Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Many of those killed at Wat O Trakuon were Muslim Chams, descendants of the king-
dom of Champa that was once based in central Vietnam. The Chams' distinct language
and religion immediately made them suspect in the eyes of the
angkar loeu
—the omni-
scient “High Organization” of the Khmer Rouge. On one evening in 1977, militia squads
rounded up every Cham family in Sambor Meas village and took them to the
wat
. Others
were brought by boat along the Mekong. Pim Phy, an 80-year-old
achar
, a white-robed
Buddhist layman, said killing began straight away and carried on all night, to the blare of
revolutionary anthems. “There were two big holes to bury the Cham people,” he told me.
“I saw it myself—all the Chams were brought in ox-carts. They were loaded and very
heavy. There were even young children and small babies. They came at night and they
were all killed.”
On April 17, 1975, the armies of the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and de-
posed the US-backed Khmer Republic. A spokesman declared 2,000 years of Cambodian
history at an end. The city's population was forcibly evacuated. The operating mantra of
Democratic Kampuchea (DK)—as the new regime termed itself—would take the form
of a chilling aphorism: “To keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.” Having returned
Cambodia to a new zero-point, the DK leadership treated Cambodia's people as expend-
able raw material from which they intended to mold a rural society of unsurpassed purity.
All traces of the old “feudal” order were to be cut away and discarded. Money was
banned, families were disbanded; Buddhist monks were forced to disrobe and were shot
if they failed to comply. The population was put to work on vast communes in the coun-
tryside, farming rice and digging irrigation dikes. Work began in the dark of morning and
ended in the dark of night. Rations were grossly insufficient, and hawk-eyed cadres en-
forced a regime of inhuman discipline. Husbands were separated from wives, children
from their parents. Death from starvation, overwork, and summary execution became
commonplace.
The most chilling thing about a place like Wat O Trakuon is that there was nothing
particularly remarkable about it. During the three years, eight months, and 20 days of
Khmer Rouge rule, the regime established an archipelago of oppression that stretched to
some 200 security centers and prisons, many with a similar satellite field of mass graves.
Today, 40 years after Pol Pot's regime took power, piles of skulls still dot the Cambod-
ian countryside like ghastly totems, lying in the open or disintegrating in old memorial
stupas. Every now and then new killing fields are uncovered and the families of victims
hold ceremonies for anonymous bones, hoping to finally give their lost relatives a proper
Buddhist funeral. In January 1979, the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese
invasion and the Cambodian nightmare came to an end. But today's Cambodia remains
haunted by its past. History echoes in the bustle of the present. And as the Irish poet Ewart
Milne wrote, history is always a cruel country.
