Miracle in Cambodia

This is an exerpt from the book that I have written that is soon to be published:

In the 1970’s and early 1980’s when Russia was pushing to take over as much of the world as possible; the Russian KGB had an effective tactic to take over a country. They would find some entity or group to create as much terror as possible so that the people of that country would welcome a Communist takeover to stop the terror.

That is what the KGB did in Cambodia. They backed this crazy guy named, Pol Pot. He called his organization and his fighters, the Khmer Rouge (the Red Khmer People). The KGB gave his band of young people guns and explosives and even artillery, and they created massive terror.

Pol Pot had this strange idea of putting everyone into the country-side, no cities. He and his cadres wanted “faithful” low IQ type followers. It was a death sentence if you were an “educated person”, if you could speak a foreign language, if you had ever been out of the county, all kinds of things, even if you could do arithmetic. United Nation’s estimates are that they murdered as much as 3 million people……25% of the population of the whole country. The capitol city of Phnom Penh finally fell in 1975 and the Khmer Rouge ran the country and continued the killing until 1980.

A documentary film was made about it, called “The Killing Fields”, and was shown all across the US. Some of the tourist attractions in Cambodia now are the enormous piles of human skulls from that time.

Many times certain people, particularly non-Christians, will ask: “How do you Christians know that your God is the only true God. How about the Buddhists, and the Muslims and the other religions?” What happened in Cambodia answered that question for me. Before 1975 there were less than 500 Christians in the whole country. But with that much intense terror and torture quite a few of the country’s 7 million people managed to escape, mostly into Thailand. The Thai’s could not let thousands of people just roam the county; they put them into refugee camps.

Here is what was so interesting to me, though. Like I said, there were less than 500 Christians in the whole country, but thousands and thousands of those escaping into Thailand were sincere new Christians. I took it to mean that if one is subjected to enough extreme, intense terror, he will be driven to what is true, really true. In this case it became obvious to some of us that they were driven to the one true God. I see no other explanation.

So, in the summer of 1980, Paul Eshelman and I and a small group of tough US businessmen went to visit those refugee camps in Thailand. The Thai Generals and the United Nations were supposed to be co-equal over the camps. But like in George Orwell’s book, The Animal Farm, the United Nations was a little more equal. However, we secured letters from the Thai Generals to allow us to enter them.

We were in a little mini-bus. We had heard that these United Nations employees, who were mostly atheists, were persecuting all these new Christians by requiring them to go into the Buddhist Temple to get their rations of sardines and bread. Being Asian and new Christians, they would starve rather than go into the Buddhist Temple. We wanted to get that stopped.

We had also heard that there was this man, who had become the pastor over the largest refugee camp named, Khao-I-Dang. We went there first. At that time there were 160,000 refugees at that camp and over a thousand new ones arriving each day. It covered 600 acres. But we wanted to meet this fellow who was acting as the pastor for all those new Christians in the camp.

We had the letters of permission from the Thai Generals, but the UN people took up our cameras and would not even let us get off of our little bus. As a result, we just took one circle through the camp and came back to the Headquarters to leave. But in a place like that, as in a US prison, there is a “grapevine” of information that travels quickly. So, the man that we wanted to meet showed up at the Headquarters. I sent him and our people to a room in the back and since it was almost 5:00 PM, I stayed with the United Nations people until they left for their “Holy Cocktail Hour”.

I had only one question that I wanted to ask this fellow when I got back there where they were. He could speak fairly good English, he had been out of the country, he had been the only Christian pastor in all Cambodia…….How could he possibly still be alive? Everything about him was a death sentence for the Khmer Rouge. He said: “Oh, I will tell you. I have not spoken to anyone from the ‘outside’ about it.” So, he started telling his story.

He said that he was in Phnom Penh when it finally fell. When the Khmer Rouge captured a city, they gave the population 24 hours to vacate it. Anyone found there after that was shot. Like I related earlier, they wanted everyone to be in the country-side.

He said he left with everyone else and saw all those strange sites, like nurses pushing their critical care patients down the road in their beds with their IV sets trailing in the wind. He related how he hid in the jungle for nearly a year. He said: “They tell you that there is lots of food in the jungle, but man, I nearly starved to death.” Finally, they found him and took him to one of those ‘killing fields’ camps. By then they had stopped shooting people. They were using up too many bullets. Now they were just lining up a new group of people each day and cutting their throats. Everyone in the camp was required to watch.

He described how they put him in this bamboo hut that was about 3 feet off the ground to get it out of the moisture. He said that on the first night a group of Khmer Rouge came to the edge of the jungle and watched his hut. He found that strange, since the usually did their killing in the daytime.

Being a Christian, he would prepare himself every night to die the next day. He had a friend that worked in the headquarters of this camp who told him that he was on the death list, but he knew that would be so anyway. Yet, they did not kill him. It really got on his nerves. Every night he would prepare himself to die the next day and it would not happen.

He said that one day they called him up to the headquarters for something, and he just decided to get it over with. He said: “You people know who I am. Why don’t you go on and kill me like all the others?”

I am standing by the window and listening intently to every word he is saying. And he said: “They told me that they were afraid to touch me because of the White Man!” And I just blurted out: “What White Man?”

Then he said that they told him in detail how every night this shining white man sat on the top step of his hut with his back to his door.

It was about three days before I remembered that I had read that book Billy Graham wrote called “Angels”, where he told these stories about how over history these shining white men would come and save certain people who must have been especially important to God. This man had literally been saved by one of those Angels!!!