Khmer Rouge Atrocities Poem by Paul Hartal

Goddess Ganga’s Mother of Water,
the great Mekong River
flows through the Kingdom of Cambodia.

The former Kampuchea borders Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
It was once a powerful Buddhist Khmer empire
that between the 11th and 14th century ruled
most of the Indochinese Peninsula.

On its red background, between two horizontal blue stripes,
the Khmer national flag displays a stylized image of Angkor,
the magnificent ancient temple complex,
a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The temple ruins are located amid forests and farms
at Tonle Sap, the Great Lake.
The people of Cambodia take stately pride in Angkor,
as a lofty symbol of Khmer nationhood and identity,

In the 20th century Cambodia underwent turbulent changes
and during the Vietnam War the Americans bombed
and invaded the country.

In the 1970s the Maoist Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge
attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless peasant society
by forcing the urban population to move from the cities
to agricultural communities.

Similarly to Mao, Pot Pol saw farmers as the base of
the working class proletariat.

The dictator persecuted teachers, lawyers, doctors
and everyone else with a university education.
Also, the anti-colonialist ideology of the Communist regime
led to the arrest and torture of those who visited another country,
or spoke foreign languages.

The Khmer Rouge had classified these people as class enemies.
Pot Pol abolished money, closed banks,
schools and hospitals and ordered to burn the books.
After all Mao, too, believed that the more books you read,
the more stupid you become.

The Khmer Rouge also tried to extirpate western medicine
and substitute it for traditional peasant medicine.

The Communist revolution in Cambodia
led not only to terrible bloodshed and suffering,
but also involved some very bizarre specificities.

Wearing eyeglasses, for example, became a dangerous thing,
because the Khmer Rouge believed
that only class-enemy intellectuals wore spectacles.

Another capital transgression was
the absence of calluses on someone’s hands.

Again, as the Khmer Rouge saw it,
only class enemies had velvety finger skins.
Unlike clerks in an office, peasants had rough skin
on their hands because they toiled hard
on the fields from sunrise to sunset.

Tuol Sleng, the Hill of Poisonous Trees,
was a high school in Phnom Penh,
which the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison of horrors.
Here thousands of men and women lost their lives
in cruel interrogations and brutal torture.

Between 1975 and 1979 the Pot Pol leadership
in Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek and other killing fields
committed dreadful atrocities.

It is estimated that at least one million people,
perhaps even two million, died in Cambodia
in this period, due to executions, torture, starvation
and forced labour induced exhaustion.

The population of the country at that time stood at about 7 million.

The genocide perpetrated by the Communist Pot Pol regime
also targeted Christians and Buddhists, as well as ethnic minorities,
mostly of Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese origin.