Khmer Rouge Haunts Cambodia 30 Years Later
Yahoo! News - Khmer Rouge Haunts Cambodia 30 Years Later
By DAVID LONGSTREATH, Associated Press Writer
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary peasant army, the horrors of their brutal, murderous rule still stain the fabric of this impoverished Southeast Asian kingdom.
On the outskirts of Phnom Penh, near the Choeung Ek Genocidal Museum, the evidence of mass murder is easily found. Just scraping the surface of communal graves turns up bone fragments, teeth and clothing worn by those put to death by the Khmer Rouge.
Seeking to create a utopian society, the Khmer Rouge abolished private property and money and emptied the cities by driving the urban population at gunpoint into the countryside to live in communal camps.
The genocidal experiment began on April 17, 1975, and wreaked havoc for nearly five years. An invasion by the Vietnamese army early in 1979 ended the group’s reign, but not before an estimated 1.7 million or more Cambodians had died from violence, starvation or overwork.
The Khmer Rouge waged a guerrilla war for two more decades, but its abuses have largely gone unpunished since fighting stopped in 1998.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, fell from favor and leadership of the group’s last active faction in 1997. A year later he was dead, and many speculated he had committed suicide. Ta Mok, an 80-year-old known as “the Butcher” who deposed Pol Pot, languishes in a Phnom Penh cell awaiting a U.N. war crimes tribunal that most Cambodians believe will never come to pass.
Prime Minister Hun Sen made deals with other leaders, such as Noun Chea, right-hand man to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, prime minister of the Khmer Rouge government. They defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1998 and now live safe from prosecution in the autonomous zone of Pailin.
Noun Chea sits quietly in the bedroom of his simple wooden shack watching the sun rise as he listens to morning news broadcasts on a cheap Chinese-made portable radio. He, like Khieu Samphan, grants few interviews and refuses to speak about the past.
Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in the west along the Thailand border, is a derelict town. The gemstones that paid for the arms and ammunition that kept the Khmer Rouge fighting for 20 years have mostly been mined. Teak trees, another source of funds, are gone as well.
Many in Pailin live a grinding existence, much like the rest of Cambodia, where half the people get by on $1 a day.
The once lush jungle of Pailin, the perfect hiding place for the guerrillas, has been turned into slashed and burned farmland that waits for a rainy season now two years overdue.
Staring at dust swirling at his border farm, former Khmer Rouge infantryman Kave Meik says: “Before we didn’t have the freedom and independence but we had plenty of food. Now we have freedom but we don’t have enough to eat.”
