THE STORY
Synopsis of "Pol Pot's Shadow"
REPORTER'S DIARY
In Search of Justice
CHRONICLE OF SURVIVAL
Historical Analysis: The U.S. and Cambodia
CAMBODIAN-AMERICANS SPEAK
The Rapper, the Dancer, and the Storyteller
FACTS AND STATS
Learn more about Cambodia
LINKS & RESOURCES
Genocide, War Crimes, Politics
MAP
REACT TO THIS STORY
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Nearly 2 million people died in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 in a Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Not a single person has ever been brought to trial for this genocide. "I came on a journey to Cambodia to find out why there's been no public reckoning," says FRONTLINE/World reporter and Pew Fellow in International Journalism Amanda Pike. She discovers a country still haunted by the ghosts of those who died -- a country that does not know whether to confront or bury its violent past. In a village a few miles outside the capital Phnom Penh, Pike meets a woman, Samrith Phum, whose husband was taken away one night in 1977 and executed as an alleged CIA spy. Today, the man Samrith holds responsible for her husband's murder lives just down the road, where he runs a noodle shop. This is a pattern across the country: the families of genocide victims live side by side with their former executioners and tormentors. Cambodia's descent into hell began in the 1970s when the Vietnam War spilled across the border. The United States bombed Cambodia relentlessly. Out of the chaos, a small, hardcore band of Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, took control of the country. They emptied the cities, marching people off to rural work camps, and turned back the calendar to Year Zero. In an effort to create a primitive agrarian utopia, the Khmer Rouge purged the country of everything foreign or modern. They outlawed books, money and medicine. They began mass executions. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his army were driven from power in 1979 by the Vietnamese, but retreated to the countryside and fought a civil war until 1998. As part of a peace agreement, the Khmer Rouge were granted control over Pailin, a semiautonomous zone along the border with Thailand. Pike sets out on a journey to Pailin to find and confront the highest-ranking surviving member of the Khmer Rouge, the secretive and elusive Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two." On her way Pike passes through Anlong Veng. This dusty village was the final headquarters of the late Pol Pot. His supporters still cling to his memory and his ideology. Pike meets Pol Pot's former cook and her husband, who was Pol Pot's ambassador to China, the main patron of the Khmer Rouge. Some fervent believers still worship the notorious dictator. Pike discovers families praying at Pol Pot's grave for health, guidance and winning lottery numbers. As she looks more closely, Pike is stunned to see that these devotees are digging through Pol Pot's ashes, snatching up fragments of his bones to take away as talismans. Next, Pike finds a school where the Khmer Rouge once taught children how to lay mines and make traps of sharpened bamboo sticks. Today, students study more traditional subjects, but they learn nothing of the genocide. In another school, Pike watches a former Khmer Rouge official teaching English to Pol Pot's only child, a teenaged daughter who has been in hiding since her father's funeral four years ago. Ironically, learning English was forbidden by her father -- speaking it was punishable by death. After navigating a long pockmarked road, Pike reaches the checkpoint that marks the border of Pailin, the gem-laden refuge of the most notorious leaders of the Khmer Rouge elite. The old puritanical Khmer Rouge world is turned upside down. At night, the town lights up like a low-rent Las Vegas. There are brothels and casinos. The main lounge act is a midget singing karaoke. The big sports draw is the spectacle of a mentally ill man being forced to kickbox with a child. Finally, Pike enters a simple wooden shack where she meets Nuon Chea, "Pol Pot's shadow." Journalist Nate Thayer (the last person to interview Pol Pot) describes Nuon Chea as "probably more guilty than Pol Pot himself for the actual killings that went on while the Khmer Rouge were in power." In his first interview for American television, Nuon Chea claims that some unnamed foreign power was responsible for the genocide, not the Khmer Rouge. Now elderly and in failing health, he tells Pike he would appear in court if summoned but he would deny his guilt. "Evil, it seems, is an old man who calls genocide a mistake,'" concludes Pike. The prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, has said, "We should dig a hole and bury the past." That attitude has frustrated the United Nations, which accuses the Cambodian government of blocking U.N. efforts to organize an international genocide tribunal in Cambodia. But back in Phnom Penh, burying the past is difficult. Pike visits Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge prison camp. The Khmer Rouge, who kept meticulous records, took photographs of their prisoners before they were tortured and executed. These harrowing photographs are an indelible record of the mass killings. Pike finds genocide survivors protesting at the prison camp. They are demanding a war crimes trial. One man shouts, "I beg you not to forget the atrocities and to remember vividly this history." Producer/Reporter Director of Photography Editors Additional Materials Music by Special Thanks
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Will the Khmer Rouge get away with murder?
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I arrived in Cambodia, along with cameraman Adam Keker, just a few weeks after the United Nations dropped out of plans to hold a war crimes tribunal here for the genocide that happened under the Khmer Rouge more than 25 years ago. After four years of frustrating negotiations with the Cambodian government, the United Nations declared that a fair and impartial trial would be impossible. While war crimes hearings have been held for Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, the perpetrators of Cambodia's atrocities still walk free. It seemed that time for justice was running out. One of the prime candidates for a trial had just died of old age without ever being brought to justice. The notorious general Ke Pauk, suspected of engineering the purges of thousands, was buried by the Khmer Rouge in a hero's funeral. We came to Cambodia to find the perpetrators of the genocide and to see what happens to a country when justice is denied. NEXT: PHNOM PENH: City of Loss Producer: Angela Morgenstern; Designed by: Susan Harris, Fluent Studios; see full web credits. | |||
Most of the 172,000 people of Cambodian origin now living in the United States arrived here as refugees, fleeing war, starvation, forced labor and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge rule. In "Cambodian–Americans Speak," three survivors who are forging new Khmer-American identities speak about their lives, their art and their struggles to reclaim memory.
Sophiline Shapiro keeps the ancient forms of Cambodian classical dance alive and blends them with dramas that speak to a people's need for justice.
Chanrithy Him writes her own heart-wrenching accounts of genocide and gives voice to other adolescent survivors of trauma.
Prach Ly jumps into hip-hop -- that most American of forms -- and raps the story of Cambodia, from the evacuated streets of Phnom Penh to the freestyle immigrant mix of Long Beach. /
Cambodian-Americans Speak by Sheraz Sadiq, an Associate Producer for FRONTLINE/World.
photo: Prach Ly
credit: Photos courtesy of Jerry Gorman
photo: Chanrithy Him
credit: Photos courtesy of Chanrithy Him and W.W. Norton & Company
photo: Sophiline Shapiro
credit: Photos courtesy of Michael Burr and James Wasserman
On March 18, 1969, American B-52s began carpet-bombing eastern Cambodia. "Operation Breakfast" was the first course in a four-year bombing campaign that drew Cambodia headlong into the Vietnam War. The Nixon Administration kept the bombings secret from Congress for several months, insisting they were directed against legitimate Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge targets. However, the raids exacted an enormous cost from the Cambodian people: the US dropped 540,000 tons of bombs , killing anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 civilians.
Shortly after the bombing began, Sihanouk restored diplomatic relations with the US, expressing concern over the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. But his change of heart came too late. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was traveling abroad, he was deposed by a pro-American general, Lon Nol. The Nixon Administration, which viewed Sihanouk as an untrustworthy partner in the fight against communism , increased military support to the new regime.
In April 1970, without Lon Nol's knowledge, American and South Vietnamese forces crossed into Cambodia. There was already widespread domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam; news of the "secret invasion" of Cambodia sparked massive protests across the US, culminating in the deaths of six students shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University and Jackson State University. Nixon withdrew American troops from Cambodia shortly afterwards. But the US bombing continued until August 1973.Meanwhile, with assistance from North Vietnam and China, the guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge had grown into a formidable force. By 1974, they were beating the government on the battlefield and preparing for a final assault on Phnom Penh. And they had gained an unlikely new ally: Norodom Sihanouk, living in exile, who now hailed them as patriots fighting against an American puppet government.
Kent State University, 1970, Vietnam War protest
Sihanouk's support boosted the Khmer Rouge's popularity among rural Cambodians. But some observers have argued that the devastating American bombing also helped fuel the Khmer Rouge's growth. Former New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg said the Khmer Rouge "... would point... at the bombs falling from B-52s as something they had to oppose if they were going to have freedom. And it became a recruiting tool until they grew to a fierce, indefatigable guerrilla army." Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has dismissed the idea that the US bears any responsibility for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. As he argued in his memoir, "It was Hanoi-animated by an insatiable drive to dominate Indochina- that organized the Khmer Rouge long before any American bombs fell on Cambodian soil."
NEXT - 1975-1979: TERROR AND GENOCIDE
photo: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - 1975
credit: Photo Courtesy U.S. NARA
photo: President Nixon at Press Conference on Vietnam & Cambodia - 1970
credit: Photo Courtesy U.S. NARA
photo: US marine in Da Nang, South Vietnam, 1965
credit: Photo Courtesy U.S. NARA
photo: Kent State University, 1970, Vietnam War protest
credit: Photo Courtesy Kent State University
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• Cambodia, a former French colony that won independence in 1953, was ruled by the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, then occupied by Vietnam, and is now a multiparty democracy led by King Norodom Sihanouk and Prime Minister Hun Sen. • On May 25, 1993, U.N.-supervised elections were held in Cambodia. Nearly 90 percent of the populace turned out for the elections, resulting in the reinstatement of the constitutional monarchy in Cambodia, now known as the Kingdom of Cambodia. • Cambodia is traversed by three mountain ranges -- the Cardamom Mountains in the west, the Elephant Mountains to the southwest and the Dankret Mountain Range in the north. It is home to three major rivers and southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake. There are still some virgin rainforests in its western and northeastern provinces. • Cambodia's official languages are Khmer, English and French. • 84% live in rural areas. • More than a third of Cambodia's people live below the poverty line, and two-thirds of the people have no access to clean drinking water. • The infant mortality rate in Cambodia is nearly 10 percent. • Agriculture is made more difficult by the presence of between 4 million and 6 million land mines. These painful reminders of the nation's war-torn history are scattered throughout the countryside, where they still injure or kill as many as 90 people each month. More than 35,000 Cambodians are amputees as a result of land mine injuries. • In 2000, Cambodia had a debt of $2 billion. That same year, its gross domestic product was $3 billion. • Cambodia's chief industries and products are timber, rubber, shipping, rice milling, textiles and fishing. • Tourism is the fastest-growing industry in Cambodia. In 2000, the country saw more than 351,000 visitors, an increase of 34 percent from the previous year. • Cambodia's beautiful and highly stylized royal ballet, perhaps the country's best-known art form, continues because of the determination of a few surviving dancers. • Apart from Cambodian New Year, which features dancing and temple visits, the Water Festival is the most extravagant and exuberant festival in the Khmer calendar. Starting on the day of the full moon in late October or early November, up to a million people flock to the banks of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers in Phnom Penh to watch traditional boats racing on a huge scale. More than 2,500 paddlers compete in a contest that dates back to the age of the powerful Khmer Empire, which was thought to have peaked during the 12th century. • In the ninth lunar month, Cambodians celebrate Pchum Ben, the 15-day-long Buddhist Festival of the Dead. Many families visit pagodas and temples to remember those tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge and to make offerings. | ||
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