Invasion day + 80 Hoggy returns. Two weeks of increasingly impossible time constraints caused by a very demanding working tour of Cambodia has meant the impetus of the many Hoggy campaigners through this site for peace has been badly dented. But together we will persevere. Hoggy has returned. The glaring need for ‘team’ has never been more obvious. Please re-join us and let us continue our work together for justice, peace, truth, and freedom.
The re-start plan is this. We will now actively work towards the publication of the blog posts into book form. A contribution to the large and essential legacy of the book in fixing the memory of the horror of war into the individual psyche.
Please write to Hoggy in letter form as before, knowing that your submissions will be considered and, wherever possible within the bounds of editorial necessity, be published. Please ask your friends, please keep the faith of peace alive, a torch for truth, kindling to help the simmering sparks of hope. It is something.
To re-start the blog Hoggy writes himself on the horror of a fact-finding visit to the Killing Fields of Kampuchea. It contains shocking imagery.
Meanwhile, in Hoggy’s absence much has happened. Ukraine holds its own. The Battle of Kharkiv appears to be ending with Russian forces high tailing it back towards the Russian border, the sense of loathing for the war as apparent in their flight as in the bitterness of the devasted people they have left behind. Putin, clearly sick in body and mind, is nearing his end and only then will the war be over. There is an old saying, ‘The war will be over by Christmas.’ But not for Ukraine. Not for us all whilst Putin remains in power.
There are so many parallels. So much repetition of history. So much we never know or never want to know; its horror too much to digest in the face of our own more immediate needs. In Ukraine, the mass murder, crime against humanity, slaughter, ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crime, butchery, call it what you will, is one more blood-stained banner mounted on the museum walls of history. We, and Hoggy admits it for himself, are only incensed because, this time we are directly threatened. How many more wars of inhumanity do we know nothing about?
Mao Zedong historians now say, murdered forty-five million Chinese people in ‘The Great Leap Forward’, who knows fully about the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh where Pakistan ordered the systematic rape, torture and murder of up to an estimated three million people? Of genocides in Darfur, the Circassian genocide of 1864 (Russia again), the Holodomor in Ukraine 1930-1931 we have already written about in the blog (Russia yet again, they frequently appear as if their leaders are educated to self-perpetuating barbarity from birth), The Serbian genocide 1941-1945, the Ottoman slaughters, East Timor, Elimination of the Herreros and Namaqua’s in German South West Africa, uncomfortably[DL1] maybe, the elimination of the native American Indians in the USA, the Aboriginal slaughter of 1840, the Rohingyas right now, the use of nuclear eliminators in Japan by us, the righteous. Virtually every school child rightly knows about the Holocaust in Europe by the Nazi regime through the power of advocacy and the immediacy of the threat but we are slaughtering ourselves continuously somewhere in the world. There are many more not even mentioned. We apologise to their descendants. The list is too long.
Why? Why is it so impossible to live peacefully one with another? Why do we seek to destroy the world and everything in it? Are we already programmed to an endgame? Surely not.
Ukraine will win out in this war, strangely following most of the genocides, the people of the countries involved survived in some form or another, the perpetrators and the persecuted alike living alongside each other. The power of human resilience in the face of the most terrible of human atrocities. It is a hope for Ukraine.
The big difference in this war is the power of immediate truth. Despite every attempt of Putin to suppress it, truth will keep leaking out, such is our ability to now live in the ‘spotlights of now’.
Maybe this time we will find ways to listen and learn from history. We have not managed it before but maybe, just maybe, we can learn this time? We can but hope. Hoggy
Today’s Letters
From Hoggy himself to our readers…
Dear Readers,
As you can see, I have been away working in Cambodia for the past two weeks and as I felt I could keep the blog going whilst away, I failed to make adequate arrangements for the team to continue writing and posting. The demands of the tour, work-wise and diplomatically, meant very early starts and very late finishes in punishing heat and humidity and I soon had to place the blog on hold. I apologise to Ukraine and all those who were looking to it for help and hope. I hope they will return. I hope they live still.
Beyond the important work of helping to educate the police service of Cambodia in the democratic methods they are working so hard to sustain, there were also useful moments for the work of peace. This is one of them.
‘The Killing Fields of Kampuchea.’ How an Old Man Cried.
There are few old people to be seen in Cambodia.
Between 1975 and 1979 almost half of the population of Cambodia were murdered by a brutal communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge or died in the civil wars or through starvation.
A generation slaughtered by a brutal regime of indoctrinated and brain washed children who were themselves then slaughtered by the regime leaders so they could not tell any tales. The Khmer Rouge.
The few who survive have a grim story to tell.
Men like Bou Meng and Chum Mey, the last two living survivors of just eleven who crawled out from the pre-death camp that was Khmer Rouge Torture Prison S-21 in 1979.
Within living memory.
We talked with them through an interpreter. Humbled and moved beyond words as they told their stories, we promised to tell their testimonies to our own people, ‘ We were treated like animals, worse,’ they said, before weirdly thanking us for the three ferries the UK sent to their aid once the facts started to emerge.
Three ferries? Is that what our help amounted to? In a policy of not intervening in other country’s affairs? I thought of Ukraine. Of all genocides. 'We do not get involved'. Millions are slaughtered. Of course we have to get involved. We just try to make sure it doesn’t look that way. Not to make it worse like we did in Iraq. In other places. The global confusion of slaughter. Cambodia has survived. Has thrown off its terrible past. As will Ukraine.
The average age of Cambodians in the country is twenty-five. There are no old people’s homes. In freedom it is a young country, in wisdom it is ancient.
We worked through the week at The Police Academy with a team of men and women whose parents and relatives had been killed in the horror of the Khmer Rouge. The horror of the man inculcated with Chinese communist dogma who called himself Pol Pot and his few murderous cronies of the Khmer Rouge regime they called Kampuchea. Our present working colleagues were welcoming, embracing, lovely, face-lined people who seemed wiser than we could ever be. They were survivors. With the inherent vices of all emergent nations.
But they were moving on.
Lost in the slaughter and genocide that was the rule of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea between 1975 and 1979 or in the civil wars that preceded it and followed it, there is a will to progress in Cambodia today. But not to forget.
The visit to one of the Killing Fields just outside Phomn Penh and the visit to the torture centre of Prison S-21 were my most profound moments in a life of frequently witnessing the results of our own human brutality and inhumanity one to another.
I stood under the skulls collected from this single Killing Field, one of hundreds across Cambodia,, row upon row of human life made extinct, 9,000 skulks piled in a pyramid. And I cried.
We, a team of three British educators, walked on ground just washed by the rains to reveal leg bones, arm bones, teeth; bones still with the clothing they died in sticking to them, the black clothing of death their wearers were forced into before being slaughtered by the children of the Khmer Rouge. Our guide pulled a thigh bone from the soil. This was a father, a mother, a daughter, a son. Sadness could not describe this moment.
I thought of the children of Ukraine. How vulnerable they are. How their futures are being stolen from them as we look on. I thought of my own children. And my grandchildren. How fragile their lives. How awful this moment seemed.
But there was worse to come. Shocked by the emergence of the bones we were unable to avoid treading on, we were taken to the ‘Killing Tree’. Here we were told these brainwashed young boys and girls of fourteen or fifteen, some even younger, took the babies from their watching mothers and swung them by their legs so their heads smashed against the tree.
And then the babies were thrown in the air and caught on the spikes of the home-made weapons of the killers.
A playground competition in brutality.
It was too much to bear.
I am used to death. A lifetime of dealing with it. But this was too much.
The tears rolled down my cheeks. I couldn’t face my younger colleagues and they couldn’t face me.
I am not a young man anymore, not so prone to emotion or shock as I might have been sixty or more years ago.
But this was shocking. And I was shocked.
It was like visiting a crime scene just after a murder. Raw. Indigestible. The smell of death and dead bodies at the Killing Fields is nauseating and permeable. Still. Forty years on. Still there, oozing from the ground like a poisonous gas reminding us of our own fragility.
Sickening.
I wanted to call the forensics team, to start an investigation. But this is now history. The perpetrators who could be found have been found, one still awaiting his trial for crimes against humanity, a trial we suspected would be postponed until he died of natural causes and the country could continue to move one as painlessly as was still possible.
Pol Pot himself had long since died under house arrest in the jungle near the Thai border. Justice? He was too barbaric to even be put on trial, his untended, unkempt grave a testimony to the disdain for humanity he showed in life. It seemed the only appropriateness we could find on a bitterly hot day in Cambodia.
Eventually, cried out, we drank from fresh coconuts, forced nervous laughter dried our tears, we were moving on to the prison. Here Bou Meng and Chum Mey were taken by the regime to be tortured as music played to drown their screams from the surrounding people and to be taken from there to the Killing Fields to die.
Their crime was to be of the educated, or to be artists, or to be considered intellectual, even just for wearing glasses. All were to be killed to create a pure race of simple-minded agrarian slave workers dedicated to the state and to its barbaric leaders. Sound familiar?
Bou Meng survived because he was forced to paint pictures of Pol Pot, Chum Mey survived because he repaired the typewriters the guards used to record the proofs of the admissions the dead had made by being tortured in order to justify their deaths and prove to the regime their own efficiency. It didn't save the guards who were systematically killed themselves to cover the crimes they had committed.
Two of the eleven who survived Prison S- 21 were children who hid under the piles of clothing of the victims until the Vietnamese army liberated Kampuchea. Only Bou Meng and Chum Mey still live, old, wizened, the last witnesses to genocide.
The Khmer Rouge had a slogan ‘Secrecy is the key to victory, High secrecy. Long survival.’
This is why we have this blog.
So that secrecy will never win.
Please write for this blog to keep transparency alive so that we can defeat the secrecy of the state, the secrecy that permits barbarism.
With gratitude to Bou Meng and Chum Mey and all who work for peace.
Hoggy
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