Holiday in Cambodia

By Anthony C. LoBaido

Editor’s note: Today is the 26th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s forceful takeover of Cambodia and the beginning of Pol Pot’s tragic, barbaric “restructuring” project. WorldNetDaily international correspondent Anthony C. LoBaido compiled a fascinating two-part, first-person account of his adventure in Cambodia, sharing what he discovered about the Khmer Rouge’s continuing legacy.

Prologue

During the dying days of America’s lost war in Vietnam, the communist Khmer Rouge (“Red Khmer” in the French language) guerillas of Cambodia sacked the capital of Phnom Penh. It was April 17, 1975 — just two weeks before the fall of Saigon.

The U.S. had been carpet-bombing suspected North Vietnamese bases in eastern Cambodia since 1970. Soon after, American and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia to track and kill North Vietnamese Vietcong military forces who had been given sanctuary across the border. This invasion failed. Yet it did succeed in one respect: the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion did manage to drive the Khmer Rouge into the center of Cambodia (a country approximately half the size of Italy).

Upon its ascent to power, the Khmer Rouge, under the infamous Pol Pot, began the single most radical and cruel restructuring of a society ever attempted in human history. Pol Pot’s endgame was to turn Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian cooperative. Between 1975 and 1979, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were forcibly removed from Phnom Penh and smaller cities like Battambang and relocated to the rural areas of the nation. Phnom Penh became a virtual ghost town in only seven days. Just as God had created the world in only seven days, (Pol Pot’s idol, Chairman Mao, had once told him, “What is God — is He nothing more than the masses of the Chinese people working together?”) Pol Pot sought to change Cambodia’s population demographics in only one week.

Those relocated to the rural areas included Cambodia’s cultural, scientific and educational elite. All evacuees were renamed “New People,” or “April 17th People,” of “The Year Zero.” They were all required to wear simple black cotton clothing. Pol Pot ordered the destruction and elimination of books, money, markets, universities, Buddhist monasteries and temples, leisure time, the exchange of information and the post office.

Foreigners, people who wore glasses or spoke foreign languages, were deemed “parasites” and systematically tortured and executed in the most barbaric manner imaginable. Over 2 million people — one quarter of Cambodia’s population — died at the hands of Pol Pot’s Utopian nightmare.

The dark side of the Earth

When he’s best, he’s little better than a man. When he’s worst, he’s little better than a beast.
–William Shakespeare

Outside PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — There are risks you take in life, and then there are the real leaps of faith. Traveling to the isolated and dangerous nation of Cambodia was my desperate attempt to jump-start my flagging journalism career. Little could I have known that I would be entering this troubled country at perhaps the most crucial and exciting time in its sad and troubled history.

My journey began in Bangkok, Thailand. As I waited to board a small Royal Cambodge Airline plane, I couldn’t help but notice a positively adorable little 4-year-old Filipina girl sitting nearby. The girl was wearing a pink top and shorts, four wrist and ankle bracelets, frilly socks and sneakers with lights in them. Lying nearby to this girl was a green and pink plastic sword that I presumed she used to fight against evil on a part-time basis. This young girl was terribly sick, coughing and squirming around in her seat. She was refusing to take her medicine, as her parents had run out of bottled water for her. I quickly offered her father a small bottle of mineral water, and this enabled the girl to take her medicine.

The one-hour flight passed quickly, and I arrived at the small Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh. Our flight had been delayed and it was late, about 11 p.m., when the flight finally touched down. The airport was dark and foreboding. The restaurants and souvenir shops were all closed. The new arrivals quickly lined up and paid our visa fees. A creepy feeling swept over me almost immediately. The customs officials were surly and rude. Later, I would learn that these positions at the airport were plum jobs set aside for those with connections with the Communist Party leaders in Cambodia’s government.

While we waited to be processed, I saw the sick Filipina girl sitting on a suitcase. She held her face in the palms of her hands. Her eyes were droopy, and she was falling in and out of sleep as though troubled by some yet unseen force. Yet her pink plastic sword was nestled between her thin legs at the ready like some tiny version of Joan of Arc.

I walked out of the airport to meet a tiny entourage of heavily armed, leering and jeering Royal Cambodia Army soldiers, police and taxi drivers. The soldiers were holding AK-47s and smiled wickedly at the new arrivals. A middle-aged taxi driver took me to the Hotel Roman, located on the Tonle Sap waterfront of Phnom Penh. The pothole-ridden streets were dark and deserted. I felt as though I had stepped into an episode of “The Twilight Zone” — a dark dream of what Cambodia must have been like after Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot emptied the city in only one week. And though I have been afraid on many occasions in my life — in football, martial arts training, forced landings on commercial flights, at the Korean DMZ or in South Africa — I can honestly say I have never been quite so afraid in my entire life. In fact, I was so disoriented and distracted that I left my bag (containing the notes for all my writing projects, my camera and wallet) inside the taxi.

The air outside was heavy and thick. It clung to my body like an old, wet burlap sack. The sultry darkness gave way as I entered the quiet, desolate hotel. I thought of that old Eagles song, “Welcome to the Hotel California.” Sitting to my left in two high-backed wooden chairs were a pair of French-speaking Cambodian prostitutes. One of them approached me and ran her slender hand over my two-day growth of beard.

“Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?,” she asked me. That was, of course, the only French I knew — the lyrics from a sordid yet popular 1970s pop song. It was both surreal and farcical at the same time. I made my way up the stairs and plopped down on the soft mattress in my room. I stared up at the ceiling fan circulating hot air around the room. I searched the dresser drawer for a Gideon Bible but could not find one.

The phone rang, and I picked it up. The taxi driver had returned with my bag — with all the contents intact to boot. I thought that was a good sign, indicating Providence might be smiling upon me. As I lay in bed, I thought of how afraid I had once been as a child after watching a movie entitled, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Dracula.” I recollected how I had run into my parents’ bedroom to sleep in their bed after a nightmare. But now there was no one and nowhere to run to for comfort.

My mind drifted further still — to the ill-fated flight of the Apollo 13 lunar mission. I recalled how the astronauts on that flight had to fly around the dark side of the Moon in order to gain the gravitational push required for them to make it back safely to earth. While they had flown around the moon, those brave men were out of contact with NASA and the world for many long, agonizing hours. And that was how I felt now. I, too, was passing around the dark side of the Moon. No phone or Internet (Cambodian authorities charge long-distance telephone rates for e-mails). In short, I didn’t know if I was going to come out of this place alive and return to the world I had disembarked from.

Into the Killing Fields

The Killing Fields harbor a peaceful and tranquil aura about them. More peaceful than any genocidal shrine has a right to be. They are approximately three football-fields in size and are bordered by barbed wire all around. I had come to this place at exactly 3 p.m. on April 17, 1999 — 24 years to the day since Phnom Penh had fallen to the Khmer Rouge. My driver had taken me to the Cheung Ek Genocidal Center for a cheap $20 taxi fare. All along the way, we had to stop and pay a 500 Rieal “toll” (about 13 cents) to partying Cambodians who had set up mini-roadblocks on the bumpy dirt “highway.” It was the second day of the Cambodian New Year. The revelers who stopped us at their makeshift roadblocks applied chalk to our faces, as is the Cambodian New Year custom. It is meant to be a good luck sign for the coming year. After navigating the roadblocks, our faces were covered with so much chalk that we had taken on a ghost-like appearance.

It was a terribly hot, humid day. High above, giant puffy white cumulous clouds floated by lazily, heading for the endless rolling hills and rice paddies that bordered the Killing Fields in every direction. To the west, a grouping of the cumulous clouds flashed brightly with bolts of lightning — yet no thunder accompanied them. From the ground, these clouds resembled a pillar of fire.

The quiet afternoon was punctuated only by the rising and then falling chorus of the legion of insects hiding in the many trees on the lush grounds. The entire scene resembled an orchard that just as easily could have been nestled in central Texas or western Canada — if not for the surrounding palm trees.


WND’s Anthony C. LoBaido at the Killing Fields’ Memorial Stupa.

The dominant feature of the Killing Fields is the towering Memorial Stupa. Erected in 1988, this elegant glass structure is also comprised of marble and wood. It contains the skulls of some 8,000 men, women and children. The skulls are arranged according to age and sex on various platforms. The skulls of girls age 15-18 are housed on the lowest platform.

At the very bottom of the Memorial Stupa lay the clothes (nothing more than rags, really) that the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide wore to their martyrdom. Scattered around the clothes are various hammers, mallets and saws once used to kill them in the most Medieval way imaginable.

I was startled from my trance-like state at the sight of this horror by a Cambodian man named Nol. He was a thin and angular man, and the sides of his face were also covered with chalk. He was wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt, baggy black shorts and a silver watch.

“My brother is in here — somewhere,” Nol said to me. “I’m not sure exactly where, though.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I replied simply. I then put my hands together as though in prayer and bowed. It was the only thing I could think of to do or say. Long ago, I had watched the movie, “The Killing Fields.” Now I had gone beyond the make-believe world of Hollywood to face the harsh reality.

Nol smiled back at me weakly. “You’re very kind,” he said. “That’s rare these days.”

The Cambodian then bent down and picked up a pair of rusty, heavy-looking leg shackles and a long common carpenter’s saw. Nol then put the shackles around his feet and quickly brought the saw up to his neck. He then drew the saw back and forth as if cutting his head off.

“This is how the Khmer Rouge soldiers killed many of the people brought here,” Nol went on. His voice was quivering but controlled, as though he had run through this very same scenario a thousand times before. I found it ironic that Pol Pot had once studied carpentry at Ecole Technique in Phnom Penh, yet went on to misuse the carpenter’s saw as an instrument of hideous death.

“First they tortured them at the S-21 Prison in Phnom Penh. Then they brought them here for final liquidation,” Nol explained.

I took out a $10 bill from my wallet and stuffed it into the box marked “Contributions.” I then knelt down and said a prayer — the 23rd Psalm, better known as “The Lord is my Shepherd.”

When I opened my eyes I was shocked to see a beautiful little Cambodian girl standing in front of me. She wore a colorful pink top and a long green skirt — the same colors of the sword carried about by the Filipina girl. She was about 10-years-old and barefoot as a goose. She looked at me with a scarcely hidden joy that sparkled in her big brown eyes. And then suddenly in an instant she ran off. For one fleeting moment, I thought she might be an angel or the ghost of a small child martyred at the Killing Fields almost a quarter-century ago.

“Go and follow her,” Nol then said. He was sitting nearby, assisting a Japanese tourist holding an expensive-looking video camera. I turned and looked at him with a puzzled expression on my face.

“She wants to show you something,” he then added in a matter-of-fact way.

I stood up and walked, then jogged, around the Memorial Stupa. About 50 meters ahead I saw the girl in the pink shirt. She was running and playing on small dirt mounds with two other little girls — possibly sisters. I ran faster now, and sweat began pouring off my face, melting away the New Year’s chalk from my cheeks. No longer did I look like a ghost myself, although I certainly felt as if I were chasing one.

The girls giggled as I approached the mounds, apparently unintimidated by the sight of a 6’3″, 215-pound foreigner. Then quite suddenly, they all fell silent as the gravity of the mounds overwhelmed me.

“Oh my God,” I gasped. All at once, I realized I was standing on a mass grave of over 100 victims — all women and children. A sign nearby stated that “almost all of them had been naked at the time of their death.” I fell to my knees in horror. This was a Halloween horror story come to life.

My eyes searched the ground. In front of me, sticking oddly out of the ground was a medium-sized piece of purple cloth. It was bright and vibrant — unbelievably vibrant considering its advanced age.

Out of nowhere I recalled that the Roman soldiers who had scourged Christ also placed a purple cloth over His body. This had been done as the ultimate mockery, since in ancient times purple was widely known as the “color of royalty.” Since bright colors in those days were derived from sea shells and the color purple required the greatest number of shells to make a cloth or robe, the garment of purple color was considered to be the most valuable of all.

“She wants you to have something,” the voice of Nol rang out from behind me.


Mr. Nol at the Killing Fields.

I turned to see him standing next to the three little girls. Nol then said something to the girl in the pink shirt in their native tongue. The girl then walked over to me, bent down and tore off a piece of the purple cloth. She handed it to me, folded her hands together and then bowed as is the southeast Asian custom.

“Perhaps you have heard Asians venerate their ancestors back to seven generations,” Nol said, “and also look forward to venerating them in the future for seven generations.”

“These children,” he went on. “Their parents survived the Killing Fields. Over half of the 12 million Cambodians alive today were born after the Killing Fields occurred.”

As I soaked in these words, I recalled that over half of the European Jews who’d survived the Holocaust were under the age of 12. Those children formed the remnant which would go on to forge a new nation of Israel, as well as fight and win five wars for freedom against their Arab foes.

“Suffer the children; let them come unto Me,” Nol then said softly.

I took the cloth and gently folded it into the small travel pouch hanging around my waist. I gave a few dollars to each of the little girls, and we took a few pictures together for memory’s sake. I then walked around the grounds for what seemed like an eternity — a lost span of consciousness in which time and space seemed to collide and stand frozen on edge. I walked past a giant photo display of the earliest pictures taken of the abandoned Killing Fields. The photos showed skulls piled high in the manner of Genghis Khan (the butcher who ate lice and drank blood yet still had the manners to stack the heads of his victims in neat little Pyramids). There was also a detailed military-intelligence-style map of the Killing Fields on display. It showed the internal logistics of the Killing Fields and every other conceivable detail of the place.

A short time later, I walked out of the Cheung Ek Center. I passed a folding table at which a few Cambodians — the same men who’d taken my $2 entrance fee — were busy playing a game of cards.

“You’re a journalist, aren’t you?” Nol asked me as I walked past him. He was standing near the card table.

“Yes,” I replied. “I am. But how did you know?”

“She told me,” Nol said, pointing over to the little girl in the pink shirt. She was still at play in the fields as though oblivious to the significance of what had happened there not so long ago.

“But … but how,” I stammered.

“Children are innocent and pure. They see and know things which adults cannot,” Nol explained. “This place, Cheung Ek, is a gateway where the ghosts of martyrs and demons who murdered them still interact and do battle in the spirit realm. For the perpetrators of this holocaust have never been brought to justice. And now the Ministry of Education in Cambodia has managed to erase all references of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities from all the primary school, high school and university textbooks.”

A myriad of evidence documenting the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities are plainly evident at Cheung Ek and the S-21 Prison. Tomes distributed by the invading Vietnamese in 1979 (aimed ostensibly at the Cambodian population as a propaganda tool to justify their intervention in Cambodia’s internal affairs) were at one time a written guide to atrocities like the Killing Fields. Yet since the post-Cold War 1991 “Peace Accords” were signed between the government and the Khmer Rouge, all textbooks in Cambodia have been shelved or destroyed. New politically correct textbooks are now in vogue. These fishhooks into the minds of the young exonerate the Khmer Rouge by default via omission. Apparently, the Khmer Rouge is seeking once again to erase history.

I was able to locate a few dusty textbooks mentioning the Killing Fields in one of Phnom Penh’s dilapidated, insufficiently funded libraries. Today, most Cambodians see Pol Pot and his accomplices as bogeymen not unlike the “Monster from the Pond.” Many of the young people I spoke with in Cambodia expressed shock, dismay, horror and then anger at the sight of the photographs and evidence I presented to them about the Killing Fields. To a person, they were terribly upset that their teachers could have kept them in the dark about such an evil chapter in their country’s recent past.

So in an effort to honor Nol, his late brother and the three little girls — not to mention all of the other Killing Fields victims — I draw out my own version of the pink and green sword — namely my pen and camera. I wish to offer the unedited words of the Cambodian people carved to time immemorial at Cheung Ek. I figure I owe them at least that much. Those words read as follows:

“The most tragic thing is that even in this 20th Century, on Kampuchean soil, the clique of Pol Pot criminals had committed a heinous genocidal act. They massacred the population with atrocity in a large scale. It was crueler than the genocidal act committed by the Hitler fascists.

“With the commemorative Memorial Stupa in front of us, we imagine that we are hearing the grievous voices of the victims who were beaten by Pol Pot’s Men with canes, bamboo stumps or the heads of hoes. They were stabbed with knives or swords. We seem to be looking at the horrifying scenes and the panic-stricken faces of the people who were dying of starvation, forced labor or torture without mercy upon their skinny bodies. They died without giving the last words to their kin. How hurtful those victims were when they were beaten and stabbed before their last breath went out. How bitter they were when seeing their beloved children, wives, husbands, brothers or sisters seized and tightly bound before being taken to the mass grave — while they were waiting for their turn to come and share the same tragic lot. The method of massacre which the clique of Pol Pot criminals carried out upon the innocent people of Kampuchea cannot be described fully and clearly in words because the invention of this killing method was strangely cruel. So it is difficult for us to determine who they are, for they have the human form but their hearts are demons’ hearts. They have the Khmer face, but their activities are purely reactionary. They wanted to transform the Kampuchean people into a group of persons without reason and a group who knew and understood nothing. A group who always bent their heads to blindly carry out the orders given to them. The Khmer Rouge had transformed our young people whose hearts had once been pure, gentle and modest into odious executioners who dared kill the innocent and even their own parents, relatives and friends.

“Pol Pot’s clique wanted to get rid of Khmer character and transform the soil and waters of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears which was deprived by the Khmer Rouge of culture, infrastructure, civilization and national character. Cambodia became a desert of great destruction which overturned the traditional Kampuchean society and drove it back to the Stone Age.”

Around Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is a city of grand contrasts. There are towering, intricately designed temples and children searching through the garbage for food. Stores selling everything from large-screen TVs to Fruity Pebbles, and little boys with no arms or legs literally hopping around begging for spare change. There are elegantly dressed Cambodian women all about town and seedy two-dollar brothels. One can tour the Royal Palace, yet walk back outside to find people living in cardboard boxes. You can soak in friendly smiles on one side of the street and feel discomfort from a myriad of knife-like xenophobic stares on the other. There are kind, caring people from organizations like Medicine Sans Frontiers working in Phnom Penh and, conversely, some of the worst criminal elements on the planet.


A young resident of Phnom Penh who was the victim of a landmine.

The outstanding features of Phnom Pehn are plainly evident. A city of 1 million, its bustling streets are filled with mopeds, cyclos and an odd assortment of cars — not to mention an occasional elephant. A visitor will find police and army personnel armed with AK-47s standing on every street corner of Norodom Boulevard. The taxi drivers, be they in a vehicle or on scooters, constantly follow visitors around. When in transit, they will pester you for even the most minute details of your travel plans as if they were debriefing a suspected CIA agent.

There are no visible signs of Christianity around the city, though there are plenty of giant cigarette billboards and signs for Communist Party meeting halls. Few dare go out at night since gun-toting criminals rule the streets. It is said that the robbers won’t shoot the victim if he or she meekly complies.

There is a romantic, cosmopolitan feel to this city. Back in the 1930s, Phnom Penh had been a gleaming French colonial capital, featuring immaculately manicured lawns, glittering temples, clean streets and cafes serving filet mignon smothered with an exquisite mushroom sauce. Today, however, the city is filled with decaying colonial buildings interspersed with various shops, many of which proudly fly the red, white and blue national Cambodian flag depicting Angkor Wat. There are numerous lumber yards, half-finished apartment complexes, an AIDS Research Center and, of course, the U.N.’s UNESCO office.

The Japanese embassy stands out prominently. It is a multi-storied building with a giant satellite dish set upon its roof. A high fence topped with razor wire protects it — as if prepared for the last stand on Fiji.

Yet the most romantic notions of Phnom Penh can’t help but give way to a rustic neo-Old West gunslinger mentality. Only these days, it’s the multi-national corporations rushing into town to keep order, replacing the glorious French Foreign Legion as the “keeper of the peace.”

These romantic notions further erode when one takes into account the plethora of criminal organizations that readily thrive in this “no man’s land” of the new world order Monopoly board. There’s the KGB (now known as the FSB), the PLO, North Korean army, CIA, MI-5 and scores of foreign power brokers. It’s a strange, primordial stew of virulent capitalism-communism gone mad.

The only thing more common in the city than the sight of the gun toting police/army is the number of banks. There are banks just about everywhere — even though Cambodia is the poorest country in all of Asia. The banks stand at the ready to launder money from the rampant illegal activities carried on here. The U.S. dollar is the unofficial currency of Cambodia, with filthy, old U.S. bills from the year 1988 being the most common, for some unexplained reason.

The consumption of this steady diet of violence and greed, the lack of closure over the Cambodian Holocaust and the onslaught of 21st century technology have combined to place the citizens of Phnom Penh into a seemingly catatonic state.

One day, as I walked the streets of Phnom Penh, an old man with black teeth approached me. The man was carrying a batch of kramas (the checkered red and white cloths the Khmer people wear around their heads and necks to block out the sun),

“Ce krama etais utiliser,” the man said to me in French. “This was actually used [worn by a Khmer Rouge soldier at the Killing Fields].”

It was at that precise moment that I underwent cognitive dissonance reduction and comprehended just how little sense of closure there is over the Killing Fields issue. Imagine touring Berlin today if the Nazis had never been put on trial and those sympathetic to the Nazi regime were still running Germany.

So, like the Russian people today who never put the Soviet era on trial, the Cambodians may well be crucifying their national conscience by trying to play a game of leap frog between the French Empire, the Vietnam War, the Killing Fields and a corporate Monopoly game.


In tomorrow’s installment, LoBaido continues to describe his dramatic experience in Cambodia, telling of his trip to a high school that had been transformed into a Khmer Rouge torture camp.

This story originally ran in WorldNet magazine, which is available at WorldNetDaily’s online store.

Anthony C. LoBaido

Anthony C. LoBaido is a journalist, ghostwriter and photographer. He has published 404 articles on WND from 53 countries around the world. Read more of Anthony C. LoBaido's articles here.