Article: How we forgot about Pol Pot

[CEOCambodiaNews]

Sean Thomas
How we forgot about Pol Pot
4 March 2023, 6:30am

When I was a small boy, I had a favourite book: The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Given that my own family life not was not untroubled, the story of how a bunch of regular kids travel, via this wonderful tree, to a sequence of fantastical places, where they meet lovable characters like the Saucepan Man, Moon-Face, and Silky the Fairy, seemed to embody a childish version of heaven. An escape, and a Utopia.

Yesterday, many decades after reading Enid Blyton under the bedcovers, I encountered the opposite of the Magic Faraway Tree. A tree that is still faraway in time and conception (and growing evermore so), but a tree that is all too real, and very definitely not magical.

The tree is in a quiet, sunstruck park, lost in a grimy exurb of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The tree is decorated with hundreds of bracelets and trinkets, with the occasional teddy bear and kiddies’ drink – poignantly Blyton-esque touches, perhaps.

But if you look close at the bark of this tree, you can see tell-tale abrasions: chops, scars, bruises. These blemishes mark the places where peasant soldiers would swing screaming children against the tree, smashing their skulls to pulp. This was done, quite deliberately, in front of their naked, wailing and soon-to-be-murdered mothers. Because this is the infamous Baby Bashing Tree, in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields of Choeung Ek.

This tree is obviously important, historically, but it also has some importance for me, personally. Because, on my previous visit to Cambodia, in 2009, I encountered the man who ran these Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, as well as the Khmer Rouge Prison of Tuol Sleng, in the middle of Phnom Penh. Tuol Sleng is where the chosen victims of the KR were tortured with surreal cruelty to extract lunatic confessions, before they were finally driven out of town to Choeung Ek, to be bludgeoned to death with axes, hammers, crowbars and trees – to save money on bullets.

I was in Cambodia for the most trivial of reasons: to write for a UK magazine about the wildly exotic foods of southeast Asia, and to eat them (if I could). However, when I landed in Phnom Penh I heard that a well-known Khmer Rouge apparatchik, Comrade Duch (real name: Kaing Guek Eav) was on trial by the UN. As I’d long had an interest in the bewildering, nihilistic horrors of the Khmer Rouge, led by the infamous Pol Pot and his henchmen, I used my journalistic credentials to get a pass to the trial.

It is an experience that I have never forgotten. The trial was conducted in a large, specially adapted auditorium on the outskirts of the city. Imagine a big Nordic concert hall, but instead of a jazz trio onstage, there is a small, wizened, croaky old man – Duch himself – surrounded by a team of officious lawyers.

The auditorium was jammed – with some press, but mainly with ordinary Cambodians, who came, day after day, quite desperate to hear an ‘explanation’ for the terror that befell them in the Khmer Rouge years, 1975-79. Much of the evidence I heard that day was technical, dry, difficult to understand, but one moment chilled me. Duch was asked if he had ‘any regrets for his time in charge of the Killing Fields.’ He replied, flatly and calmly, ‘I am sorry for the babies we smashed against trees. And so forth.’
Read on: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how ... t-pol-pot/

[John Bingham]

Lots of cliched nonsense in that article.

Villages were devoid of people over 45 – because everyone that age was dead.

?

[CaptainCanuck]

Lots of cliched nonsense in that article.

Villages were devoid of people over 45 – because everyone that age was dead.

?

I appreciate your consistency .... Any article about the KR and you're quickly there to critique it ...

[Ong Tay]

Excellent quote at the end:

Does this matter? Yes, because we live in a time when kids think Marxism is cool again. When self-confessed Marxist Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an amusing old uncle.

[techietraveller84]

I know enough about the KR that I get scared when I see what is happening with China's influence and how another dictator of similar magnitude could be re-instilled.

[John Bingham]

Excellent quote at the end:

Does this matter? Yes, because we live in a time when kids think Marxism is cool again. When self-confessed Marxist Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an amusing old uncle.

Yes, it's fantastic how the author managed to write a 2000 word article on "not forgetting Pol Pot" only to conflate his genocidal regime with the MEP for North Islington.

[CEOCambodiaNews]

Circa 1998: Recalling Pol Pot and his Khmer regime in Cambodia
Khmer Rouge leader died on April 15 in 1998, leaving behind a legacy of brutality and impoverishment
Amir Latif | 14.04.2023 - Update : 15.04.2023

Some Cambodians still regard Pol Pot as a revolutionary and powerful figure to be worshipped.

For them, he was the one who strived for transforming the jungle-clad Southeast Asian country into a peasant utopia, but for many others, he was simply a "genocidal" dictator who presided over one of the "darkest chapters" of the 20th century.

Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge (radical communist regime) leader breathed his last in a remote jungle hideout along the Cambodia-Thailand border on April 15, 1998, leaving behind a legacy of brutality and impoverishment.

He is blamed for the deaths of over 1.5 million people who died under his four-year blood-stained ultra-Maoist reign, but he never saw justice.

The victims – men, women, and children – are said to be tortured and executed, while others died of starvation, overwork, or disease in the sprawling rural labor camps of "Year Zero," beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975 characterized by only work and death.

Pol Pot, however, always denied the allegations, describing them as "propaganda by the West and Vietnamese."
Full article: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/c ... ia/2872098

[CEOCambodiaNews]

Remembering 17 April 1975
Photos and text from the Documentation Center of Cambodia magazine Searching for the Truth.
Posted in https://www.ssn-news.net/?news=47544


April 17, 1975 Reminds Cambodians of Tragedy, Separation, and Loss of Family Members
Posted: 17-04-2023, 11:21 AM
Phnom Penh: Every year in April, Cambodians living in Cambodia and working in remote areas often return to their hometowns and villages to meet their parents, relatives and family members to celebrate the three-day Khmer New Year.

But if we think back to 48 years ago, in the traditional Khmer New Year, April 17, 1975 was the day that the Khmer Rouge army conquered Cambodia and came to power. The Khmer Rouge military immediately evicted people from their homes, and every Cambodian family was broken up. This was also the day of the beginning of the tragedy, genocide and massacre of Cambodians across the country.

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, more than 2 million innocent Cambodians lost their lives, leaving people with disabilities, orphans, widows, and people with severe mental illness.

Today, there are more than 5 million survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, and they are getting older, deteriorating and facing health problems for which they should receive care and health care. These survivors of the Khmer Rouge went through horrific stories and went through all the hardships of rebuilding families, communities and a broken nation, so their stories should not be forgotten and should be remembered.
It is essential to educate the next generation and prevent the Khmer Rouge regime from happening again. The date, April 17 1975, not only reminds the Cambodian people of the past tragedy, separation and loss of family members, but also encourages the Cambodian people to be stronger in the future.

Som Bunthon, Editor-in Chief of Searching for the Truth.
Documentation Center of Cambodia
https://dccam.org/magazine-searching-for-the-truth

[Khmu Nation]

I wonder if they forgot about Dre?

[John Bingham]

I remembered him. It was the 25th anniversary of his death a few days back. I re-read Phillip Short's biography recently for the first time since it came out over 20 years ago. Still one of the most mysterious and dark figures in history.