Michael Paterniti, author of the article ‘Never Forget‘ in GQ Magazine, discusses the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign of terror, Cambodia’s ongoing trials of Khmer regime crimes, the notoriously brutal S-21 death camp, the destruction of individuality including the banning of smiles in the Khmer Rouge’s anti-society and the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia initiated by Nixon.
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For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our next guest, Michael Paternity.
He's got a new article in GQ called Never Forget.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Pretty terrible story here, but at least it's long enough ago that maybe it's not as terrible to hear as if it was all brand new.
Thank goodness I was too young to remember even hearing about this live in real time.
The true horror of the Khmer Rouge's rampage in Cambodia and how it came about and how it was carried out is something that, well, clearly is the kind of thing in order to never repeat, we have to never forget.
So I really appreciate your journalism along these lines and the story you told here and having you on to talk about it.
Thanks.
It's good to be here.
First of all, what is S-21?
S-21 was also known as Tul Sleng, which was before the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975.
It was just a school inside of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.
But when the Khmer Rouge took over, they converted it into a prison camp.
They put barbed wire over the balconies and basically set the classrooms up as cells in which they would hold 50 to 100 people at a time.
It was a complex of three-story cement buildings.
There are two or three of them.
There's a third one in the back, but they used two primarily.
They used the downstairs classrooms for what became known as these infamous torture sessions.
Now we have the commandant of that prison camp on trial for, finally, after 30 years.
His name is Doik.
He was the man in charge of issuing orders for torture and for the interrogations that took place there, resulting in the death of 15,000 of the 1.7 million Cambodians who were killed during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.
For people who aren't really familiar with the story, you go through some of this in the article.
Just the complete purge, the idea that the takeover was based on.
This is not just there was a military coup somewhere, and then the people who lost power were massacred or something.
You say these guys, the leadership of the Khmer Rouge, were educated in Paris and got all these crazy ideas.
Then they came home and collected some AKs, I guess.
You can even talk about Richard Nixon's role in weakening the regime that they overthrew.
If you can explain the totality of the purge as it was seen and carried out by the leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
That is one of the most perplexing parts of this whole thing.
The way they turned on themselves.
The way they literally took the party loyal, tortured and killed them, as well as everybody else.
The factors leading to the Khmer Rouge's rise to power.
There are many, several in particular.
One of them does include the American bombing of Cambodia, which at first was secret and then was not.
Estimates have it that we killed between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodians in our bombing.
We were trying to go up to the Viet Cong who were using trails down through Cambodia.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through part of Cambodia.
On the pretense of trying to disrupt supply lines, we went in and did a lot of bombing.
The regime was propped partially by us in Cambodia and fell very quickly to this band of revolutionaries who were hiding out in the jungle.
They had been there since the beginning of the 60s and had a lot of popular support.
They came in, the Khmer Rouge did, under Pol Pot with the promise of a radical agrarian revolution that was going to equalize things for those who were poor and hungry.
The world, in fact, sat up and took note.
Many people in America applauded the potential future of the country under the Khmer Rouge.
There are a couple of famous quotes from politicians like George McGovern who felt these were the right people at the right time for a new Cambodia.
Did George McGovern ever take that back?
Good question.
I don't know.
He would have had to.
I've interviewed him a couple of times.
I hope he has.
He wasn't alone.
I just have to say there was a feeling among journalists and world leaders and even the prince of Cambodia himself that he imagined a Swedish-style democracy taking root.
None of it, of course, happened because the minute the Khmer Rouge had control, they emptied the capital city.
They drove out two million people out onto the roads at the hottest time of year.
They began what was a wholesale massacre of innocence.
If you wore glasses, you were killed.
If you spoke a foreign language, you were killed.
If you were an intellectual or had a university education, you were killed.
If you were a Buddhist monk, you were killed.
It was just indiscriminate and completely random.
It had nothing to do with, finally, skin color.
It had everything to do with suspicion.
Because Pol Pot and the people he was surrounded by were so completely paranoid, it just turned into quite literally a wholesale genocide where there was no discrimination.
What you have now is, with the death of Pol Pot in the late 1990s and the death of some of the other leaders, you have an international community and a Cambodian government that is finally facing up to this and really trying to serve justice in a way that probably should have been served a decade ago.
Well, in fact, part of your story is about the people who decided to make this their mission, to finally have some trials since there never were any.
I guess part of the role that those ideas played in your coverage of this story as well.
I want to ask you all about that in just a moment.
I wanted to get you to address something that you write about in the article during, I guess, the worst of, for what, three or four years this was going on.
The principle at play, you say, is that every single person had to be, with no exceptions, I guess, the entire society had to be absolutely and completely broken like a torture victim, basically because wherever anyone had any hope or dream for the future, there lies individuality.
Therefore, even smiles became illegal.
Love became illegal.
Share with us some of the absolute lengths of totalitarianism that we're talking about here.
Yeah, they created an anti-society.
They did everything they could to crush family, village, religion.
There was a very strict kind of code that the Khmer Rouge set down, and it did include this idea of no smiling, which was a manifestation of joy.
In order to become part of a whole rather than an individual, you had to suffer.
They emphasized the suffering and they worked the population sometimes 16 to 20 hours a day.
But they abolished certain words from the radio.
They really tried to censor anything that gave joy or created joy.
In terms of marriage, it was hand-picked by the party.
People were mated.
It wasn't for love.
If people did fall in love, if people had any kind of conjugal relation that was not approved by the party, they were killed.
So there was this kind of reign of terror that took over.
Jumping ahead in the aftermath, it became very hard for those people in the years that followed to trust their feelings and trust society in general again.
To this day, there's deep-seated paranoia that runs through that country.
It sounds like they would have banned the sunset if they could somehow.
Yeah, it was almost that absurd.
It almost came to that.
It was this idea, too, that finally the party, and they were referred to as ANCAR, that only ANCAR could make decisions for you.
ANCAR was incredibly rigid in what they were deciding.
Really, they were deciding whether you got to live or die.
That's really what it came down to.
Everything else was taken from you.
Your clothes, your possessions, everything.
You were given black pajamas and sent to work camps.
Now, you addressed a bit of the role of Nixon's bombing of Cambodia in terms of destabilizing the prior regime and creating popular support for the rise of Khmer Rouge, which led to all this.
After America lost the war in Vietnam, the no longer North but then just Vietnamese government, eventually, I think in 1979, invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge and drove them out of power, right?
Right.
They came in and were met on the outskirts of Phnom Penh by Khmer Rouge forces that almost immediately crumbled.
The Vietnamese walked into Phnom Penh, which had become a ghost town, basically.
In that first wave of Vietnamese soldiers, there was also a journalist, and they happened upon S-21, Artul Flang, primarily because of the stench of decomposing bodies.
When they came into this compound, they were literally rocked back on their heels.
They took pictures as they went and documented it.
To this day, when you visit Artul Flang, which is now a museum, you can see some of those original photographs that they took of bodies decomposing on bed frames and just the mess that Doik and his henchmen left behind.
But the Vietnamese came in and the politics surrounding what happened next were a little bit complicated, but eventually Cambodia was able to take back its own government.
The Vietnamese were the liberators in that instance.
As much distrust as there is between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese, there were many Cambodians who, at least speaking to that moment, had a lot of gratitude for the fact that they were able to come in and break the regime like that.
You refer in one part of the article to the fact that the Khmer Rouge really wasn't disbanded.
They were just driven back into the jungle and they retained their seat at the United Nations.
They still represented Cambodia.
All of that is because of the policy of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
They were backing the Khmer Rouge in Thailand and still in Cambodia against the Vietnamese.
They couldn't let the Vietnam War die, so they preferred Pol Pot, right?
I don't know if it was that simple in that they preferred Pol Pot over the Vietnamese.
I think that as the details came out about what had happened, it became harder and harder for anybody to support Pol Pot.
But you did have this very complex, tenuous situation where the Khmer Rouge still occupied a seat at the UN.
So we did recognize them and we still recognized them until 1991, which was almost 12 years later.
Knowing what we knew, we still had to have this relationship with them.
I think part of that had to do with the tenuous hold that the new government had on the country and the fact that the Khmer Rouge were in the jungles and were rearming.
So the situation was very fluid and unknowable.
So in a sense, they were trying not to pick a fight and perhaps have the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh back.
Yeah, I think there was some of America playing both sides and trying to deconstruct the situation.
But there was also a fair amount of neglect.
We had lost in Southeast Asia and we were fed up.
So there wasn't a lot of energy or will to confront the Cambodian issue.
So it wasn't until some voices got a little bit louder and until a lot of these details started coming out that it became morally impossible to continue our relationship with the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge seemed by 1991 to be weaker than they were thought to be.
So it also just made practical sense at that point that we were able to break ties.
But it is a very curious and troubling thing for me that we would have kept on with the Khmer Rouge in any capacity for that long, and yet we did.
Alright, now in the article you also tell the story of a couple of victims, Van Nath and Chum May, I believe the names are, of the Khmer Rouge.
And also you tell the story of the activists, lawyers, journalists involved in pushing for there to finally be some form of trial, which now has happened, beginning just a few months ago.
Right, and I have to say that the survivors of S-21, and there are seven or so that we know of out of 15,000, 99.96 of the people who went in were killed.
But Van Nath was able to survive because they needed somebody to paint portraits of Pol Pot.
And Van Nath was a painter, and he was given one opportunity to do one portrait, and the results were deemed good enough that he was able to live.
And so he painted his way, he still was stuck at S-21, still there listening to the screams and the torture, and witnessing some of that, but he stayed alive.
Chum May was a mechanic, and on the day that he was going to be taken to be killed, they had a broken, supposedly a sewing machine, at least that's what Chum May had said to me in other accounts, I've heard it was a broken machine of some sort, but he was kept to repair this machine, and then he kept fixing things, and so they kept him alive.
So in this way, seven or so of those who were at S-21 were able to live.
Seven out of 15,000 who were brought there?
Exactly, yeah.
Including, you know, there were 11 Westerners, there were I think four Americans, two just got caught in Cambodian waters, some allegedly were running drugs, from Thailand to wherever, and unknowingly ended up in Cambodian waters, and were taken to S-21.
Two of the Americans were killed at the very end as the Vietnamese were coming in, were burned in some oversized rubber tires on the site.
But some of the survivor testimony, some of the prison guards, and their testimony have been used in this trial against Doig.
And Doig himself, who was the leader of the prison camp, in charge of the prison camp, and taking his orders from the standing committee of the Khmer Rouge, which was the body that made policy decisions and basically called the shots, Doig has admitted to his own guilt and has apologized now, 30 years later, for the terror that he wrought.
But this is all playing out in real time right now in Cambodia, in a trial that has a good part of that country riveted, and many in the international community paying close attention.
So we had, I think, in week 10 of the trial, which would have been a couple of weeks ago, Van Nath and Chum May describing their experience at S-21.
And Chum May, in particular, the torture that he underwent when they pulled out fingernails, electrocuted him.
Others were fed feces, waterboarded.
Children were thrown from third floor balconies and killed.
There was just an entire gruesome menu.
And I'm not sure if we've pinned this to S-21, but in some cases they would cut people open and put in scorpions or living insects that bite red ants.
I mean, these guys were really, they were eventually just trying to outdo each other in creative ways of sort of stealing the dignity from their prisoners, who in fact were innocent to begin with.
And one of the most frustrating parts when you hear these stories is while being interrogated, each prisoner was asked if they were a KGB or CIA.
And almost to 100%, none of these prisoners knew what those letters meant.
What those letters stood for.
They had no idea what was being asked of them.
And so when they denied that they were, they were tortured all the more until finally they did confess that they were CIA or KGB.
And for that confession, then they were killed.
Yeah, well, see, torture does work.
Yeah, I guess.
Well, you know, it's an interesting story.
It really does seem to have everything.
It's got the evils of the American empire, of communism.
It has stories of heroic struggle and perseverance and individual responsibility for atrocities at the same time as, you know, this guy Doik, you know, of course, is an individual and responsible for his actions and yet again was part of this communist regime that, as you say in the book, he says, listen, what would you have done?
They were going to kill my kids and my wife and whatever.
We would all become a death camp leader at that point, wouldn't we?
Yeah, I mean, that is his defense.
And in the end, the defense of the Khmer Rouge leaders who are going to come to trial next after Doik.
I think the question is, you know, put in the shoes of this man who did want to see his family live and threatened with his own death and their death.
He did what he had to in his telling.
And for that, he's remorseful.
But at the same time, you know, it's a little more nuanced than that.
He had some latitude.
He did run and was in charge of what happened there.
And by the accounts that have come out in the trial and the reporting that I did, he was an absolutely brutal, dictatorial leader of that prison camp, inflicting the worst horrors on its prisoners, many of whom were innocent.
So it's hard to balance the question against the reality of what he did.
But it's true.
And in my travels there, one of his defense attorneys, Kar Savuth, is a Cambodian.
He's 77 years old, one of the first of the post-Khmer Rouge generation of lawyers, because all the other lawyers were killed.
He lost his brothers and other family members to the Khmer Rouge.
And now he is defending Doik in the name of sort of building this nascent Cambodian legal system.
In order to see that justice is carried out and that the defendant does have representation.
Well, that's an important point, actually, the structure of the trial.
This is a Cambodian under the auspices of their national government, their legal system.
Is that right?
Or under the U.N. or what?
Well, the trial is a combination.
For each Cambodian attorney in the defense, at least Kar Savuth would be the Cambodian defense lawyer.
And then Francois Roux would accompany him, and he's from France.
And it would be the same on the prosecution.
There's a Cambodian lawyer and an international lawyer.
And then the judges, I think the break is, and I might have the number a little off, but I think it's five to four Cambodian to international who are judging the case.
So the Cambodians wanted this to happen in their country, not at The Hague.
They wanted it to include their lawyers and their judges as corrupt as their system has been deemed by various NGOs and various studies.
And even as this trial has been caught up in some corruption, they felt it was incredibly important for them to do this thing in Cambodia in hopes of laying in the first foundations of a legal system that can stand on its own.
And actually put into effect this international law that they're bringing in this case.
But in general, putting into effect laws that will stand without people resorting to violence and revenge killings, which are, again, somewhat prevalent there too.
Acid attacks happen to be the crime du jour where somebody's accused of having an affair and then they're doused in acid.
That happens in Cambodia, is that what you're saying?
Yeah, that's just one of the ways justice gets meted out.
There's just a rough justice that has ruled for centuries in Cambodia.
And so the hopes are that this trial will be the beginning of a new phase in Cambodian society where some of these disputes can get resolved legally, where there's trust in the legal system, where there's less corruption.
And this starts with resolving these crimes of 30 years ago, which haunt the country to this day.
I'm not positive about the form and how it will all work out, but three chairs for responsibility anyway for any of these guys.
Obviously Pol Pot was allowed to die in his house, untouched by any form of justice as far as I can tell.
But at least some of these people are being held to account.
Can you tell me when we'll know whether Doik is convicted and what he'll be sentenced to and that kind of thing?
Yeah, well we know he's not going to receive the death penalty because that's not in play here.
The trial has been full of delays and all sorts of procedural complications.
So it's expected to be a somewhat drawn out procedure.
The feeling though is that the trial will reach some sort of conclusion hopefully by fall, perhaps a little bit later.
The second round of trials will begin in 2010.
So we'll know something.
His defense team, Roo and Karsavuth, are arguing that he has served time in prison and is repentant.
So his sentence should be lighter than it might otherwise be for somebody who is in deep denial and full denial.
But that will be left to the court and there are many Cambodians who would like to make sure he never sees the light of day again.
So right now that's the battle that is happening on a daily basis in that courtroom.
And I think when you talk to Francois Roo and the defense attorneys, they're trying to find, as they say, a way for this man to enter the human community again.
And they think that somewhere in that process he should be allowed back into society.
So they would like to avoid a life sentence obviously and find a way for him to serve his time and then be released.
Well, you know, Nixon's dead, but Henry Kissinger is still alive enough to be indicted, I think.
Any chance of that?
No, I'm just kidding.
We all know better than that.
Yeah, it is remarkable actually to sit back through those transcripts when Nixon does call for a full bombing of Cambodia.
I think the transcripts come from 1970 and the exchange is chilling because you have Nixon, who is feeling incredibly frustrated with the changing tide of the war in Vietnam, calling Kissinger wanting to shut down the supply routes and he says something like, I want everything that can fly to go in there and, quote, crack the hell out of them.
And Kissinger in turn calls Alexander Haig and says, I just talked to our little friend and he wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.
He doesn't want to hear anything.
It's an order.
Anything that flies on anything that moves.
And then they proceed to go in and drop everything they got.
That sounds like enough for a conviction right there.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really, it's a little chilling piece of American history.
And yeah, that's all it'll ever be, too.
Not in this lifetime.
Anyway, this is a great article.
I really appreciate your journalism along these lines and this great interview.
Oh, thanks a lot, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Michael Paternini and the article is Never Forget at GQ Magazine's website.
It's men.style.com.
Never Forget by Michael Paternini.
And we'll be right back on anti-war radio chaos in Austin.
