In May 1976, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge appointed Kang Kek Leu to run their newly established “Security Office 21” (S-21). His assignment was to interrogate and exterminate all those opposed to Angka Loeu (the “Organization on High”), the Cambodian regime’s self-designation. In the appropriately named, Tuol Sleng (meaning “hill of guilt”) in Phnom Penh, he enclosed a former school with corrugated iron topped with electrified barbed wire. On the ground floor, he divided classrooms into small cells, each designed for single prisoners. Given the evil he committed, would anyone have imagined that one of Angka Loeu’s leading “butchers” would, within a generation, be a repentant follower of Jesus Christ?

There were few more brutal scars on the face of the twentieth century than Pol Pot’s ruthless genocide of two million people after he seized power in 1975. Born out of his atheistic Communism, Pol Pot’s dream of Year Zero was to return Cambodia to a peasant economy in which there would be no class divisions, no money, no books, no schools, no “reactionary religion.”1 The 1976 constitution banned religion, and the regime demonstrated their zeal by tearing down the nation’s biggest cathedral, killing Muslim clerics, and turning Buddhist temples into pigsties. Such measures drove the Church into Thailand and scattered its leadership across six continents, before the Vietnamese invasion in late 1978 toppled the Khmer Rouge.2

Yet, almost unbelievably, many of the  have now repented of their former way of life, embraced forgiveness, and been baptized as followers of Jesus. Since the death of Pol Pot in 1998, 2,000 of his followers have repented and put their faith in Jesus. Such has been the transformation that the Khmer Rouge’s mountain stronghold, the town of Pailin in southwest Cambodia, now has four churches, all with pastors and growing congregations.

According to one pastor, 70 percent of converts to Christ in Pailin are former guerillas, including Lee Samith, a senior aide of Pailin’s governor. Many see the opportunity at last for redemption: “When I was a soldier I did bad things. I don’t know how many we killed,” says Thao Tanh, 52. “I read the Bible and I know it will free me from the weight of the sins I have committed.”3 Nor is Kang Kek Leu the only senior figure to convert; Kun Lung, Pol Pot’s chief propagandist, was recently baptized and has exchanged broadcasting the Angkar’s gruesome “messages” for proclaiming the gospel on Pailin Radio.

No longer symbols of man’s inhumanity to man, these former henchmen of Pol Pot are now walking trophies of God’s undeserved love. God has turned the harbingers of the killing fields into the heralds of living faith. Time will tell whether such repentance is genuine or merely a convenient remorse to assuage the wrath of potential human rights’ courts. Where true repentance occurs, restitution and perhaps reconciliation will follow. Such repentance amongst the former members of the Khmer Rouge should remind God’s people of the unstoppable nature of the gospel and the way that God can turn a mountain of guilt into a harvest of grace.
Footnotes:
1

Patrick Brogan, World Conflicts (London: Bloomsbury Publications, 1998), 155-168; David Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodia: History, Politics, War and Revolution since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
2

Don Cormack, Killing Fields, Living Fields (Crowborough, UK: Monarch Books, 1997), 163-172.
3

Jason Burke, “Khmer Rouge Embraces Jesus,” The Observer, October 24, 2004, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1334716,00.html.

article adopted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church is located in Perryville, MD