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CHAPTER ONE
* * *
Worms from Our Skin
TEEDA BUTT MAM
I was fifteen years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in
April 1975. I can still remember how overwhelmed with joy I was
that the war had finally ended.
It did not matter who won. I and many Cambodians wanted
peace at any price. The civil war had tired us out, and we could not
make much sense out of killing our own brothers and sisters for a
cause that was not ours. We were ready to support our new
government to rebuild our country. We wanted to bring back that
slow-paced, simple life we grew up with and loved dearly. At the
time we didn't realize how high the price was that we had to pay for
the Khmer Rouge's peace.
The Khmer Rouge were very clever and brutal. Their tactics
were effective because most of us refused to believe their malicious
intentions. Their goal was to liberate us. They risked their own lives
and gave up their families for "justice" and "equality." How could
these worms have come out of our own skin?
Even after our warmest welcome, the first word from the Khmer
Rouge was a lie wrapped around a deep anger and hatred of the
kind of society they felt Cambodia was becoming. They told us that
Americans were going to bomb the cities. They forced millions of
residents of Phnom Penh and other cities out of their homes. They
separated us from our friends and neighbors to keep us off balance,
to prevent us from forming any alliance to stand up and win back our
rights. They ripped off our homes and our possessions. They did
this intentionally, without mercy.
They were willing to pay any cost, any lost lives for their
mission. Innocent children, old women, and sick patients from
hospital beds were included. Along the way, many innocent
Cambodians were dying of starvation, disease, loss of loved ones,
confusion, and execution.
We were seduced into returning to our hometowns in the
villages so they could reveal our true identities. Then the genocide
began. First, it was the men.
They took my father. They told my family that my father needed
to be reeducated. Brainwashed. But my father's fate is unknown to
this day. We can only imagine what happened to him. This is true
for almost all Cambodian widows and orphans. We live in fear of
finding out what atrocities were committed against our fathers,
husbands, brothers. What could they have done that deserved a
tortured death?
Later the Khmer Rouge killed the wives and children of
the executed men in order to avoid revenge. They encouraged children to
find fault with their own parents and spy
on them. They openly showed their intention to destroy the
family structure that once held love, faith, comfort, happiness, and
companionship. They took young children from
their homes to live in a commune so that they could indoctrinate
them.
Parents lost their children. Families were separated. We were
not allowed to cry or show any grief when they took away our loved ones. A man would be killed if he lost an ox he was assigned
to tend. A woman would be killed if she was too tired to work.
Human life wasn't even worth a bullet. They clubbed the back of
our necks and pushed us down to smother us and let us die in a
deep hole with hundreds of other bodies.
They told us we were VOID. We were less than a grain of rice in
a large pile. The Khmer Rouge said that the Communist revolution
could be successful with only two people. Our lives
had no significance to their great Communist nation, and they told
us, "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."
They accomplished all of this by promoting and encouraging
the "old" people, who were the villagers, the farmers, and the
uneducated. They were the most violent and ignorant people, and
the Khmer Rouge taught them to lead, manage, control, and
destroy. These people took orders without question. The Khmer
Rouge built animosity and jealousy into them so the killings could
be justified. They ordered us to attend meetings every night where
we took turns finding fault with each other, intimidating those
around us. We survived by becoming like them. We stole, we
cheated, we lied, we hated ourselves and each other, and we trusted
no one.
The people on the Khmer Rouge death list were the group called the
city people. They were the "new" people. These were any Cambodian
men, women, girls, boys, and babies who did not live in their "liberated
zones" before they won the war in 1975. Their crime was that they lived
in the enemy's zone, helping and supporting the enemy.
The city people were the enemy, and the list was long. Former
soldiers, the police, the CIA, and the KGB. Their crime was fighting in
the civil war. The merchants, the capitalists, and the businessmen.
Their crime was exploiting the poor. The rich farmers and the
landlords. Their crime was exploiting the peasants. The
intellectuals, the doctors, the lawyers, the monks, the teachers, and
the civil servants. These people thought, and their memories were
tainted by the evil Westerners. Students were getting education to
exploit the poor. Former celebrities, the poets. These people carried
bad memories of the old, corrupted Cambodia.
The list goes on and on. The rebellious, the kind-hearted, the
brave, the clever, the individualists, the people who wore glasses,
the literate, the popular, the complainers, the lazy, those with talent,
those with trouble getting along with others, and those with soft
hands. These people were corrupted and lived off the blood and sweat of
the farmers and the poor.
Very few of us escaped these categories. My family were not
villagers. We were from Phnom Penh. I was afraid of who I was. I
was an educated girl from a middle-class family. I could read, write,
and think. I was proud of my family and my roots. I was scared that
they would hear my thoughts and prayers, that they could see my
dreams and feel my anger and disapproval of their regime.
I was always hungry. I woke up hungry before sunrise and
walked many kilometers to the worksite with no breakfast. I worked
until noon. My lunch was either rice porridge with a few grains or
boiled young bananas or boiled corn. I continued working till
sunset. My dinner was the same as lunch. I couldn't protest to
Angka, but my stomach protested to me that it needed more food.
Every night I went to sleep dirty and hungry. I was sad because I
missed my mom. I was fearful that this might be the night I'd be
taken away, tortured, raped, and killed.
I wanted to commit suicide but I couldn't. If I did, I would be
labeled "the enemy" because I dared to show my unhappiness with
their regime. My death would be followed by my family's death
because they were the family of the enemy. My greatest fear was
not my death, but how much suffering I had to go through before
they killed me.
They kept moving us around, from the fields into the woods.
They purposely did this to disorient us so they could have
complete control. They did it to get rid of the "useless people."
Those who were too old or too weak to work. Those who did not
produce their quota. We were cold because we had so few clothes
and blankets. We had no shoes. We were sick and had little or no
medical care. They told us that we "volunteered" to work fifteen
hours or more a day in the rain or in the moonlight with no holidays.
We were timid and lost. We had to be silent. We not only lost our identities,
but we lost our pride, our senses, our religion, our loved ones, our
souls, ourselves.
The Khmer Rouge said they were creating a utopian nation
where everyone would be equal. They restarted our nation by
resettling everyone and changing everything back to zero. The
whole nation was equally poor. But while the entire population was
dying of starvation, disease, and hopelessness, the Khmer Rouge
was creating a new upper class. Their soldiers and the Communist
party members were able to choose any woman or man they wanted
to marry. In addition to boundless food, they were crazed with gold,
jewelry, perfume, imported watches, Western medicine, cars,
motorcycles, bicycles, silk, and other imported goods.
My dear friend Sakon was married to a handicapped Khmer
Rouge veteran against her will. He was mentally disturbed and also
suffered from tetanus. At night he woke up from his sleep with
nightmares of his crimes and his killings. After that, he beat her.
One night, he stabbed my friend to death and injured her mother.
Near my hut there was a woman named Chamroeun. She
watched her three children die of starvation, one at a time. She
would have been able to save their lives had she had gold or silk or
perfume to trade for food and medicine on the black market. The
Khmer Rouge veterans and village leaders had control of the black
market. They traded rice that Chamroeun toiled over for fancy
possessions. The Khmer Rouge gave a new meaning to corruption.
The female soldiers were jealous of my lighter skin and feminine figure.
While they were enjoying their nice black pajamas, silk
scarves, jewelry, new shoes, and perfume, they stared at me, seeing
if I had anything better than they did. I tried to appear timid with my
ragged clothes, but it was hard to hide the pride in my eyes.
In January 1979 I was called to join a district meeting. The
district leader told us that it was time to get rid of "all the
wheat that grows among the rice plants." The city people
were the wheat. The city people were to be eliminated. My
life was saved because the Vietnamese invasion came just
two weeks later.
When the Vietnamese invasion happened, I cried. I was
crying with joy that my life was saved. I was crying with
sorrow that my country was once again invaded by our
century-old enemy. I stood on Cambodian soil feeling that I
no longer belonged to it. I wanted freedom. I decided to
escape to the free world.
I traveled with my family from the heart of the country to
the border of Thailand. It was devastating to witness the
destruction of my homeland that had occurred in only four
years. Buddhist temples were turned into prisons. Statues of
Buddha and artwork were vandalized. Schools were turned
into Khmer Rouge headquarters where people were
interrogated, tortured, killed, and buried. School yards were
turned into killing fields. Old marketplaces were empty.
Books were burned. Factories were left to rust. Plantations
were without tending and bore no fruit.
This destruction was tolerable compared to the human
conditions. Each highway was filled with refugees. We were
refugees of our own country. With our skinny bodies, bloated
stomachs, and hollow eyes, we carried our few possessions
and looked for our separated family members. We asked
who lived and didn't want to mention who died. We gathered
to share our horrifying stories. Stories about people being
pushed into deep wells and ponds and suffocating to death.
People were baked alive in a local tile oven. One woman
was forced to cook her husband's liver, which was cut out
while he was still alive. Women were raped before
execution. One old man said, "It takes a river of ink to write
our stories."
In April 1979, the Buddhist New Year, exactly four years
after the Khmer Rouge came to power, I joined a group of
corpselike bodies dancing freely to the sound of clapping
and songs of folk music that defined who we were. We
danced under the moonlight around the bonfire. We were
celebrating the miracles that saved our lives. At that moment,
I felt that my spirit and my soul had returned to my weak
body. Once again, I was human.
