November 18, 2007By Jon Swain
The Sunday Times (UK)She was a French housewife caught up in the chaos of Pol Pot’s takeover of Cambodia. But her passport didn’t save her or her husband and daughter from the killing fields. Our correspondent tells the extraordinary story of Denise Affonço
Paris in the autumn on a balmy afternoon. People are strolling in the sun. Cafes are full. It is a life that has no connection with the killing fields of Cambodia. But the memories of that era three decades ago when the Khmer Rouge turned a once-tranquil land into a charnel house are suddenly and bitterly brought alive by a song about the “bright red blood” covering its towns and plains.
Even though it is years since I have heard the Khmer Rouge national anthem, the words send a shiver down the spine. Denise Affonço sings it quietly over lunch in a cafe opposite the Trocadéro, sadness and slight embarrassment on her face. “I can still remember it by heart,” she says. “We were brainwashed night and day.”
“The bright red blood was spilled over the towns/And over the plain of Kampuchea [Cambodia], our motherland/The blood of our good workers and farmers and of/Our revolutionary combatants, both men and women.”
Affonço stops, eyes blinking in the lingering autumn sun. This neat and petite woman is a survivor of one of the worst crimes in modern history. When it was over, she began life anew in France. She no longer wakes in fear.
The words of the anthem are an appropriate description of how the Khmer Rouge turned her country, an oasis of peace in the early 1960s as the Vietnam war raged next door, into the killing fields in 1975. Up to 2m people were executed or died from disease, overwork and starvation during their rule – nearly a third of the population. Her family was destroyed. Like the Russian and Chinese revolutions before them, the Khmer Rouge forged their movement in blood, but their leader, Pol Pot, made his peasant army go further – beyond transforming Cambodian society, his black-clad army of peasant soldiers obliterated it.
Under Pol Pot’s tyranny, Cambodians of every class, belief and ethnic group perished. Many were tortured. To survive, as Affonço says, you had to do three things: “Know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing.” Affonço clung to life. In the rural communes where she worked she witnessed terrible horrors, and lost the father of her two children, and her daughter, who starved to death. She cannot forgive herself. Nor can she forget. Her son survived. But he has never got over the ordeal and has buried it away in his mind. She knows he was badly beaten. Some things are too painful to remember.
“I will always regret leading my daughter to her death,” she says. “I feel so responsible. When she used to ask for a bowl of rice, I could not give it to her. I was in despair. It was not my fault. It was destiny that did that. But how she suffered before dying, hungry and sick.”
A number of survivors of the Khmer Rouge have recorded their experiences in memoirs. Affonço has written one of the best. Her book, To the End of Hell, is the story of one ordinary family’s struggle to survive; it speaks for all Cambodians who suffered and perished under the Khmer Rouge.
Today she lives in a neat world in Paris where people weep over a single death and do not hear gunfire. She has remarried, to a Swiss man, and works in a European strategic think-tank.
Cambodia, too, has changed. The killing fields are a thing of the past. Pol Pot is dead. The country is today a favourite stop on the Asian tourist circuit. But on April 17, 1975, this Frenchwoman – the daughter of a French father of Indian heritage and a Vietnamese mother – with a job in the cultural section of the French embassy in Phnom Penh, found herself trapped in the besieged Cambodian capital with her two children and their father, a Cambodian of Chinese origin.
Against her better judgment, Affonço had decided to stay behind as the Khmer Rouge victory approached. As French citizens, she and her children, Jeannie and Jean-Jacques, had the right to be repatriated to the safety of France. But evacuation was doubtful for Phou Teang Seng, their father, a non-Frenchman. Rather than split up the family, which she thought would be wrong, she elected that they should stay together.
Also, Seng convinced her that staying behind would be safe. A naive armchair communist, he was looking forward to the victory of the Khmer Rouge. She soon found how tragically wrong he would be. “He was arrested in July 1975, and I don’t know where he was taken,” she says.
“He was probably in the first Khmer Rouge extermination camps. There were no archives then. Sometimes I try to imagine what tortures he endured before they killed him. If he had died of malaria or a disease, I would say that the good God had taken him away. But I cannot stop imagining him being tortured before he died.”
As she relates her story, I, too, can see scarred and war-battered Phnom Penh again. For much of the war, the city had somehow managed to retain something of the air of a French provincial town. But, as the conflict moved towards its horrifying conclusion, life was collapsing. Thousands were starving and the hospitals were heaving with untreated wounded.
Who knows, I might have walked or driven past Affonço in those last days when I was also in beleaguered Phnom Penh. The hotel where we few journalists covering the war’s end lived was only a few hundred yards down the Boulevard Monivong from the French embassy where she was working. Her children went to school just across the road at the Lycée Descartes, its school yard peppered with shrapnel.
As the Khmer Rouge closed in, fear and panic broke out in the streets; the Americans shut their embassy and evacuated their staff in a helicopter-borne operation, bringing to an ignominious end their destructive involvement in a once-gentle land. The Khmer Rouge had fought for five years under a hail of 539,000 tons of US bombs. The people of the city waited in a mixture of fear and hope for the victors to march in.
The victorious Khmer Rouge immediately started to empty the city of its population at gunpoint. The people streamed out of it in their thousands. From the French embassy where Affonço had worked, and where the few journalists and foreigners trapped in Phnom Penh had taken shelter, we saw the old, the sick, the orphans and little children stream past the gate. Even the 20,000 wounded from the hospitals hobbled by, trying to hold each other up or being wheeled down the road in their beds, serum and plasma bottles still attached.
We did not fully realise it at the time, but we were witnessing the start of one of the world’s most terrifying attempts to create an agrarian communist utopia. No other communist revolutionaries had gone to the extreme of forcing townspeople into the countryside, where they were resettled in giant communes. The mass deportation was the beginning of the world’s most radical experiment in communist rule.
Affonço and her family joined this forced trek into an unknown hell. From that moment on, life became a struggle for survival. Had she sheltered in the French embassy, she and her children might have escaped to France when we westerners sheltering there were evacuated by truck to Thailand some weeks later. So, too, perhaps would have Seng. But it was not to be.
During the next three years, eight months and 20 days, until they were overthrown at the beginning of 1979, the Khmer Rouge held Cambodia in a paralysing grip as the rice fields overflowed with corpses. Like all Phnom Penh’s evacuees, Affonço and her family thought the evacuation was temporary and they would soon be allowed to return to the city. It never happened. They became part of a dehumanised labour force toiling long hours in the fields.
But the endlessness of the nightmare of starvation, disease and violence never quite crushed Affonço’s will to survive – even after she had lost Seng and her beloved daughter, Jeannie.
Seng was summoned one day into the forest by Angkar Leu, the Khmer Rouge organisation on high, and executed like other intellectuals, professionals and especially soldiers who had been associated with the former regime. Misery piled on misery. Aged nine, Jeannie faded away and died. Affonço’s book is dedicated to her.
In January 1979, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and chased the Khmer Rouge from power. The fighting enabled Affonço to run away. Hollow-cheeked and desperately ill, she was saved by a kindly Vietnamese army doctor called Minh, who nursed her back to health. Eventually she made her way to France.
Affonço’s book is an extension of an account of her suffering that she wrote in the immediate aftermath at the request of the Vietnamese authorities, who wanted to use it as evidence in a war-crimes trial of the Khmer Rouge leadership. That court received no international legitimacy. The cold war was in full swing. Vietnam was firmly in the Soviet camp. As a result, the West shunned the new Vietnamese-backed government that replaced the Khmer Rouge as a puppet regime, and said it was a show trial.
The truth, as Affonço acknowledges, is that the Vietnamese military intervention had saved the lives of countless Cambodians who were condemned to die. They included Affonço and the remnants of her family, who were at death’s door. The evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes, which was laid before that early tribunal, cannot be disputed. In fact, the passing of time has brought to light yet more barbarities.
“One of my worst memories,” Affonço says, is coming across a mass grave filled with the bodies of Khmer Rouge victims after the Vietnamese invasions. “Each prisoner had to kill another prisoner with a blow to the skull and then was killed himself,” she says. “The last alive showed us how it was done. The bodies were stripped, laid out, covered in rice husks and then burnt.
The cinders were ground up and used as a natural fertiliser in the fields.”
This year, as Affonço’s book is published in Britain, agreement has finally been reached between the United Nations and the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, after years of stalling, to put the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders responsible on trial. The UN-sponsored court is too late for Pol Pot. Brother No 1, as he was known, died in the jungle in 1998 in a zone controlled by the last Khmer Rouge guerrillas and was cremated on a funeral pyre of rubber tyres.
But several top leaders of the genocide survived him and are still alive to face trial. They include Comrade Deuch, the regime’s torturer-in-chief, who had run the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh as an extermination camp. Under his direction the lycée became a portal of death for thousands. While Khmer Rouge records show 20,000 were murdered there, Deuch has acknowledged responsibility for 40,000 deaths.
Many victims were members of the Khmer Rouge itself, relabelled traitors in Deuch’s paranoid world as the regime devoured itself.
Confessions were extracted using whips, chains, water baths and poisonous reptiles. In one case he ordered the purging of an entire Khmer Rouge battalion, including two nine-year-old soldiers, because it was thought disloyal.
“Kill them all,” he wrote.
Deuch is now in prison and Nuon Chea, the party’s ideological chief, known as Brother No 2, was taken into custody in September at the age of 82. But Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, and Khieu Samphan, its head of state, still live in luxury villas in western Cambodia in the last retreat of the former communists.
Affonço wonders how it is that the hour of retribution has taken so long to come. “The tribunal has a historical responsibility,” she says. In fact, the tribunal will be the first legal reckoning with communism. But Affonço will not be there. She does not want ever to return to Cambodia. “It is finished. I have put a line under it,” she says. She admits that her integration into France has been hard. But she is touchingly grateful that it has given her a new life.
When she arrived, almost destitute, she was bundled into a resettlement camp outside Paris. Her experiences of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and her denunciations of communism caused discomfort in left-wing French circles. They did not want to admit that their love affair with communism had been so misplaced.
It was then that President Giscard d’Estaing personally responded to a letter she wrote to him at the Elysée Palace and helped find her work in the French foreign ministry. She says she owes him a debt of gratitude. But her biggest wish, when she retires in two years’ time, is to go to Vietnam and find Minh, the Vietnamese army doctor who saved her life. “I hope he is still alive so that I can tell him how grateful I am,” she says.
“I am a Catholic and still believe in the goodness of man. Those who did those awful things to us were only a small section of humanity. Minh was good to me. I can never forget his kindness.” From war-torn Cambodia, through its killing fields to France has been an extraordinary odyssey for Affonço. It is a triumph over extreme adversity that those who survived the Nazi death camps can understand.
She still suffers nightmares and cannot forget her tearful goodbyes as her daughter lay in the mucky sweat of death, just skin and bone, beyond hope and fading away. But Affonço says she would like to hear from those leaders of the Khmer Rouge why it happened. It will not be justice. But it will help her move forward.
To the End of Hell: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge by Denise Affonço (Reportage Press, £15.99) is available at the BooksFirst price of £14.40, including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585. Part of the profits from this book will go to a scholarship set up by the Documentation Center of Cambodia in the name of Jeannie, Denise Affonço’s nine-year-old daughter, who starved to death in 1976 under the Khmer Rouge regime. More information at www.reportagepress.com
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Life fading fast
The village resembles a city of death. In the evening, you hear the cries of the sick. In the morning, out come one or two corpses from the huts. The plot of earth cleared to pass as a burial ground quickly fills up; another must be found. All these deaths don’t move the Khmer Rouge in the least.
The famine tortures everyone. I stuff myself with creepers, wild spinach, bull rushes and roots. To have the sensation that you’ve eaten a little meat, I fall back on grasshoppers, scorpions, centipedes and cockroaches. Physically I’m used up, but I work as best I can; weeding plantations gives me a chance to look for grasshoppers or termites. Hunger is a physical torture that brings man down to the level of an animal. It’s this way that I’m surprised by my neighbour, one morning, gulping down huge earthworms. I’ve tried everything, but earthworms I could never touch.
In December 1976, harvesting begins again, and brings with it the luxury of solid rice for two or three months. This gives us a little good cheer. The same month, it’s the turn of Leng, my dead sister-in-law Li’s eldest daughter, who is 18 years old, to die.
One morning Leng announces, “Auntie, I have no strength left,” and goes to bed. I look after her. She cries on seeing me clean her dirty clothes; she does not want me to, but I must, since we all only have two changes of clothes left. Two days later, a few hours before she dies, she asks me if I can wash her, and put her in a white sampot and shirt. While I’m fulfilling her last desires, she confides: “Auntie, if I don’t go tonight, I will tomorrow. Don’t worry! When I’m up there, could you please just make sure that I’m properly buried? The hole must be deep, so that nobody steals my clothes and wild beasts don’t eat my body.”
Nearly thirty years on, I still shiver when I recall her words. If my niece asked me to do this, it was because she had seen, with her own eyes, bodies disinterred by wild beasts and others by grasping grave robbers who dug them up…
Leng shuts her eyes and passes away peacefully, at nightfall. Having neither candle nor paraffin for a vigil, I put her under my mosquito net, where we spend the night beside her brother and sister.
Nobody is frightened of death or corpses any more.
Extracted from To the End of Hell: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, by Denise Affonço.
