Nal Oum said he will never forget the day the Khmer Rouge took the capital. He was one of just over 400 physicians in Cambodia, and had stayed despite the conflagration engulfing his country, with a belief that medical doctors would always be neutral and would work to save any life—regardless of politics, race, or creed.
He understands now he was wrong. He, like many others, didn’t believe that humans were capable of such evil.
It was a busy afternoon in the French-built hospital in Phnom Penh when the men in black uniforms gave orders to vacate Cambodia’s capital city. The Khmer Rouge sent boys with assault rifles to carry out their orders.
Work had kept Oum busy. He had sent his then-wife and two sons to France to wait out the war, which gave him more time to care for the wounded, as one of the people in charge at the hospital.
The hospital was originally built to house around 450 patients, but with the civil war they had well over 1,000. The beds were all full. Many of the sick and wounded were lying on the floor.
One of the buildings housed more than 100 children, of all different ages, including infants. On April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge communist regime took the capital, Oum was there, with the children. “I remember by heart the small beds,” he said.
When the men began evicting staff from the hospital, Oum asked them who would take care of the patients without doctors or nurses. They simply told him to go out, and said they would take care of the patients. “But it was all lies,” Oum said. “I kept thinking at that time, at that moment, that all those children would die.”
“Until now, this picture of those children is still in my mind. I couldn’t accomplish my job to save them,” he said. “It’s something that follows me every day.”
“My hospital vanished within hours,” he said. “It became a ghost hospital.”
The Killing Fields
Oum is my father-in-law, and was among the first educated men to expose the genocide that took place in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978. He recently recounted his story in the book, currently only in French, “Un Médecin Chez Les Khmers Rouges,” (“A Doctor Among the Khmer Rouge”).He was part of delegations that exposed the crimes against humanity committed by the Khmer Rouge. The French media have called him the “Doctor Zhivago of Cambodia,” referring to a novel about a physician during Russia’s October Revolution.
The Khmer Rouge targeted a long list of victims, from the brave and kindhearted to the clever and literate. Their ways of killing were likewise broad. People were shot, suffocated, baked alive in tile ovens, bludgeoned to death, buried alive, and starved.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in his 1982 book “Years of Upheaval” that “No country has endured such a succession of miseries as Cambodia in the last decade.”
Kissinger related how, after Cambodia was invaded by the North Vietnamese in 1965 and bombed by the United States after 1969, a civil war then broke out. The civil war left the Khmer Rouge in power, and after suffering a genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia was again invaded in 1978 by North Vietnam.
Oum witnessed a unique part of this history. According to the human rights organization Cultural Survival, only 45 medical doctors survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, which especially targeted the educated. Oum is the only medical doctor known to have escaped one of the death camps.
“What I witnessed the most,” Oum said, “was this unexpected hell on earth.”
The 28-Day March
The killings began almost immediately. After Oum was evicted from his hospital, he was sent on a long march out of the city and into the countryside. People flowed in all directions and to unknown destinations, led by armed soldiers.It happened so fast that Oum didn’t have time to change out of his white doctor’s gown. People had no chance to grab belongings, families had no time to search for one another.
“We didn’t even know where to go,” Oum said. “We were just told to go forward all the time, and not return to the city. Otherwise the young soldiers had their guns, and from time to time they would fire a shot in the air as a warning to keep walking.”
Eventually, they stopped for food. People were told to line up for a small handful of rice, which was distributed by soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. A man in shorts with his chest showing came and asked for rice, “then I saw one of the soldiers with a black suit come out of a truck,” Oum said.
The armed soldier tied the man’s hands behind his back, pushed him away from the line of people, “Then I heard the gunshots,” Oum said. The young man rolled, and the dry red dirt puffed into the air around him.
Killings would soon be commonplace on the march that lasted a month. “We saw those corpses everywhere,” he said. “Two or three corpses here, two there.”
The Cambodian people were imprisoned on farms and forced to work in the rice fields. Many people were moved several times—a strategy used to disorient them and to prevent prisoners from getting too familiar with one another. For food, all they were given each day was a small portion of rice.
The mental pressure was constant. The Khmer Rouge would often murder people and leave the bodies in the rice fields for the prisoners to see. “They put them in shallow graves, so later on you would always smell the decomposing corpses,” Oum said.
“It was very shocking to everyone. Not only me,” he said. “We lived in a time of terror when people dared not to speak.”
“We communicated to each other that if you want to survive you need to make yourself blind, make yourself mute, and make yourself deaf,” he said. “We had to say nothing. Even if you witnessed with your eyes, you needed to act like you didn’t see it.”
The Escape
Oum was moved to four different camps, and when he was on a train being sent to his final camp about six months after the Khmer Rouge took power, he was struck by a terrible realization.“When I traveled by train from one district to another, I didn’t see many children,” he said.
Only recently was it revealed what happened to them.
When former prison commander Kaing Guek Eav, better known as “Duch,” was on trial in 2009 for the 16,000 Cambodians tortured and killed at his S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, he was asked about allegations that guards had executed the children by bashing their heads against tree trunks.
Duch revealed the Khmer Rouge policy on detained children: “There is no gain to keep them, and they might take revenge on you.” So, to avoid the risk of children growing up and seeking revenge for their parents, they murdered the children and the infants.
Oum said during his first month as a prisoner, he knew he had to escape, but the opportunity didn’t present itself until he was moved to that last camp. It was in a town called Poy Samrong, near the Thai border, and housed around 1,000 families.
“When I decided to escape I told myself it would be a travel of no return. If you were arrested alive, they would put you through all the miseries in the world in front of other people,” he said. “They would accuse you of anything. They would kill you slowly.”
He began setting aside rice each day, which he hid in a sleeve he had torn from a shirt. He found a small amount of medicine—just enough, he said, to kill himself if he were caught.
The trip wouldn’t be easy. There were miles of open fields he would have to cross. Guards would arrest or kill him on sight. A prisoner working in a field who saw him would need to report him or be killed.
After the fields would be the jungle, with dangers of its own. “You also had to avoid the dogs,” he said. “If a dog barked, they would know where to find you and you would be finished. Luckily there were no dogs. They had killed all the dogs by that time.”
Then, finally, the opportunity arrived. The guards announced that the first holiday would be held on April 16, 1976, to celebrate the day the Khmer Rouge took power. Prisoners would be given three days where they wouldn’t have to work.
It was around 7 p.m. when the music started. The moon was full and bright. The guards were distracted.
“I didn’t feel any fear or anything at all, faced with this unknown jungle,” Oum said. “It was a trip into the unknown. I didn’t have any tool to guide me. I counted on my faith to do this, because I had nothing.”
“At dusk, when you can’t see into the distance, I slipped away with my pack of rice,” he said.
A Refugee
The rice fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Oum determined that during the day he would need to hide and sleep in the thick bushes. During the nights he would walk along the raised mounds above the water in the fields.Each night, he would try to cover 5 or 6 miles. During the days, as he tried to sleep, he would often be able to see people near the houses that dotted the fields.
After at least 10 days of walking through the fields, Oum reached the jungle. There, he took on new rules for traveling. He would walk during the days, and at night he would sleep in the thick branches of the trees to avoid the beasts that hunted in the dark. He said, “I used a string to tie my arms to the branches. It was enough to at least wake me in time to not fall to the ground.”
The jungle quickly took its toll. He had contracted malaria. He grew weak and disoriented. He lost track of time.
He eventually came to a village. In Thailand, near the border, many people look similar to Cambodians and speak Cambodian. The village played music at night, and Oum waited until they turned off their lights. He walked along the main road toward the huts, “and when I got in I was chased by two or three dogs, and they barked loudly.”
Hearing the dogs, a man came out his door with a rifle and began firing at him. Oum ran as fast as he could. “I zigzagged and escaped into the dark.”
The following night he came to a river, and realized he didn’t have the strength to cross it. He said, “I found a small refuge. It was shelter under high grass. I dug a hole and I went to sleep.”
The next morning he heard the cracking of twigs. Oum peaked out from the tall grass and saw an old man who appeared to be Cambodian. Oum was tired and his mind wasn’t alert, and decided to ask the man what was the shortest way to Thailand.
“I prepared my speech in Cambodian to tell him that I wanted to escape to get to Thailand and rejoin my family in France,” he said.
The old man was surprised. “He said no, you’re right here on Thai soil, on Thailand ground.”
Oum fell to his knees and embraced the old man’s leg. “I thanked him very much,” he said, “and I said, ‘I’m safe, I’m safe.’”
Then the man told Oum something he'll never forget. He pointed to the river that he nearly crossed the night before, and said, “Don’t talk too loud. 100 meters from here, if you cross that brook, you go back into Cambodia. On the other bank of the river are the Khmer Rouge, and you would be caught.”
The Edge of Death
Unfortunately for Oum, the journey into Thailand wasn’t the end of his ordeal. He was imprisoned for crossing the border illegally. He was sent to a prison in Chanthaburi. The cell was about 8 feet by 8 feet, yet had close to 20 people in it. There, Oum’s illness grew worse.During the first evening roll call in front of the prison, Oum said “I saw a spark in front of my eyes and I fell down.” When he regained consciousness, he was back in the prison cell.
“I started thinking clearly that I was going to die,” he said. “I regretted how, after overcoming so many obstacles coming over the border, I would come and die in a Thai prison cell.”
“I was very disappointed that I wouldn’t have a chance to survive and go abroad to tell people what I wanted to tell them about my country,” he said. “This was my thought when I was so near to death.”
His fingers grew rigid. His body began to tremor. He was no longer able to sit up without growing dizzy and falling backward. As a physician, he knew he would soon die.
He asked the guard for one request, that he could send a letter to the French Embassy. He was allowed to dictate the letter and another man wrote it. He said simply that he was a physician from Cambodia, that he was in jail, and “if the help couldn’t come in three or four days, I would no longer be in this world.”
The French ambassador sent a representative to rescue him. Oum was taken first to a Thai hospital, and on July 1, 1976, he was brought to a hospital in France.
There he saw his two sons again. One was 9 and the other was 4. “They enjoyed seeing me, but I don’t think they realized what was actually going on, or what happened to me,” he said. He didn’t want to speak more about this part.
A Life of Exile
The world at that time still didn’t fully realize what was taking place in Cambodia, and Oum played a crucial role in exposing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.The newspapers wrote Oum’s story. In April 1978, Oum spoke at a hearing on Cambodia organized by the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo. President Jimmy Carter sent a letter congratulating him and the other survivors.
“After that, especially the West in Europe and the United States, started to know a little better about what was put into place,” he said.
Yet even today the plight of the Cambodian people has not ended. The country is now called a constitutional monarchy, but its prime minister, the Communist Party’s Hun Sen, has been in power for more than 25 years.
Sen is widely accused in Cambodia of being a puppet of the Vietnamese communist regime, and for the Cambodian people this has deep implications.
Sen was a battalion commander under the Khmer Rouge in the east near the Vietnamese border, and fled to Vietnam in 1977 when the Khmer Rouge was conducting internal purges. He later became a leader of the rebels sponsored by the Vietnamese communists before their final invasion of Cambodia, and began his political career under the Vietnamese communist rule of Cambodia in 1979.
In August 2014, on the occasion of the trial of the head of the S-21 Prison, Human Rights Watch accused Sen of blocking any meaningful trials for the killings, forced labor, and other abuses carried out by the Khmer Rouge.
“The goal of justice for Khmer Rouge victims has been irrevocably tarnished by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s political interference, the failure to bring more cases, long delays, and pervasive corruption,” said Brad Adams, the Human Rights Watch Asia director, in a press release.
“What should be a day of celebrating justice is instead a reminder of missed opportunities,” Adams wrote.
Oum is in exile from his homeland. He doesn’t dare return under the current regime. Yet, he still hopes that the crimes committed against his people will eventually see justice, and that the people will one day be free from the tyranny brought onto them by communism first under the Khmer Rouge, then under the Vietnamese.
“To me, talking today about communism, is talking about the history of the misery and the misfortune of humankind that is still going on today,” he said.
Exposing these crimes, Oum said, “is our moral obligation, for all of us, in order to honor the memories of the innocents and anonymous people killed.”
“It is our duty for the memory and the history of humankind,” he said. “It’s our moral duty.”
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