Mass graves a constant reminder of Pol Pot

Press, 17 November 1987, Page 49

Mass graves a constant reminder of Pol Pot

By

GILLES CAMPION

NZPA-AFP Phnom Penh One night in August Sary, aged six, asleep by his mother’s side, dreamt that men and children, some blindfolded, rose up from the earth and asked him to play with them. The next morning, a feverish Sary related the strange dream to his mother who, already puzzled by the regular sinking of the house’s supporting pillars, alerted local district officials. On August 14, at the site pointed out by the little boy, workers unearthed a pit containing the corpses of 21 adults and children who had been executed by the Khmer Rouge during their bloody reign from 1975 to early 1979. The mass grave was a few hundred metres from the sinister Tuol Sleng prison, a former school turned into a detention and torture centre by the men of the former Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot. According to Phnom Penh officials, dozens more mass graves are probably dotted around the capital, which was emptied of all its residents as soon as the

Khmer Rouge came to power in April, 1975. Although the city had welcomed the Khmer Rouge as liberators on April 17, the euphoria did not last long as on the same day Pol Pot’s troops ordered the total evacuation of the city under the pretext of imminent United States air raids. Phnom Penh’s some 2.5 million inhabitants, assured by the Khmer Rouge they could return home after three days, left the capital taking nothing with them. Their exile was to last three years, eight months and 20 days, during which several hundred thousand people — three million according to the Phnom Penh Government — perished. Although a lot has been written on the Khmer Rouge massacres since they were deposed by the Vietnamese army in January, 1979, it is still hard not to be overcome by the sight of Tuol Seng’s torture rooms and some 9000 skeletons found in Choeung Ek, 15km southeast of Phnom Penh. In Choeung Ek, mass graves containing the corpses of 8985 men,

women, children and even infants were discovered by chance by farmers in January 1981. Thousands of skulls, piled under a wood shed in the heart of the green countryside, are silent testimony to the Khmer Rouge terror. All around, vegetation has grown over the pits, but femurs, bone fragments or shreds of clothing still surface here and there amid the brush. Residents of nearby houses, exiled in the country since 1975, did not know about the graves. In their hasty flight, the Khmer Rouge left behind heaps of documents on Tuol Sleng prison, including files on its 20,000 prisoners. The former Ponhea Yat school, now the Museum of Genocide, could accomodate between 1000 and 1500 prisoners. In its courtyard, 14 white tombs have been built for its last victims, found with their throats slit on their beds of torture on January 7, 1979. The wardens kept a detailed file on the prisoners, whose photographs and interrogation records were found in one building. Some horrifying

photos on the walls of the former classrooms show faces reduced to bloody pulp, open wounds, or terrified young women hugging their babies in their arms. In another room there were photos of torturers and guards: mostly teenagers with hard, cruel looks, devoid of pity for the “enemies of the Revolution.” These “enemies” were first and foremost intellectuals and their families “corrupted” by study, members of the former regime and all those suspected of working for the Soviet K.G.B. secret service, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (C.1.A.) or for Vietnam. A total of 87 foreigners were also tortured and later executed in Tuol Sleng, mostly Vietnamese, Laotians, Thai and Indians, but also French, Americans, British and Australians. Some handwritten confessions have survived. An American, James Clark, “admitted” the C.I.A. paid him to take photographs in Kampuchea. Prisoners would admit anything to escape their

torturers. Bernard Harrard, aged 22, a FrancoVietnamese arrested in Phnom Penh the same day the Khmer Rouge took power, admitted he "lived off his father, spending his time reading, going out and having fun” — a crime punishable by death in the Khmer Rouge penal code. Some skeletons of Westerners have been found in the Choeung Ek mass grave. Others probably still lie undiscovered in pits dug in Phnom Penh and its suburbs by Pol Pot’s soldiers. The capital’s residents say it is enough to dig near the foot of a tree to find bones. Survivors say the Khmer Rouge, inspired by the Nazis, used their victims as human fertilizer, especially in rubber plantations. All over Kampuchea, mass graves are periodically unearthed by farmers who pile up the bones in the middle of ricefields so that no one forgets the crimes of Pol Pot. Condemned to death in absentia in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge tyrant is believed to have taken refuge in China or along the Thai border.