David, what were the human rights organizations hearing from out of Cambodia after 1975 and what were they doing about it?

Well, you had actually the first reports of what the Khmer Rouge were doing from the press who were still in Phnom Penh at the time of the evacuation. And then in late '75 and early '76 you started getting early refugee stories coming from people who had escaped into Thailand. So you began to get stories of what was happening and what was going on in Cambodia.

Regrettably in a way these stories were so unbelievable that they were not believed. And the... the kind of impartial investigations and documentation that should have gone on did not. The international human rights organizations were actually slow in getting to what was a terrible, terrible situation.

What were some of the kinds of things that refugees were beginning to report by the end of 1975?

Well, what they were reporting was basically a wholesale violation of virtually all of the principles established in the universal declaration of human rights. In the course of the evacuation, the emptying of the cities, what was the collectivization of agriculture and the communalization of eating, and the turning the city people into peasants, virtually what they were describing was a country that, the situation where the whole country was a slave labor camp.

Where the routine was incredibly harsh and where classes or groups of people that the Khmer Rouge deemed or suspected would be opponents of the revolution were being massacred. Massacres started with the officials of the old regime, the officers and sometimes the officer’s family and sometimes lower ranking soldiers of the Lon Nol forces.

What they considered to be futile remnants. You had the dissolution of Buddhist monkhood and the total suppression of religion. You had, in 1976, essentially what the Khmer Rouge considered an intensification of the revolution, where having eliminated as it were the soldiers of the old regime, and the civil servants of the old regime, they started going after the educated classes and the commercial classes. People that they figured would stand in the way of the socialist revolution that they were trying to make.

Everybody... Or not everybody... There were many predictions that there would be a bloodbath in South Vietnam if the North Vietnamese won the war. There were not similar predictions, so far as I know, made about Cambodia. How do you account for the fact that the result was almost the opposite of the expectation?

The, well, you... it just wasn't imagined that such extreme measures would be taken as were taken by the, the Khmer Rouge. It just wasn't anticipated. One, in retrospect, you can see from their behavior in the areas that they were under control before 1975, you can see what their policies were going to be.

And in fact some of the Cambodians who were flocking to the cities to Phnom Penh before 1975 were not only escaping the civil war or the US bombing but were also fleeing from the repression in the Khmer Rouge areas. But this wasn't paid sufficient regard. Uh.

But it was just... it just wasn't anticipated that such extreme and harsh measures would be taken as were taken by the Khmer Rouge.

What was the Khmer Rouge ideology? What were they after? What did they want to accomplish with all this?

Well essentially the Khmer Rouge was a combination of Cambodian intellectuals who had been educated in Paris in highly theoretical Marxist Leninism, who had returned to Southeast Asia and picked up on, as it were, extreme...

Out of film

Also, maybe we ought to try to be quiet.

Do you want to ask me the question again?

No.

Tell me where we were.

What did the Khmer Rouge... Where did they get their ideas, etc.?

The uhh, the Khmer Rouge explained what they were doing in Marxist categories. They say that it was a situation of dictatorship of the proletariat in the midst of class struggle. What they mean by that, or I presume, I presume, or where... how you can get at that question is looking at their ideology. Khmer Rouge was a coalition of intellectuals who had been educated abroad and the poorest of the Cambodian peasantry.

The leadership group of the Khmer Rouge had almost to a person been educated in France in highly theoretical Marxist Leninism, and returned to Southeast Asia and picked up as it were the extreme aspects of Maoist ideology, the substitution of the Asian peasantry for the European proletariat as the maker of revolution.

Ideas associated with the Great Leap Forward and the extreme ideas of the Cultural Revolution, and they sought to apply this kind of ideology on a social system, a social structure that had been, a traditional society that had been broken down essentially by the civil war. That happened from '75... from '70 to '75. So they came...

Just, just hold a second, let’s get another...

Traditional Cambodian society had been shattered, had been destroyed by the civil war. And on that situation the Khmer Rouge sought to make I suppose what was one of the most thorough going revolutions in history.

They, it was a peasant revolution. Everybody was going to become a peasant. That is essentially why they evacuated the cities, to make everybody into a peasant. Increased rice production was the theory of what would happen and the, eliminating the classes that had traditionally exploited the peasantry, was in theory supposed to release the productive, the productivity of the peasantry. It of course, didn't happen, and agricultural productivity declined throughout the Khmer Rouge period. And people went increasingly hungry.

But that was one of the things that the Khmer Rouge thought that they were trying to do.

At what point did the news of the holocaust begin to be believed and that people in the west began to react to it?

Well, some people believed it right away. One of the troubles was that the early accounts were shrouded in political controversy. There was the theory that the early refugee accounts were exaggerated CIA propaganda to justify the bloodbath theory, as it were.

But as, as more people kept coming out into Thailand and their testimonies reinforced what the early refugees had been saying, finally you had a body of evidence that couldn't be, couldn’t be denied.

Under what circumstances did you go to Cambodia and what did you do there?

My first trip inside Cambodia occurred while I was working on Cambodian refugee and famine relief programs, and I originally went in in regards to that work in 1981. In 1982 I made a second trip to Cambodia as a freelance journalist in order to photograph the evidence that remained of what had happened under the Khmer Rouge.

Ah, what is your opinion... In summary, what did happen? What is a... What did they do? How many people did they kill? Did they make any reeducation camps, or just eliminate people?

Well there was essentially a three tiered structure of the murder by government in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. At the top of the pyramid so to speak, was a prison execution, extermination system, where people who were presumed to be opponents, enemies of the regime, traitors to the revolution, were individually executed.

Places like Tuol Sleng, or what was the S-2l, what was called S-21 has now been remained Tuol Sleng where 15,000 people were individually executed and only seven survived from that. That was at the hub or at the center of a prison execution system that existed at the regional and district levels as well and resulted in the deaths of scores of thousands of people who were singled out individually.

In the middle, as it were, you have people who were killed, groups, classes, who were massacred or purged and then massacred. Groups that were considered to be opponents of the regime, former army officers, former government officials, ah ethnic minority groups that resisted forced assimilation. Party cadre, that is Khmer Rouge who were in areas that resisted and were late in implementing the extreme policies that were being ordered from Phnom Penh.

What happened in those cases, the center as it were, would send out troops in cadre, take over those areas, execute the cadre that were not implementing the extreme policies and then implement the extreme policies. You have that middle area of a lot of death...

Hold on...Okay.

...by massacre.

Just repeat that last sentence.

You have essentially a middle area of people that, the best Cambodia scholars, provisionally estimate that probably half a million people, 500,000 were massacred, were executed because they were in the wrong group as it were.

And then you have at the bottom, or at the base of this pyramid a much larger group of people who died by a combination of exhaustion from forced marches and slave labor, induced starvation, because following the collectivization of agriculture, productivity declined. With the communalization of living and eating the rations given to people diminished so people were exhausted.

They were becoming hungry, and they became susceptible to disease. And the Khmer Rouge had sought to prohibit western medicine. They had killed many doctors and health professionals because they were educated abroad or were part of the educated classes. Other doctors or health professionals didn't reveal themselves for fear of execution, so you had the reemergence of traditional...to diseases, tuberculosis, beriberi, to which scientific medicine has been able to cure. Ah...

So the, again the most able Cambodian scholars, provisionally think that half a million to two million people died of this combination. So you have, in essentially three and a half years of rule, ah...

Why don't you pick that up again? Say, "you have essentially..."

You have essentially in three and a half years of Khmer Rouge rule somewhere between one and a half and two and a half million out of seven million people dying through a combination of execution, induced starvation, exhaustion and disease.

When you talk to Cambodians today who went through this and lived through this, what are they like, emotionally?

Well it varies obviously from individual to individual. Many people were initially reluctant to say what had happened to them, they, memories they did not want to revive. Once people started talking, in many cases they wanted then to tell their stories and they wanted their stories to be known, as it were, and they were glad that foreigners, the press, would listen to what had happened to them. Ah...

At first, it, particularly in 1980, and 1981 when memories and the trauma was so fresh, it uh, even talking to people in the refugee camps, or inside Cambodia was painful. People would cry as they recounted the deaths of their relatives and their friends. Uh...It was very, it was even painful to listen to their stories and to see the pain that had caused people to remember and to tell. Although after people would tell you this they would thank you for listening to their stories in many instances.

Stop. Cut. Need a little...

Describe these long marches.

Well, as you know, or as you may know, prior to 1970, Phnom Penh was a city of about 500,000. During the war, by 1975, it had swollen to somewhere over two million people. And as you know, when the Khmer Rouge came in they evacuated not only Phnom Penh, but all of the provincial cities as well.

And what happened, you had forced marches into the countryside. And the areas to which the city people were sent proved unable to accommodate them. And you had during the, throughout the three years of Khmer Rouge rule, essentially a series of forced marches, forced migrations, as area after area to which these people, the city people were sent were unable to accommodate them, and these marches continued to kill off the old, the very young and the sick.

How would you describe the current political situation involving Cambodia on the world scene and how that is affecting ah, aid to Cambodia today?

Well let me start with the second part of that. Essentially in following the Vietnamese invasion there was a famine which followed a situation of declining agricultural production over a number of years. And the, you had essentially Cambodians streaming back into Phnom Penh, starving and ill, and Cambodians also streaming into Thailand, also starving and very ill.

And that's... were the two places where the situation of the Cambodians could be seen by the outside world. And the international community did respond to the famine crisis that followed the genocide as it were. And the famine problem has been solved by and large. Most people have enough, although there are areas.

Hold it just a minute, no let’s just change focus on it. Go back to "the famine problem has been solved".

Well, the worst of the famine crisis is clearly over. Cambodia is not self sufficient yet in rice production. But the famine crisis as we knew it in 1979, 1980, 1981 has been resolved.

The international community continues to provide humanitarian aid and relief to the Cambodians that are situated on the Thai-Cambodia border. Unfortunately, in my own opinion, the relief operation inside the country has been substantially closed down. In my own opinion that is because there has been a unrealistic line drawn between humanitarian famine relief and what could be considered reconstruction or rehabilitation, which the international community is not willing to do. In my opinion, the line that is drawn between famine relief and rehabilitation and reconstruction has been an unrealistic one that doesn't fit the realities of how life is like in Cambodia.

Nonetheless, the international community, by which I mean primarily Western Europe, the United States and Japan has seen fit to end its aid to... its relief program inside the country.

You gave a nice example of that, an instance of what would be allowed, and what wouldn't be allowed within the fishing area. Would you retell that?

Well some examples, which are kind of rough examples of what I mean by an unrealistic line between famine relief and rehabilitation or economic development. You can ship in fishnets, as it were, so people can catch fish, but rebuilding a fishnet factory inside Cambodia would be considered economic development.

Or you can send in rice, and rice seeds, but machinery needed to rebuild the irrigation system is considered economic development, where in my opinion in reality it is what is necessary to get Cambodia self-sufficient in rice, which is, I believe, the responsibility of the international community.

And until that has occurred, I don't believe that the famine situation has really been adequately resolved. Now, I think the international community should get Cambodia back to a situation of self sufficiency in food.

Would you tell me how you got to the prison records that you later photographed?

Well, the central security prison, that is the extermination camp that was at the top of this nationwide system of execution and extermination prisons is in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese invaded they did so...

Sorry. Yeah. We're going to have to go back.

At the top of the prison execution, extermination system that existed throughout Cambodia, there was S-21, the central security prison, or what is known commonly as Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, the place where 15,000 people were executed and only seven survived.

When the Vietnamese invaded they did so so quickly that essentially the Khmer Rouge jailers and prison officials ran off, fled for their lives and left behind scores of thousands of pages of documentation that had been utilized at this prison execution center.

This wasn't known about before 1979, before the Khmer Rouge were ousted. And it's very surprising that you would have in an illiterate peasant country a bureaucracy of death that was that efficient and that developed. Ah...

Literally an Asian Auschwitz, as it were. But you had the Khmer Rouge prison officials took photographs of individual upon entry. There are records, individual entry records for everybody who came through there, that would list people's professions, their place of origin, the reason they were arrested. Ah...

People were individually photographed. People were forced to confess to being traitors to the revolution and naming their conspirators as it were. Often this took the crude form of being accused of being either a CIA agent or a KGB agent. That's actually how it was expressed.

But these people were forced to confess. They either, if they were illiterate dictated confessions or if they could write they handwrote confessions. In some of the margins of the confessions you can see notes about torture that were written by the prison officials to indicate the means that they undertook to get people to confess to their misdeeds.

And so you have these confessions and you have typewritten summaries of confessions that were made by the prison officials to send on to party higher ups. And you have photographs of individuals taken after they were dead or nearly dead that could also be sent off to party higher-ups to show that the traitors to the revolution had been killed and they were not being harbored.

So you have this extraordinary documentation of murder and torture from which in fact the Cambodian speaking scholars can reconstruct part of... quite a bit of the internal history of the regime, and actually of the political pathology of the regime. That is to say, you can take the entry schedules and the execution schedules and look at the kinds of people who were essentially washing through as the Khmer Rouge sought successive scapegoats, as to who was sabotaging the revolution.

As the revolution failed to work they kept looking about for who was sabotaging it now. Because they had figured that they had eliminated the enemies to the revolution but still things weren't working so they sought scapegoats. And you can trace this as it were by looking at the successive occupation and situations of people who were being booked and exterminated, and looking at the questions and answers in the confessions.

So it is an extraordinary set of documents, documentation that people didn't know exist. But there it is. It's in Khmer. It's being organized as best the archivists can do, at Tuol Sleng. When I was there in 1981 you had piles on the floor of file folders full of photographs, full of negatives with these confessions, and slowly they are trying to organize, make archives of it. But it's an extraordinary set of record keeping.

Given all this horror and human suffering, what kind of lesson should we draw from this? Maybe we should draw the lesson that we should change the...