By Lauren Crothers
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
Cambodia marked Friday the 40th anniversary of battle-hardened Khmer Rouge soldiers seizing the capital and evacuating its residents at gunpoint, catalyzing a nearly four-year regime under which around 1.5 million people died and millions more suffered.
The bloody forced emptying of Phnom Penh was an extraordinary event and a key moment in the movement’s history. It saw urbanites driven out into the provinces where they were considered different from the rural classes and worked so hard that many died or were executed.
The Khmer Rouge had been embroiled in a bloody civil war with U.S.-backed soldiers from the Lon Nol regime.
When the guerrillas battled their way into the city, residents were told to pack light -- that they would be required to leave for their own safety amid reports of a coming American-led bombing campaign, but would be able to return after a few days. That, however, was a terrible lie.
It was a crime that was ultimately adjudicated at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in a trial that saw former “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea and former head of state Khieu Samphan convicted of crimes against humanity last year and sentenced to life in prison. They are appealing.
In that trial, civil parties who endured the horrors of the regime told of being forced, at gunpoint, to quickly pack some things by wild-eyed, black-clad soldiers -- some of them just children.
Youk Chhang is the executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an expansive archive of materials and documents used during the regime.
He was just 14 and home alone, having become separated from his family, when three Khmer Rouge soldiers who smelled, looked and sounded like “outsiders” stormed into the house and ordered him to leave.
“When the Khmer Rouge came, it was silent and I will never forget that moment -- within myself I was left alone, separated from my family,” he told The Anadolu Agency on the day of the anniversary.
“I felt like I was the only person in the country all by myself.”
As he made his way out of the city, he reached a key arterial boulevard on which “a million” people were walking, too. In that moment, he told AA, he felt a kind of collective loneliness.
“I remember people looking greedy, or fearful and afraid. In these situations, people can become a victim or a perpetrator. You are hungry, but you feel unwelcome,” he said.
“Walking among these millions, I felt very lonely. But I think many of us felt lonely.”
April 17 continues to be a significant day in the psyche of many Cambodians, he explained, because “it became part of our identity and no one can escape from it.”
He said the lead-up to the anniversary this year was particularly eerie as the majority of the capital’s residents were at their provincial homelands to mark the Khmer New Year, resulting in much of the city resembling how it was when the ultra-Maoist soldiers took over.
At 5.30 a.m. Friday, the city slowly came to life.
The occasional motorbike puttered along as early morning walkers took to one of the parks in the center of the city. As the sun rose over the riverside, small pockets of people performed their daily exercise routines.
For Chhang, however, no amount of time passed can erase the lingering question as to why the evacuation and subsequent horrors were able to happen in the first place.
“April 17 will come back every year,” he told AA. “Rather than try to avoid it, we have to confront it. Each year, try to make sense of it.
I was 14 years old -- what crime did I commit for them to separate me from my parents, punish and imprison me?”
