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171 pages

English

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A True Story of Surviving Genocide and Forging a New LifeWhen the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975, new Christian Radha Manickam and his family were among two million people driven out of the city. Over the next four years, 1.7 million people--including most of Radha's family--would perish due to starvation, disease, and horrifying violence. His new faith severely tested, Radha is forced by the communist regime to marry a woman he doesn't know. But through God's providence, he discovers that his new wife is also a Christian. Together they find the courage and hope to survive and eventually make a daring escape to the US, where they raise five children and begin a life-changing ministry to the Khmer people in exile in the US and back home in Cambodia.This moving true story of survival against all odds shows readers that out of war, fear, despair, and betrayal, God can bring hope, faith, courage, restoration--and even romance.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 novembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493405428
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0518€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2016 by Les Sillars
Published by Baker Books
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-0542-8
Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Endorsements
“Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, Intended for Evil blazes with vivid detail. Sillars had me at ‘hello.’”
Lynn Vincent , New York Times bestselling author of Same Kind of Different as Me and Heaven Is for Real
“ Single death: tragedy. Million deaths: statistic. Sometimes attributed to Joseph Stalin, sometimes to others, that formula certainly holds true for writing about the Khmer Rouge’s murder of 1.7 million Cambodians. So Les Sillars was wise to tell the story of one man, Radha Manickam, and his journey through Communist hell during the 1970s. It’s also a tale of coming to Christ and surviving through God’s grace. If you want to understand that era, Intended for Evil is a great book to read.”
Marvin Olasky , editor-in-chief of World
“The Khmer Rouge’s murderous regime in Cambodia was one of the worst events in human history and perhaps the purest Communist revolution the world has ever seen. And yet we know very little about it. Intended for Evil is the remarkable and intimate story of a man who miraculously survived the Khmer Rouge and later returned to Cambodia as a missionary. His story of faith in the midst of suffering, torture, and the now infamous ‘killing fields’ will leave you stunned.”
William J. Bennett , former secretary of education, bestselling author, and host of The Bill Bennett Podcast
“ Intended for Evil is one of the most compelling stories I have read of life under the tyrannical despotism of Cambodia’s Communist rulers, the Khmer Rouge. From 1975 until 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion brought the downfall of the regime, Radha Manickam experienced the brutal public murder of commune members who displeased the Communist cadres, cynical political deception, constant surveillance—often literally by children—and a complete suppression of normal human relations.
Most extraordinarily, Radha experienced a compulsory marriage to another prisoner who might have caused his death had she reported his Christian faith to the authorities. In an astonishing example of God’s miraculous providence, his bride turned out to be a Christian, and the two of them endured a harrowing few years surviving first the Khmer Rouge and then the brutal uncertainties of Vietnamese rule over Cambodia.
In Intended for Evil , Les Sillars has drawn an astute and vivid portrait of a young man encountering one of the most wicked political regimes of all time. It is an exceptional book.”
David Aikman , former Time correspondent and author of One Nation without God?
“ Intended for Evil reads like a gripping novel—a thriller, a totalitarian dystopia, a horror story. But it’s history, not fiction. Les Sillars’s book is also an inspiring account of the resiliency of the Christian faith against the most extreme opposition.”
— Gene Edward Veith , provost emeritus, Patrick Henry College
Dedication
To Radha and Samen
Contents
Cover 1
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Endorsements 5
Dedication 7
Author’s Note 11
Prologue 15
1. Civil War 19
2. Talking Theology 31
3. Two Worlds 42
4. Streets of Fear 50
5. The Khmer Rouge 61
6. Into the Countryside 74
7. Water Buffalo Island 83
8. Angka the Idol 93
9. Don’t Let Them Count One 108
10. A Strange Dance 116
11. Something Rotten 124
12. A God of Disorder 136
13. Super Great Leap Forward 144
14. Rebels Within 151
15. The Plan 158
16. The Other Plans 166
17. Equally Yoked 177
18. Inevitably, Angka 183
19. Risking Angka’s Wrath 194
20. A Killing Field 201
21. Hard Waiting 210
22. Free Trading 219
23. Traveling Mercies 227
24. Church of the Lord Jesus Christ 234
25. Family Ties 245
26. Settling in Seattle 250
27. Home Again 260
28. Such a Time as This 270
29. . . . And of the Holy Ghost 279
Epilogue 285
Acknowledgments 299
Notes 301
About the Author 311
Back Ads 313
Back Cover 315
Author’s Note
Y ou should call this guy,” David Aikman told me in the fall of 2013. We were in a hallway at Patrick Henry College, where we both taught. David, a senior Time correspondent for many years, had heard from mutual friends an incredible tale about a Cambodian Christian who had survived the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. According to David, this person wanted someone to write down his stories. He passed along the email address of one Radha Manickam of Seattle.
As my knowledge of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge at the time consisted of a hazy recollection of a movie, The Killing Fields , I had no idea where this might lead. But I sent Radha a note, and we set up a phone call. Radha mentioned his forced marriage, the loss of almost all his family, and seeing people murdered. I promised to do some reading and call him back.
I soon realized that the Khmer Rouge regime was one of modern history’s greatest catastrophes—and one largely forgotten in recent years. I found the Khmer Rouge both horrifying and fascinating. No other government in modern history has killed a greater percentage of its own citizens? The most totalitarian government ever attempted? Torture, starvation, and mass executions? Civil war and bloody revolution? Because of the Vietnam War, the American military was involved in Cambodia and even, said critics, partly responsible? And Radha, then a new Christian and the slightly spoiled son of a wealthy merchant, had lived through it all? Wow.
So in January 2014, I started interviewing Radha; we had long conversations at least weekly for a year. Every time we spoke, he told me something else that made my jaw drop: people sliced open before his eyes, treks through the jungles, unbelievable deprivation, and a faith that survived many doubts and much anger. The story he told was stunning. I hope I’ve done it justice.
The human memory is often less than completely accurate, but Radha’s story was remarkably consistent with what I was learning in my investigations about life under the Khmer Rouge. For example, when Radha described how the leaders of his village were purged in the summer of 1978 or communal dining areas were instituted in the fall of 1976, I later read in various historical and scholarly studies that, yes, the Central Committee in Phnom Penh had instituted just such a policy around that time.
Radha’s story also matched the many memoirs of Khmer Rouge victims; what he described for me corresponded to the experience of many, many other people. He seemed rather reluctant to dwell on the more sensational details, which made him all the more credible to me.
Quotation marks indicate my best attempt to represent accurately the substance and tone of Radha’s conversations as he recalled them, but of course the dialogue is not verbatim; obviously, it’s difficult for anyone to recall exactly what they said thirty-five years ago. Where possible, I confirmed dialogue with Samen or others.
A note on spelling “Angka”: it’s also commonly spelled “Angkar” (pronounced with a silent “r”), but many of the scholars writing closest to the time of the Khmer Rouge tended to prefer the shorter version, so I went with that.
I owe a great debt to the many scholars and writers who have written about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. For background, I relied on respected books of history, social science, or journalism by David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, William Shawcross, François Ponchaud, Karl D. Jackson, Donald Cormack, and Elizabeth Becker. These writers and others are cited where appropriate in endnotes, but I’d like to express my admiration for their careful and diligent scholarship. Where my summaries or interpretations of Cambodian history, personalities, and events fall short, the fault is entirely mine.
Prologue
But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead; he will surely take me to himself.
—Psalm 49:15
T he second time Radha Manickam tried to commit suicide, it was by singing “This World Is Not My Home.” It seemed appropriate. He was lying atop a termite hill next to a small, sputtering fire in a northwestern Cambodian rice paddy in January 1978. He was twenty-five years old, and after three years under the brutal regime of the Communist Khmer Rouge, he weighed around ninety pounds. It was raining.
He and the rest of his plowing crew were spending the night out in the rice fields with the water buffalo. The wet, gritty surface of the termite hill rose a few feet out of the soggy rice paddy. His only covering was a thin blanket one yard square. In the darkness around him, his fellow workers were trying to sleep. Chhlops (child spies) were likely sneaking among the dikes, ferreting out imaginary treason, and Khmer Rouge soldiers were patrolling the area. A Bible verse came to Radha’s mind: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
Radha was so very weary. He didn’t think he could keep going, driven by the soldiers to do more and more work on less and less food with a few scant hours of sleep per night. The regime was not equally harsh everywhere, but everywhere it was harsh and nowhere was it free.
Cambodia had become the realm of the dead. Khmer Rouge propaganda declared, “Everywhere in the country, in the countryside, in the factories an