Return to the killing fields

The skulls are piled neatly behind glass now, targeted by cameras rather than guns or clubs. Candles burn on the steps of this mausoleum, whose spire tapers towards the morning sun. Beyond its walls life goes on, and not always reverentially. A pair of men stroll over former mass graves where fragments of bone still sometimes surface, especially after the monsoon rains. Two cheerful young tourists take a snap next to a billboard that shows how thousands of people were once trucked to die in a place where children's heads were beaten against what is now known as the "killing tree".

Forty years ago almost to the hour of my visit, a horror began that for many thousands of people ended here at Choeung Ek, an extermination camp on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. On April 17 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the capital and began to evacuate its residents and those of other big cities. It was the start of a campaign of enslavement and mass slaughter that was to claim the lives of at least 1.8 million people, about a quarter of the country's population. Now, in the grounds of this killing field, survivors of the near four-year terror are taking the microphone at a small commemoration. Orange-robed monks sit to the right, while visitors crouch and kneel to the left. A 70-year-old woman named Chan Kim Sour is in tears as she tells how her family was killed. "I am very depressed," she sobs. "Please find justice for me."

Among those listening is Theary Seng, whose parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge. She is visibly moved by the ceremony, which ends with the monks collecting bags full of food and money. Yet, for all the solemnity, Theary Seng thinks there is something missing. "This is not a place of hope," she says, as the crowds disperse. "It's a place that drums in the past, but it needs to do more. There's no redemption in the way we commemorate."

It is a reminder of what an open wound the Khmer Rouge years still are in Cambodia - and how much of a reckoning remains. It is now more than 30 years since the release of the film The Killing Fields, which told of the survival of Dith Pran, the Cambodian colleague of the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg. The events still whisper in the hearts of those then involved in the proxy wars of Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, a US bombing campaign in the late 1960s and early 1970s killed 150,000 to 500,000 people, in a vain attempt to stop supply routes to the North Vietnamese army. John Gunther Dean, the 89-year-old former US ambassador who oversaw the US evacuation from Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge arrived, has deplored how Washington "abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher".

"We'd accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That's the worst thing a country can do," he said in an interview with the Associated Press shortly before the anniversary. "And I cried because I knew what was going to happen."

Theary Seng is taking me on the journey she and her family made during those terrible days. A little girl of four when the Khmer Rouge arrived, she left Cambodia for the US the year after Vietnam toppled Pol Pot's regime in 1979. She grew up in Michigan and California, trained as a lawyer, returning to Cambodia periodically from 1995 to work. She came to live here in 2004, working as lawyer, activist - and investigator of her personal history. Theary Seng runs a civic education group and headed an NGO called the Centre for Social Development before leaving in acrimonious circumstances in 2009. She had a high public profile some years ago but has since pulled back after becoming "completely exhausted" talking about the past.

The accounting for the Khmer Rouge era is still sparse in a country that, for all its foreign factory investment and urban elite trappings, is among the poorest in its region. It never had the kind of broad-ranging truth and reconciliation commission with which South Africa tried to deal with the legacy of apartheid. Nor was there ever a full sense of regime change. Hun Sen, the prime minister of 30 years, is a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected. He now presents himself as the man needed to prevent a return to the era of mass atrocities.

Cambodia does have a legal process in the form of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. But this has been increasingly criticised during its nine-year life. So far, it has achieved just three convictions against leaders, including Kaing Guek Eav, or "Comrade Duch". He was a security chief and had charge of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, whose inmates ended up in the Choeung Ek killing fields. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, two other top officials, were sentenced to life imprisonment last year but human rights groups accuse the Cambodian government of undermining the work of the court.

Theary Seng is disillusioned by the tribunal. She says it has failed to embrace survivors like her as parties to cases - although others, including the court itself, have disputed this. She argues legal processes suitable for protecting the rights of a single defendant in a "simple murder in the streets of Michigan" shouldn't be applied to an atrocity where most of the population are victims. "For example, the right to remain silent," she says. "I don't want these bastards to remain silent - I'm sorry."

Her own investigations are not so much about justice as about how her parents died and who was responsible. She is also, in common with other Cambodians such as the film-makers Rithy Panh and Kulikar Sotho, trying to redress an imbalance that has meant most of the accounts of the Khmer Rouge years have come from foreigners. A decade ago, she wrote a book called Daughter of the Killing Fields. Now she is working on an expanded account of a past that is raw yet elusive. While the Khmer Rouge days were characterised by surveillance, informers and paranoia, gathering facts is now near impossible.

<

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

"I have to weigh - is what my relatives are telling me true?" Theary Seng says over dinner the night before the journey. "What is true any more? There are so many layers and it has been so difficult."

Elegantly dressed in a traditional long skirt and blouse, Theary Seng talks with an unnerving directness about the impact of her inquiries on herself and her family. She says she has read a lot of self-help books as she "didn't want to shame my relatives by going to see a psychologist", adding that she was drawn to law as "a tool to give coherence to my tangled inner world". What she refers to as her "fists-up" approach has alienated some, who say her criticisms of the country and its people can be insensitive. One long-time observer of the country's politics says she is "known for her rants", some well-targeted but others suggesting a "deep cultural dislocation". Theary Seng concedes that not all of the censure of her is wrong but retorts that sometimes the attacks on her are personal rather than addressing what she is saying.

She may be trenchant but Theary Seng can also be warm and darkly funny. At one point, when we see a dangerous piece of driving, she volunteers that "200 people die a month because of road traffic accidents". She adds wryly: "I don't know why I bring up awful information at the wrong time."

Our first stop is at a pagoda by the side of the highway, where multicoloured pennants flank a drive that leads to a concrete building with a red tiled roof. Inside are a large Buddha icon, abandoned furniture and Van Sovy, a shaven-headed 71-year-old female caretaker. She was here when Theary Seng and her family arrived at this impromptu detention centre on their march from Phnom Penh in April 1975. "A lot of sadistic violence occurred here," Theary Seng says. "I talked to a man who came in and out of here, and he talked of seeing people eating the internal organs of people they had killed."

Theary Seng explains that she pieced together her account from the memories of her two older brothers and two aunts, who were also with her. It was in this place that her father, a teacher, fatally answered the call for civil servants and people like him who had fought for the ousted regime to make themselves known to their captors, because they were needed to rebuild the country. In those early days, the Khmer Rouge were hailed by many, including Theary Seng's mother, as liberators from the US proxy war. One of the great tragedies was a belief that ties of nationality, ethnicity or religion would be protection. As Robert Carmichael puts it in When Clouds Fell From the Sky, a new book about a young diplomat enticed home by the Khmer Rouge, many did return voluntarily because they were patriotic and believed "Cambodians would not kill Cambodians".

Theary Seng's family never heard from her father again. "I really was a broken child," she tells me as we drive away. "Some people today would say, and I probably would agree, I am still broken. A lot of Cambodians are broken. My relatives and my family are a microcosm of a larger society."

We pass over the Mekong River, across which Theary Seng's family fled to escape the pagoda after her father's disappearance. Nowadays it is spanned by a new suspension bridge, the longest in the country and backed with Japanese money. Traffic crawls across, forced into a bottleneck by the cars, motorbikes and tuk-tuks that pull over to take selfies with the bridge.

On the other side, the settlements become sparser as we reach the countryside close to the Vietnamese border. We stop at a compound where a door in a small shrine swings gently back and forth in the breeze, drawing attention to the skulls within. In a building next to the shrine, murals show grim scenes of people being herded and tortured. "If I had been older, this is what I would have remembered," Theary Seng says.

Her family sought refuge in the village of Chensa, where her father's relatives came from. The settlement is now a long road with occasional compounds interspersed with rice fields. The family lived discreetly here for more than two years until suddenly, one day in late 1977, they were arrested.

The morning after we arrive, Theary Seng heads off with one of her aunts in search of a possible witness to their capture. His name is Keo Sok and he was a clerk under the Khmer Rouge. He lives a short drive away, with a small shrine in his front yard. His forehead is lined and his teeth decaying. He is also surprisingly friendly. It is an emotional meeting, during which Theary Seng wells up with tears.

Keo Sok says he was just 17 years old when one of the Khmer Rouge's committees chose him to be a note-taker. He never wanted to do it but was afraid to say no. He was worried and nervous when the Khmer Rouge killed people but was not involved in the murders himself. He knew Theary Seng's father but he had nothing to do with the family's arrest. Theary Seng later says she believes him, though she also notes that he showed little remorse. "I do not feel anything [bad], as I did not do any wrong to her family," Keo Sok says.

To an outsider, it seems unbelievable and unnerving that these claims and counterclaims have been festering in such a small community for 40 years. We go to see two more people in the area whom Theary Seng's aunt says may have been involved in the arrest of the family. Theary Seng's surprise visits to the pair, who are both distant relatives, are much more tense than the encounter with Keo Sok. At the first house, the man in question, shirtless and skinny, angrily denies complicity. The second man lies motionless on a mat in the shade, while family members defend him. His head is turned away from the conversation and his stillness suggests he will take any secrets to the grave.

After their arrest, the Seng family were taken to another pagoda prison. It's a place of solitude and rare beauty, a vast open ground dotted with a few dogs, a piglet and a lone scurrying figure. But the beauty is deceptive: Khmer Rouge soldiers kept guard in the handsome palm trees, and the sun-dappled waters of the small lake are only there because the earth was excavated by prisoners.

A few months later, the family was moved to a different prison, where Theary Seng was put to work collecting animal manure from the rice fields. It was here that her mother was taken away. Seven years old by now, Theary Seng says she has quite a clear memory of the night her mother disappeared in 1978. She saw a guard entering the cabin. She asked her mother why he was carrying ropes that were wetted. It was to make them easier to handle for tying up prisoners. The last words she heard her mother say were to tell her to go to sleep.

As we walk through a copse to arrive at the site, a party is in full swing. It's the end of the Khmer New Year celebrations and people are dancing to traditional music. A man who has had a bit too much to drink pulls Theary Seng in for a dance. The music stops and another man offers her a pair of rusted shackles. She is thrilled, falling to her knees in excitement. I ask her why she is so euphoric. "These are the actual shackles of that time," she says. "They could have held the ankles of my mother. They could have held the ankles of my brother. This is a concrete bridge to my memories of that era."

We leave the party behind and walk to where Theary Seng thinks her family was detained in a small shack that has long disappeared. I ask her how she knew this was the prison's location. She says she can't really remember but she thinks her brother told her. Outside the compound, she talks to an old woman who lives nearby. "Are you still angry?" asks the woman, not unkindly. "Of course you regret the loss of your mum. But what can you do?"

As we prepare to leave, Theary Seng goes to retrieve the shackles. She is distressed when the man suggests he will keep them. She pays 10,000 riels - $2.50 - to recover them. The sum is small but Theary Seng is upset that what she thought was a gift turned into a transaction. The man's attitude may have sprung from poverty or drunkenness but she sees it as a sign of something bigger. "There's just no honour in society," she says after we have left. "I am tired of it."

On the drive back to Phnom Penh, Theary Seng is excited about the new information. But she admits that it has also added fresh confusion. Untruths aren't just told by those with something to hide, and they sometimes aren't even told wittingly. The shaping and smoothing of memories that goes on constantly in all our minds has had 40 years to run in Cambodia. It is also snared in communities who must find a way to live now, whatever the past. "There are no means and methods to reach the truth," Theary Seng says. "I have been digging and look at the mess it has left in its wake."

We are heading back to the great bridge. It ought to be a sign of modernity and of a country on the move. Yet even here there is another ceremonial reminder that the past is not such a foreign country in Cambodia. When prime minister Hun Sen attended an event in January to mark its completion, he once again declared himself the country's security from the Khmer Rouge. "If Hun Sen hadn't been willing to enter the tigers' den, how could we have caught the tigers?" he said.

From the prime ministerial office to the village, ambiguities, concealed facts and contested claims remain the norm. Four decades on, the idea of whether and how to let go is still moot, even in the face of the assertiveness of someone like Theary Seng. "This is the question for me, and I don't know how to answer it yet," she says, as we drive back to the city where her childhood nightmare began. "Sometimes, things are better left as they are."

Michael Peel is the FT's Bangkok regional correspondent.

The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the supporters of the Communist party, led by the Marxist Pol Pot, that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, writes Spencer Brown. The name means Red Khmers in French - the Khmers being the predominant ethnic group in Cambodia.

The group dated back to the 1960s, when it served as the armed wing of the Communist party of Kampuchea (the Khmer name for Cambodia).

After a civil war against pro-western forces that lasted from 1970 to 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured the capital Phnom Penh and imposed rule across the country, renaming it Kampuchea.

They aligned themselves with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in their battle against anti-Communist forces, and sought to establish an agrarian utopia, setting the calendar to "year zero".

Religion, money and private property were abolished and the cities were forcibly emptied. Estimates vary but, overall, it is thought that about 1.8 million people died through starvation, forced labour and execution during the regime.

The Khmer Rouge were overthrown in 1979 by invading Vietnamese troops. Leading members of the movement fled to remote parts of the country, and their influence steadily declined. Pol Pot was sentenced to house arrest in a show trial in 1997 but died a year later.

Photographs: Antoine Raab; Getty

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation