Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims

Chapter 2. The Faceless Father

2. The Faceless Father My father was very brave and he had a high spirit, even when they tortured him. —Sambath He has never told this tale, a story of a man he hardly remembers. His wife doesn’t know, and he and his siblings never speak of it. The pain is still too raw. It is the tale of his father’s slaying at the hands of his own people, the beginning of the end for Sambath’s family. By the time the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979, Sambath had lost both parents and a brother. He felt like an old man at the age of eleven. But while these events were unfolding around him, his seven-year-old mind could not comprehend the lasting impact they would have. He only knew that his world was in a constant state of change, and there was nothing he could do to stop the motion. When Sambath was born in 1968, Cambodia would only have two more years of relative peace before civil war broke out. Still, the early 1970s were an idyllic time for Sambath. The fighting had not yet reached his home in Battambang province’s Prey Russey village in northwestern Cambodia. Sambath remained protected from the campaign of the Khmer Rouge, which had been gaining strength since the late 1960s. In Prey Russey, which means bamboo forest in Khmer, villagers hunted wild pigs and deer. Elephants chomped on the rice fields and tigers roamed the jungle surrounding his village. “There were no roads for a car,” Sambath said of his village. “There was only a path for ox carts.” His father was a prosperous farmer, at least in comparison to other villagers . They sometimes borrowed rice or money from him, which they paid back with interest. Sambath’s mother bought rice from villagers and sold it at the market and rice mills. There were five farmhands who worked on the land year round, but dozens more were hired for the annual rice harvest. His father was a gregarious man who liked to make jokes and talked in a booming voice. He would often take his kids swimming in the large pond in front 10 Chapter 2 of his home. He was also fashionable, dressing in the nicest clothes his income could provide. Their home was a popular place with neighbors, partly because they owned the only radio in the village. During holidays, villagers would gather at their home to play cards and bet on fighting cocks. But Sambath remembers none of this. He cannot remember his father’s face or much else about him, so he relies on the little his relatives told him about those years, when the family still spoke of the Khmer Rouge and what they did to his family. His only memory of his father is when he carried Sambath to a bunker because he worried about bombs dropping from the American planes that sometimes passed overhead. In 1973, the malice of the Khmer Rouge was already obvious. The mostly uneducated peasant cadre used their positions to exact revenge for past perceived wrongs or disputes, or to get rid of people they simply did not like. As the Khmer Rouge captured more territory, they warned Sambath’s father that if he did not join the revolutionary movement, he and the rest of his family would be killed. Sambath’s father sent his family to the district’s town to escape the fighting, while he and Sambath’s older brother stayed behind to protect the family home and other property. “My family could not live there any longer because the Khmer Rouge soldiers were very cruel,” Sambath said. “They killed monks in my village and said they were useless because they did nothing.” Sambath’s father ended up joining the movement, showing the minimum amount of support he could get away with, and provided cows to the Khmer Rouge for transport of materials and ammunition. Sambath’s father had wanted to join the forces of President Lon Nol, who had ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a U.S.-backed coup in 1970, and who opposed Angka’s policies. But he saw that the government forces were weak and incapable of standing up to the Khmer Rouge, who had taken over many areas, bringing an ominous future with them. His aunts and uncles told Sambath that his father was a brave man who was not scared of the Khmer Rouge. Still, he tolerated...