Intended for Evil: Episode 1

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars. Today, we have the first of a three part series, “Intended for Evil.” You might call it a “tripletake.” In this series, most of the background sounds are from Cambodia during this period. But in a few places we added sound effects. Just so you know.

RADHA MANICKAM: Usually we wake up like six, seven o'clock in the morning, everything is kind of calmed down and quiet. And then we still, we start hearing some gunfire, like pop pop everywhere. …

It was April 17, 1975. Radha Manickam was 22 years old and living with his family near downtown Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

MANICKAM: And then by nine o'clock, we hear this rumble on the street, which is the Khmer Rouge driving with the tank, the big tank.

The communist Khmer Rouge had just won a brutal five-year civil war in the jungle against the American-backed Khmer Republic. A half-million people had died in the war.

That morning, April 17, Khmer Rouge guerillas were marching into the city. Later that morning Radha saw them. Squads of soldiers walking in single file down their street.

They all wore loose black cotton pants and shirts with buttons and breast pockets. Often called “pajamas.” A black Chinese cap, and a red and white check patterned scarf around their waists or necks. Sandals cut from rubber tires.

They looked very young. Lots of teenagers. Thin and tough. They were mostly dirty after months or years in the jungle. Many were carrying rocket launchers or AK-47s.

It was Radha’s first exposure to the Khmer Rouge. The leader of the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot. Brother Number One. He led the most violent and brutal government in modern history. In its doomed attempt to create an agrarian utopia, between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot’s regime murdered over 1.7 million people. Many were beaten to death or executed. Others starved to death or died of fatigue or some wretched disease. Mao and Stalin’s Communist regimes killed far more people. But no other government has destroyed nearly a quarter of its own citizens.

Today Pol Pot is largely forgotten. But he and the Khmer Rouge are well worth remembering. Because the ideas that formed the Khmer Rouge are still with us today. We’ll talk more about that in the third episode of this series.

Also worth remembering are the stories of those who survived. People like Radha Manickam. His grandfather had immigrated from India decades before, and his family was Buddhist. But a few years earlier Radha had become a Christian. We’ll be telling his story over the next three episodes. It is in many ways a brutal story. One of loss and grief and terror. But it’s also a story of hope and grace. And ultimately, redemption.

This series is based on my recent interviews with Radha, along with my 2016 book about his experiences. The book and this series are titled “Intended for Evil.”

Cambodians knew the Khmer Rouge were coming. When the civil war broke out in 1970, the US supported a corrupt Khmer Republic government against the Marxist Khmer Rouge. And in the spring of 1975 America ended its support of Cambodia. Much like it left South Vietnam. The U.S. evacuated its Cambodian embassy on April 12.

Initially many residents of Phnom Penh were giddy that the civil war was over. Khmer Rouge forces had been shelling Cambodia’s cities for months. People were sick of war. Of the rockets and bombs. The food shortages and the Khmer Republic’s blatant corruption. They were sick of refugees from the countryside flooding the city. Of night-time terror. Of death.

MANICKAM: I think that everybody, including myself, hope that the communists will win. So the war will be over. … Because we thought that, you know, when the the war over peace gonna be in Cambodia again, once again, like in the 60s.

So when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and other cities five days later, people celebrated. In the morning sunshine Cambodians waved white flags from windows and sheets from doorways. They wrapped white handkerchiefs around their arms. They ran out to greet the tanks and troop carriers. Citizens lined the streets clapping and cheering and shouting, “Victory!” and, “Congratulations, comrade!”

AUDIO: [Khmer Rouge national anthem]

MANICKAM: And then people gather on the main street and welcome them and everyone. You know, yelling in French, that peace, peace, peace.

It was the first day of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Year Zero. This is the Khmer Rouge national anthem: “Glorious April 17.”

People took pictures of smiling citizens and Republic soldiers standing in happy groups behind piles of surrendered rifles. They sang Khmer folk songs. They danced Khmer dances. They chanted communist slogans. For a few short hours they believed.

And then hope vanished. Like the illusion it was. Maybe they’d have been less optimistic if they’d heard the lyrics to their new national anthem:

Glittering red blood which blankets the towns and countryside of the Kampuchean motherland!
Blood of our revolutionary combatants, male and female!
Blood that was transmuted into seething fury, into fierce struggle
On 17 April, under the Revolutionary Flag!

At the time Americans knew very little about all this. In early 1975 there was a lot going on.

The Captain and Tennille were big. People cared about the Oscars.

WARREN BEATTY: And the winner is, Godfather Part II.

Unemployment and inflation were rising.

ANNOUNCER: … today’s bad economic news. The unemployment rate soared to 8.2 percent nationwide last month …

So were oil prices.

CUSTOMER: I used to spend five dollars on gasoline a week now maybe I spend 20, I don’t know …

The Cold War was raging. People who could find Cambodia on a map often saw it only as a part of the Vietnam War. A war that by mid-April of 1975 was nearly over.

JOHN HART, NBC: … The American people gave up on Vietnam without telling Vietnam …

When he took over, Pol Pot kicked out all the foreigners and imposed an information blockade, both in and out of the country. So people in the West knew almost nothing about the Khmer Rouge.

Radha and his family didn’t really know much about them, either. They lived on a cul-de-sac of two-story row houses. A wealthy neighborhood of merchants, government officials, and military officers. Radha’s father, Chetia Manickam, was Cambodia’s only authorized importer of Suzuki motorcycles and Sanyo appliances. Radha had six younger brothers and sisters. His mother, Meenachi, was pregnant. His grandmother also lived with them.

On that first morning of Khmer Rouge rule, Radha and his father looked out the window. They saw some neighbors, Republican army officers, on their balconies.

MANICKAM: And then we see they start dropping their clothes from the balcony down to the street, because they want to wipe out everything that associated with military. They afraid the Khmer Rouge gonna arrest them.

Later in the morning they saw the lines of young Khmer Rouge soldiers coming down the street with their AK 47s.

MANICKAM: … on the street, and then keep yelling, “If you are military personnel come down,” or I'll be on the street, the Angka, which is the organization, want to invite you to meet you know, meet them.

“Angka” was what the Khmer Rouge called their revolutionary organization. To them it was more than just an organization, but we’ll get into that later.

The Manickams stayed inside, and the soldiers passed by their house. Later in the day …

MANICKAM: But I turned on the radio …

They heard a Khmer Republic official saying they intended to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. But then another voice came on. It was harsh and cold.

MANICKAM: But then I hear that he grabbed a microphone and said, “This is not a talk, we win the war.”

There would be no negotiations.

Huddled in their house, the Manickams didn’t know that within an hour of entering Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge troops started looting shops and rampaging through the markets. They stopped traffic and commandeered vehicles.

Around 9 a.m. the Khmer Rouge started clearing the city. They went into businesses, markets, houses, apartments, orphanages, clinics, and temples. Any place people lived or worked. They forced the people into the street and told them to start walking.

To leave the city.

The book, Murder of a Gentle Land, tells how the Khmer Rouge stormed into Phnom Penh’s largest hospital. They shouted, “Out! Everybody out! Get out!” At gunpoint the communists forced the doctors and nurses and every last patient into the streets. Hundreds of them and regardless of condition or consciousness. Relatives pushed the beds of patients unable to walk, holding up bottles dripping plasma.

They limped and staggered into the street where the temperature topped 100 degrees. The book describes how a man carried his adult son whose legs had been amputated, leaving bloody stumps. The son was screaming, “You can’t leave me like this! Kill me! Please kill me!”

A couple of Khmer Rouge guerrillas burst into the operating room of surgeon Haing Ngor that morning. He had just started operating on a Republican soldier, he wrote in Survival in the Killing Fields. But he and his medical team fled the clinic. He told ABC News in 1989

HAING NGOR: I feel very sorry that left one patient behind and that patient died.

REPORTER: But there was no other way?

NGOR: No. Because if I stayed there and finished my job, I could not believe that the Khmer Rouge did not kill me.

Father François Ponchaud, a Catholic missionary, saw the “hallucinatory spectacle” of wounded patients forced into the streets.

PONCHAUD: [Speaking in French]

Here he’s telling an interviewer in 2009 that the Khmer Rouge, “just looking at me sent shivers down my spine and scared me so.” He described in his memoir, Cambodia: Year Zero, seeing one man who had bloody stumps instead of hands and feet dragging himself along. A father carried his daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling.

Refugees later reported seeing Communist soldiers invade homes for invalids. And then hearing shots as they murdered patients in their beds and chairs.

The Khmer Rouge swept across the city. Sometimes they were polite and sometimes they screamed. But they always got their way because they shot or bayoneted anybody who refused.

The euphoria was gone by midmorning. By sunset fear covered the streets like canal water on a rice field. Democratic Kampuchea had arrived.

The next morning the Khmer Rouge were back. This time they knocked on the Manickams’ door. The Americans are going to bomb the city in three days, they said. You must leave the city. Take only what you need for three days.

So the family started packing up. Radha began piling some stuff onto one of their motorcycles. Appa (that’s the Tamil word for Dad) just looked at him sadly.

MANICKAM: My dad said no, don't take it because you're not going to be able to use it at all.

SILLARS: Did you believe them? When they said, “Yeah, you can come back in three days”?

MANICKAM: I think a lot of people believe them. For our family, my dad said, “We're not going to come back. Just take whatever you can and go.” So we left everything back at the house, including money. He said, “You're not going to use money.”

They filled three suitcases. Each of the older children carried a bag.

Appa was a big man by Asian standards and by then badly arthritic. He took his canes and one of his Sanyo radios. He also ensured that two of his most important family idols had been carefully packed. Amma (Mom) was seven months pregnant. She had the youngest daughter, Lakshmi, by the hand.

They set off down the street, Appa hobbling on his canes.

They joined a group of other glum-looking city-dwellers. Some had packed their belongings into small cars and were pushing them along. Their street trickled into a tributary that joined larger and larger rivers of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of people.

MANICKAM: When we get to the main street, that people all over the place, you know, we don't know where they're coming from. It's like a wave of ants crawling on the street.

For about the next ten days the Manickams shuffled along the main streets with Phnom Penh’s two million other residents. The roads were packed. Khmer Rouge soldiers lined the streets, prodding them along. The stench was unbelievable. It was brutally hot and corpses were all over.

MANICKAM: I think mostly smell rotten body on the street.

The soldiers let nobody leave the street, even to relieve themselves. So people just defecated on the roads.

MANICKAM: And also people dump, you know, alongside the street, it has no bathroom. And it's hard to bear. Especially for people from the city.

Nobody had enough water so people were drinking whatever they could find. In barrels. Even puddles. Within a few days dysentery and other intestinal diseases were roaring through the crowds. The smell got worse. Nobody talked much, but many were wailing softly.

MANICKAM: Well, it's all sad. Because people lost their family. … And it keeps pushing by the Khmer Rouge, young soldier, to keep moving. Even if you just sit down for a few minutes and they come and they push you again.

One night Radha lay on his back and wondered what the point was. Were the Americans really going to bomb the city? Or was this just some sort of trick? If so, what was the point?

He’d soon realize that it was definitely a trick.

Eventually the Manickams entered the countryside south of Phnom Penh. The crowds had thinned as many of the city-folk found farm families or villages to take them in. That was what the Khmer Rouge intended; that the city folk would settle into the rural communities and form “cooperatives.”

The Manickams found a family willing to let them stay under their hut in a village called Prek Long. Soon some local Khmer Rouge officials stopped by to see which of the “New People” could work in the fields.

Radha had heard the term “New People.” They were those who had lived in cities and now been driven into the countryside. But more than that. They had resisted the revolution. They were enemies. Businessmen, landlords, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, teachers. Those with soft hands, whose thinking had been tainted by Western ideas.

Poor farmers, peasants, and others who had supported the Khmer Rouge were the virtuous country folk. “Old People.” If they’d been enthusiastic enough about the revolution or fought in the war, they might be permitted to join Angka. Get a bit of extra food or freedom.

But in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, New People were forever tainted by their capitalist backgrounds. They were just slave labor and, once they were unable to work, “parasitic plants,” as one saying put it. Cadres enjoyed taunting New People with a saying, roughly translated: “Keeping you is no gain, losing you is no loss.” The Khmer Rouge planned to squeeze every bit of labor from them. And then if they died, they died.

But all that wasn’t obvious at first. So when Radha and his sister Indira were assigned to New People work teams, they showed up at sunrise. Headed over with their group to nearby fields. Radha didn’t see why they had to dig up the field with hoes.

MANICKAM: At the time, they don't want to use the ox or also in our tractor to plow, so they want people to use their hoes.

Radha had never before worked in a field. He found it hot, tiring, and very frustrating.

He and Indira came home one evening in May to some grim news. Lakshmi had developed a terrible fever.

MANICKAM: My sister, younger sister Lakshmi was ill. I think it's probably typhoid, but we don't know.

The previously cheerful, sunny little girl lay on a bed under their host family’s hut. Her tiny body was burning.

MANICKAM: She kind of delirious you know, talking to herself and screaming and stuff like that. …

As Radha watched, she broke into convulsions. Then she calmed down and closed her eyes. She seemed to fade, and sink, and settle.

MANICKAM: And then the next morning, she passed away

The family dissolved into tears. Lakshmi had been Radha’s favorite. Back in Phnom Penh she would run to him and clamp onto his calf like a barnacle. Giggling while he walked around and pretended to try to shake her off his foot. How could God allow this? he thought.

Appa went to sit in front of the hut, his canes beside him. His head drooped, and the temperature dropped. He stayed there all night. As the sky lightened in the east, Radha came outside. “Appa,” he said. “Appa, please.” No response.

That morning Amma and Grandma wrapped Lakshmi in some fine cloth they had brought. The family carried her gently out to a corner of a rice field and buried her there.

When Radha came back to the hut, Appa was still sitting there. By late morning he still hadn’t spoken. Had hardly moved.

Finally Appa struggled to his feet and limped into their sleeping area. He dug through a suitcase.

MANICKAM: He has two Hindu gods with him that he carried from home, because my dad come from a Brahmin caste. And Hindu religion is very important to him.

He put the idols in a bag and started down the path to the Bassac River. Amma watched him with anxious eyes. Then she whispered to Radha, “Go with him!”

Radha followed quietly as Appa hobbled along on his canes, carrying his bag. Appa’s jaw was clenched.

MANICKAM: So he took it with him to the river, and then he go into river.

One of the idols was Genesha, a son of Shiva with the head of an elephant. The god of success, one who removes obstacles. The other was Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu. She was the embodiment of beauty. The goddess of wealth and prosperity. She protected her worshipers from misery.

MANICKAM: He was angry because Lakshmi has passed away. This Lakshmi didn't have that luxury. And at the time, I was scared, I thought, my dad is gonna kill himself in the river.

Standing in the water, Appa reached into his bag. Took out the idols. And threw them into the river.

Radha was stunned. Appa turned around and saw his son, the Christian. But neither said anything. Radha helped his father up the riverbank. Then Appa took his canes and labored back to the house.

MANICKAM: You know, by saying, I asked you to help my child, but you didn't help my child. So I don't believe in you anymore. … And then that night, we sit all night. You know, I think that he feels sad that he lost his first child.

In May, a few weeks later, the Manickams heard that the Khmer Rouge had invited all “foreigners” to register at a particular temple. It was not far from the edge of Phnom Penh. Those who did could leave Cambodia. The Manickams thought that might be their way out.

The next morning the Manickams got up well before dawn. There were 10 in their party: Grandma, Appa, Amma, Radha and the five remaining children, as well as a cousin. They slipped out of their settlement and headed back north. By now the crowds were gone. The Khmer Rouge soldiers just stood and watched them pass. A few bodies still littered on the roadside.

At the temple some Khmer Rouge had set up a table under a big tree. Radha and his father explained that they were Indian citizens and they wanted to return to India. The officers listened politely. The Manickams were clearly Indian, plus they had their passports.

The officers said, tomorrow we’ll take you back to Phnom Penh. From there you can leave the country. Sleep here tonight on the grounds. We’ll keep your passports, they added.

Radha and his father paused. This was unsettling, but they had no choice. They slowly turned and went back to their camp.

The next morning the Manickams were loaded onto a truck and taken back into Phnom Penh. They spent a night at a villa that had been the American embassy.

But then, instead of being taken to the border, they were trucked to yet another cooperative known as “Water Buffalo Island.” They stayed there several weeks. There Amma gave birth to a son, Murugan.

Also, Radha caught malaria. One day he woke up chilled and shaking, asking for blankets. He fell into convulsions and Appa had to hold him down to keep him on his mat. After an hour or so of chills, a fever set in. He was sick for weeks.

MANICKAM: So for two months, I couldn't eat, I couldn't do anything, I couldn't walk. Because for two months, no food in my stomach. … All I can take is just water.

In early June some cadres announced that everybody in the village was going to Battambang Province in northwestern Cambodia. Battambang produced most of the country’s rice. It was, and still is, the country’s most fertile region.

It was the beginning of a massive forced migration. Starting in the summer of 1975 the Khmer Rouge sent about 1.8 million people to live in a region whose population had been 900,000.

The Manickams protested, mildly, that they had been told they could go home. To India. Oh, we are sending you home, they were told. We’re sending you northwest toward Thailand.

MANICKAM: They said now you can go to your country with the rest of the other people that go, you know, heading the same direction.

Go with the rest of the village now and you’ll be able to continue on to Thailand. They added that anybody who was sick or couldn’t walk could stay behind.

MANICKAM: You can leave here for a while, and we take care of them, send them back later to you.

The Manickams didn’t believe them. Appa knew that if the family was split up, they’d never get back together. That night Radha prayed desperately for strength. And the next morning he got himself down to the Mekong River with his family.

Soldiers herded the hundreds of villagers onto several big boats. After a few hours’ ride, they left the boats and were packed onto a convoy of troop carriers.

Before they got on the trucks the soldiers were searching bags. As they waited, Appa asked Radha if he still had his Bible. Radha felt sick. He did. It was red and heavy, with the edges of the pages painted gold.

MANICKAM: And then all he said is, you're going to kill the family.

But Radha prayed, and the soldiers somehow overlooked the Bible.

On the trucks there was no room to sit down. And it smelled awful. Radha saw along the side of the road bodies of people who had apparently died on earlier convoys and been tossed out the back of the moving trucks.

That night they unloaded at a village beside some rail tracks in Pursat Province. Rice fields, scraggly bush, and thinning forest stretched in every direction. They stayed in some empty huts.

At six o’clock the next morning everyone stood waiting beside the tracks. Each Manickam had a sack. Some clothes, maybe a pot or cooking tools, plus some rice or other food.

The train didn’t actually stop. It just slowed down and people had to hustle to jump on. Radha didn’t think his dad was going to make it.

MANICKAM: The train that we were on, it’s slow enough that my dad can grab and I push him up and then get everyone on that train.

Appa first, then Grandma and Amma, carrying two-month-old Murugan, and the rest of his siblings.

The cattle car was stinky and steamy, jammed with people all huddled over their belongings.

Radha clung to the doorway and watched the countryside edge past. It felt painfully slow. The train clacked past fields and endless rice paddies and canals.

Water was everywhere. In the wet season beginning in late spring, the Tonle Sap, the country’s largest lake and river system, gets so full that it reverses direction and floods thousands of acres of countryside around the lake. Over the centuries the annual flooding has made the Tonle Sap area one of the most fertile in southeast Asia.

MANICKAM: So we get to the the mountain area, the young soldier came and force everyone off the train. …

It made no sense. They had not yet reached Battambang, let alone the Thai border. Radha hurried his family out of the car and they all stood under the hot sun.

A Khmer Rouge officer addressed the crowd. You have three days to settle yourselves, he shouted. Three days to build shelters for yourselves and your families. This is where Angka needs you. Go up there, he told them, pointing west at the forest covering the mountainside a mile away. Build your shelters up there. From now on you will serve the Glorious Revolution.

He turned to walk away.

Radha and Appa listened, merely confused at first, and then shock set in. There must be some mistake, he told his father. Radha hurried after the officer.

MANICKAM: So I tried to tell them that not, are we supposed to be on this train to the border.

“No!” the officer barked at him. “Nobody goes further than this point!”

Radha was stunned. But what could he do? So the Manickams picked up their sacks and trudged along the path toward the mountainside. They joined the scraggly line of city dwellers heading west. Radha watched the Khmer Rouge screaming and kicking at the tired, frightened people to rush them along. He kept urging his father and siblings to hurry.

New People who stumbled often dropped their sacks. Before they could pick them up the soldiers would shove them down the trail. Old People would come along behind, collect the sacks, and toss them into one of their carts. It was another Khmer Rouge strategy for separating the New People from their capitalist pots and watches and spare shirts.

The Manickams hung onto their sacks and kept moving. After an hour they arrived at the mountainside and struggled a few hundred feet up and into the forest. This was to be the site of their new village. Phnom Tippedai.

The New People got to work on their shelters. They were city folk so tasks like building a small hut that would have been easy for a farmer took them hours. A few people had axes or knives they were willing to share. They dug post holes with sharpened sticks. They filled in the frames by thatching leaves and branches together. They smoothed floors and piled thatch together for beds. Slowly the structures took shape.

That evening the Khmer Rouge handed out to each family a few cans of “rice dust.”

MANICKAM: Kantouk.

Kantouk is what you have left after you grind brown rice into white rice. No self-respecting farmer would eat it. Grandma mixed the rice dust with a bit of salt and water. Then baked little kantouk cakes in the fire. The family sat around their fire next to an unfinished hut and choked them down.

MANICKAM: And then I saw my dad is kind of sad and kind of crying. For me too, because they feed this to animal to pigs and ducks. … but now they feed it to people.

I’m Les Sillars, and I wrote and produced this episode of Doubletake. It’s the first in a three part series about Radha Manickam and his family called “Intended for Evil.” It’s based on my book of the same name. It’s available online, either in print or as an audiobook.

Next time, on Doubletake.

MANICKAM: When the day lights up. You're scared all the time. And during that first year, the Khmer Rouge still have guns to carry around watching you working. So it is hard to see if you are next or they call you in the middle of the night. You the next person that they call. You don't know. So you live in fear. Sleep in fear. Work in fear.

Thanks for listening. I hope that you’ll follow us on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to rate and review us. We’d love to hear your reaction, so please, email a note to us or send us a recording at editor@wng.org.

We’ll see you next time.

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