[Tlc] Fwd: Thirty years on, the holocaust in Cambodia and its aftermath is remembered

[Michael Montesano]

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On Line Opinion, Australia  -  13 Nov 09

*Thirty years on, the holocaust in Cambodia and its aftermath is remembered*

John Pilger

The aircraft flew low, following the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once
over Cambodia, what we saw silenced all of us on board. There appeared to be
nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia
had stopped at the border.

Whole villages were empty. Chairs and beds, pots and mats lay in the street,
a car on its side, a bent bicycle. Behind fallen power lines lay or sat a
single human shadow; it did not move. From the paddies, lines of tall wild
grass followed straight lines. Fertilised by the remains of thousands upon
thousands of men, women and children, these marked common graves in a nation
where as many as two million people, or more than a quarter of the
population, were “missing”.

At the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Belsen in 1945, *The
Times*correspondent wrote: “It is my duty to describe something beyond
the
imagination of mankind.” That was how I felt in 1979 when I entered
Cambodia, a country sealed from the outside world for almost four years
since “Year Zero”.

Year Zero had begun shortly after sunrise on April 17, 1975 when Pol Pot’s
Khmer Rouge guerrillas entered the capital, Phnom Penh. They wore black and
marched in single file along the wide boulevards. At one o’clock, they
ordered the city abandoned. The sick and wounded were forced at gunpoint
from their hospital beds; families were separated; the old and disabled fell
beside the road. “Don’t take anything with you,” the men in black ordered.
“You will be coming back tomorrow.”

Tomorrow never came. An age of slavery began. Anybody who owned cars and
such “luxuries”, anybody who lived in a city or town or had a modern skill,
anybody who knew or worked with foreigners, was in grave danger; some were
already under sentence of death. *Out of the Royal Cambodian Ballet company
of 500 dancers, perhaps 30 survived.* Doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers
were starved, or worked to death, or murdered.

For me, entering the silent, grey humidity of Phnom Penh was like walking
into a city the size of Manchester in the wake of a nuclear cataclysm which
had spared only the buildings. There was no power, no drinking water, no
shops, no services of any kind. At the railway station trains stood empty at
various stages of interrupted departure. Personal belongings and pieces of
clothing fluttered on the platforms, as they fluttered on the mass graves
beyond.

I walked along Monivong Avenue to the National Library which had been
converted to pigsty, as a symbol, all its books burned. It was dream-like.
There was wasteland where the Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral had stood; it
had been dismantled stone by stone. When the afternoon monsoon rains broke,
the deserted streets were suddenly awash with money. With every downpour a
worthless fortune of new and unused banknotes sluiced out of the Bank of
Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge had blown up as they fled.

Inside, a cheque book lay open on the counter. A pair of glasses rested on
an open ledger. I slipped and fell on a floor brittle with coins.

For the first few hours I had no sense of even the remains of a population.
The few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent, and on catching sight of
me, would flit into a doorway. A child ran into a wardrobe lying on its side
which was his or her refuge. In a crumbling Esso filling station an old
woman and three emaciated infants squatted around a pot containing a mixture
of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money:
such grotesque irony: people in need of everything had money to burn.

At a primary school called Tuol Sleng, I walked through what had become the
“interrogation unit” and the “torture and massacre unit”. Beneath iron beds
I found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor. “Speaking is absolutely
forbidden,” said a sign. “Before doing something, anything, the
authorisation of the warden must be obtained.”

After a while, one sound had a terrible syncopation: rising and falling day
and night. Without milk and medicines, children were stricken with
preventable disease like dysentery. It seemed that the very fabric of the
society had begun to unravel. The first surveys revealed that many women had
stopped menstruating.

What compounded this was the isolation imposed on Cambodia by the West
because its liberators, the Vietnamese, had come from the wrong side of the
cold war, having driven America out of their country in 1975. Cambodia had
been the West’s dirty secret since President Richard Nixon and his national
security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered a “secret bombing”, extending the
war in Vietnam into Cambodia in the early 1970s, killing hundreds of
thousands of peasants. “If this doesn’t work,” an aide heard Nixon say to
Kissinger, “it’ll be your ass, Henry”. It worked in handing Pol Pot his
chance to seize power.

When I arrived in the aftermath, no Western aid had reached Cambodia. Only
Oxfam defied the Foreign Office in London, which had lied that the
Vietnamese were obstructing aid. In September 1979, a DC-8 jet took off from
Luxembourg, filled with enough penicillin, vitamins and milk to restore some
70,000 children - all of it paid for by *Daily Mirror* readers who had
responded to my reports and Eric Piper’s pictures in two historic issues of
the paper which sold every copy.

Following on from the* Mirror*, on October 30, 1979, ITV broadcast *Year
Zero: the silent death of Cambodia*, the documentary I made with the late
David Munro. Forty sacks of post arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham,
with £1 million in the first few days. “This is for Cambodia,” wrote an
anonymous Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. An elderly woman
sent her pension for two months. A single parent sent her savings of £50.
People expressed that unremitting sense of decency and community which is at
the core of British society. Unsolicited, they gave more than £20 million.
This helped rescue normal life in faraway country. It restored a clean water
supply in Phnom Penh, stocked hospitals and schools, supported orphanages
and re-opened a desperately needed clothing factory.

Such an extraordinary public outpouring broke the US and British
governments’ blockade of Cambodia. Incredibly, the Thatcher government had
continued to support the defunct Pol Pot regime in the United Nations and
even sent the SAS to train his exiled troops in camps in Thailand and
Malaysia. Last March, the former SAS soldier Chris Ryan, now a best-selling
author, lamented in a newspaper interview “when John Pilger, the foreign
correspondent, discovered we were training the Khmer Rouge in the Far East
[we] were sent home and I had to return the £10,000 we’d been given for food
and accommodation”.

Today, Pol Pot is dead and several of his elderly henchmen are on trial in a
UN/Cambodian court for crimes against humanity. Henry Kissinger, whose
bombing opened the door to the nightmare of Year Zero, is still at large.
Cambodians remain desperately poor, dependent on an often seedy tourism and
sweated labour.

For me, their resilience remains almost magical. In the years that followed
their liberation, I never saw as many weddings or received as many wedding
invitations. They became symbols of life and hope. And yet, only in Cambodia
would a child ask an adult, as a 12-year-old asked me, with fear crossing
his face: “Are you a friend? Please say.”
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