Stories of Survival, Cambodia: "One of the Many Voices"

To continue the commemoration of the anniversary of Pol Pot's fall, this installment of "Stories of Survival" focuses on Cambodia. The excerpts are quite graphic at times---so be warned---and truly show that the human capacity for cruelty knows no bounds.

From an article by Christiane Amanpour at CNN, drawing parallels between the use of torture by U.S. interrogators and by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge:

"I thought that was the end of my life," he told me. "In my room people kept dying, one or two every day."

Van Nath was kept in a room packed with 50 other inmates, shackled together and forced to lie down.

"We could not sit. If we wanted to sit, we had to ask permission first. No talking, whispering or making noise," he told me.

Van Nath described how male prisoners were whipped raw, their fingernails were yanked out, they were hogtied to wooden bars. Prison guards mutilated women's genitals, ripped off their nipples with pliers. And worst of all, babies were ripped from their mothers' arms and slaughtered.

Van Nath was accused of being a CIA agent and given electric shock torture, but he survived when his jailers found out he was one of Cambodia's most prominent painters. And what did they make him paint?

"Pol Pot's picture. Big pictures," he told me. "I had to paint the same one again and again. If they didn't like my painting, that would have been the end of my life."

Youk Chhang, Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh

"They say that time heals all wounds," he said. "But time alone can do nothing. You will always have time. To me, research heals. Knowing and understanding what happened has set me free."

"I'm no different from everyone else," he said. "Most people here lost a family member in the genocide, and everywhere you look there is a story."

Sisowath Doung Chanto

The brutality of [my father's] punishment was so extreme that even the executioner himself could not speak of it without shock. My mother got the chance to find the executioner in 1985 eight year after my father's execution. According to this Khmer Rouge cadre, named Met Chan, who was personally involved with the interrogation of my father described ways which he and his comrades punished my father.

From the time they took my father out of our hut, he was kicked, dragged and beaten all the way to the killing site. Before he was executed he was cuffed in chains along with three other men and was confined in a basement inside an abandoned temple. He went without food for several days because Khmer Rouge cadres knew that he was going to be killed anyway before they finally decided to take him to the grave. His face was swollen with bruises from the beating. His back and ribs were broken by the constant beating by the young Khmer Rouge Cadres. The beating was so severe that it paralyzed his speech and consciousness. By this time, he was just lying on the floor unable to move or ask for mercy. According to Met Chan, his last words were calling for his wife, son and daughter.

I guessed he was thinking about his family even though he was dying.

Two days after the interrogation, they took him to the killing ground. He was hit with a metal rod three times at the back of the head. Whether he died immediately from the blows was not mentioned by Met Chan. My Mother did not wish to know any more. My father Sisowath Doung Kara was executed on July 1978 just five months before the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and liberated it from the Khmer Rouge.

I am one of the many voices speaking out atrocity of the Khmer Rouge's genocide politics.

[Photo from Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng Prison.]