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Cambodia has a shocking recent history; one of the most harrowing stories of the breakdown of humanity anywhere in the world. Apologies for all those well-read people who already know this but I didn’t realise the extent of the problem. Other than a few notable exceptions such as Princess Diana supporting the landmine removal programme, it has not been widely publicised, so for my benefit here’s my very short synopsis. In 1975 a dictator called Saloth Sar, who became known as Pol Pot, took power by force as head of the Khmer Rouge, a communist movement idolising extremist Maoist politics, (everyone who’s read Animal Farm knows that communism only works on paper, not in reality). The Khmer Rouge espoused a whole load of rubbish about being a party for the Kampuchean people; Khmer, Kampuchea and Cambodia all being interchangeable words for indigenous Cambodians and Khmer Rouge just means the communist “Red” Cambodians. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were only in full control of the country until 1979 when the Vietnamese army, supporting a Cambodian rebel alliance, started to overthrow the despot leaders, although that war rumbled on until the mid ‘90s. In the four years that Pol Pot was in power his regime killed 25% of the Cambodian population (nearly 2 million people) and broke down the civilisation by displacing all the people living in urban areas to labour camps in the countryside, and separating all the families, and forcing people to work for nothing but meagre rations of rice. Bizarrely the UN continued to recognise Pol Pot as the official leader of Cambodia, apparently no-one in the world noticed that he was engaged in genocide against his population, except Vietnam – who were given UN sanctions as penalty for invading the Khmer Rouge! Pol Pot set up detention centres such as S21 in Phnom Penh where so-called spies, dissidents and objectors were tortured in the most brutal and unbelievable manner. S21 used to be a high school, Pol Pot kept the buildings and the guy in charge who was known as Duch. Duch stopped teaching Maths and started torturing and signing death warrants for anything up to 20,000 people. This included the British and New Zealanders who were sailing a yacht around the world when they got captured by the Khmer Rouge. Their ludicrous confessions about being CIA spies, all carefully typed up by the S21 interrogators, show the extent to which the Khmer Rouge were completely mad and deluded. The New Zealander called Kerry Hamill somehow managed to maintain a sense of humour in his confessions despite being tortured by whipping, electric shock, drowning, starving and many more indescribable inhuman behaviours – you’ll have to go to the S21 Genocide Museum to see the full extent of what Duch devised for extracting the “truth”.
Kerry Hamill’s “true” confession is brilliant. He confesses to being a CIA spy who was trained by such luminaries as Ray Davies (lead singer of The Kinks), Colonel Sanders (bespectacled old American with a bow-tie who set up KFC), and Professor Pepper (probably a reference to the Beatles album). He says he was taught communication skills by a Mrs S. Tarr (his mother’s name was Esther) and psychological training by a Major Ruse (meaning a con, of course). To have the presence of mind to make all that up whilst being tortured is hard to comprehend. No wonder his brother broke down in tears when he explained the genius of the confessional rubbish to Duch during the trial in 2012. Duch started off as a Maths teacher, then became the man who tortured and killed people for a living, then was discovered in 1999 hiding in a Christian Aid centre in the Cambodian jungle. He got his sentence increased to life after he had the nerve to appeal that the original sentence of 19 years was too harsh! If you see the Killing Fields museum a few km South of Phnom Penh where Duch sent them to executed after extracting his confessions you’ll know why he deserves to never see the light of day again. At the Choeung Ek Killing Fields they have found over 8000 skulls but believe there are several thousand more still in the ground. 5000 skulls are displayed in the glass walled Stupa in the middle of the Killing Fields site. Bullets were too expensive so people were clubbed to death, or had their throat cut then pushed into the mass grave to bleed to death and covered in DDT to speed up the decomposition. Pol Pot believed that “To kill a weed you have to remove it, roots and all”, which means that the entire family of every traitor has to be killed because it is “better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake”, so he killed everyone. To kill children and babies (so that they can’t take revenge) the executioners picked them up by the feet and smashed their head against a tree then threw them into the pit. We know this because they found thousands of fragments of bone and hair and flesh ingrained in the bark of a big tree next to a mass grave. Pol Pot died naturally in 1998 before he could be brought to trial.
If you want to read Kerry Hamill’s S21 confession go to
http://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/00090609-00090621.pdf
After a day listening to the audio guides at S21 and Choeung Ek which included some eye witness accounts of terror, and seeing the way a high school building was converted into a torture factory, the cells where people were chained up which used to be classrooms, the gallows from which they were strung up which used to be a school exercise beam, the paintings from survivors which depict the suffering, and the photographs which the Khmer Rouge took of all their detainees (despotic genocidal maniacs always keep immaculate records – the Nazis were the same), I’m a bit lost for words.
Kerry Hamill’s “true” confession is brilliant. He confesses to being a CIA spy who was trained by such luminaries as Ray Davies (lead singer of The Kinks), Colonel Sanders (bespectacled old American with a bow-tie who set up KFC), and Professor Pepper (probably a reference to the Beatles album). He says he was taught communication skills by a Mrs S. Tarr (his mother’s name was Esther) and psychological training by a Major Ruse (meaning a con, of course). To have the presence of mind to make all that up whilst being tortured is hard to comprehend. No wonder his brother broke down in tears when he explained the genius of the confessional rubbish to Duch during the trial in 2012. Duch started off as a Maths teacher, then became the man who tortured and killed people for a living, then was discovered in 1999 hiding in a Christian Aid centre in the Cambodian jungle. He got his sentence increased to life after he had the nerve to appeal that the original sentence of 19 years was too harsh! If you see the Killing Fields museum a few km South of Phnom Penh where Duch sent them to executed after extracting his confessions you’ll know why he deserves to never see the light of day again. At the Choeung Ek Killing Fields they have found over 8000 skulls but believe there are several thousand more still in the ground. 5000 skulls are displayed in the glass walled Stupa in the middle of the Killing Fields site. Bullets were too expensive so people were clubbed to death, or had their throat cut then pushed into the mass grave to bleed to death and covered in DDT to speed up the decomposition. Pol Pot believed that “To kill a weed you have to remove it, roots and all”, which means that the entire family of every traitor has to be killed because it is “better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake”, so he killed everyone. To kill children and babies (so that they can’t take revenge) the executioners picked them up by the feet and smashed their head against a tree then threw them into the pit. We know this because they found thousands of fragments of bone and hair and flesh ingrained in the bark of a big tree next to a mass grave. Pol Pot died naturally in 1998 before he could be brought to trial.
If you want to read Kerry Hamill’s S21 confession go to
http://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/00090609-00090621.pdf
After a day listening to the audio guides at S21 and Choeung Ek which included some eye witness accounts of terror, and seeing the way a high school building was converted into a torture factory, the cells where people were chained up which used to be classrooms, the gallows from which they were strung up which used to be a school exercise beam, the paintings from survivors which depict the suffering, and the photographs which the Khmer Rouge took of all their detainees (despotic genocidal maniacs always keep immaculate records – the Nazis were the same), I’m a bit lost for words.
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