Intended for Evil: Episode 2

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

Last week we introduced you to Radha Manickam. He was born and raised in Cambodia. His family had immigrated there from India. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge defeated the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic after a five-year civil war.

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.

He was 22 years old.

On that day Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. They forced at gunpoint every single resident of every single Cambodian city into the streets, and then into the countryside.

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.

Thousands of people died. Many were shot. Others died on the street from the heat or infections.

Radha’s family was first pushed into the countryside south of Phnom Penh. After a few months they were among the 1.8 million people shipped to northwest Cambodia in the summer and fall of 1975. The region of Battambang. They were supposed to grow rice. Lots and lots of rice.

When we left the Manickams last episode, they and hundreds of others had just been dumped off a train near a forested mountainside. They were told to build huts there to make a new village. Phnom Tippedai.

It was one of thousands of new villages the Khmer Rouge set up in the first months of the regime. Pol Pot’s goal was to create a new society that was purely socialist and purely Khmer. Governed by a revolutionary organization called “Angka.”

When the Khmer Rouge took over, first they tried to crush the old society. Completely. That was the point of emptying the cities. Pol Pot thought that would destabilize society, eliminate private property, and wipe out everything: religion, free markets, schools, sports, legislatures. Not to mention traditional ideas of morality, sexuality, and family.

And then out of the ruins of Cambodian society the Khmer Rouge intended to create an agrarian utopia. Made up of villages like Phnom Tippedai. Ruled by Angka.

Tens of thousands of people died in those first few months. The Manickams barely survived the evacuation of Phnom Penh. But they hadn’t seen anything yet. Angka was just getting started.

That first evening after the Manickams arrived at the mountainside, they heard a Khmer Rouge cadre banging on the steel rim of a car wheel. He was summoning the village to a propaganda meeting. His name was Phan. He was a tall, harsh, lean man in his forties. He had an AK-47.

The New People gathered at the center of the village. A fire was burning. They sat down on the ground in rows of 10 as instructed. Phan stepped forward.

MANICKAM: And then most of the people sat … listening to his propaganda about how great Angka is. …

Angka had permitted them to help build the new society, Phan said.

MANICKAM: Now started out, you might work hard to work hard to earn, you know, your food. And then when you produce a lot of food, then Angka gives you more than enough.

They were all equal now, Phan said. If you think you are someone special because you used to drive a car and eat in fancy restaurants, you are not. One water buffalo to plow a field is worth 50 of you New People.

Everybody must work very hard, and they must be patient. The Glorious Revolution is still new so there might not be much food now. But one day they will have all the rice and fish and fruit they could eat, and more! But they must bear with Angka during this temporary shortage.

Meanwhile those who worked hard would eat. Those who did not work would not eat. Phan then introduced Angka’s rules. Radha would hear the same themes repeated endlessly over the years. They had a depressing similarity:

There is no private property. Everything belongs to Angka. If you are caught stealing from Angka, you will be crushed.

Just a note here: “Crushed” doesn’t quite do justice to the Khmer word translated here: “kamtech.”

MANICKAM: Kamtech is smash or crush.

It means to destroy completely; to reduce to dust and then wipe away the traces.

The officer went on. If you lie to Angka, you will be crushed.

If you are lazy and live off the work of others, you have betrayed Angka. If you try to fake illness to avoid work, you will be crushed.

Angka will provide for all your needs. If you try to gather your own food apart from what Angka gives you, you will be crushed.

The list was punctuated by warnings not to do anything stupid because “Angka has eyes like a pineapple.”

MANICKAM: So, you know, like two, three hours, he kept repeating himself. And a lot of people kind of doze off because it's late in the night and exhausted. Not enough food to eat, you know, empty stomach. Mosquito everywhere …

Now, continued the officer, we are free! And we are all equal! Free from your cars and fancy clothes and gold and books. Free from your worthless schooling and temples and businesses. Do not think of such things. You are happy here. Comrade, you are very free.

These propaganda meetings happened nightly for most of the next three years. In Marxist terms, the point was to raise the people’s “revolutionary consciousness.” Khmer Rouge doctrine held that Angka was infallible and revolutionary consciousness was the most important factor in any human context. George Orwell explained this in 1984. As Big Brother put it, for the true communist revolutionary, reality is not something objective and external. Rather, reality exists only in the human mind. Quote: “Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

And in Cambodia in 1975, Angka was the Party. Pol Pot intended to turn his brand of socialism into Cambodia’s national religion. Enforced by Angka with the legalism of Pharisees and pretensions to the omniscience of Big Brother.

Pol Pot thought that human nature has no limits. That it is infinitely malleable. He thought that with enough force he could create the “new socialist man.” So the Khmer Rouge planned to “restructure” the individual completely and force society into new, collectivist patterns.

Of course, Radha didn’t understand all this on that first night. As the darkness deepened, Radha peered at Phan in the firelight. Swatted at mosquitoes. A Cambodian proverb came to his mind: The dry gourd is sinking, and the clay pot is floating. A rough English equivalent: The world is turning upside-down.

At the time, Radha thought it was all ridiculous.

When the indoctrination meeting was over, the officer shouted, “Long live the Revolution!” three times. The New People echoed it back to him, copying his salute of a raised fist thrust into the air. Then, “We are committed to obeying!” Then, “Long live Angka of the Revolution of Kampuchea!”

Then they all headed to their makeshift beds under the trees. Their huts hadn’t been finished yet.

The next morning before sunrise, Radha was assigned to a group of 10 other men. They set off south through the forest in single file toward the rice fields.

They saw groups of Old People busy planting rice as their families had for generations. Rows of New People in colorful city clothes were sloshing through the fields. Young Khmer Rouge soldiers, carrying assault rifles, sauntered atop the dikes.

For the first time Radha felt like a prisoner. Until now the work had been fairly light and the work sites hadn’t been guarded. But at the edge of the rice paddy he realized: this was a prison camp.

Get to work, a soldier said. He pointed out the water-covered fields. Make sure you plant correctly, he said. Do not betray the Revolution. The implication was clear: do it right, or we’ll kill you.

Radha was desperate.

MANICKAM: At first, I don't know what to do with it. Because I have no clue how to do anything, you know, farming, because I'm from the city.

He began to pray like he had never prayed before—that God would show him what to do. So Radha stepped into the seed bed along with the others in his group, bent down, and began to work. The sun was just coming up.

He peeked at the Old People working nearby and tried to copy their motions. Rice farmers plant seeds close together in beds that are much smaller than fields. That way they can more easily manage the weeds and water levels. After about a month, the farmers pull the stems, about five to seven inches long at that point, gently out of the muddy beds. Then they transplant them into flooded paddies where they have more room to grow.

It was then the transplanting season. Radha bent over and started tugging out plants. He cleaned off the roots, then wrapped up the stems in bunches and tied them to one end of a bamboo pole.

But there was a problem.

MANICKAM: For me, grass and rice … look the same. …

At first he couldn’t tell the difference between the rice stems growing out of the beds and the blades of grass growing up between them.

MANICKAM: I pull everything in front of me until some people that know about rice that come close to me and they kind of whispered in my ear said this is grass, you're not supposed to pull it, this is rice, you're supposed to pull it.

He knew he wasn’t going fast enough. The only water he had to drink was from the rice field or canal. It was hot and he had no hat.

Then he looked behind him and saw his rice stems starting to float to the surface. There’s a technique to planting rice, and Radha wasn’t doing it right.

SILLARS: Did you suspect that we have one of the guards sees this and they're gonna come over and just like, take you away and either beat you or maybe even shoot you?

MANICKAM: Yeah. Because in the meeting, also mentioned about it, we waste stuff. We don't do it right. We destroy the community property. It's subject to be crushed. Because you'll be betraying a revolution.

To plant rice, you bend from the waist; hold the stem in three fingers; push the roots into the mud with your thumb; and then tamp down the hole with your forefinger. It should take just a couple of seconds to pick a stem from your bunch and plant it, forming nice regular rows. Plant three or four in front of you, step backward, plant three or four, step backward.

MANICKAM: And then people that saw me they kind of afraid I'm gonna be in big trouble. They ran over and kind of helped me out. … So that's how I learned how to do it. It took me a long time how to how to do that. …

Sometimes he cut his fingers on the grass, and the dirty water stung his cuts.

SILLARS: Then you were slow too.

MANICKAM: Yes, very slow.

After a back-breaking day of work, they headed back to the village in single file. Radha lined up with the others to receive the ration for his family of 10: three 14-ounce condensed milk cans filled with rice dust—kantouk. That was the whole family’s ration for the next several days.

Radha spent the first week or so in the rice paddies.

MANICKAM: And then they begin to send you away from home. They separate brother from sister.

He and Indira were sent to separate youth work crews a few miles away. To build canals and roads. Radha’s group was given long-bladed hoes resembling mattocks. The kind used by Indochinese farmers for centuries, and woven baskets to carry dirt.

AUDIO: [Khmer Rouge propaganda film]

Each member of the team had to build a section of dike three feet square and three feet high each day. They worked in pairs. One would lift the dirt into a basket with the hoe. Another would haul it to the top of the dike and dump it.

Radha didn’t know how to hold a hoe. He grasped it tightly and soon had massive blisters all over his hands. He soon realized that you loosen your grip when you swing so that doesn’t happen.

Radha was part of a massive construction effort going on all over Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge were expanding the system of canals and dikes to water new rice fields. They also attempted bridges, roads, and some buildings. Humans handled most of the hard labor instead of heavy equipment.

Khmer Rouge propaganda films show thousands and thousands of energetic comrades hustling up and down dikes and canals. They have poles slung across their shoulders with a wicker basket full of dirt hanging from each end. This film shows comrades covering the hillside like ants. In loops stretching off into the distance. The workers load their baskets with dirt at one site, cross the river, then dump the baskets onto a slowly-extending peninsula. Then they turn around and rush back for more.

For Radha, life on a road building crew was very different. It was brutally hard, all day, every day. It was hot so you couldn’t work too fast, but you couldn’t stop, either. Time dragged like a plow behind a water buffalo in an endless rice paddy.

For a bunch of city folk this kind of manual labor was quite a shock. It was dangerous to slack off. And you had to finish your section or you didn’t go back to camp to eat, so you might as well just get it done. So, that’s what Radha did.

The Khmers Rouge didn’t want him to think about his previous life. Well, right then he didn’t want to think about it, either. He swung the hoe, scooped dirt, swung the hoe, scooped dirt. His hands stung like crazy during those first few days. But eventually it was evening and then morning, evening and then morning, day after day after day.

After a few weeks Radha heard that his Grandmother had become ill and died. By the time he got permission for a visit to Phnom Tippedei she’d been cremated. All he could do was stand at the edge of a pit and look at her remains.

In those first months one of Radha’s supervisors was a man named Leap. He could be vicious and capricious one minute and an arm-around-the-shoulder confidant the next. He teased Radha mercilessly and often yanked hard on his beard. Radha could only laugh. He burned inside, but outwardly it was, “Yes, comrade. Onward with the Revolution, comrade.”

During harvest time that first year, maybe December of 1975, Leap stepped to the front during a nightly indoctrination meeting. About a hundred workers were lined up in rows in the firelight. Radha was near the front.

MANICKAM: So they said that we learned that one person in the crowd betraying the Community Trust. Betraying Angka. We gonna have a judgement today, tonight.

Then Leap and Moha took their flashlights and began strolling up and down the rows, shining the beams onto the comrades’ faces, one at a time. Radha could hear Leap and Moha behind him. They grabbed one of the workers and hauled him roughly toward the fire.

MANICKAM: And they said, This guy steal rice from the field, and cook. So what are we gonna do with him? Since they already tell us you know what to do already. So everyone had to say, “Crush.”

Leap and Moha dragged the terrified worker to a tree. They tied his hands together in front and then to the tree above his head.

Radha could feel his heart pounding. Leap picked up a rifle and poked at the guy’s bare torso with the bayonet.

And we’re going to pause the story right here. Radha remembers what happened next in vivid, and I mean vivid, detail. But we’ll just say that Leap and Moha tortured the guy. Performed an ancient Khmer battlefield ritual involving his liver. Things a city-boy like Radha had never heard of. Things he couldn’t unsee.

MANICKAM: I was frozen. I couldn't watch it anymore.

He didn’t dare put his head between his knees. Leap might think he didn’t approve of butchering traitors to the Revolution. So he tried to look down but not be obvious about it.

MANICKAM: So it kind of halfway down. I'm just gonna see a little bit of what's going on.

Radha knew the worker was screaming the whole time. But for him the world went strangely silent.

MANICKAM: And in my mind, I keep praying. I said, Lord, make this over. Get it over.

Finally Leap just killed the guy. And they did all this in the firelight. Right in front of the workers all lined up. As an object lesson.

MANICKAM: To show them that this is the power of the Revolution.

This was the first and most vicious of a handful of murders Radha witnessed over the next four years. The threat of violence was always there. He saw cadres beat people with bamboo poles. He saw a squad of youths attack a guy cooking unauthorized rice, leaving him bloody on the ground and missing an eye. Soldiers could come at any time of day or night and haul away your co-workers or your neighbors. And you’d never see them again.

When the Khmer Rouge first took over, Radha prayed every night that the Lord would let him live to see the next day. But after witnessing that first execution, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

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 they call. You don't know. So you live in fear. Sleep in fear. Work in fear.

That’s how Radha lived during most of the Khmer Rouge regime. In fear. Over the next few years he was assigned to crews that lived in cooperatives in various parts of the northwest. On road crews and field crews. He learned to plow behind water buffalo. He cleared mountainsides and sawed timber. Occasionally he was allowed to visit the villages where his parents and younger siblings were living.

But one thing was even more pervasive than the fear and violence: hunger. From the beginning, it gnawed at his insides. At everybody’s insides. Except the Khmer Rouge cadres, of course. And their families.

The work crews ate in communal dining halls called “cuisines.” The food was terrible. The luckiest comrades got a piece of vegetable or a bite of fish in their watery rice porridge, seasoned with fish paste. The kitchen workers often used dirty water from shallow canals, especially in the fall dry season. Radha often tasted grit in the soup.

So the workers were always hungry. They joked with a weary gallows humor that they ate anything that moved. But it was little short of the truth. Radha saw people eating leeches and earthworms. At different times Radha himself ate bark and leather.

They did this secretly because Angka had forbidden the workers from finding their own food. Soldiers used to search the workers before meals. One day someone found a crab out in the rice paddy and sneaked it into the cuisine.

MANICKAM: So before they pour the porridge into that bowl, he put the crab in first so it can be cooked.

Cooked in the hot water of the porridge. But the cooks saw the crab. The soldiers dragged the guy outside.

MANICKAM: So they took away his food and they doubled his workload. So we learned that not to let them know that we have extra food

So the unspoken rule was: you find it in the field, you eat it in the field.

Sometimes Radha tried to fill his empty stomach with water. One day during a break he sat near a pond.

MANICKAM: So I was so hungry, I pray, I say Lord, I’m really hungry, and I saw this snail I don't know. Probably an old snail, somehow was really big. It's like the size of a bowl … kind of floating toward me.

He grabbed it and wandered over to a nearby fire pit. He squatted down and slid the snail in among the coals. After a while he pulled it out. Took a big bite.

SILLARS: Well, how’d it taste?

MANICKAM: Very good. We're gonna get no salt not thing but still good. Yeah, I feel my stomach.

Another time while plowing he saw a huge frog on a dike. He had the stick he used to guide the water buffalo.

MANICKAM: I just close my eye and throw it and just punched through the, the side of that frog and stick to the dike.

He cooked and ate that frog secretly, too.

Comrades who found their own food were just ungrateful, according to Angka. It implied criticism. Distrust of Angka’s provision.

Angka, however, wasn’t providing much.

Pol Pot and his inner circle knew next to nothing about farming or building canals or running a country. Or much of anything except Marxist ideology.

Cambodia was a poor country but fertile. Before the Khmer Rouge, farmers harvested lots of rice, fish, fruit and vegetables. Few people were rich, but few went hungry. When the Khmer Rouge arrived, food shortages began almost immediately and soon got worse. Crops failed. Canals malfunctioned. Trade with the outside world ceased. The country avoided collapse only because of aid from China, the Khmer Rouge’s one international ally.

So in August of 1976 the regime came up with a “Four Year Plan.” It called for the comrades to achieve victory over the rice paddies by planting two, three, or even more crops per year. No paddies had ever produced so much rice. But the Khmer Rouge thought that the “super great leap forward” was possible if the farmers had proper “revolutionary consciousness.”

When local Khmer Rouge officials realized how much rice they’d need to meet their quotas, many cut workers’ rations back to almost nothing. But they told Phnom Penh that the crops were on schedule. They falsified their reports to save their own lives, and starved their workers in the process.

The sham couldn’t go on long. By the end of 1976 the Central Committee realized that things were falling apart. Pol Pot concluded that the problem must be traitors, spies, and capitalist counter-revolutionaries who had sabotaged the rice harvest. He transferred corps of his most vicious and loyal cadres and soldiers from the eastern and southwestern provinces into the northern regions.

In Radha’s region, beginning in late 1976 the new cadres doubled down on the New People to get it all done.

MANICKAM: And that's when we start working 21 hours a day.

The gong rang at 3 a. m. Radha’s crew of water buffalo plowmen spent their first hours in darkness replanting rice stems. Then they plowed all day. After the evening bowl of rice gruel they went back out to pull and bundle more rice stems for transplanting. They worked by firelight until midnight. Three hours later they were up again.

Radha believed by then that the Khmer Rouge were deliberately working the New People to death. He weighed less than 90 pounds. He felt like a ghost. His eyes were sunk deeply into his head, dark caverns looking out into the world. He found it hard even to walk and was covered in lice. They came out at night and woke Radha with their bites. They were hard to kill. Even though he knew it was pointless, he used to pick a few out of his clothes, place them on a rock, and crush them with an axe.

In the midst of this, December 1976, Radha got permission to visit his parents in their village, Kok Porn. He hiked all day, arriving in late afternoon. So many people had died that the place looked like a ghost town. He stopped in front of his family’s hut and a scrawny, misshapen girl came out.

She was pale and nearly bald from malnutrition.

MANICKAM: So she crawled out like a little kid on the ground and she couldn't stand.

The girl struggled forward and grabbed his hand. “Brother,” she croaked. He looked down. The apparition spoke again: “I am Indira.”

His sister. She had faked an illness to stay with her parents and look after them. But the once pretty, healthy young woman now couldn’t even walk. He just stood there, sobbing.

His mother soon heard that her son was back. She hurried home from the rice fields. And she had even worse news for him. They went inside the hut and began to talk, and to weep.

Just days before Radha arrived, Amma and Appa had traded for food a pair of emerald rings. Family heirlooms they had kept hidden. Each ring had a five-carat stone. As they passed down from generation to generation they had darkened to a rich, deep green. They exchanged Amma’s ring for a few field rats. For Appa’s they got some 14-ounce cans of rice.

They never got a chance to eat them. Until the fall of 1976 families could still eat together in their huts. Then the Central Committee announced that even families eating together in their own hut was a “capitalist framework.” It undermined the “revolutionary spirit.”

So the Central Committee ordered everyone in the villages to eat all meals in the communal dining halls. All food in every village was to be collected in the collectivist kitchen. Cooked in collectivist pots. And distributed in the collectivist “cuisines.”

MANICKAM: Because everything is now community. You can’t cook yourself. You can’t do anything.

Each comrade could keep one spoon.

Soldiers went hut-to-hut confiscating whatever food they could find. The soldiers arrived at the Manickam hut on the very day Amma was cooking the rice and rats for which they had just traded their emerald rings.

Cadres seized their food, their pots, the food in their pots, and everything else edible.

“Give me some rice!” cried Appa as the cadres were walking out with the food. He was by then just bones, crippled with arthritis. But they ignored him and went on to the next hut.

Appa could take no more.

MANICKAM: Radha: His heart is broken, because he used to have everything. And now he sleep on the dirt ground. His children die one by one.

He died a few days after.

Amma also told Radha how his two youngest sisters had also died of illness and starvation: Annapoorani, 6, and Dhanam, 13, as well as his brother Murugan, just one year old. Ravy, the second oldest brother, was away working in the fields. The other brother, Selvem, who was 8, was out with a children’s crew.

A short while after going back to his own crew, Radha heard that Selvem had been beaten to death.

MANICKAM: They accused him of too lazy.

As he absorbed all this over those days, Radha’s anger and frustration welled up. It was just too much. One night he just got so angry. Where was God in all this?

MANICKAM: I said, you know, why this is happening to me and I love you and I even betray my parents and following you and now my family does die one by one.

I believed in You, he raged. And now look at what You’ve done to my family. Why are you punishing me? He recalled 1 Corinthians 14:33, a familiar passage: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” The Khmer word for “disorder” is also the word for “war” or “confusion.” It helped him to feel connected to God once again, for a while. In those days, it seemed, he often argued with God.

MANICKAM: And then that night, also, I I pray that God will take me home, but he never did. The next morning, I get up and start all over again.

Next time, on Doubletake.

MUSIC: [This World is Not My Home]

MANICKAM: And then halfway through when it say I can’t go on anymore. I hear like a voice whispering in my ear said, I have a plan for your life. I don't know where I hear that. And it clearly in my ear. And then I said, Lord, if you have a plan for my life, and it is your voice, you should help me now.

I’m Les Sillars and I wrote and produced this episode. It’s based on my book, Intended for Evil. You can buy the complete story as an audiobook, or in print, at your favorite online retailer.

Thanks for listening. Again, we’d love to hear your comments on this or any episode. Email editor@wng.org. And please do follow, rate, and review us. It’s really important for helping other people find this show.

We’ll see you again soon.

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