Cambodia Holocaust: The Killing Fields revisited

Dear friends,

Even as Singapore mourns the passing of one of her founding fathers this past week (for the late Mr. Lim Kim San), there was another wake of sorts somewhere in our ASEAN neighbor of Cambodia.

Ta Mok, a former Khmer Rouge leader nicknamed "The Butcher" had just died. He was the regime's military commander and together with the Khmer Rouge leadership, were linked to many atrocities of the 1970s where about 1.7 million people died under the Khmer Rouge, through a combination of starvation, disease and execution. Unfortunately, many of these accused, including its leader Pol Pot has since died.

The Vietnam war and its aftermath is all too real for me as the 1970’s was a time when the concept of “Domino Theory” held sway in American foreign policy circles , and this led many of us to believe that after Vietnam and Cambodia had fallen to the Communists, Thailand ,Malaysia and Singapore would be the next dominoes fated to fall.

Words and names such as Pol Pot, the “Killing Fields” etc inexplicably trigger poignant memories of my days at medical school in the National University of Singapore. I remember vividly the day when the news came.

I was studying at the old medical library (now College of Medicine Building-the Ministry of Health), College Rd.

The news was that the British charity, Oxfam, has finally got into Cambodia for the first time in years. Dr. Fletcher, our physiology lecturer (from the UK) was helping to coordinate the collection of funds for the charity.

One must remember that up till then, there had been no news at all about Cambodia since the xenophobic Khmer Rouge seized power at about the same time the American-backed South Vietnam had fallen to the communist North Vietnamese (1975). Cambodia (now renamed Kampuchea) continued to remain incommunicado even after she was invaded by Vietnam in 1978.

At that time in 1981/82 (I cannot recall the exact month), we were third year medical students. Although not rich, my fellow classmates and I emptied our wallets and purses in response to this urgent call for aid. I remember helping to fill cylindrical glass jars (loaned from our labs) with notes of various denominations. We must have collected at least a few hundred Singapore dollars.

I am not sure if those measly dollars helped much, but that was our only way to share our humanity with those fellow human beings who had been through worse than Hell on earth.

It was only a few weeks later that the magnitude of the catastrophe was made known to the rest of the world via the world’s media.

And most of us only fully realised the extent of the Cambodian holocaust from the 1984 Academy award-winning movie “The Killing Fields “,which was based on the experience of the journalist Dith Pran, who survived the Khmer Rouge regime. Dr. Haing Ngor, himself a real-life survivor of this tragedy starred as Dith Pran.

In 1996,the Oscar-winning film star was himself tragically murdered senselessly in his adopted city of Los Angeles by an Asian street gang.

Another noteworthy mention about Cambodia was that even after the Khmer Rouge were evicted from power by the Vietnamese, ASEAN and its western friends, through a series of diplomatic manouevres, ensured that the murderous Khmer Rouge (rather than the Vietnam-backed communist government) held on to Cambodia's seat in the United Nations!

In foreign policy ,your enemy’s enemy is your friend. We would rather be in bed with the Khmer Rouge even if there were the world’s most barbaric regime.

I will never understand the senseless cruelty and inhumanity we show towards other fellow human beings in places like Cambodia, Auschwitz, Srebrenica ,Rwanda and the Sudan.

I will bet my last dollar that Cambodia and other tragedies like her would be repeated till the end of time. And all Khmer Rouge’s leaders (who are now awaiting trial for crimes against humanity) will inevitably die natural deaths and their victims remain buried in those Killing Fields, unavenged!

And somehow, at the passing of these human monsters, there will still be those who will mourn their deaths! Just as Ta Mok is mourned.

Life sucks.

Dr. Huang Shoou Chyuan

Links to Cambodian Genocide:
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