Hill of Poison - Part I
I apologise for my lack of correspondence over the last week or so - yet I didn't feel I could write of my travels untill I had recorded some sketch of my time in Phnom Penh. Both for you, dear readers, and for myself - as this log is a diary and a record of my memories too. However, I found myself unable to do so until the sharpness of those memories had dulled - and untill I could come to terms with the echoes of years past.
So, for the past weeks I have sought words, phrases to convey the abrupt horror and heart-rending tradgedy still fresh after these three decades. And, I admit, I have failed; but let this at least be an attempt.
Perhaps, at first, the stark facts of history.
On the 17th April 1975, the Khmer Rouge under the direction of Saloth Sar - or Pol Pot ("Political Potential") entered victoriously into Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, deposing the none-too-pleasant Lol Non dictatorship. Ordering residents "one to two kilometres" from the city to root out dissidents, and "protect them from American bombs", those who refused or were unable to move were killed. The city was a ghost town, uninhabited untill the end of the Khmer Rouge's reign. By then, perhaps a half of those removed had survived. In the interrim, Pol Pot introduced his cancerous "Year Zero" policy, returning Cambodia to a pre-historic agricultural level. This insane cultural spasm involved the torturing, breaking, and - at the very last - killing of each and every person with education, who was literate, who had soft hands or pale skin, who wore glasses, or who just happened to be a baby, a toddler or relative of one of the above.
Ankar (the Khmer Rouge organisation) cooked all food - doing so oneself or picking wild berries was "private enterprise", and spelled death. Ankar's soldiers were children - usually 12-20 years of age, taken from parents, brainwashed, they informed upon and murdered their own relatives. George Orwell's "1984" comes nowhere close.
In the three years up to Vietnam's invasion, the population of Cambodia dropped from some 7.5 million, to somewhere around four million.
In Ankar's own words:
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."
So, for the past weeks I have sought words, phrases to convey the abrupt horror and heart-rending tradgedy still fresh after these three decades. And, I admit, I have failed; but let this at least be an attempt.
Perhaps, at first, the stark facts of history.
On the 17th April 1975, the Khmer Rouge under the direction of Saloth Sar - or Pol Pot ("Political Potential") entered victoriously into Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, deposing the none-too-pleasant Lol Non dictatorship. Ordering residents "one to two kilometres" from the city to root out dissidents, and "protect them from American bombs", those who refused or were unable to move were killed. The city was a ghost town, uninhabited untill the end of the Khmer Rouge's reign. By then, perhaps a half of those removed had survived. In the interrim, Pol Pot introduced his cancerous "Year Zero" policy, returning Cambodia to a pre-historic agricultural level. This insane cultural spasm involved the torturing, breaking, and - at the very last - killing of each and every person with education, who was literate, who had soft hands or pale skin, who wore glasses, or who just happened to be a baby, a toddler or relative of one of the above.
Ankar (the Khmer Rouge organisation) cooked all food - doing so oneself or picking wild berries was "private enterprise", and spelled death. Ankar's soldiers were children - usually 12-20 years of age, taken from parents, brainwashed, they informed upon and murdered their own relatives. George Orwell's "1984" comes nowhere close.
In the three years up to Vietnam's invasion, the population of Cambodia dropped from some 7.5 million, to somewhere around four million.
In Ankar's own words:
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."