Escaping the Khmer Rouge

by Chileng Pa

  As I worked on the bike tubes, thinking about the new regime and how it treated people as cattle, I was startled by a voice from the opposite side of the road. “Mit Bong, we were truthful with Angkar,” I heard someone say.

  The man’s voice continued. “I told you about my position in Lon Nol’s government because Angkar said you would reward anyone who confessed. So, we confessed. But now you are taking us away to be killed.”

  I quickly lowered myself into the ditch in the midst of the bushes and peered out to see what was happening. Four guerrillas, three young and one older, were escorting several families down the path about nine meters from where I was hiding. The oldest guerrilla was followed by the former Lon Nol soldiers and their wives, two carrying babies. Their young children walked behind the parents and the three younger guerrillas followed in the rear. When they had gone about fifteen meters beyond me, I buried my bike in the ditch under tree branches. I hurried after them to see what the sons of bitches were going to do to these people. But I already knew the yothea were leading them to their execution. After passing two rice paddies, they walked through a rough field toward a termite hill surrounded by trees, thickets, and brush. I hid in some nearby bushes.

  The guerrillas gathered the ex-soldiers and their families around them, twelve people in all including the babies. The Khmer Rouge took the babies from their mothers’ hands and put them in a rice sack, which they set to one side near the trunk of a tree. The frightened infants began screaming. The three executioners then took turns slaughtering everyone. They massacred the younger children in one pit with their parents, smashing in their heads with bamboo clubs. I heard a smash and then a cry, another smash and another cry. Tears rolled down my face.

  The monsters in black clothes took a moment for cigarettes and conversation. “What did these bastards do to those innocent babies?” I wondered to myself. I was filled with anger and despair. The two youngest executioners didn’t waste any time before beginning the killing and they were only young teenagers! I knew their bastard parent, the idiotic Angkar. These young yothea had begun learning Khmer Rouge communist ideology very early, long before they became guerrillas. I had just witnessed the evidence that these young boys did not hesitate to kill men, women, and children. They were merely following the orders of Angkar to hate everyone and take their revenge even on babes in the cradle. Or babies that should have been in a cradle or hammock; instead, they were stuffed in a sack, screaming.

  I saw this scenario with my own eyes. After the two young guerrillas gathered their courage over cigarettes, they threw away the butts and picked up the rice sack lying at the base of the tree, which held the two infants. They then whacked the sack against the tree trunk two or three times, and laughed. They threw the sack of dead babies into the murder pit and strode away with their comrades.

  After the harvest of early 1976, food rations were reduced even further. New People were fed gruel, called babaw riev, in a communal kitchen. This traditional Cambodian rice soup was now primarily water with only a few grains of rice floating in it. New People were forced to work even harder and given fewer rest breaks. Angkar told us that as residents of Angkar territory, we had to demonstrate self-control by enduring extended periods of thirst, hunger, and fatigue. In particular, we had to increase our tolerance to the pain of starvation.

  It wasn’t long before the suffering of my family intensified, along with that of all the New People. We were starving. I was able to find a few taro, papaya stumps, and taro leaves to add to the babaw riev, but it wasn’t enough to keep my family fed. It was especially frustrating for me to witness the affects on my one year old son. My wife was not able to breastfeed him because she didn’t have sufficient nutrition herself to produce milk.

  In desperation, I collected some of our valuables, mostly new clothes and medicine which we had carried all the way from Phnom Penh and successfully kept hidden from Angkar. When I took bicycle tubes to be fixed in other districts, I traded my goods for villagers’ rice, corn, salt, sugar palm, and anything else I could get my hands on. I did this without the knowledge even of my neighbors because, if the village chief learned of my activities, I would be killed. I was able to get much that we needed, but the trips were dangerous and I wasn’t able to get enough to keep us healthy.

  I also added to our diet by sneaking out of the bike shop to catch fish in a nearby creek and find edible root plants and taro leaves. But even this was extremely dangerous since I had no doubt that anyone catching me would report my activities to Mit Sean, and I would then face severe punishment.

  Despite my efforts, my grandmother’s health failed. By the fall of 1976, she’d became severely malnourished and ill. Her body swelled and there was no doctor or medicine to treat her. All I could do was request medicine from the traditional healer at the revolutionary clinic. He’d been appointed by the village Angkar to run the clinic on the theory that traditional folk medicine was superior to modern medicine. He gave me a handful of his homemade medicine, which other villagers told me was not effective in curing sickness but apparently did help people who were starving. It was the only medical remedy the Khmer Rouge allowed to people they considered to be legitimately sick. The medicine was made from leaves, rice powder, and various herbs ground together and molded into small pellets which we called “rabbit shit” from its appearance. One mid-afternoon when I returned home from the bike shop to feed my grandmother, I found her lying on the bamboo bed in our hut. I called to her as I hurried out to the communal kitchen for her ration, but heard no response. When I returned to the hut, she was still lying on the bed.

  “Grandmother! Grandmother, wake up!” I called again to her. “I’ve brought your babaw riev for you. Hurry! You must get up and eat it before it gets cold.”

  Even before I touched her, I knew she was gone.

  “Grandmother!” I cried out. “When did you die?” It was one of the saddest moments of my life. My grandmother had been my lifelong advisor, and I loved her deeply. I was still sobbing when my sister came back to the hut after she’d eaten her meal in the communal dining hall. She couldn’t speak when she saw me sitting by our grandmother. She just began to cry, as we tried to comfort one another. I left them together in the hut, and hurried to the village chief to let him know that my grandmother had passed away.

  “Mit Bong,” I told him. “My grandmother has just died. May I please have some white cloth to wrap her in and some plywood to make her a casket?” The work leader, Visal, was also there and he answered gruffiy, “Mit Thy, Angkar has a clear understanding of our culture, and knows the respect that must be shown to elders. However, things are different now. The country has been liberated from an imperialist regime. Right now, our Angkar still has shortages of everything. We need to be conservative with our use of materials so we will have them when we need them in the future. Our cooperative needs cloth to make clothes for our workers as they labor on the farms to meet the goals of the supreme Angkar.”

  He went on and on. “I can’t give you cloth to waste on wrapping a dead body. Take your grandmother and bury her near the rice field where her body will rot and provide nutrients for growing stalks of rice. Go on! Mit Thy, get out of here and get her buried quickly! If Mit Sean catches you wasting any more time, he will take you and your wife away. Now go!” He made the decision, and the village chief didn’t say a word.

  I hated him, but there was nothing I could do to him without dooming myself. I wanted to say, “You’re a bastard, Visal. Let’s see how you feel when you’re told to bury your parents in this manner.” But I managed to choke out, “Yes, Yes, Yes, Mit Bong, I will go bury my grandmother now.”

  As I walked back to my hut, I cried tears not only of sadness but of anger and frustration. I wanted to cut Visal’s black heart from his chest and make him eat it.

  When I arrived at my hut, I begged my neighbors to help me braid some bamboo to make a thin carrier to hold my grandmother’s body. The only things my sister and I could find to wra
p her in were a piece of torn mat and an old blanket. Our neighbors helped carry her body to the top of the dike along the rice paddy. We decided to bury her on the small hill near the rice paddies in the midst of some bushes. I dug a grave in soil baked hard from the blazing sun. As I stood beside my sister, sweat poured from my body and mixed with my tears.

  I gently placed my beloved grandmother in the grave. I buried her quickly and, when I’d finished filling in her grave, I placed thorns of bamboo in the top layer to discourage wild dogs scratching for food. I had no incense to burn for the prayers I should have been saying for her. So, I cut three slender boughs from different trees, stuck them in front of the grave to represent three sticks of incense, and lit them. Then, I knelt with my sister and recited a prayer, adding these tearful words, “Grandma love, it’s your grandson. I pray that your spirit goes to a joyous and peaceful place. And, when your spirit is reborn into this world, I pray the life you are given will help to defeat these murdering fools and their demonic regime, these illiterate Democratic Kampucheans who proclaim they’re the hope of the people for greater glory but provide instead only oppression and death.

  “Farewell, my grandmother.”

  8

  A Poem for Grandmother

  This is dedicated to my beloved grandmother who made my life complete.

  Damned guerrilla

  Did you ever

  Have mercy on

  The Khmer people,

  Or did you always

  Have a black heart

  Even from your birth?

  April seventeen

  Seventy-five

  You said,

  “Liberate the Khmer

  From the hell

  Of Lon Nol

  And liberate

  Us from the light.”

  Black shadow of

  Yothear troops

  Excitedly

  With AK Forty-sevens

  You bravely walked

  The streets.

  Strutting with

  Tire sandals

  Among the bereft

  Shouting “Re-

  Education!”

  Into joyless,

  Hopeless ears.

  Whoever is talking

  Of the old regime

  Must be erased.

  Everyone

  Must know the

  New Language

  Which Angkar

  Has produced.

  Woe and dust

  Wherever the lies

  Were shunned.

  The new history

  Wielded shovel

  To every

  Child of Truth.

  What whispered

  Conversations

  Bloom today.

  Morning death

  In the arbitrary dawn.

  No judgment.

  Black devil,

  Whose dream of

  Equality is

  A child chained

  To an elder

  Chained to a

  Cripple chained

  To starvation.

  Slave laborer

  Labor for

  Rest is death.

  An enemy

  Of Angkar

  Rests among

  The Truth.

  Black cotton meals

  Black living

  Black marriages

  Black working

  Are common.

  Ash black cotton

  Is fate for all.

  Keeping one’s

  Own white cotton

  Colored clothing

  Belonging to

  The old regime

  Churned to death by

  Black cotton.

  Men and women

  Guerrillas were

  Ransackers of

  Families, friends,

  And neighbors,

  Of New People’s

  Belongings.

  Black guerrillas

  Ransacking

  Every hut

  Where they found

  Meager things

  Meager hopes

  As they took

  It all.

  Meager things

  Were hiding.

  The guerrilla

  Accusing

  An enemy.

  They must kill

  The whole family.

  Weave into

  The fabric

  Of Lon Nol’s

  Uniforms,

  They will order

  Torture

  Until death.

  Loud black cotton

  Screaming that

  We should be

  Grateful to

  Angkar for

  Staying

  In one bundle.

  Colorful clothes

  Must quickly

  Be dyed

  The hope and

  Joy of black.

  Or we will die

  If we keep

  The white color of truth.

  9

  Witness to Death

  The leader of Democratic Kampuchea was Pol Pot. In honor of the Angkar regime that “liberated” Cambodia from the previous Lon Nol administration on April 17, 1975, Pol Pot ordered the construction of a thirty kilometer long levee and canal system in Svay Rieng Province, where I was living. It was to be called the April 17th Levee. At the time, I didn’t know who Pol Pot was or his omnipotence over my life and those of every other Cambodian, but I was all too familiar with the April 17 levee and canal.

  In January 1977, orders were passed down from Angkar to the Khmer Rouge yothea in charge of each district and village in Svay Rieng Province directing them to draft the strongest men and women and send them to the canal and levee site. I was among the first to be drafted in Prayap. My wife was to remain in Prayap, harvesting rice. My sister, however, was dispatched to another worksite. It was the last time I would see her for many years, always wondering if she remained alive.

  I walked to the worksite with my friend, Sovong, and we shared one another’s grief at having to leave our wives and children. We were joined by groups from other villages. This was the harvest season, and the air was cool, a soft breeze helping us along.

  The yothea leading us to the worksite had no regard for our comfort. Despite the cool weather, we took a direct route through rice fields ready to be harvested, across pastures and fields of reeds, and through creeks and muddy swamps. In some areas, the mud was knee high and progress was ponderously slow. Trudging through the mud, I glanced ahead and saw mud all the way to the horizon where dull white clouds floated slowly above the rice fields, pulled along by the cool winds of the season like circus elephants linked trunk to tail. I looked behind me and saw long lines of bundles moving across the mud, carried on the heads and shoulders of hundreds more like myself. As the day passed, all of us were nearing exhaustion.

  I noticed that the women were becoming especially tired. I immediately thought of my wife, Devi, and how much I would miss her and little Sokhanarith. I knew that when she went to work in the fields the next morning, she would have to drop my son at the children’s center. I thought to myself, “That’s enough! Just stop thinking about it. To survive in this regime, I must close my eyes and ears, for I am powerless to oppose it. In this Angkar revolution, if I get an order, I must obey it.”

  “What are you mumbling about, Mit Thy?” Sovong asked me.

  I smiled. “Nothing, Sovong.”

  We eventually arrived at the worksite near the village of Chhoeu Teal. The yothea ordered us to build long rectangular sleeping barracks made of split bamboo. With the construction of our quarters completed two days later, the digging of the canal began. We started before dawn. Our group leader measured off a number of meters of ground that our group was to dig before sundown. We worked in pairs, one of us with a hoe loosening the dirt, the other raking the dirt into the basket, then carrying it to the fill area. If our group failed to complete the assigned number of meters before dusk, we lit torches and continued the work until it was done. />
  We were served two meals a day. Both were the same: two ladles of rice gruel and a bowl of banana stalk stew. Each evening after the dinner meal, we gathered for a “living life meeting” at which the worksite chief and the group leaders dutifully recited Angkar propaganda. These speeches were designed to poison the minds of the young workers. Angkar promised severe punishment to anyone who failed to give full attention to every word spoken by these ignorant bastards. It soon became obvious that the yothea were trained to use violence and the threat of violence to achieve discipline. Their actions were designed to maintain an atmosphere of fear, and they proved to be very good at it.

  At the first of these meetings, the worksite foreman rose, walked to the front of the group, and spoke.

  All you Mit! You have been liberated from the claws of the Lon Nol regime and the American imperialists. We revolutionaries don’t tolerate lazy people under our Angkar rule, lazy people like the monks who don’t want to work but just go out to beg food from people like water leeches. Angkar has to take these people away.

  He added,

  You have been given the privilege of digging the canal and building the levee to honor the day we gave you freedom! You are here under orders of the supreme Angkar. Now, I will explain the rules to you. The supreme Angkar expects you to devote all your energy to this task, the energy of your bodies and the energy of your minds.