"I accept the regret, the sorrow and the suffering of the million Cambodian people who
lost their husbands and wives. I would like the Cambodian people to condemn me to the harshest punishment."
?Kaing Guek Eav (?uch?, addressing the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh, August 12, 2009
?At times, I have imagined you shackled, starved, whipped and clubbed, viciously. I have imagined your scrotum electrified, being forced to eat your own feces, being nearly drowned and having your throat cut.?
?Rob Hamill, brother of New Zealander and Khmer Rouge victim Kerry Hamill, addressing Duch before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, August 17, 2009.
It would be easy for me to condemn Rob Hamill.
After all, isn? my Christian theology all about forgiveness?
The technically correct Christian response to the confession of one who has wronged you or your family is to accept the confession and be forgiving as Christ forgives us.
Rob Hamill certainly failed to embody that ethic when given the opportunity to confront Kaing Guek Eav in open court. Confession had been given. Responsibility had been accepted. And yet no forgiveness came from the mouth of Rob Hamill.
My training tells me to tut-tut Rob Hamill and hold him up as a sorry example of humanity? sinful refusal to forgive.
That? what my training tells me . . .
But that is absolutely not what my heart tells me. You will hear no condemnation of Rob Hamill? words from this quarter. Putting myself as best I can in the shoes of Rob Hamill, I cannot honestly say that I would not feel exactly the same way and that I would not express a desire for the infliction of retributive justice at its harshest.
And therein lies the insidiously continuing damage of the evil perpetrated by the Khmer Rogue.
“I admit that I am responsible for the crimes, torture and execution at S-21.”
– From a prepared statement by Kang Kek Ieu, a.k.a. “Duch,” March 31, 2009.
Kang Kek Ieu, the born-again Christian who once ran the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture facility in Phnom Penh, came tantalizingly close to making one of the most dramatic gestures in the history of international war crimes tribunals last Tuesday as his trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal opened.
Duch, as he was called in his days of active duty with the Khmer Rouge, actually took a measure of responsibility for the thousands of brutally painful deaths inflicted at the Tuol Sleng S-21 facility.
He asked forgiveness for his actions. “I apologize to the survivors of the regime and also the loved ones of those who died brutally in the regime. I don’t ask that you forgive me now, but I hope you will later.”
It was almost exactly a year ago that I sat in the living room of the man Vann Nath has described as “The Butcher of Tuol Sleng.” My interview with the former chief of guards at the Khmer Rouge interrogation and detention (read “torture”) center in Phnom Penh was an experience I’ll not soon forget. As I have written in earlier blogs, the hour I spent with the seemingly amiable Him Huy put me face-to-face with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and has haunted me ever since.
My interview with Him Huy was part of a larger agenda on a trip to Cambodia in quest of both perpetrators and survivors of the Khmer Rouge holocaust. There was an urgency to that trip, borne out of an understanding that the long-awaited Khmer Rouge Tribunal would likely be putting the surviving senior leaders of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea on trial for crimes against humanity before the end of 2007. Determined to provide a running commentary on the proceedings in this blog, I was attempting to prepare myself fully for my self-appointed role as a close observer of the Tribunal’s proceedings.
A year ago . . .
Nobody, it seems, can make documentaries quite like Ken Burns.
His recent series, “The War,” tells the story of America’s involvement in World War Two through the eyes of four American cities and towns, among them Mobile, Alabama.
When war broke out, Glenn Frazier, a 17 year-old infantryman from Mobile, was serving in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. In “The War,” Mr. Frazier admits that he had enlisted several months earlier with no thought of ever seeing combat, and that he had gone to the Philippines under the assumption that it would be a nice, safe duty station in the event that war did break out.
And Mr. Frazier had a good reason to do his best to avoid combat.
“I was raised in a real Christian family,” Mr. Frazier explains, “ and, as a result, killing was not part of my training, and that was a big hurdle for me to get over because I’d been taught not to kill.”
He goes on to describe the incident that pushed him over the edge and caused him to get past that particular doctrine.
After watching a Japanese plane bomb a hospital and then land a direct hit on a friend of his, Mr. Frazier had a turn of heart.
“When that Japanese Zero turned its wings right above the trees and started to fly away,” Mr. Frazier recalls, “I could see him with a smile on his face and at that point I had no trouble killing people. As a matter of fact I got to the point where I hunted them, and if I didn’t kill Japanese in a day I felt I didn’t do my job.”
The acts of genocide, which have no statute of limitations, mean any acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
* killing members of the group;
* causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* forcibly transferring children from one group to another group.
-- From Chapter I, Article 4 of the Law on the Establishment of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea.
The terms “Khmer Rouge” and “genocide” seem to fit together, hand in glove. For those not versed in the intricacies and subtleties of international law, the deaths of nearly two million people through governmentally sanctioned programs of extermination, abuse, overwork, and deliberate neglect obviously constitute genocide. If that isn’t genocide, one might understandably ask, then what is?
Well, as is so often true when dealing with the realities of the Khmer Rouge, the answer may not be quite that simple.
“Revolution’s victory over imperialism is not about inviting guests
to a dinner party,
not about writing a text, not about embroidering flowers,
not about having the right education, not about being soft,
not about being well-mannered and polite,
not about fearing the enemy;
the revolution is about seething with anger against one class,
about striking and destroying that class”
“We, the Communist Party,
follow the correct and clear-sighted line.”
“For the Angkar, there is no god, no ghosts,
no beliefs, no supernatural.”
Throughout the reign of the Khmer Rouge, a propaganda machine in Phnom Penh spewed out a lengthy series of official slogans that were then distributed to the general population through radio broadcasts and political education meetings held in local villages and labor camps.
Short and simple, the Khmer Rouge slogans were masterworks of ideological indoctrination. Although many sound clumsy when translated into English, they conveyed clear and unambiguous messages easily absorbed by the largely illiterate rural population that had been the base of the Khmer Rouge’s support from its earliest days.
French Cambodia-watcher Henri Locard has done a huge service to all who seek to understand the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by translating a large collection of these slogans and publishing them in “Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar” (2004: Silkworm Books).
To study Locard’s translations is to step into a nightmarish world ruled by black-and-white, either-or thinking. Angkar, the Khmer Rouge regime’s self-label, knows all and is perfect in its ideology and governance. Anyone who questions Angkar is an enemy, and enemies are everywhere. Eternal vigilance against enemies and tirelessly self-sacrificing devotion to Angkar are small prices to pay for the privilege of living in Cambodia’s collectivist paradise.
Samuel said to Saul: “The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
1 SAMUEL 15:1-3 (NRSV)
For Christians and Jews who stand in opposition to genocide and oppression, the verses quoted above from the First Book of Samuel in the Old Testament are something of an embarrassment. There’s just no way to interpret around it: God is commanding Saul, the first king of Israel, to commit genocide upon a people known as the Amalekites.
And this passage is not unique in the Old Testament. God repeatedly commands the Israelites to wipe out one indigenous people or another on the way to a complete conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land.
To lay such verses such as these alongside Jesus’ teachings on love and forgiveness is to engage in an exercise of theological dissonance. And, the Old Testament itself also contains passages that proclaim a more universal vision of humanity in which war has no place. At Isaiah 66:18-19a, for example, God declares: “For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and see my glory, and I will set a sign among them.”
How can God seemingly countenance genocide in one place and then command love, forgiveness, and forbearance in another?
Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign; he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, just as Jehoiakim had done. Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the LORD that he expelled them from his presence.
-- 2 Kings 24:18-20 (NRSV)
Now here’s a passage that doesn’t get much play in your average Sunday School curriculum. I’ve not heard a sermon preached on this passage and I doubt seriously that I myself will ever preach such a sermon.
In the Biblical books of 1 and 2 Kings, there are many such passages. King after king after king ascends to the throne only to prove himself to be unworthy by practicing evil (which usually entailed the worship of a polytheistic phalanx of ancient Canaanite gods). After the death of the legendary King Solomon we see only a handful of faithful and competent kings. The vast majority, according to the Bible, are scoundrels and weaklings.
This long sad tale of monarchical sloth eventually culminates a few hundred years later in the seizure and sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army and the exile of Jerusalem’s best and brightest to Babylon. Indeed, the miserable Zedekiah’s faithlessness appears to have been the last straw that broke the camel’s back of divine patience. Zedekiah’s last royal act is an ignominious flight from a burning Jerusalem, climaxing in the capture of Zedekiah’s entourage, the painful death of Zedekiah’s sons, and the gouging out of Zedekiah’s eyes.
Thirty years ago, Nhem En worked as a cog in a machine of evil.
Assigned to the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, Nhem En stood at the center of the firestorm of torture, brutality, and murder that swept over Cambodia in the late Seventies.
What exactly did Nhem En do at Tuol Sleng? Was he an interrogator, inflicting unspeakable torture? Was he a guard, imposing severe punishment for minor infractions of arbitrary rules? Was he an executioner, bashing in the skulls of those condemned without trial or evidence?
Nhem En played none of these roles.
Nhem En was a photographer. He took pictures.
Nhem En’s photos are on display at the museum that now occupies the Tuol Sleng facility. Each is a black-and-white of a face, essentially a mug shot. In the case of mothers with children, there are multiple faces.
As each new truckload of recent detainees arrived, Nhem En and the photographers whom he supervised would set up their cameras at Tuol Sleng’s intake building. Before being delivered to holding cells that were little better than human kennels, each prisoner had his or her picture taken. By the time Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in January 1979, thousands of these photos had been taken.
Today, these photos constitute powerful physical evidence of the horrors that the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon fellow Cambodians.
There is nothing obviously remarkable about Him Huy.
Him Huy, like most of his neighbors, toils in the rice fields near his tiny village in Cambodia’s Kandal province. As he comes in from the fields, he bears an odd resemblance to Charles Bronson, but without the American actor’s trademark scowl.
His home is little more than the characteristic Cambodian shack on stilts, and consists of two rooms. The walls are adorned with photos of Him Huy’s large extended family.
Him Huy graciously offers his American guests hot tea and engages in friendly small talk with the Khmer translator who accompanies them.
If you knew nothing of Him Huy’s past, you would never guess that he is the same man whom Vann Nath, perhaps the most prominent survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, has described as a “butcher.”
When investigating criminal activity, I think most law enforcement agencies would concur that it is best to consider all who may have been involved in an illegal enterprise and assess their potential liability. This is especially true when dealing with major crimes requiring coordination among many different players.
In the case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, however, that principle apparently does not apply.
Under Article I of the 2003 Agreement between the United Nations and the Royal Government of Cambodia to prosecute crimes committed during the period that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, only “senior leaders” and “those who were most responsible” for Khmer Rouge crimes may be prosecuted.
Article I represented a compromise between the U.N. and the Cambodian government whose genesis is far too complex to develop here. Let it suffice to say that internal political considerations on the Cambodian side weighed more heavily on the process than broad notions of justice.
In the eyes of most observers, Article I drastically limited the pool of potential defendants, leaving the Tribunal primarily with the “big name” surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
What do the surviving victims of the Khmer Rouge holocaust think about the prospects of a trial of the senior leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity?
Prime Minister Hun Sen has proclaimed that Cambodians should “dig a hole and bury the past.” Reports have routinely circulated in the Western media declaring that most Cambodians want to put the Khmer Rouge years behind them and move on.
Getting a handle on the pulse of public opinion in Cambodia is a tricky exercise. Much of the population lives in rural areas without telephone service. Low literacy rates and an understandably cautious attitude toward strangers who come asking political or ideological questions also hamper the quest for reasonably accurate opinion polls.
Cambodian culture defies generalizations and categorizations. Assumptions that might be valid in assessing the tide of public opinion in America will lead researchers far off the path in Cambodia.
The joint U.N.-Royal Government of Cambodia Khmer Rouge Tribunal made its first formal charge against a former Khmer Rouge leader on July 31, citing Kang Kek Ieu, otherwise known by his revolutionary name "Duch," for crimes against humanity.
Duch, who has been held in detention by the Cambodian government, has been transferred to the custody of the Tribunal.
Duch was the head of the infamous S-21 detention and torture center at the former Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge regime in the Seventies. At least 14,000 men, women, and children were held at S-21 and eventually executed at the Choeung Ek killing field outside of Phnom Penh.
Documentary evidence seized at Tuol Sleng after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam in 1979 provides overwhelming evidence of Duch's role in directing torture and ordering executions.
Duch, a born-again Christian, was discovered living near the Thai border by journalist Nic Dunlop in 1999 under an assumed name and working in refugee camps.
Further indictments are expected in the coming weeks, most likely against the three most senior Khmer Rouge leaders still living, Noun Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary.
Cambodia was once described to me as “a land without forgiveness.”
While that description is neither literally true nor entirely fair, it does illuminate the cultural reality of “disproportionate revenge” identified by Alexander Hinton and explored in Part I of this series. In Cambodia, a grudge may be held and nurtured for decades before the aggrieved party strikes back.
Buddhism teaches that forgiveness and forbearance are virtues, but the anthropological and cultural evidence suggests that these teachings are disregarded with an alarming frequency in Cambodia.
And that reality perhaps helps to explain why so many former senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge are so resolute in their denial of personal responsibility for the Cambodian holocaust of the 1970's. If forgiveness is not a realistic possibility, then why should anyone risk an admission of culpability for acts likely to provoke revenge?
On Sunday, May 20, 2007, somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand Cambodians gathered at a place called Choeung Ek (rough pronunciation: “Joing Ike”), which lies about 13 kilometers to the south of Phnom Penh.
The crowd looked on as a group of actors presented a disturbing drama based on gruesome events from Choeung Ek’s recent past.
In the shadow of a huge glass tower containing hundreds of skulls of the victims of Khmer Rouge genocide victims, actors portraying political prisoners with their hands securely tied were led to a broad expanse of grass and forced to kneel.
Young men wearing the simple black uniforms associated with the Khmer Rouge then approached each prisoner and, using sturdy bamboo sticks, pantomimed executions inflicted by blows to the back of the prisoners’ skulls.
As each prisoner slumped to the ground, bodies began to accumulate visibly, simulating a vast “killing field.”
May 20.
Known benignly as the “Day of Remembrance,” but more popularly called the “Day of Anger” or “Day of Hatred,” each May 20 since 1984 has been a sort of dark holiday in Cambodia.
The Day of Anger is a day when Cambodians make grim pilgrimages to Choeung Ek and to many, many other sites of Khmer Rouge genocide around the country. It is a day when survivors of the Cambodian holocaust mourn lost family members and friends and to re-kindle feelings of anger toward the Khmer Rouge.
May 20 was chosen as the date for the Day of Anger because it was on May 20, 1976, that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea decided to transform all of Cambodia into one vast agrarian collective. Many mark that day as the beginning of the nightmare that led to the killing fields.
His name is Vann Nath.
There is nothing in Vann Nath’s personal manner to suggest that he thinks of himself as anybody special. Consistent with Cambodian cultural standards of hospitality, he pours his guests a cup of tea as he welcomes them with a voice that is soft and deferential.
But, Vann Nath’s eyes betray him.
All a visitor need do is to look into this man’s eyes, with all of their gentle dignity, to realize that he is indeed someone very special.
On a hot and humid night in the midst of Cambodia’s rainy season, Vann Nath speaks quietly of the years he spent face-to-face with Lucifer.
Vann Nath is one of only a handful of prisoners to survive incarceration at the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 detention and interrogation center in Phnom Penh, otherwise known as Tuol Sleng.
From 1976 to 1979, Tuol Sleng claimed, by conservative estimates, 14,000 victims as the Khmer Rouge conducted purge after purge in an attempt to purify Cambodian communism. Most of Tuol Sleng’s victims were tortured repeatedly before being sent to the mass graves of the killing field at Choeung Ek, just outside of Phnom Penh.
