16 February 2007
A Man Who Knew How
Precious Life and
By
A television audience estimated in the millions will feast
on
the glitz and glamour of
bestowed on February 25, 2007. To an awful lot of people, it matters whether
"
difference to me. My thoughts will be elsewhere that Sunday night - on a
friend who won an Oscar 22 years ago.
On the night of the 57th Oscars in 1985, "Amadeus" claimed Best
Picture; F. Murray Abraham won for best actor; Sally Field, for best
actress. Then came the announcement of the winner of the award for best
supporting actor. To the stage bearing the widest grin of his life bounced a
man few Americans had ever heard of. He had acted in only one motion
picture. He had been trained as a physician in his native
had witnessed unspeakable cruelty and endured torture before escaping and
finding his way to
Ngor.
Ngor's Oscar-winning performance in "The Killing Fields" gave
him the platform to tell the world about the mass murder that occurred
between 1975 and 1979 in
communists. When I met Ngor at a conference in
Oscar night, I was struck by the intensity of his passion. Perhaps no one
loves liberty more than one who has been denied it at the point of a gun. We
became instant friends and stayed in frequent contact. When he decided to
visit
before, he asked me to go with him. Dith Pran, the photographer Ngor
portrayed in the movie, was among the small number in our entourage. So were
Diane Sawyer and a crew from ABC's "Prime Time Live." Experiencing
with Ngor and Pran so soon after the genocide left me with vivid impressions
and lasting memories.
But
of 1979. In spite of the country's continued suffering on a grand scale, I
knew it was a playground compared to the three and a half years that Ngor
and Pran lived through and miraculously survived.
During that time, crazed but battle-hardened and
jungle-toughened revolutionaries who had seized power in 1975 set about to
remake Cambodian society. Their leader, Pol Pot, embraced the most radical
versions of class warfare, egalitarianism and state control. His model was
the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Mao and Stalin were his heroes. In the
warped minds of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the "evils"
they
aspired to destroy included all vestiges of the former governments of
Cambodia, city life, private enterprise, the family unit, religion, money,
modern medicine and industry, private property and anything that smacked of
foreign influence. They savaged an essentially defenseless population
already weary of war. The Khmer Rouge killing machine produced the killing
fields for which the film was later named.
Indicative of the ultraradicalism of the Pol Pot regime, 1975
was no longer 1975 in
numbering of succeeding years would follow accordingly. The name of the
country was changed to
random homicides were instituted as public policy in order to discipline,
frighten and reorganize society. Any one individual's life meant nothing in
the grand scheme of the new order.
One day after taking power, the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated
the populations of all urban areas, including the capital,
city swollen by refugees to at least 2 million inhabitants. Many thousands
of men, women, the sick, the elderly and the handicapped died on the way to
their "political rehabilitation" in the countryside. Survivors found
themselves slaving away at the most grueling toil in the rice fields, often
separated from their families, routinely beaten and tortured for trifling
offenses or for no reason at all, kept hungry by meager rations and facing
certain death for the slightest challenge to authority.
Thon Hin, a top official in the Cambodian foreign ministry at
the time of our 1989 visit, told me of the propaganda blasted daily from
speakers as citizens labored in the fields: "They said that everything
belonged to the State, that we had no duty to anything but the State, that
the State would always make the right decisions for the good of everyone. I
remember so many times they would say, 'It is always better to kill by
mistake than to not kill at all.'"
Churches and pagodas were demolished and thousands of Buddhist
monks and worshippers were murdered. Schools were closed down and modern
medicine forbidden in favor of quack remedies and sinister experimentation.
By 1979, only 45 doctors remained alive in the whole country; more than
4,000 had perished or had fled the country. Eating in private and scavenging
for food were considered crimes against the State. So was wearing
eyeglasses, which was seen as evidence that one had read too much.
With total control of information and communication, Pol Pot's
killers kept the Cambodian people unaware of the full extent of the state's
atrocities. Most had little idea that the horror they were witnessing was a
nationwide event. The rest of the world knew even less. Mass graves
unearthed in later years provided belated and grisly evidence of the
violence.
During our 1989 tour, Ngor and I visited Tuol Sleng. It was a
former high school in
torture center. Of 20,000 men, women and children taken there, only seven
survived. Hideous devices and copious amounts of dried blood on the floors
were still present for visitors to see. The walls were lined with snapshots
of the hapless victims - pictures taken by their very captors.
Fifteen kilometers away we visited a place called Choeung Ek,
where a memorial now houses more than 8,000 human skulls, all of which were
found in an adjacent field. Cambodians say that nearby streams once ran so
red with blood that cattle would not drink from the water.
Early estimates of the death toll from starvation, disease and
execution during Pol Pot's tyranny range as high as 3 million - in a nation
of only 8 million inhabitants when he took power. Most now put the figure in
the neighborhood of 2 million deaths. Whatever the actual number, it is
certain that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was responsible for far more deaths than
even the 1.2 million who perished on both the American and Vietnamese sides
during the last decade of the Vietnam War.
Haing Ngor didn't just see these things, he endured them. He
had
to get rid of his eyeglasses and disappear as a doctor. He reappeared as a
cab driver, hoping he and his wife would not draw the attention of the Khmer
Rouge. Nonetheless, on more than one occasion, he fell prey to their
brutality. In one torturous episode, one of his fingers was sliced off. In
another, his wife died in his arms from complications during childbirth.
Ngor's skills as a physician might have saved her, but he knew if he
revealed he was a doctor they both would have been executed on the spot.
In his riveting 1987 autobiography, "Survival in the Killing
Fields," he sketched his anguish in print: "The wind brought me her
last
words again and again: 'Take care of yourself, sweet.' She had taken care of
me when I was sick. She had saved my life. But when it was my turn to save
her, I failed." He eventually escaped
Khmer Rouge regime.
Haing Ngor believed the world must know these things, fully and
graphically. When fate led to a chance to act in a movie about the period,
he grabbed it and performed brilliantly. He deserved the Oscar it earned
him, even though he often said that he really didn't have to "act."
He had
personally suffered through calamities much worse than those depicted in the
film. He was driven to do well so that the rest of us would remember what
happened and those to whom it happened.
After "The Killing Fields," Haing earned a little
money here and
there in film from cameo appearances and bit parts. He lived in a modest
apartment on
and educating audiences about the catastrophe in his homeland to make a
career in
provide free medical assistance to refugees along the Thai border. I
remained in touch with him in the years after our 1989 visit to
always had time for his friends, and I brought him to my town of
Then one cold morning in February 1996, Stu Frohm of the Midland
Daily News called my office. He had just seen a wire report and wanted my
comment. Dr. Haing S. Ngor had been shot and killed the day before - not
somewhere in southeast Asia, but in downtown
it turned out, were ordinary gang thugs trying to rob him as he got out of
his car. They took a locket which held the only picture he still had of his
deceased wife.
It's impossible to make sense out of a senseless tragedy. I
do
know this, however: For Haing Ngor, rediscovering his freedom after
experiencing hell on Earth wasn't enough. He couldn't relax, breathe sighs
of relief or resume living a quiet or anonymous life. He felt compelled to
tell his story so others would know what awful things total government can
do. He forced us to ponder and appreciate life more fundamentally than ever
before.
Enjoy the Oscars on February 25. We should be grateful we live in a
country where we can celebrate our creative achievements in film. But we
should be even more thankful for people like Haing Ngor, who did more to
educate for liberty in a few short years than most people who take their
liberty for granted will ever do in their lifetimes.
Copyright 2007