Embracing the Executioner

Simon's head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.

"What are you doing out here all alone? Aren't you afraid of me?"

Simon shook. "There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast."

-William Golding

The level of suffering among these children seems to be in direct proportion to their level of optimism. Aida in the West Bank and Joseph in Belfast are far more soured on life than are Boutros and Jamila in Lebanon, who have more to be sour about. This is not surprising; adults who have endured hardships often manage a more optimistic view than their experiences would justify. What is surprising here is that some of the children who have suffered the most are not only the more optimistic; they also show the greatest amount of charity toward their fellows, including their enemies. This is true to a large extent in Belfast, and to some extent in Israel and Lebanon. It is practically universal among the Cambodians.

Why this is so is mystifying. The charity level among children who suffer economic hardship is not noticeably high; yet they, like many of the Cambodian children and the Vietnamese to follow, have been starved, brutalized, deprived of companionship, parents, love. It may have something to do with the suddenness of these assaults. Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb. They simply may not have the time to seethe or develop their hatreds. For them the exercise of charity may be an automatic protection, an instantaneous striking back with the antipode of what strikes them--kindness for cruelty, generosity for spite. In short, their goodness may be a means of survival.

Kim Seng (see above photograph) has survived quite well for someone who, when he escaped into Thailand two years ago, was nearly dead from malnutrition. His father, a doctor, was killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge soldiers. The policies of the Khmer Rouge included the execution of Cambodian intellectuals. Kim Seng watched his father being taken away in a helicopter, and for a long time in the refugee camp at Khao I Dang, all he drew were pictures of helicopters.

His mother died afterward, of starvation, with Kim Seng at her side. He was eight at the time, a member of one of the mobile work teams of children instituted by Pol Pot for their ''education and well-being." The night before his mother died he was taken to her in a nearby village. He noticed how swollen she was, how frail and tired, and that she was breathing with great difficulty. Kim Seng's mother took his hand and told him that he would very soon be an orphan. Then she said: "Always remember your father's and mother's blood. It is calling out in revenge for you."

By that time Kim Seng was already keeping a diary. He would begin his entries: "Dear friend, I turn to you in my time of sorrow and trouble . . ." On this particular night he took his diary and wrote how frightened he felt. In the morning his mother was dead. Kim Seng knelt at her bedside and prayed; then he asked a neighbor to bury his mother next to where his father lay, his father's body having been returned to the family. Kim Seng brought a shirt with him as a payment for this service.

The neighbor and his wife carried Kim Seng's mother to the burial ground, the boy walking behind them. Kim Seng was quite weak and thin. The neighbors buried his mother, burned incense, and departed. Then Kim Seng knelt by the grave and burned three incense sticks of his own. Finally he took a handful of dirt from each of his parent's graves, poured it together in his hands, and beseeched his dead parents to look after him. He then returned to the mobile team.

"Do you feel your parents' spirit inside you now?"

"Yes, it talks to me. It tells me that I must gain knowledge, and get a job. I would like to be an airplane pilot."

"Does your spirit still tell you to get revenge?"

"Yes," solemnly.

"So, will you go back to Cambodia one day and fight the Khmer Rouge?"

"No. That is not what I mean by revenge. To me revenge means that I must make the most of my life."

Kim Seng, now 10, sits at the other side of a kitchen table at the end of a long dirt-floor hut in Khao I Dang. He is visible down to the middle of his chest. The face is bright brown; the head held in balance by a pair of ears a bit too large for the rest--the effect being scholarly, not comical. Kim Seng has a special interest in France these days because he has recently learned that his older brother is there. He studies diligently, hoping to join his brother. He believes that knowledge makes people virtuous.

"What is this picture, Kim Seng?" The drawing is one of two he did upon first arriving at Khao I Dang. It is of three boys, stick figures, standing to the side of several gravestones. The background consists of a large mountain with a leering yellow moon resting on its peak. Perched on a tree is an oversized owl, whose song, says Kim Seng, is mournful.

"One day I left my mobile team to go find food for myself. I was very hungry. I met two boys, and together we came upon a mass grave of 30 bodies. The Khmer Rouge soldiers found me. I told them that I had gone for firewood. But they punished me. They bound my hands to a bamboo stick behind my back. I was tied up without food for several days."

The second drawing is of a bright orange skeleton with tears in its eyes and a grim mouth in an open frown. "I drew this after the death of my mother. I ate leaves then. That is why there is a tree in the picture."

"If you drew yourself today, would the picture be different?"

"Yes, very different. Here I have food. And there would be a smile on my face."

He is asked to do a self-portrait. He moves to a long table under a window at the far end of the hut. An elder provides him with paper and crayons, and he works in silence. The noise of the other children has abated momentarily, the only sound being an occasional squawk of a late-rising rooster. Soon the boy presents his work, which is not a self-portrait at all but a bright blue airplane with green doors, green engines, and a red nose and tail.

"But where are you, Kim Seng?"

"I am the pilot in the window." He points himself out enthusiastically. "We are flying to France."

Khao I Dang is one of two main refugee camps set up by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees at the eastern edge of

Thailand. From there the refugees will be resettled. Some will return to Cambodia in an attempt to rejoin their families. The camp sits at the foot of Khao I Dang Mountain, a high, craggy hill where thousands of Cambodians have hidden in the brush before making their escape runs down into the camp. One day, the children fear, the Khmer Rouge will come hurtling down that slope to recapture them. It will not happen for a while yet. It is the end of the monsoon season. The air smells of hot mud. The sky hangs low, like a gray fishnet over the straw roofs.

The camp looks more like a Cambodian village than a refugee holding center, perhaps because some families have been here so long, awaiting resettlement, that the place has naturally taken on an ancient form. The only blatant signs of modernity are the blue mushroom-shaped water towers, the laterite roads and the rehabilitation center, a larger hut where molds for artificial limbs lie stacked on shelves like loaves of white bread. The people mill about the wat, their Buddhist temple. Their gardens are crowded with tomatoes, scallions, cloves, lemon grass and "Cambodian traditional"--marijuana. Squash wobbles on the latticework between the huts. A barefoot woman carries an armload of morning glories. Beside the roads grow needle flowers with pointed petals of burnished pink, and mai-ya-rab, a tiny fern (a weed really) that shrinks away at the human touch, but after a while restores itself.

Nop Narith is Kim Seng's size and age. He has shaggy black hair and great buck teeth that gleam in a smile. He holds his left arm below the table. Narith had polio when he was younger, and the arm is withered. Both his parents are dead.

"When the soldiers came to my house, they took our whole family away. Me they took to a mobile team. I never saw my parents again. But I have a photograph of my father. My father was worried that I could not take care of myself. Yet I feel guarded by his spirit. I dreamed that I saw him, and he promised that his spirit would protect me. In the dream he told me to gain knowledge and to take revenge on his killers."

"Do you seek revenge against the soldiers, then?"

"Yes."

"What do you mean by revenge?"

"Revenge is to make a bad man better than before."

At first, these unorthodox interpretations of revenge seem less personal than traditional--an attitude inherited from an agrarian people accustomed to gentleness and passivity. To be sure, there was a long time, between the 9th and 15th centuries, when Khmer culture sustained a golden age--the period of Angkor Wat with its five peaked towers and massive stone gods. But fundamentally, Cambodia has remained a village nation, and the values of Pol Pot, not to mention his horrors, must have seemed as shocking as they were terrifying. The children in Khao I Dang have simple values. They have been taught to honor the land, the country, their dead ancestors, their parents and their village.

Still, it is not always this way. Many children use the same wiles in the camp that they employed to survive in the jungle and elude Pol Pot. There are even stories of children denying the existence of their parents within the same camp because they have heard that an unaccompanied child stands a greater chance of being claimed by another country. One boy was desolate because his friend suddenly left camp with a family with which he had been secretly ingratiating himself for months. A ten-year-old was so eager to emigrate that he found himself wandering around back at the Cambodian border. He had stowed away on a truck that--he had persuaded himself--was bound for America.

What you have to realize, says Pierce Gerety, the director of the International Rescue Committee in Thailand, is that "their whole country has been burned over." Gerety, his wife Marie, and Neil Boothby, a child psychologist, all of whom work steadily with these children, need continually to remind themselves that the small serious eyes that look up to them have taken in sights that should exist only in hell. A common story the children tell is of seeing pregnant women tied to trees, their stomachs then slit open by bayonets. More common still is the liver torture--the children draw pictures of this. Here the victim is also tied to a tree, and his liver is plucked out by a specially designed hook. He may survive 20 minutes in this condition.

Yet there is a kind of torment that goes deeper than such memories, and here is where their idea of revenge comes into focus. The children express this thought indirectly.

Nep Phem is 18, and a gifted artist. His eyes tear, perhaps from a cold, and his answers are very thoughtful, introduced by long pauses. When you ask him what liberty requires, for example, he tells you "Patience." On one subject, however, his responses are rapid and automatic:

"Do you think that people learn war or is it inborn?"

"War must be born in you."

"Can the impulse to make both war and peace exist in the same person?"

"No. They cannot live together."

"Which wins out?"

"Peace always beats war."

Kim Seng says the same thing. As does Meng Mom, a puffy-cheeked twelve-year-old dancer who toys shyly with the lavender sleeve of her shirt. She is silent on all topics but one:

"Why do men make wars?"

"There are a lot of bad men in the world."

"How does someone stay good if so many men are bad?"

"Good must fight the bad."

"Can good and bad exist in the same person?"

"No. Not together. They are in separate places. The good must beat the bad."

These simple abstractions have a meaning for Cambodian children that is clearly disturbing to them. It is not as if the Khmer Rouge are an invading horde from a distant nation; the Khmer Rouge are their neighbors, their friends, themselves--which may account for the fact that so many of the children have nightmares in which they assume the roles of Pol Pot's soldiers. They have, in fact, known children who were Pol Pot's soldiers. The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are thus acutely shocking. No, they say; the good spirit and the bad spirit cannot live within the same body. But what if they do? Here is where their definition of revenge suddenly makes perfect sense. How do you take revenge on yourself? Even at a very young age these people perceive their own capacity for evil, which is the human capacity, and they deny it with as much vehemence as fright.

Or, like Sokhar, they say nothing. Sokhar is eleven now, was eight when she first came to Khao I Dang. She too did a drawing when she arrived, but unlike Kim Seng, she did not explain it, and in fact said almost nothing at all during her first two years at the camp. Sokhar is well fed, and soft-featured, though "in Cambodia I met with starvation." She has crying fits still, but is beginning to talk. It is difficult, however, to speak of her drawing, which, while primitive, requires an explanation.

She takes it in her hands, and studies what she drew: three children gathering rice in a field. A Khmer Rouge soldier has a rifle trained on them, "to keep them working." Off to the left of he picture is the device. It looks like a wheel with a hollow hub and spokes leading out to the rim. Or perhaps it is a doughnut with lines on it. Three extra lines extend from the outer rim at he bottom, giving the thing the appearance of an insect. At the top there is yet another line sticking out at an angle to the right, the end of which is attached to a small ring.

"What is happening here, Sokhar?"

"This is a picture of the Pol Pot time." She hopes to change the subject.

"Who are these people?"

"They harvest the rice."

"And what is this [the circular device]?"

"This is something you put on the head."

"Who puts it on your head?"

"The Pol Pot soldiers."

"What is its purpose?"

"To kill."

"Do soldiers do the killing?"

No answer.

"Is it the soldiers who work the device?"

She will not respond to this question. Not now. But she has answered it before. After two years of silence she at last explained the device--if not fully, at least enough to allow a guess as to how it worked. The children harvesting rice include Sokhar; she is the largest of the three. Whenever a child refused to work, he was punished with the circular device. The soldiers would place it over the child's head. Three people would hold it steady by means of ropes (the three lines at the bottom). A fourth would grab hold of the ring at the end of the other rope (the line at the top). The device worked like a camera lens, the areas between the lines in the drawing being metal blades. When the rope with the ring was pulled, the lens would close, and the child would be decapitated. A portable guillotine. But it wasn't the soldiers who worked the device. It was the children.

Outside the rain splashes down, then stops just as suddenly, and everything is hot again.

The children are excited; they are about to perform a few of their folk dances. Some older boys are shooting baskets on a hard dirt court. They laugh in surprise when the American visitor blocks a shot. They did not know that defense was part of the game.

Behind the wat is a shack where the coffins are kept before cremation; and behind that, near a patch of sweet potatoes, the crematorium sits in a clearing under a shed, like a doll's chapel. There is no activity there today. But the wat itself is busy with a festival marking the last day of the Buddhist Lent. A monk in yellow sits cross-legged on a table, while children crouched in a circle burn incense. The smoke is supposed to fly to heaven in order to beckon their ancestors to descend and join them.

Other children are playing soccer in uniforms on a huge dirt field. Some enjoy the playground. A naked baby stands before a swing, perplexed as to how to work it. A few busy themselves in the arts hut, painting or carving elaborate wooden musical instruments like the take and the kail. This is where Nep Phem likes to spend his time. When asked why art is important to him, he answers: "So that I may give something to someone, and allow someone to love me in return."

But most of the children are in the theater tent now--the "Khao I Dang National Theater"--milling and chattering with expectation. Then the bright pink curtains part, showing a backdrop painting of Angkor Wat. The xylophone plays the water-drop music. The dancers enter. The boys strut, the girls cock their hands and heads and do not smile. They glow with color, their dark brown skins set off by the deep blues, reds and greens of their sarongs and sashes. They do four dances, starting with a hunting dance in which a small boy brandishes a spear and tries to look ferocious. The coconut dance is the most fun and the most intricate, as the children clap halves of coconuts from hand to hand. They flirt, but do not touch.

The last dance is Ro Bam Kak Se Ko, the rice cultivation dance, presented in five parts. The first is the planting of seeds. The second is a dance of three scarecrows (the little ones in the audience howl at the masks). The third part is the cutting of the rice, and fourth is the tying. Finally comes the celebration of the harvest. The children prance under a full moon. Over the loudspeaker an announcer explains: it was a good year.

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