terror. It was impossible not to be moved by that image. But there was no reason for sorrow. As the wife of this top-ranking Khmer Rouge official, Madame Hu Nim had some responsibility for what happened. I had no sympathy for her.

  Several westerners were also tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng: carefree young drifters sailing aimlessly through the waves of Southeast Asia on holidays of a lifetime, one day they strayed too close in their yachts to the Cambodian coast and were captured by Khmer Rouge gunboats. I wondered a lot about that moment of capture. There had been nothing in their lives of idle pleasure and youthful irresponsibility to prepare them for the terrors in store. As the black-clad soldiers boarded, they could not have imagined that they were going to be taken to an extermination camp and tortured to death. Each was accused of spying against Cambodia and was forced, under torture, to make a detailed confession of CIA involvement and training. Copies of their confessions, extracted by the cruellest tortures, were afterwards found in the prison camp. The statements of two French brothers, twenty-two and twenty-six when they were killed, just echoed puzzlement and stupefaction: ‘ . . . ne sachant rien de la cause de notre arrêt . . . je ne sais pas du tout la faute que j’ai commis,’ one wrote.

  The confessions of other foreigners were more revealing. In a desperate attempt to satisfy the spy hysteria of their torturers and save their skins, they fabricated CIA activities for themselves, weaving them into real events in their lives. In his 4000 word confession, Kerry Hamill, a New Zealander, claimed he was recruited into the agency by his father, supposedly a CIA colonel. He described, in considerable detail, the agency’s plans to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime. James Clarke and Christopher Lance, both Americans, and Ron Dean and David Scott, Australians, gave equally imaginative and fictitious accounts of their espionage activities in Asia. Dean’s yacht, the fifty-two-foot ketch Sanuk, had been captured on 2 November 1978, while on its way to a Thai port to have a new teak deck fitted. He signed his confession on 21 November, after nearly three weeks of whippings, the bastinado (caning of the soles of the feet) and electric shocks to the genitals. By the time the Vietnamese reached Tuol Sleng six weeks later, he and the other westerners had been savagely murdered. They were repeatedly hanged by the feet, let down into a vat of water and hanged again, to die at last of strangulation. All that Deuch needed to justify having them killed in this inhumane manner was their signatures and thumbprint on their confessions, to show that he had caught a group of ‘imperialist spies’.

  Also found at Tuol Sleng were the nine rules of conduct Deuch made his foreign prisoners obey while undergoing torture.

  Regulations of Security Agents

  1. You must answer in conformity with the questions I asked you. Don’t try and turn away my questions.

  2. Don’t try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas. It is strictly forbidden to contest me.

  3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

  4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting the time to reflect.

  5. Don’t tell me about your little incidents committed against the propriety. Don’t tell me either about the essence of the revolution.

  6. During the bastinado or the electrization [sic] you must not cry loudly.

  7. Do sit down quietly. Wait for the orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, you must immediately do it without protesting.

  8. Don’t make pretexts about Kampuchea-Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.

  9. If you disobey every point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of whip or five shock of electric discharge.

  What kind of man was the mass killer who ordered his men to carry out such hideous tortures? I was determined to find out, but none of my Cambodian friends could enlighten me; Ing Pech, one of the only known Tuol Sleng survivors – he got away the day after the Vietnamese captured the city on 7 January 1979 – was not forthcoming either. He said that as the director of the prison, Deuch had lived a life of relative affluence in a comfortably furnished house nearby which now served as the Polish embassy. He visited the prison regularly, sometimes with his wife in tow. ‘He had a kind and gentle manner, but everyone was terrified of him,’ Pech said. ‘His favourite expression was “This man is bad and needs to be re-educated.” When you heard that you knew Deuch meant tortured and killed.’

  Deuch escaped. As the Vietnamese fought their way into the suburbs of Phnom Penh, he fled with hundreds of other Khmer Rouge officials to the Thai border. To the embarrassment of western refugee officials, he crossed into Thailand and hid in a Khmer Rouge refugee camp which was receiving food and medical aid from the international relief agencies. After three months, he crossed back into Cambodia and rejoined Pol Pot’s forces in the west of the country, to fight the Vietnamese.

  I could find no one in Phnom Penh who knew about Deuch’s early life. But his parents were still alive and inside Cambodia. Later on, I tried to trace them, travelling up to the district town of Strung, in Kompong Thom province. The journey was the first westerners had been permitted to that part of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s birthplace, and the area was still insecure. As we rattled through the countryside, around the Great Lake, past Angkor and Kompong Thom, the country was as I remembered; an unforgettable composition of inundated rice fields, palm trees and misty hills.

  Here and there, giant canals cut through the landscape. They had been feverishly dug with bare hands under the eyes of vengeful Khmer Rouge guards. Most had now been aban
doned as useless. I was appalled by the destruction and continuing misery; people were still living off leaves. In the remotest places we visited, there was latent hostility, either because we were foreigners or because we had come from the city. We were driving along a lonely stretch of road at dusk, about to cross a bridge, when we were challenged by a group of government soldiers. They were scowling peasant boys, dark-skinned forest people, probably defectors from the Khmer Rouge. Tense minutes followed as they surrounded our car and poked rifles through the windows. Eventually, they let us pass for double the usual number of bribes of cigarettes. Our government ‘minder’ was trembling with fright.

  At Strung, I found a watery eyed old woman with black-lacquered teeth, and her husband, parents of the mass-murderer, living in a large, spacious teak house on stilts, where Deuch had grown up. It was clear that his mother had no idea what a monster her son had become. I could not bring myself to tell her as we sat on the floor and sipped bitter Chinese tea. I did not want to burden an already old and troubled mind. She spoke of Deuch with a mother’s love. ‘He was a good, respectful boy who helped his parents.’ Her husband, a half-Chinese fisherman with a mouthful of gold teeth, said his son had studied hard and had come top of the class. ‘He was something of a loner,’ the old woman conceded. ‘He read a lot and seldom played with the other children in the village.’

  She had seen him only once in recent years. One day after the Khmer Rouge victory, he drove up in a car with a military escort and announced his forthcoming marriage. He ordered his mother to accompany him to Phnom Penh. She had never before been to the big city, one hundred miles away, and was flattered at the invitation. But Deuch did not allow her to stay. She was driven back to Strung after the wedding. She had not seen Deuch again. The journey had made her realise that her son had an important role in the Khmer Rouge. Why then, she wondered, were no special privileges accorded her husband and herself? They had suffered like the rest of the population and hated the Khmer Rouge. It was a sad, unsatisfactory meeting. I came away unable to put a human face to Deuch’s evil. Indisputably he was fanatical and cruel, a man who listened to no plea for mercy; yet many of his victims were from among his own kind. Perhaps there is a clue in the fact that he spent three years in a political jail under Prince Sihanouk. Deuch’s mother assumed her son had been tortured in jail, so perhaps he was taking revenge for his suffering. On his release he had gone underground and joined Pol Pot.