Former Khmer Rouge describe complex attachment to regime and its legacy.

Photo by: Heng Chivoan

Meas Muth, former Khmer Rouge military division chairman, speaks at his
expansive home in Samlot, Battambang.

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Sometimes [my children] ask me, “Who is the Khmer Rouge? Who did all this
killing?” And when they do that, I clap my hands on my chest and say, “It’s
me.
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Oddar Meanchey and Battambang Provinces
At the age of 14, Out Moeun left her family home in Anlong Veng district,
Oddar Meanchey province, to work for Khmer Rouge Central Committee member
Chhit Choeun, alias Ta Mok.

Though it was 1987, a full eight years after the regime fell from power,
units of Khmer Rouge soldiers were still scattered throughout Cambodia, and
she was one of many girls recruited to supply them with weapons. Every two
weeks or so, she and seven other girls would rise before dawn and begin
travelling, mostly on foot, to provinces as far afield as Kampong Cham and
Kampong Chhnang. They each carried a case of AK-47s on their backs, along
with one package containing food, clothing and a hammock.

Government and Vietnamese soldiers, from whom the girls had been instructed
to hide, routinely accosted them. “I shot at those enemy troops more times
than I know how to count,” Out Moeun, now 36, recalled in an interview at
her roadside grocery stall less than a kilometre from Ta Mok’s old house.
She was hit only once in those exchanges, sustaining a bullet wound she
showed off readily: a deep purple scar on the right side of her belly.

Like many former cadres in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold, Out
Moeun still speaks admiringly of the movement’s leaders, particularly Ta
Mok, whom she described as “a good leader” and “a better man than Pol Pot”.
She shed tears when discussing his arrest in 1999 and his 2006 death in
pretrial detention at the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

This allegiance, however, has not translated into resentment towards the
tribunal itself, which she credited with operating “according to the law”.
Asked if she was concerned about international prosecutors’ ongoing push for
more investigations, she said she was far too busy supporting her family to
pay much attention to the tribunal and its work.

She added: “I don’t care about the court arresting more people, because the
people they would arrest are not related to those of us at the lower levels.
We don’t care.”

The question of how former cadres might respond to more arrests assumed
greater urgency after the tribunal announced in September that it had opened
the door to investigations beyond those of the five leaders currently
detained. That decision overrode objections raised by national co-prosecutor
Chea Leang, who had argued that, as a result of additional prosecutions,
“ex-members and those who have allegiance to Khmer Rouge leaders may commit
violent acts”. Five days after the announcement, Prime Minister Hun Sen
echoed this warning in a speech, saying, “If you want a tribunal, but you
don’t want to consider peace and reconciliation and war breaks out again,
killing 200,000 or 300,000 people, who will be responsible?”

Contrary to these statements, interviews with former cadres in Anlong Veng
and Samlot, another former stronghold in Battambang province, suggested a
more complicated attachment to the regime and its legacy, one that would
seem to preclude outright violence in response to an expanded dragnet. Like
Out Moeun, most former cadres disavowed any personal stake in the fate of
former regime leaders, though they also took obvious pride in the power
those leaders once wielded – and in their own small contributions in support
of that power.

San Roeun, a 56-year-old former soldier who now sells tickets to Ta Mok’s
house, which has been transformed into a government-run tourism site,
expressed concern about how more arrests might affect “the political
situation”. But he ruled out the prospect of civil war, emphasising that he
and others like him had little interest in the welfare of those who might be
arrested.

“The reason I joined the Khmer Rouge was because I wanted to help King
Sihanouk,” he said. “I never knew about Pol Pot. We wanted to fight Lon
Nol.”

Reminiscing on his years in combat, he spoke at length of his performance on
the battlefield, describing his ability not only to survive but to continue
killing government troops during the 1980s.

“My son and daughter, they are in school now, and they are reading about the
history of the Khmer Rouge killings,” he said, sitting in the booth from
which he sells 50 tickets on a typical day. “Sometimes they ask me, ‘Who is
the Khmer Rouge? Who did all this killing?’ And when they do that, I clap my
hands on my chest and say, ‘It’s me. Your father is the Khmer Rouge.’”

Photo by: Robbie Corey-Boulet
An old radio truck rests on the grounds of Ta Mok’s house
in Anlong Veng, Oddar Meanchey.Former military chairman speaks out
Among the few cadres who claimed that more arrests could in fact lead to
civil war were Meas Muth, a former Khmer Rouge military division chairman,
and Im Chem, a former Khmer Rouge district chief, who have been named by
scholars and in the media, respectively, as possible suspects.

In an interview at his Samlot home, Meas Muth, who was listed as a possible
suspect in a 2001 report by historian Stephen Heder and war crimes lawyer
Brian Tittemore, said Hun Sen’s prediction of “200,000 or 300,000” deaths
was sound.

“Hun Sen knows everything about his country, and he was thinking about its
future. There could be civil war,” said the former secretary of Central
Committee Division 164, which incorporated the Khmer Rouge navy. He added
that his “supporters” would likely take part in the unrest, and that he had
supporters “everywhere in Kampuchea”.

In their report, titled “Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability
for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge”, Heder and Tittemore point to “compelling
evidence” suggesting that Meas Muth was responsible for the execution of
cadres under his command. That evidence includes 24 Tuol Sleng confessions
signed by prisoners from his division.

Though Meas Muth denies having been informed of Khmer Rouge arrest,
interrogation and execution policies, the report includes accounts of
meetings during which they were apparently discussed. At a General Staff
meeting he attended in 1976, for instance, Son Sen, the defence minister,
instructed those present to “have an absolute standpoint about purging
counterrevolutionary elements; don’t be half-baked”. The following month,
Son Sen said at a similar meeting that the party should do “whatever needs
to be done to make our army clean”. At that meeting, according to the
report, Meas Muth said, “On this I would like to be in total agreement and
unity with the party. Do whatever needs to be done not to allow the
situation to get out of hand” and to prevent the strengthening of “no-good
elements or enemies”.

Along with an overview of the evidence and its implications, the report
includes a thumbnail sketch of a young Meas Muth, a broad-shouldered man in
a plaid shirt with full, closed lips and a thick head of brown hair. For the
interview in Samlot, the former commander, now 73, wore a light blue
button-up half-sleeve shirt over a tank top. His lips, when opened, revealed
stained, jagged teeth, and his considerably thinner hair had whitened.

As he talked, he smoked tobacco wrapped in tree leaves and spat into a dark
blue pail that rested beside his chair. The shade of the pail matched
exactly the stones embedded in the patterned tiles that covered the floor,
one of the more eye-catching features of his sprawling home, which comprises
three buildings and is surrounded by a 5-hectare orchard of coconut, mango
and jackfruit trees. Another highlight is the staircase of the main
building, an imposing spiral made of polished beng wood.

Completed in 2006, the house stands in marked contrast with the more modest,
though comfortable, stilt constructions nearby, and has become a frequent
gathering place for Meas Muth’s neighbours, many of whom are relatives,
supporters or soldiers who fought under him. On the afternoon of the
interview, neighbours stopped by periodically to discuss plans for the next
day’s Kathen festival celebration to be held at the nearby Ta Sanh Chas
pagoda, the construction of which Meas Muth has largely funded.

One family brought a guest who had never before been to the house. Upon
entering, she complimented Meas Muth on the stones in the floor. Meas Muth
looked down and said: “These stones, these are just simple stones. They are
not high-quality.” The guest then walked to the staircase, put her arm on
the banister and marvelled at the sheen of the wood. Meas Muth replied,
“That’s made out of just simple wood. It is not a rare quality. It is just
normal wood. Maybe you could find it anywhere.”

After 10 minutes of small-talk, the family left, and Meas Muth answered
questions about the allegations laid out in the Heder
and Tittemore report.

“Yes, I remember that man,” he said, referring to Heder, the principal
author. “He spoke Khmer fluently, and then he just wrote blah blah. It wasn’t
true. He just wrote what he heard, not what he saw.”

He said that, contrary to the report, he spent the regime years as a “simple
leader” supervising workers in the Battambang rice fields.

“I had never heard about S-21, because I was not in Phnom Penh. I was here,
in Samlot, so I just knew everything around me,” he said.

He acknowledged having attended the meetings mentioned in the report,
including a General Staff meeting in September 1976 at which Tuol Sleng was
represented by its third-ranking cadre. But he said he did not remember what
was discussed. “I can’t remember because it’s been over 30 years already,”
he said.

He said he would not be surprised if the court came to arrest him, though he
argued that this would be a waste of everyone’s time, in no small part
because, unlike Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, he would
resist cooperating with any attempt to prosecute him. Not for him,
apparently, the teary confessions, the claims of responsibility or the pleas
for forgiveness that were the hallmarks of the Duch hearings.

“Duch is crazy, because he wants the tribunal to be the end of his life,”
Meas Muth said. “For me, I will not cooperate. I want to have a life, like
all other people.”

Photo by: Robbie Corey-Boulet
Former Khmer Rouge Northwest Zone district chief Im Chem.

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I have said again and again that I do not want
to go to that court.
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‘We must follow the leader’

Like Meas Muth, former Khmer Rouge district chief Im Chem, who in September
was reported to be a suspect by the French newspaper
Le Monde, said the threat of unrest was real.

In an interview at her home in Anlong Veng, where she lives with her husband
and one of her two daughters, she said attempts to uncover the truth about
old conflicts would inevitably give rise to new ones.

“If you want to recover it, it will become new,” she said. “People will go
to protest in Phnom Penh to demand that the prime minister doesn’t arrest
more people, because he said he wouldn’t. And if he allows it to happen
anyway, civil war will happen again.”

The Northwest Zone district Im Chem headed, Preah Net Preah, was home to
Trapaing Thmar Dam, the regime’s biggest irrigation project.

“Thousands and thousands of people were sent there to dig this water basin,
which is even bigger than the baray at Angkor Wat,” Youk Chhang, director of
the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), said in an email. Notorious
for its brutal working conditions, the dam was included in a list of work
sites falling under the scope of the investigation for the court’s second
case that was made public last week. DC-Cam’s 2007 annual report describes
Im Chem as “one of the overseers of the [dam’s] construction”.

Im Chem, now 67, repeated her claim that the dam was completed by the time
she was transferred to Preah Net Preah, and she added that, as district
chief, she had the authority only “to encourage people to work in the rice
fields”.

Several former cadres and experts said Im Chem was too far down the chain of
command to be a likely candidate for prosecution. “If she is one of the
suspects, then the gates are wide open, since there are a number of former
Khmer Rouge on her level who are still alive,” said Alex Hinton, author of
Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide.

For her part, Im Chem said she survived the regime by following Ta Mok from
her native Takeo province to the northwest, adding that any crimes she might
have committed were the result of having obeyed his orders. “We live in a
society where we must follow the leader,” she said.

She denied being concerned about talk of more arrests, though she, too, said
she would not cooperate with an investigation.

If the court were to detain her, she asked that she at least receive
advanced notice. “If they want to take me to the court, they should alert me
first, because sometimes I take naps, and it would take me by surprise if I
were sleeping,” she said. “Plus, I have said again and again that I do not
want to go to that court.”

‘Finish the job’
Though Meas Muth and Im Chem were largely alone in their descriptions of the
threat of civil war, many low-level cadres shared their view that more
arrests would do more harm than good, citing concerns that any resulting
tension, even if it didn’t lead to violence, could compromise efforts to
promote national reconciliation and economic development.

Those residents of Anlong Veng and Samlot who have no ties to the regime,
however, for the most part encouraged the court to continue its pursuit of
former leaders.

“The prime minister says he will not allow the court to arrest anyone else,
but I don’t care,” said Long Thy, 49, who moved to Anlong Veng in 1999. “I
want to see justice. If they can investigate even just one more leader, they
should do it. It’s up to the court.”

Mao Sovannara, 41, a Royal Cambodian Armed Forces soldier who has been
posted in Samlot since 2005, said it was the government’s responsibility to
remedy any problems resulting from more arrests, not to air its views on
whether they should be carried out in the first place.

In 1975, at the age of 7, the Battambang native was taken from his home and
sent to a cooperative in Banteay Meanchey, a move that separated him from
his parents, his brother and his sister. The conditions in the rice fields,
he said, were “like torture”, and he never saw his parents and brother
again.

Speaking outside the grocery stall they run in the Samlot market, both he
and his sister, Mao Ravin, said they had gotten to know Meas Muth since
moving there, and that they had no problem with him personally. “I do not
discriminate against him,” Mao Ravin said. “He’s a good man now.”

But Mao Sovannara said his relationships with Meas Muth and other cadres had
not altered his belief that the tribunal was necessary. “I’ve waited over 30
years to see justice, so the tribunal should be allowed to do its work,” he
said. “The young generation will get important knowledge, and also a lesson:
When you start something, you don’t stop in the middle. You finish the job.”