Cambodian town with gruesome past lures tourists

Locals relish the lucrative prospect of welcoming more tourists to the once isolated area, Anlong Veng (AFP/File, Tang Chhin Sothy)

A Map of Cambodia locating the town of Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold (AFP Graphic)

Khmer Rouge insider until he defected in the mid-1990s, Nhem En, pictured, has built up a huge archive of photos (AFP/File, Tang Chhin Sothy)

One of the best-preserved visitor sites in town is the lakeside home of late military commander Ta Mok, "The Butcher" (AFP/File, Tang Chhin Sothy)

27 July 2012
By Michelle Fitzpatrick (AFP)

ANLONG VENG, Cambodia — Want to see Pol Pot's grave or his broken toilet seat? How about a visit to the house of a feared Khmer Rouge commander known as "The Butcher"?

Welcome to the town of Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold which hopes to become the next must-see destination on Cambodia's dark tourism trail, but which faces calls not to glorify its role in the country's bloody past.

A rectangular mound of earth lined with half-buried glass bottles and protected by a corrugated iron roof marks the spot where Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was hastily cremated in 1998.

Aside from a sign asking visitors to "please help to preserve this historical site" there is no information on offer, leaving Cambodian tourist Pov Dara, 27, to ponder the significance of the low-key grave.

Khmer Rouge Dictator Pol Pot Still Revered Among Some in Cambodia

June 28, 2011
Daniel Schearf, VOA | Anlong Veng, Cambodia

It has been more than three decades since the Khmer Rouge began a violent campaign that laid waste to Cambodia, killing up to a quarter of the population in pursuit of a communist utopia. As the four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders go on trial in Phnom Penh, the man most responsible, Pol Pot will never see justice. He died in 1998 just as the extremist communist group was disintegrating. But, one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, some Cambodians still consider Pol Pot a powerful figure to be worshipped.

Sek Navuoch kneels in front of a simple-looking grave covered by a tin roof and bordered by glass bottles that have been pushed upside down into the dirt.

The 32-year-old lights incense and presents bananas and then puts his hands together and prays.

Cambodian reconciliation efforts force Khmer Rouge veterans to confront the past

Im Chaem (R) standing next to Chhang Youk (Photo: AP)

A child looking at Ta Mok's body (Photo: Reuters)

Wednesday, December 1, 2010
By Dustin Roasa
The Washington Post

ANLONG VENG, CAMBODIA - In a dimly lighted concrete classroom with smudged and peeling walls, the principal of Anlong Veng High School recalled the man who had built it, the late Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok.

"Everyone here loves Ta Mok. He was a good leader, and he cared about his people," 42-year-old Sreng Kor Ma said. Known as "the Butcher" for his brutality during Khmer Rouge rule, the commander remains popular in this remote former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, where he built hospitals, bridges and other infrastructure and where thousands of the organization's former soldiers still live.

But this year, 12 years after the Khmer Rouge surrendered, long-held loyalties are finally being challenged in Anlong Veng. In April, a local truth and reconciliation forum allowed victims to publicly confront people who had participated in the regime. In June, the government distributed a high school textbook here that for the first time teaches the history of the Khmer Rouge to the children of its former soldiers.

And in July, a joint U.N. and Cambodian tribunal handed down its first conviction of a former Khmer Rouge member, sentencing the onetime chief of the notorious Tuol Sleng torture center, Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, to 35 years in prison. With each of those developments, anxiety has grown among Anlong Veng's Khmer Rouge veterans, complicating efforts at reconciliation and their attempts to reintegrate into Cambodian society.

"There is resentment and fear among the former Khmer Rouge, but they are powerless to do anything," said Chhang Youk, head of the independent Documentation Center of Cambodia. "For them, life under the Khmer Rouge was glorious, but the regime has become symbolic of evil. It is creating divisions within families."

Life after the Khmer Rouge

During the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia from 1975 until 1979, an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died from starvation, disease or overwork. When the Vietnamese invaded and toppled the Pol Pot-led government in 1979, remnants of the regime and its military fled to Cambodia's border with Thailand. There they launched an insurgency that endured until the last of the movement surrendered in December 1998.

As Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary directed the guerrilla war from their bases in western Cambodia's mountains and jungles, Ta Mok cultivated a following in Anlong Veng. But in the mid-1990s, after a U.N.-sponsored peace agreement led to the country's first democratic elections in 1993, Khmer Rouge fighters began defecting to the government, culminating in the surrenders of Ieng Sary in 1996 and Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan in 1998. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998, and Ta Mok, who had held out, was captured in 1999 in the nearby Dangrek Mountains. He died in prison in 2006 while awaiting trial.

Most former Khmer Rouge fighters have since descended into the grinding poverty common in rural Cambodia, and many remain nostalgic for the movement. Although a few elite Khmer Rouge officials kept their local government posts in exchange for laying down their arms, the rank and file remain poor, unskilled farmers.

"These people have benefited very little following the surrender," said Sok Leang of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation, which holds public forums throughout Cambodia, including in Anlong Veng. "They are embedded with the utopian agrarian ideology of the regime. They were brought up with no concept of doing business."

Sor Lim, 55, who joined the Khmer Rouge as a teenager in 1974, settled down to life as a poor rice farmer in 1998. "Life under the Khmer Rouge was good. Ta Mok fed everyone, but now life is difficult because we have to provide for ourselves," he said.

The ongoing Khmer Rouge tribunal has also provoked worries here. Early next year, the court is expected to begin trying Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, another former Khmer Rouge minister. The court's mandate is to prosecute senior leaders and those most responsible for crimes, but it has not said whether it will pursue cases beyond those four. This has done little to calm fears in Anlong Veng.

Recent media speculation has centered on Im Chaem, 64, who was a provincial district chief during Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s. In 2007, she told researchers from the Documentation Center of Cambodia that she had supervised construction of the Trapeang Thma dam, a project in which thousands of forced laborers are thought to have died.

On a sweltering recent evening, Im Chaem returned from working in the fields to her wooden stilt house outside Anlong Veng. As the sun cast long shadows across the parched grass, Im Chaem declined to discuss her past in the Khmer Rouge. If the court summoned her, she said, she would refuse to go. "Cambodia is at peace and stable," she said. "If there are more prosecutions, there will be war."

Prime Minister Hun Sen, who defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1978, has also repeatedly warned of instability if the court pursues more suspects. "Cambodia must dig a hole and bury the past," he has said.

But confronting the past is just what Cambodia must do to move forward, said Chhang Youk, of the documentation center. "Reconciliation in Khmer terms is reconnecting the broken pieces," he said. "It's our obligation to put these broken pieces together, so that we can understand."

The center produced the first government-approved textbook about the Khmer Rouge, the 75-page "A History of Democratic Kampuchea," which it distributed in Anlong Veng in June as a supplement to the Education Ministry's high school history textbook, which contains less than four pages on the Khmer Rouge.

As in much of Cambodia, Anlong Veng's young people know few details about the Khmer Rouge, despite the town's connection to the regime. Touch Valeak, 19, a student at Anlong Veng High School, said the new textbook was helping students understand a key part of their history, though his parents remain skeptical of both the book and the tribunal. "They are suspicious," he said.

This resistance has hindered reconciliation, Sok Leang said. But the public forums, the textbook and the tribunal are beginning to have an impact, he said.

Still, the Khmer Rouge retains a powerful allure here. Up in the Dangrek Mountains, an overgrown path leads to a rectangle of black soot under a rusted tin roof. Pol Pot's body was burned here on a pile of tires after his death in 1998.

Nuom Sothea, 31, a roadside cellphone vendor, said she didn't know much about the man. "But he has a strong spirit, and many local people go there to pray to him," she said.

It was Nuom Sothea's birthday, and later that day she planned to walk to Pol Pot's final resting place, where she would leave a bunch of ripe bananas in hopes of bringing good luck.

Roasa is a special correspondent.

Ta Mok House at Anlong Veng on Khmer New Year 2010

Thank "ksp daily" for the link to the video!

For additional videos please visit: http://www.khmer2us.com

Finding real beauty far away from Angkor Wat

A structure related to the Central Sanctuary of Prasat Preah Vihear stands at the edge of a cliff. (Photo Source: Shanghaidaily.com)

Beijing, Feb. 8 (Shanghai Daily) -- Bus trips, motorbike adventures and hikes. When you travel in Cambodia, you need more than a pair of sturdy shoes and a guidebook. You also need determination, persistence and a discerning eye that can discover the real beauty.

Just as Angkor is more than its wat, so too is Cambodia more than its national pride Angkor Wat. Far more than that, indeed.

This Southeast Asian country can be an adventurer's paradise, if you are tough enough, physically and mentally.

Leave behind touristy Siem Reap where the magnificent Angkor temples are and venture further to the far-flung areas and mountains, and you will find nature and history telling a different story.

That amazing story, however, comes at a cost - most of the inspired temples, lost to all but the intrepid for decades, are tucked away well off the beaten track; some so far away that there's hardly a road you can track.

Prasat Preah Vihear (Preah Vihear Temple), in northwestern Cambodia's Preah Vihear Province, is a sublime spot but is only for those with a serious thirst for adventure. The vast area borders Thailand and Laos to the north, much of it heavily forested and extremely remote.

It's all about location, location, location - a mountain temple perched precariously atop a cliff-face on the Thai border.

In this tough but rewarding two-day trip on rough, dusty roads, you will see the real life of ordinary Cambodians - harsh, bitter yet vibrant.

My pilgrimage began with a two-and-a-half-hour bus trip from Siem Reap to Anlong Veng, a transfer where I stopped over to get fully prepared for the next day's odyssey.

For almost a decade this small town was the ultimate Khmer Rouge stronghold: home to Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Ta Mok, among the most notorious leaders of Democratic Kampuchea.

Today Anlong Veng is a poor, dusty place with little going for it except the nearby Choam-Choam Srawngam border crossing, which takes you to a pretty isolated part of Thailand. The average visitor will find little to see or do here, but for those with a keen interest in contemporary Cambodian history, some Khmer Rouge sites are an important - if troubling and enigmatic - part of the picture, through which you can feel the pain and tears the people once suffered.

On a peaceful lakeside site, Ta Mok's house (admission US$2) is a Spartan structure with a bunker in the basement, five childish wall murals downstairs and three more murals upstairs, including a map and an idyllic wildlife scene. About the only furnishings that weren't looted are the floor tiles - on these very bits of ceramic, the men who killed 1.7 million Cambodians used to plan offensives, pass death sentences, and joke with friends.

From the turnoff to Ta Mok's house, my local driver/guide Noon (who speaks English) drove a further 7 kilometers north to Tumnup Leu, where a right turn and 400 meters brought me to Ta Mok's grave.

"Mind your feet and closely follow me, if you don't want to lose any part of your body," Noon warns, referring to a nearby minefield.

The tomb has no name or inscription of any sort, but this doesn't seem to bother the locals who stop by to light incense sticks and - in a bizarre new local tradition - hope his ghost grants them a winning lottery number.

The real challenge presented itself when early next morning we hit the road heading to Prasat Preah Vihear. The transport situation was as dire as the state of the dirt road, with through-traffic virtually nonexistent.

Before getting started, Noon suggested I wear a mask. I didn't put it on until half an hour later when the dust and dirt were everywhere in the air.

For the next two and a half hours, my eyes didn't open for even a minute. The dust went all the way through the mask - into my eyes, nose, mouth and ears. My hair became sticky, face turned brownish, hands got dark. Even worse, my clothes, trousers, scarf, bag - everything exposed - were covered all over with thick dust.

I became a "dust girl."

When we finally reached the foot of the mountain after the non-stop bumpy journey, Noon and I changed to a bigger, more powerful motorbike (rental US$5) for a hair-raising, 20-minute ride up gradients of up to 40 percent.

I held on tight to Noon to keep from falling off. My heart was racing.

But the moment I got off the motorbike, stood on the mountain top, and took in the panorama, I felt that all the hardship paid off. I was overwhelmed by the satisfaction of knowing that I had completed a modern-day pilgrimage almost the equal of one undertaken at the height of the Angkorian empire.

The views are breathtaking: lowland Cambodia, 550 meters below, stretching as far as the eye can see, with the holy mountain of Phnom Kulen looming in the distance.

For generations, Prasat Preah Vihear has been a source of tension between Cambodia and Thailand.

During my recent visit soldiers holding rifles were everywhere: patrolling or standing guard right on the border or around the temple. Flags of both the United Nations and Cambodia flapped high in the wind.

"Just two weeks ago, there was a big fight right here on the border," Noon told me.

That's maybe why very few people want to come here - even if they want, they are most likely to think twice, for the journey and for their own safety.

"You are the only tourist here in two weeks," said one stationed soldier among a group who gathered around looking in curiosity and surprise at me. "Very few people come here, not to mention women; you are probably the first one.

"The whole journey up here is very hard, not everyone can make it, you are very brave and strong-willed," he added.

The most dramatically situated of all the Angkorian monuments, 800-meter-long Prasat Preah Vihear (admission US$5) perches high atop the south-facing cliff face of the Dangkrek Mountains.

The height of Angkorian architectural audacity, its foundation stones stretch to the edge of a precipitous cliff. Breathe in the views as they are simply enormous.

Prasat Preah Vihear, an important place of pilgrimage during the Angkorian period, was built by a succession of seven Khmer monarchs, one of them being Suryavarman II, builder of Angkor Wat, which is also why in some aspects this mountain-top temple is similar to the "mother of all temples" in Siem Reap.

Like other temple-mountains from this period, it was designed to represent Mt Meru and was dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva.

Start a visit at the monumental stairway, if possible from the bottom (near the market and the crossing from Thailand). As you walk south, you come to four cruciform gopuras (sanctuaries), decorated with a profusion of exquisite carvings and separated by esplanades up to 350 meters long.

At the entrance to the Gopura of the Third Level, look for an early rendering of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a theme later depicted awesomely at Angkor Wat. The Central Sanctuary and its associated structures and galleries, in a remarkably good state of repair, are right at the edge of the cliff, which affords stupendous views of Cambodia's northern plains.

Completing my pilgrimage with a deep breath, I looked into the distance, feeling my body and soul never before so closely connected.

Offerings to Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot [-Even his KR followers are still in power in Cambodia]

Khmers have placed offerings at Pol Pot's cremation site.
The view of the river around Ta Mok's house, now used by locals to bathe and for their cattle.
The mural of Angkor Wat inside Ta Mok's house, near Anlong Veng.

Friday, February 13, 2009
Illawarra Mercury (Australia)

He is responsible for the death of at least one million Cambodians during one of the most brutal revolutions in history.

So when I visited the cremation site of Pol Pot, the leader of the radical Khmer Rouge, I was shocked when I saw a freshly cut mandarin placed at the site as an offering to his spirit.

The fruit had not even begun to dry out in the fierce Cambodian heat.

"They ask him for good luck,'' my moto driver, Dan, explained.

"Do they still like Pol Pot?" I asked, not quite believing that I had reason to ask such a question.

"Yes, they still like (him).''

Pol Pot's ashes are buried on the site where he lived leading up to the election of the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, and until 1979, when it was defeated by the Vietnamese.

It is just outside Anlong Ven, a small town about three hours north of Siem Reap and the ancient temple of Angkor Wat.

His house was destroyed by those who suffered during his torturous reign over the country, but his cremation site has since been beautified from the pile of rubble and old tyres that once marked it. It is now sheltered by a wooden hut and a statue of Buddha has been erected.

His second house, used to meet with his comrades (Pol Pot only called the opposition soldiers), is a few kilometres away and we returned to our motorbikes to take the remote path that leads there.

Along the way, we passed Cambodian soldiers waiting in the forest in anticipation of an invasion from Thailand, which is less than 1km away. The Thais have made a recent attempt to claim one of the country's ancient temples, Preah Vihear, about 200km from Anlong Ven, and the nation is now on full alert.

Landmine warning signs also dot the side of the path - a bush toilet stop could become deadly.

Dan told me when he first visited Pol Pot's cremation site in 2003 it was surrounded by landmines, which have now been cleared by an NGO project.

We arrived safely at Pol Pot's second house, a single cement room now covered in the names of tourists and the dates that they visited.

It is nowhere near as lavish as the house of Ta Mok, the regime's military leader. My friend Jill and I visited Ta Mok's house when we arrived in Anlong Ven two days earlier.

His residence included three two-storey wooden buildings with decorated floor tiles and beautiful murals depicting the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and Preah Vihear. The wreck of an old truck used by the men to transport prisoners still lies in the garden and the tower communications system also remains.

The river that Ta Mok built for protection around his home still holds water, although all the trees have drowned. From the window of one of the buildings, I watched a local family bathe in the water and two farmers herd their cattle along its bank.

Khmer also come here to pray in front of a Buddha statue. I cannot comprehend how they can pray in such a haunting place - or how they find peace at the home of one of the men who is responsible for the deaths of so many of their own. Perhaps it is for that reason that they come here. Are they seeking peace from the past?

A steady flow of tourists visit the Pol Pot and Ta Mok (he died in jail in 2006) sites almost thirty years after the fall of the regime. Most are Cambodians or Thais, Dan said. Jill and I are the only Western foreigners in Anlong Ven at the moment, he claimed.

Dan and our other moto driver, Jacky, who has just moved to the town from Phnom Penh in an attempt to benefit from the growing number of tourists heading here, were more than happy to share their stories with us.

Both men lost family members during the Khmer Rouge regime. Dan was just three years old when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh and he and his family fled west to Battambang.

Jacky does not know what happened to his parents. I didn't ask him whether that is because no one can tell him or because he doesn't want to know.

Loyal to the old regime

Sunday October 14, 2007
Bangkok Post

In their last stronghold, the former leaders of the infamous Khmer Rouge are still held with a mixture of respect and affection, writes GEORGE MCLEOD from Anlong Veng

Almost ten years after the defeat of the murderous Khmer Rouge, Anlong Veng in Cambodia's far north is a booming border town, with Cambodians and Thais flocking there to trade and farm.

Propaganda posters depicting idealised workers have been replaced by billboards advertising beer, cigarettes and condoms. Karaoke bars and brothels dot the town where army outposts once stood.

But even with the Khmer Rouge regime gone, their ideology appears to have remained intact in their last stronghold, where they clung to power up until 1998, when the Cambodian army finally wiped out the rebel movement.

Kuch, who works at one of the many new guesthouses in the town, just minutes from the grave of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, looks back on the Khmer Rouge period with fondness.

"The Khmer Rouge leaders were always good to us," says Kuch, who goes by only one name. "We always had enough food, everybody liked Ta Mok and Nuon Chea," he said, referring to the former Khmer Rouge leaders.

Even after the arrest of Khmer Rouge mastermind Nuon Chea, residents of Anlong Veng cling to old beliefs about the defunct Maoist movement.

Prolonged negotiations between the UN and the Cambodian government saw Nuon Chea's arrest last month on charges of crimes against humanity. The ailing 82-year-old is accused of helping instigate one of the 20th century's worst mass-slaughters.

More than one million Cambodians are thought to have died under the Khmer Rouge regime from 1974-1979. They emptied Cambodia's cities and killed nearly all of the country's intelligentsia; some were executed for simply understanding a foreign language. Rural areas were turned into virtual forced labour camps where hundreds of thousands starved.

The regime was ousted by a 1979 Vietnamese invasion, but the Khmer Rouge mounted an insurgency from Cambodia's eastern borders. Anlong Veng lies about 10 miles (17km) south of the Thai border and was the last rebel stronghold to fall to the government.

I first visited Anlong Veng in 1998 only weeks after the town was invaded by the Cambodian army. North of the city, Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok and 200 die-hard supporters were still fighting the final days of a lost war.

Anlong Veng and the surrounding countryside had been hurriedly evacuated by the Khmer Rouge. Entire villages were eerily empty, some with chickens still scurrying about. Many abandoned houses still had rice sacks in their living rooms as if residents left expecting to return in hours.

After hearing stories of starvation and hardship, Anlong Veng appeared relatively prosperous even in the Khmer Rouge's last hours. The town centre had a large concrete hospital and a school, unlike most other Cambodian towns whose schools were little more than bamboo huts. Anlong Veng's roads were well-maintained and the town even had a man-made lake providing fish and water in the dry season.

Propaganda leaflets scattered near the frontlines gave some insight into the warped views taught to Khmer Rouge cadre.

Cambodia was said to be occupied by Vietnamese agents who were carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Cambodians. Many featured photos of emaciated children and mass graves, possibly Khmer Rouge mass-graves, with captions stating that the atrocities were perpetrated by the yuon - a derogatory term for the Vietnamese.

A school book discovered near the city taught young children how to wage guerrilla warfare, and to fight the yuon invaders.

Living in the past

Attitudes appear to have changed very little in the past decade, despite the now well-known tales of the brutality vented out by Pol Pot and his cadre.

"Sure, some bad things happened (under the Khmer Rouge), but that wasn't the leaders' fault. There were many (Vietnamese) agents here, they have always tried to dominate Cambodia," says Daeng, an ethnic Lao who also goes by only one name.

When asked about the killings and purges allegedly ordered by Nuon Chea, Daeng was dismissive.

"I don't know too much about Nuon Chea, but I think he was a good person. Anything bad that happened was probably his subordinates," he said.

For many locals, the fall of the Khmer Rouge has brought uncertainty and vice.

"It was better before because the leaders protected us," said Daeng, a former soldier whose arm was disfigured from a gunshot wound sustained during the war. "There are no jobs now and a lot of bad people have come to the city."

None of the residents interviewed were aware of the UN's arrest of Nuon Chea. "I didn't know he was arrested," said another resident who came from Kompong Cham province.

Anlong Veng's hardline leader Ta Mok is remembered with a mixture of fear and fondness. In the mid 1990s, Ta Mok instituted draconian laws prohibiting prostitution, theft and drunkenness at pain of death. But for many residents, the strong rules brought stability.

"Everybody knew what to do, it was much easier back then," says Kuch.

"One benefit is that we have more freedom now. You had to be very careful what you said and did before, and you couldn't travel unless you were told to. Ta Mok had eyes and ears everywhere," he said.

With widespread apathy in former Khmer Rouge areas, some observers wonder if the Khmer Rouge tribunal has failed to connect with ordinary people.

"I think the ex-Khmer Rouge members are very happy with the peace brokered by Khieu Samphan's surrender, however, they consider modern Cambodia very corrupt compared to the Spartan ways of Ta Mok, who was fair but tough," wrote Martin Rathie, an expert on the Khmer Rouge currently teaching at Vientiane College.

"Many of the KR feel neglected by the system because all the big shots went to western Cambodia or Phnom Penh," he wrote in an email response.

According to Rathie, many Cambodians simply want to leave the Khmer Rouge period behind. "Most of the residents just want to forget the past and concentrate their efforts on getting good roads, schools and clinics."

Heather Ryan from the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), said more effort is needed to make the UN tribunal relevant to ordinary Cambodians. "I don't think nearly enough outreach has been done. That's one thing that we are really critical of the court for," she said. The OSJI is a legal NGO that has been monitoring the Khmer Rouge trial.

Ms Ryan emphasised that the pro-Khmer Rouge sympathies of many Anlong Veng residents were unusual.

"Those are the communities where there are many ex-Khmer Rouge living, so I think they have a very different attitude about the regime and the (UN) court," she said.

"Nuon Chea has lived in that community for about 20 years peacefully, so he is regarded as a member of the community," she speculated.

Ms Ryan was surprised that Anlong Veng residents were unaware of Nuon Chea's arrest. "That's very odd because the press coverage everywhere was immense," she said. "I would be cautious about taking what is said in Anlong Veng and assuming that it applies in the rest of Cambodia."

Even the grave of Pol Pot is adorned with incense and locals often visit the site for good luck. When Ta Mok died in prison last year, hundreds turned out for the funeral, many crying at the fallen strongman's death.

The houses of former Khmer Rouge leaders have become mini-tourist attractions. The biggest is one of Ta Mok's houses in the town centre. A large map of Cambodia is painted on the wall, which in 1998 said that southern Vietnam was stolen from Cambodia. The label has since been scratched out by the Cambodian government.

A nearby guard said Cambodian authorities had erased the label to prevent visitors from sympathising with the Khmer Rouge.

"Ta Mok was a good man," said a guard near Ta Mok's house who did not want to be named. "He used to go to Thailand and bring us back gifts."

Contact: georgemcleod@gmail.com

Former KR Soldier: Pot Pol, Son Sen, and Ta Mok Are Real Criminals

Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper
Translated from Khmer and posted at KRtrial.info

Kamrieng-Battambang: Kamrieng is a district governed by former Khmer Rouge (KR) soldiers who integrated with the government in 1996. The leaders in the area who have positions in the government seem to be hesitated in giving any comment on the trials of top leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea Regime. In contrast, former KR soldiers some of whom are now the disabled or become ordinary people are still trying to protect their former leaders.

Though they dare not to disagree openly, those former KR soldiers claimed about their former leaders’ innocence and accused the deceased people such as Pol Pot, Son Sen, and Ta Mok, who they think should be tried, of atrocities.

“Concerning the trials of the top leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea regime, it’s the responsibilities of the government and the United Nations. We “small people” do not have any comment,” recently said Nob Sovann, Kamrieng’s deputy governor, a former KR soldier in division 705. “We are so tired of war, but now we’re having peace. Everything must be done in conform to law,” said the deputy, adding that he didn’t disagree with the trials since the court would be a good sample for younger people to realize that the people who committed atrocities would be punished.

However, a former KR soldier whose lower right leg was lost said on the condition of anonymity that he didn’t know what the living KR leaders had committed from 1975 to 1979 since he had been fighting along the Vietnamese bother to protect the country. But, after the regime collapsed, he has been living along Thai border in the forest in Kamrieng. He has noticed that the KR leaders who are living nowadays are “good people”, and that they may have been under the order of Pol Pot, Son Sen and Ta Mok only.

“When [I] was fighting, Uncle Ieng Sary was mostly abroad and Uncle Khieu Samphan was a scholar. Other [KR] leaders were all respectfully meek,” said the former KR soldier, adding that the trials of those people were not right since they seem not to have killed the people.

The disabled former KR soldier claimed that Pol Pot, Son Sen, and Ta Mok were the people who should have been punished since while they were alive they were very cruel and never absolved anyone.

Nob Sovann, however, claimed about his stance that everything should be done in accordance with law. He pointed out that his former soldiers didn’t react anything to the trials. “I know their minds clearly,” he said.

My Father, Pol Pot's Butcher

Ta Mok during his heyday as a Khmer Rouge cadre

EXCLUSIVE LEGACY OF ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS MASS KILLERS

10/03/2007
Justine Smith In Battambang, Cambodia
The Mirror (UK)

HER hands shake as she reaches up to the rafters of her one-room hut to pull down a photo in a gilt frame that sparkles incongruously through the gloomy poverty.

She dusts it down and gazes at the white-haired old man in the picture. Ho Khoem hesitates, then hands it over, her eyes flickering warily to assess my reaction.

"That's him," she says through our interpreter, who shudders at the sight and the memory of this benevolent-looking geriatric.

Ho then brings down a second picture, the same man in his demonic prime. In this one, a stern black-and-white portrait superimposed bizarrely over a picture of a then-modern Asian home, he looks far more the career killer.

Dressed in a black uniform, his cold eyes stare defiantly, his shoulders taut with power, his wife submissive by his side. He is Ta Mok, or Grandpa Mok, an innocuous-sounding pseudonym that still unnerves any Cambodian who lived through Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

Ta Mok, born Chhit Chhoeun, earned the less cuddly nickname of The Butcher for the brutal efficiency with which he carried out Pol Pot's orders to wipe out enemies of the regime. Thousands upon thousands of them.

"Yes, my father did bad things," Ho whispers tearfully, as her teenage daughter skulks in the shadows, listening to her mother speak of the family's guilty secret for the first time.

"But was he evil? I can't believe it. He must have done the things he did for a reason. He was not like that at home. He was not a bad father. Strict, but he loved us in his way. So why would he kill, kill, kill, like they say?"

About 1.7 million people, or one quarter of the Cambodian population, perished in less than four years under the Khmer Rouge, including babies who were swung against blades wedged in tree trunks to save bullets.

It is believed Ta Mok was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands of innocents, including a single slaughter in the Angkor Chey district in which 30,000 people died.

Ho, 56, said: "I wanted to ask him exactly what he did but I never could. I suppose I was scared of him. It is in our culture that you do not disrespect your elders. He would have been very angry if I had asked him.

"Because I am a woman, I was kept out of it. My brothers were put in commanding positions by my father, but I was put in charge of a hospital. I did not know what was going on.

"When the Vietnamese took over in 1979 I had to read about the torture and the slaughters in the newspapers like everybody else. I was in shock. It was the first time I had ever heard what my father had done.

"The nightmares started, seeing him do those terrible things. I still have nightmares and I still live in fear that one day someone will come to my house and take revenge on me and my daughter as we sleep. I do not sleep very much."

Ta Mok was one of just two former Khmer Rouge leaders charged with genocide. He was due to face trial by a panel of Cambodian and international UN-selected judges later this year. He had been in jail for more than seven years when he died last July, aged 81.

Just one of his former comrades remains in custody, Kak Kek Ieu, known as Duch, who oversaw the slaughter of 10,499 "spies and traitors" and 2,000 children at the capital's Tuol Sleng torture centre.

It is now a grim museum displaying records of the victims, all meticulously documented by the regime itself, but Duch is unlikely to have to answer for his crimes as the tribunal lurches from one diplomatic crisis to another.

Other former Khmer Rouge killers accepted amnesty while Ta Mok was fighting on, having deposed Pol Pot in 1998. Many are immune to prosecution.

Some of the more minor members of the regime still enjoy privileged positions in the army and government - including prime minister Hun Sen, who is not implicated in any war crimes.

Ho said: "I went to see my father twice in detention before he died. He just sat around watching TV all day. He was tired and angry - angry that he was the only one being punished while everyone else was free.

"He said he would tell the world what really happened."

He had also threatened to expose an alleged American and British role in equipping Khmer Rouge guerrillas, long after the world knew of the genocide, to fight their communist enemies in Vietnam.

Despite his terrible legacy, little is known of the man called the Butcher. Even the organisations devoted to documenting the crimes of his regime differ over his background - from his age to the number of children he had.

Born to an affluent farming family in the Takeo region of Cambodia, he spent time studying as a Buddhist monk but abandoned his monastery and his family to join the revolutionaries, prompting his own father to call him a "peal", a contemptible man.

Ho was one of four daughters and three sons born to Ta Mok and his wife, Uk Khoem, who was also his cousin.

She said: "Nobody knows why he went from being a good monk to a fighter. He was not around much when we were children because he was always in the jungle, training and fighting. He rose through the ranks quickly and became a commander.

"I wanted his attention but there were seven of us and he did not have much time for us.

"When the Khmer Rouge were in power we lived in a big house and we had everything you could want. We just lived happily without knowing all the horrible things that were happening. Father made sure we were looked after, but I do not remember him being home much at all.

"When he was, we never had any problems in the family. He was not violent with us."

Ho's husband, Vin, made commander of Pochentong airport by his father-in-law, died 15 years ago when the JCB he was driving hit a landmine.

Now Ho earns less than a dollar a day, selling rice wine and tins of food from her shack in a village 40 miles from the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Battambang.

It is a hard life for the 175 villagers, all former Khmer Rouge cadres and their families, cut adrift by history and still reviled by the nation.

Some are known to have committed atrocities, including one woman now running a beer stall who worked in a concentration camp.

Others were simply foot soldiers, indoctrinated as children. For them, the future is bleak no matter what happens at the tribunal in Phnom Penh.

Ho said: "I worry about our children. They are being punished for the sins of their parents.

"My daughter has no chance of ever getting out of here - no education, no job. We have been left to rot here."

I had to read about the slaughtering and torture in the papers

We lived in a big house without knowing about all those horrible things.