Transcript
Les Sillers (0:02)
From World Radio, this is Double Take. I'm Les Sillers.
Rada Manakum (0:06)
When the day lights up, you scare all the time. And during that first year, the Cameroons 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're the next person that they call. You don't know.
Les Sillers (0:34)
Last time we followed Radha Manakum 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 a 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, Rada 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 Anka. The soldiers and cadres were often merciless and brutal.
Rada Manakum (2:13)
I had to show them that this is the power of the revolution.
Les Sillers (2:19)
Famine and disease were raging through the land. In December of 1976, RADA went back to visit his mother. He learned that four of his six siblings and his father were dead.
Rada Manakum (2:31)
His heart is broken because he used to have everything and now he sleeps on the dirt ground. His children die one by one.
Les Sillers (2:42)
And that was very nearly the last straw for Rada. A short time later, he tried to commit suicide by singing. In January 1977, RADA was living in a cooperative called Tuol Mate. 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 1 yard square. In the darkness around him his fellow workers were trying to sleep. Spies were sneaking among the dikes. A verse came to Rada's mind. Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Rada 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.