Intended for Evil: Part III

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

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 if they call you in the middle of the night. You’re the next person that they call. You don’t know.

Last time we followed Radha Manickam through the first two years of the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. The communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh in April of 1975. It was the start of probably the most brutal government in modern history.

No other government has ever tried to exert such totalitarian control. Much Khmer Rouge ideology resembled key elements of Christianity turned inside out and upside down. Everywhere there were shadows of Biblical truth and practice. Love, worship, community, confession, transformation, unity, judgment, virtue, purity, equality. All hideously distorted under the Khmer Rouge so that they produced hate, fear, idolatry, division, and violence.

Leftist scholars used to split hairs over the extent to which Khmer Rouge ideology reflected classic Marxism. But the outlines are clear: it’s the philosophy of Mao executed with the speed and violence of Stalin, all shot through with xenophobia. It’s as if some alien intelligence distilled decades of totalitarianism from around the world into one monstrous system. And then unleashed it on a small, unsuspecting country.

That fall Radha and his family were among millions of Cambodians sent up to the northwest province to live in forced labor camps called “cooperatives.” He had to go out on work crews. Digging canals and plowing rice paddies behind water buffalo.

The Khmer Rouge’s revolutionary organization was called “Angka.” The soldiers and cadres were often merciless and brutal.

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

Famine and disease were raging through the land. In December of 1976 Radha went back to visit his mother. He learned that four of his six siblings and his father were dead.

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

And that was very nearly the last straw for Radha. A short time later he tried to commit suicide. By singing.

In January, 1977, Radha was living in a cooperative called Tuol Mateh. But on this night he and his crew were out sleeping with the water buffalo next to a rice paddy. He was 25 years old, and after three years under the Khmer Rouge he weighed around 90 pounds. It was raining.

His only covering was a thin blanket one yard square. In the darkness around him his fellow workers were trying to sleep. Spies were sneaking among the dikes. A verse came to Radha’s mind: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

Radha was so very weary. He didn’t think he could keep going. The cadres were driving the workers to do more and more work on less and less food. On a few scant hours of sleep per night. He saw no way out.

MANICKAM: I said, you know, God, take me home because I can go on anymore because less to eat and long to work a long time. And so that night I pray….

That God would take him home. End it. He waited and heard only water dripping off the bushes. Nothing happened.

MANICKAM: And then I said, Okay, if you're not going to take me home, I'm going to try to help you.

MUSIC: [“This World Is Not My Home”]

So he began to sing. In English.

Perhaps not as loudly he could but quite clearly about how …

MANICKAM: This world is not my home, I'm just passing through; My treasure I laid up somewhere beyond the blue; The angel beckon me from heaven’s open door; And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

It’s a country gospel tune he had learned at Maranatha Church in Phnom Penh. Soon after he became a Christian in 1973. He hummed it to himself in the fields while plodding behind the water buffalo, along with “Call for the Reapers” and “Bringing in the Sheaves.” “Power in the Blood” was one of his favorites.

MANICKAM: And then halfway through when I 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’s 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.

Just then a group of young soldiers stepped out of the darkness. They had been hanging around the communal kitchen under the tin roof and out of the rain. But they had gone for a walk, picking their way across the tops of the dikes. They heard the strange singing and headed over to investigate. Their leader was named Sal.

MANICKAM: So they came with guns, a young, about this high, 14 year old short guy, chubby. And he said, Comrade, what language are you singing?

Radha had expected this. He just had to say “English” and, ideally, Sal would just shoot him on the spot. Dump him in a shallow grave. Or beat him to death. He figured that God could hardly blame him. He’d endured a lot already.

But as Sal was speaking Radha heard the voice again. “I have a plan for your life,” it repeated. Radha didn’t really know what he was doing because he couldn’t think clearly. But he changed his mind.

MANICKAM: And I said, Oh is not a language or some word I throw together.

Sal bought the lie.

MANICKAM: So he said, Go to sleep, you need to get up early, go to work. And then I went back and then I slept through the night and I praise God that he kept me alive. But I'm not happy. Because I don't want to start three o'clock in the morning go into the water again.

But he did.

Some weeks later, in February of 1977, the youth brigade leaders pulled him in from the rice fields for a chat. “Comrade,” one said, “we want you to get married.”

Radha did not want to get married.

MANICKAM: At the time, you know, I wasn't favor in getting married at all, because I was skinny. And you know, Harley can walk my barely can walk myself.

He recalled from his days at church in Phnom Penh the words from 2 Corinthians 6: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.”

MANICKAM: I said, No, I don't want to get married. And he said, Well, it's not a request, it is an order for you to get married.

The Central Committee had realized by then that the Four Year Plan’s “super great leap forward” was in reality a leap into the abyss. Crops were failing. The country was near collapse. Pol Pot blamed spies and counter-revolutionaries. He also blamed the inferior New People, who were unable to work with true revolutionary consciousness. Besides, they were dying like flies out in the cooperatives. So Angka ordered a series of mass weddings across the country.

MANICKAM: So they want to match up young men and young women, you know, to be married, so they can have more children. The reason they want that, because they want to brainwash the children, because the children belong to the government, not to the parent.

Their children would be the next generation of the “new socialist man.” As one observer put it, if the only possible passion was revolutionary passion then matchmaking was Angka’s business.

Radha went back out to the field. He was pretty bitter. And he prayed.

MANICKAM: And I said, Lord, you know that I cannot marry a non Christian. If I married a non Christian, I wouldn't be a Christian any longer. And I gotta say, by the way, I lost 13 member of my family, so you should help me.

It wasn’t exactly that he would turn his back on God. More like God was turning his back on Radha.

SILLARS: Your understanding was that if a Christian marries a non Christian, and then they aren't a Christian anymore.

MANICKAM: That's right.

But there was nothing he could do.

MUSIC: [Khmer Rouge national anthem]

On April 16 Radha was one of seven young men gathered in the communal dining hall. Also there were the seven young women they were to marry. The ceremony would be the following day, the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.

The cadres got up and delivered the usual: be faithful to Angka, do not betray Angka, always be committed to Angka. Radha would later call it the Khmer Rouge version of pre-marital counseling.

But when the girl opposite Radha saw him, she refused the match. She was Old People. Loyal to Angka. So she could get away with it. The next day the leaders told Radha that his marriage was off.

MANICKAM: And I said, Oh, okay. I didn't even say thank the Lord, because it's kind of a relief for me because I don't want to get married.

A few weeks later there was another mass wedding. The village leaders set him up again.

MANICKAM: And then the second one, when she walked in, on the night before, she saw me, …

She actually shrieked and ran from the room.

MANICKAM: She said, I'm not gonna marry this dark skinned guy. I'm gonna marry somebody else.

This happened two more times that year. Once the girl was pulled out of line at the last minute and given to this ugly old soldier, probably as a reward for service. Another girl ran away the night before the wedding. And that was that for 1977.

In January, 1978, the cadres called him again. It was a year after he’d been called in the first time about getting married.

MANICKAM: They came again. They said, comrade this time if you don't get married, we're gonna give you a piece of land one meter by two meter, which I know it's my grave because it's been four times now.

He was to marry a girl named “Men.” All he knew about her was that she seemed quiet.

MANICKAM: So I went back to the Lord and I pray as the Lord this time you keep her there because my life depended on it.

The wedding was again set for April 17. The night before the wedding the leaders delivered the usual propaganda.

MANICKAM: So the next day, they line up, you know, 19 young men on one side and 19 woman on one side

The women did not have intricately-patterned gowns, jewelry, or make-up. Instead, they had Angka-approved hair and wore a gray blouse with a gray skirt. The men wore blue pajamas from North Korea.

MANICKAM: And then they walk in, they match us up, face each other. And then one came up and say, This is your husband, and this is your wife, you're now married.

The newlyweds all came up to the front. They pledged to Angka that they would serve Angka faithfully and raise lots of rice and loyal young revolutionaries. Those were their wedding vows. Radha and Men went through the motions. She was New People, too.

After the ceremony there was no dancing or singing or feasting. Radha, Men, and the other couples went out through the rice fields to a new village that had been built over the previous few weeks. He was 25, she was 23. They had one small backpack each.

It was a quiet walk.

Men’s actual name was Nget Samen, but in Khmer Rouge fashion her first name had been shortened to one syllable. She had lived through much the same thing as Radha and many, many other Cambodians. On the morning of April 17, 1975, she and her family had been herded into the streets. They stuffed some belongings and Grandfather into a small car and walked out of the city. They were New People.

SAMEN MANICKAM: And we saw the same thing. We saw the people die in the street …

They too ended up south of Phnom Penh to work in a village. There she lost the first member of her family. Her grandfather needed help to go to the bathroom. But one night he went out by himself because he didn’t want to disturb anybody. He made his way over to a nearby pond.

SAMEN MANICKAM: And now he fell down in the pond …

He got stuck in the mud, fell over, and drowned. They found him the next morning.

At the end of June, 1975, the Nget family was part of the massive transfer of New People from the southern part of Cambodia to Battambang in the northwest. To raise rice. Just like the Manickams. On the train from Pursat she saw teams of people, instead of water buffalo, pulling plows through the rice paddies.

Her father was appointed a group leader in their new village. That went badly. Some of the New People would refuse to send their young people out on the work crews. So Samen’s dad used to send his own children to make up the required number of workers. Like Radha, Samen also dug canals and dikes in the rain. Worked in fields. Starved.

Her mom would get so hungry she would faint.

SAMEN MANICKAM: People die every day. Cry every day. Some people cry.

In late 1975 her father died. He had been sick for a long time, unable to leave his bed even to relieve himself. Finally, one day he was delirious. Agitated. Waving his arms and looking around.

SAMEN MANICKAM: And my mom asked him what you see. … He just say I'm so happy. I'm so happy. Then he said like three words. And …

He said it three times: I’m so happy.

A short while later, he died.

The family was devastated. Samen’s mother slept with the corpse for three nights. How do you move on in that situation? And people had done much worse things with deceased relatives. One rumor told of a woman who was executed because she started to eat her husband’s corpse.

The family looked for someone to bury her father’s body. They offered their father’s clothes in exchange, but the comrades in the village insisted on rice.

SAMEN MANICKAM: They want rice, they don't want the clothes.

So they had to survive on even shorter rations than usual for several days.

Old People mourned openly when a loved one died; they wept and wailed and vented their grief. New People were denied that luxury. It displayed a loyalty outside Angka and that was forbidden. So at the grave the Ngets shed a few quiet tears and felt the sorrow building up inside them.

In early 1976 Samen and some siblings came inside one evening and found their mother on the floor of the hut. She too had been ill.

SAMEN MANICKAM: My mom pass away that night. …

As with their father, they tried to find somebody to bury her mom. She had wanted to be buried in some fine silk cloth she had somehow saved.

But the guy they found to dig the grave wanted to keep the silk cloth for himself. As payment. He finally agreed to bury her in the silk, but Samen was suspicious. She had heard of grave diggers who dig shallow graves then come back later to rob them.

SAMEN MANICKAM: I think that guy gonna do my mom like that too. The same way. Same way. Because he buried my mom not too deep.

RADHA MANICKAM: Shallow. In the shallow grave.

They didn’t ever go back to check.

Throughout this period she had been gradually losing track of her siblings. Some had been married at the time of the revolution and had tried to flee Cambodia with their spouses and children. She didn’t know where they were. A few had died.

And then Samen and her sister Samith were sent away to a different village, leaving her two youngest brothers behind. She arranged for a neighbor to look after them. But Samen knew she might never see them again.

A little later a Khmer Rouge officer in charge of her new village sent word that he wanted to marry Samen. She did not want to get married.

SAMEN MANICKAM: And one thing I say I don't want to get married my whole life.

She had never wanted to get married. Even before the Khmer Rouge took over. She’d seen lots of bad marriages back in Phnom Penh. It wasn’t for her.

So the officer walked by her hut every day for three days. Each day he sent a village leader in to renew the offer. It would have meant more food. A lot more food. Less danger. She declined each time.

SAMEN MANICKAM: I'm not too happy to marry.

It took ferocious courage, or maybe deep despair, to refuse the offer. She suspects also that the village leader just reported to the cadre that Samen was still thinking it over. Maybe she didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news.

But before the situation got really serious, everybody in the village was shipped off to a new location, including Samen and her sister. It was called Chromouk. She never heard from the cadre after that.

Chromouk brought its own set of problems. It was so short of food that Angka required the villagers to go out and forage for wild vegetables in the forests. Worse, after only about a week she heard that the family looking after her two younger brothers had moved. They took the boys with them. There was no way to track them down, and no point in going back to look.

Her family of 13 was down to her and her sister.

She had one change of clothes.

SAMEN MANICKAM: I look like a boy. So skinny and small.

A few months later, perhaps in June, 1977, Angka ordered that Chromouk merge with Tuol Mateh. That was where Radha was living.

The two sisters trudged over with everybody else and found a couple of spots in one of the long huts. She got to know a kindly older woman in her group, Heang. She began to regard her as a godmother.

Samen began in Tuol Mateh a long period of illness—that is, even more ill than was normal under the Khmer Rouge. When Angka started arranging marriages to build up the revolutionary strength of the people, her group leader kept her out of the lineup. She was too weak and sick for marriage.

But one day, while she was in the cuisine eating dinner, her group leader came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. Come to my room, said the group leader. Samen thought she was about to be punished for something but she had no idea what.

SAMEN MANICKAM: Then I'm afraid. My hands try to shaking and my heart like pumping, then I scared.

She gave her rations to somebody beside her at the table and headed over. The leader sat her down. Comrade Men, she said, we want you to get married. His name is Comrade Dha. Do you know him?

Samen knew who Comrade Dha was. Radha. Did she want to get to know him better? the leader asked.

No, she did not. Samen protested that she was too weak and sick. But her group leader insisted and so Samen asked for a few days to think it over. The leader agreed. Samen went to her room.

SAMEN MANICKAM: Then I get out. I go to room then my heart like no. I don't like that I don't want that, my family, I keep, I keep thinking about my family all the time.

After four days, she agreed to the match. Reluctantly.

A bit later she talked about it with her godmother, Heang. It’s time, said Heang. You need someone, and you can look after each other when you’re sick.

“Look after each other with what?” Samen demanded. “All we have is our spoons.”

She was scared and resentful and sad that of her whole family only Samith was there for the ceremony.

SAMEN MANICKAM: And now it had to promise like we'll listen Anka and to like, produce.

She said the vows, promising to produce the rice and the revolutionary offspring. All the while thinking that nobody could do that. It’s ridiculous.

But after the ceremony she went with Radha back to the hut in the new village, carrying her belongings.

For Samen, too, it was a quiet walk.

Their tiny hut was just big enough for two people to lie down. But they didn’t interact much. The very next morning Radha went back out to the fields with his plowing crew. He slept out there for the next month.

After a month he came back to the village. He felt awful. Could barely stand. Probably his malaria had flared up. His boss told him he could go home …

MANICKAM: But you know the rule that no work no food. And I said, That's okay because I'm too sick to eat at that point.

He went back to his hut and went to sleep. Around noon Men came in and saw him lying in the corner.

MANICKAM: And she saw me there and she knew that I have nothing to eat.

She went to her corner and brought him a couple of small rice dust cakes and a bite of porridge she had saved. He was desperately hungry.

MANICKAM: So jump on my feet and accidentally say thank the Lord, kind of out loud.

Men looked up. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.

Radha was terrified. Angka had told them that Christians worked for the Americans. They were probably CIA. They should be eliminated. And anyway Angka had forbidden all religion.

MANICKAM: And then I heard a voice whispering in my ear again …

The same voice he had heard before. When he was singing in English.

MANICKAM: … said, You tell her. And then I kind of, okay, take a risk. You know, and I come close to her, I sat her down. …

He confessed, in whispers, because spies were everywhere, that yes, he was a Christian.

MANICKAM: … And I said, if I tell you this, please don't tell anyone else. Here's, I'm a Christian. And I can see tears begin to roll down on her cheek. And she said, That's okay. Because I'm also a Christian.

SAMEN MANICKAM: Then he said Yeah, I'm a Christian. And but he told me Don't tell nobody but I feel so happy that I be a Christian.

And that’s when it hit him like a water buffalo: that’s the plan. God really did have a plan for his life. Here she was.

Radha suddenly felt light, and somehow Angka didn’t seem quite so ever-present anymore.

They went outside the hut so they could see any spies that might be coming along. They began to talk and genuinely listen to each other for the first time. Nget Samen was 23, the sixth of nine children born to her father, Nget Choy. He was a Cambodian pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Her father had also been the academic dean at Takmao Bible School in the 40’s. He was the first Cambodian staff member with the British and Foreign Bible Society in the early 50’s. Her grandfather had been one of the first Cambodians to accept Christ through western Protestant missionaries back in the 1920s. The family was one of the most prominent in Christian circles in Phnom Penh.

God had put them together.

And together they prayed that someday God would open a door and allow them to see the other side of the world.

When Radha and Samen got married, they didn’t know what would happen next. As far as they knew, they were going to spend the rest of their lives under Khmer Rouge rule.

And in fact they still faced years of hardship and, at times, grave danger.

But their marriage was a turning point. Radha and Samen might have survived without each other. But finding each other taught them that God had a purpose in allowing all this to happen. And having each other gave them hope.

We don’t have time in this podcast to tell you all of the rest of their story. It’s pretty amazing. The Khmer Rouge regime ended in 1979 when the communist North Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. Through much hardship and danger, Radha and Samen made their way to UN refugee camps in Thailand and from there to the U.S. Radha became a pastor and missionary. He still travels back to Cambodia regularly. He’s a leading figure in a national Cambodian church that might be 2 percent of the population.

There are a lot of theories about how the Khmer Rouge could be so evil. Why so many people had to die. A senior Khmer Rouge official, Brother Number Two, once blurted out the truth to a documentary filmmaker, “If we had let them live, the party line would have been hijacked!”

Exactly. If you think you’re building utopia, you can justify mass murder.

Those surprised by the evil found in human hearts don’t yet know themselves. As the famous Russian dissident and Christian writer Alexandr Solzenhitsyn pointed out, the dividing line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. The question is not, “How could the Khmer Rouge be so evil?” but, “Why are we all not more like the Khmer Rouge?”

Yet by God’s grace, the institutions common to all reasonably free societies—family, church, voluntary associations, democratic government— keep evil in check. But only to the degree that they reflect a Biblical view of human nature. When those pursuing some vision of a perfect society sweep away these institutions, the human capacity for evil is unrestrained. It grows and distorts and corrupts all it touches. Until violence explodes out of one heart and escalates from person to person until, as the prophet Hosea lamented, “they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.”

It’s something to keep in mind when a society’s leaders insist that institutions like the traditional family or Christianity are outdated, irrelevant, or oppressive and need to change with the times.

I once asked Radha what he thought it meant, everything he went through under the Khmer Rouge. He said that while living under Angka he was deeply angry with the Communists and with God. He thought that God was punishing the whole country for its unbelief. Now he believes God preserved Cambodian Christians and his own life through those horrific years to bring good out of great evil. And who knows what good those many thousands of Khmer Christians will accomplish in the future? He’s like Joseph confronting the brothers who sold him into slavery: You intended this for evil, he told them. But God intended it for good.

Radha could have fled his homeland years before the Khmer Rouge took over but he didn’t. God protected his life so many times, he said, because He has a plan for his fellow Cambodians and the Church in Cambodia; the plan includes Radha. It was a hard plan, one that called for much suffering. “But if I hadn’t stayed in Cambodia,” he once told me, “I wouldn’t know the pain of the people.”

I’m Les Sillars, and I wrote and produced this series. We’d love to know what you think of our program, so please, send us a note or a recorded message. editor@wng.org

And if you’d like to hear or read Radha and Samen’s full story, you can find Intended for Evil: A Survivor’s Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields as a paperback or audiobook online.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

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