Wednesday 1 September 2010

To be good was to be dead


The traces are everywhere; the debris of death is everywhere. There are obvious places like Choeung Eck not far from Phnom Penn, where a memorial has been constructed, an ossuary containing thousands of skulls, many bashed in, evidence of how they met their end.

Nearby is a tree, now known as the Chankiri or the Killing Tree. When Brother Number One ruled Cambodia infants and babies, brought with their parents from Toul Sleng, the capital’s notorious detention centre, were battered to death against its trunk, swung by the feet. It was the habit for the murderers to laugh as they beat out brains because not to laugh was taken as an indication of sympathy for these tiny “enemies of the people”, and to show sympathy was to become a target.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge became a vast extermination camp, a land of perpetrators and a land of victims, with the slimmest of boundaries between the one and the other. The logic behind the killing process is almost impossible to comprehend for any normal human being. Any evidence of education was to put one in danger; even wearing spectacles was to risk being condemned as an ‘intellectual.’ The paradox is that the very creatures who inflicted this hell on earth, this Maoist paradise, were themselves intellectuals, far better educated than most of their victims.

One of these men, Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, former head of Toul Sleng, has now been sentenced to nineteen years imprisonment for overseeing the torture and death an estimated 14,000 men, women and children. I visited this grim place, now the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, when I was in Cambodia. With my entry ticket I was given an explanatory leaflet, detailing the ten rules that all inmates were meant to observe, far too bizarre even to use a word like Kafkaesque; rules like “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”

Although the sentence is impossibly lenient, Duch believed that it should have been more lenient still. He believes that he should have been allowed to go free, though he admits to all of his crimes without equivocation. There is some deeper process at work here, a process of self-distancing, something I’ll touch on a little bit later.

Duch is the first person to be tried and sentenced for the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Although many of the survivors have been angered by the sentence, one at least has to be thankful that there was any process at all, given the reluctance of the Cambodian authorities, many of them former Khmer Rouge cadres, including Hun Sen, the prime minister. But other trials are to follow, more important trials, including that of Noun Chea, Brother Number Two.

Chea was formerly the chief political ideologue of the Khmer Rouge. Something of his outlook and attitude has been caught in Enemies of the People, a remarkable low-budget documentary made by Thet Sambat, a journalist whose parents and brother were killed in the genocide. Hiding his background, and letting Chea and his underlings speak for themselves, his resulting footage comes as close as one is ever likely to get to the thinking of the Khmer Rouge.

Chea is seen talking to Khoun and Soun, two of his former underlings, men who specialised in slitting open stomachs so they could remove and eat the victims’ gall bladders, assuring them that “You did not have any intention, therefore you did not commit any sin.”

Here we have the same distancing shown by Duch, who admits to crimes while hoping to escape from personal responsibility. Chea goes on to describe ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ as a “clean regime”. He continues to refer to the dead as “enemies of the people”, whose removal was justified by the revolution. When Sambat finally reveals the truth about himself and the fate of his family Chea seems to slip from monstrous abstraction to genuine human sympathy, saying that he too lost many relatives to the regime. It defies words; it defies understanding.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, Edmund Burke is alleged to have said. There were no good men in Pol Pot’s Cambodia; for to be a good man was to be a dead man.

36 comments:

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  2. I still find it difficult to absorb. I've been to the country twice now, and a gentler, more child-like people than the Khmers I have yet to discover.

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  4. Cambodia has a horrible past, but it's far from being a horrible place. I'm rather fond of it.

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  6. I see myself more as a reincarnation of Gertrude Bell. :-)

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  8. I heard about this long time ago, not much details but again, I had no guts to know too much.
    There are many this type of inhuman happenings in Asian history. I personally believe there is something to do with their childhood: many of them did not receive the right nutrition (which is "parents' love") when they were children, that's why they could have done such cruel things. Forgive my oversimplified viewpoint Ana, but I found it helped me understand many things.
    I am grateful to live in US - where "brother number one" or "two" type of evils can only play individual games.

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  9. I think the writers of Genesis had it write when they said that the "knowledge of good and evil" (HA!) led to all death in the world. I hate society, I really do, I hate the way that people bunch together in to a pack, and leave all decency, common sense and, really, though they will never confess to it, honor at the door. Why do we need a society? Why do we need judgement and death? And since when do any of us need a utopia anyways?

    And why do we hate egotisticalness and pride so much? Do egotistical, self-centered people do THIS? Last time I checked, the Texans had yet to create a Khmer Rouge. As unfond as they are of "tea drinkers," they have yet to actually kill them. At worse, they would give them a vicious swirley.

    Still, it would have been nice if someone had returned the favor with the Khmer Rouge. Is it really that hard to sneak around the jungle with a rifle? Even a civil war's better then this shit. There's a certain point at which anarchy is an improvement over your government - you have officially reached it.

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  10. @MGON: Nah they're the same. The minute you decide people are worth that little, you are already headed down the sorry road of the Khmer Rouge. The fact that the Rouge decided on a large group, and then poorly defined it, is really just a coincidence.

    @Ana: Maybe they're too gentle.

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  11. Yun yi, some of the stories I heard from people in Cambodia were truly incredible. The son of a man who had been a doctor told me that in 'Democratic Kampuchea' he had to pretend to have been a baker under the old regime, just in case he was killed. All the doctors were killed.

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  12. Jeremy, I think you may be ready to read people like Gustav le Bon and Jose Oretaga y Gasset, assuming you have not laready done so. :-)

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  13. The mentality that condemns all doctors to death is beyond comprehension.

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  14. Ana, it sounds like this Khmer Rouge had exactly the same nature as Chinese Culture Revolution (the worst "revolution" in history. I don't even know it deserved the word "revolution" or not), but just way worse. When I read "the Enemy of People" I could not help to laugh, even though the fact was nothing to laugh about, because I was so familiar with such slogans. Just so you know Ana, during culture revolution, the very wide spread slogan in school was "long live the '0' score". I guess you can get a picture of what's going on. Knowledge was crime.

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  16. David, it's lovely to see you here. Yes, the mentality is beyond comprehension but it goes even further - people who wore spectacles could also be killed as 'intellectuals.' (You're right about West London!)

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  17. Yun yi, indeed. Have you read Mao:the Unkown Story by Juan Chang and Jon Halliday? It's a revalation.

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  18. Jeremy, we could all do with a little happiness. :-)

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  19. Adam, it's an excellent piece of film making. Oh, I'll be starting seriously on the Hancock DVD's soon. I want to finish them before the new term begins.

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  20. PS, it would be a help if you could remind me again of your favourite episodes.

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  26. Alas, I'm soon to be overtaken by a fairly intense period of work. :-)

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  29. Ana, no, I haven't, but will read it for sure. Thanks!
    I've read another one "the private life of Mao" by his private doctor, who came back China passionately right after 1949. He died (1995) one year after the book was published (which was quite mysterious). I liked the book and found it quite objective.

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  30. Yun yi, you must let me know what you think when you've finished. I read it when it was first published, five years ago now, and it's left a vivid impression.

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  31. Adam

    I am sure you are having a greatr time.

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