The Project

I might as well confess right now that when I booked my flight to Cambodia I knew absolutely nothing about the place. After a very cursory glance at the Lonely Planet website, my mind swam with high-saturation Orientalist reveries of jungles and fragrant rice-based dishes, and that was really all the persuasion I needed, in the midst of my dissertation, to shell out on a flight to the other side of the world. I wanted out and, along with four of my closest friends and the final instalment of my student loan (thanks, Gordon!), I got out.

Cambodia really pulled out all the stops on the Orientalist reverie front. The cities were full of crumbly Deco apartment blocks, and the countryside was jewel-coloured and submerged in hot syrupy silence. We reclined on bamboo terraces, we ate outrageously good food, we accelerated mopeds into walls. At sunset, we capered in tropical rain on the apricot-coloured shore of a great steamy lake and, at night, we disgraced ourselves in toe-curlingly poor games of pool against Khmer virtuosos. And, oh, Angkor! Tree roots oozing over ancient toppled walls, stone reliefs so thick with moss they were like damask. The works. The whole place, the whole country, was luxuriously, theatrically delicious; but, of course, the guidebook said: don’t wander off the marked paths. You wouldn’t want to stumble upon a landmine.

I don’t have the energy, or the sanctimony, to argue that if you are going to go and debauch it up in some developing country you ought to be aware of any nasty genocides in its recent history. I think the palm trees/temples/cocktails approach is an entirely valid one: there is nothing morally wrong with having fun, and it is misguided to let serious things eclipse pleasant ones, but the most extraordinary thing I did in Cambodia – and the thing I least envisaged – was share a room with a man responsible for the deaths of at least 15,000 people.

To cut a long story short, the Khmer Rouge were in power from 1975 to early 1979, when they were ousted by the invading Vietnamese. In that time, three million Cambodian people died. This is what happens when a country is badly run by murderous despots. The Khmer Rouge wished to do away with cities and create an all-peasant agricultural society. Each to their own, except that anybody who was considered bourgeois was summarily put to death. Indicators of bourgeoisie famously included wearing glasses, being a teacher, having a degree, travelling abroad, speaking another language, having soft uncalloused hands, and living in a city*. You did not need to be a political firebrand or from an ethnic minority: man, woman or child, if you couldn’t get out of Phnom Penh you’d probably find yourself in S-21, the Toul Sleng death camp. This hastily-converted high school was run by a man named Duch and, thirty years on, we found ourselves taking a day out of our sightseeing itinerary to attend his trial.

As part of the ongoing UN tribunal, this took place in the purpose-built Extraordinary Courts of C Cambodia (ECCC): 500 cinema seats were arranged before a glassed-in courtroom, and everybody – court and audience – were provided with headsets through which a ghostly voice translated everything that was said into Khmer, English, or French. In this way, every member of the international court was able to speak in their own language.

The vast proportion of the audience was Khmer – which was surprising because of the official line that nobody wants a tribunal, that this is just opening old wounds and that at this point moving on is more important than bringing those responsible to justice. Bear in mind that many of those holding government positions in modern Cambodia were once part of Khmer Rouge themselves. Pol Pot’s regime still isn’t taught in schools - it is not official collective ‘history’ - but everybody has their own personal story about it. Many Khmer people do want to talk about what happened – most are too young to remember, and speak of their parents’ experiences – and their presence at the tribunal was testament to that. Maybe the younger generation, a step removed, are the driving force behind this tribunal and the greater openness in general, but, frankly, you don’t meet enough older people to ask them their opinion. A third of the population died under Khmer Rouge. Bearing that fact in mind, the courtroom had a higher concentration of over-fifties than we had seen in a long time, who seemed to positively welcome opening up those old wounds.

The witness had his back to the glass, but television screens showed a wiry nervous man in a suit jacket and trousers that were too big for him and did not match. He sat with his knees and ankles together, ducking his head, not looking up to respond to questions. He was a farmer, he testified, but in the 1970s he had been a child medic at Toul Sleng, dispensing placebo medicines and tending the wounds of those who had been tortured. He knew the medicines were useless because he was so hungry he had eaten handfuls of them; he knew about the torture because he heard the screams. Yes, he could identify Duch. He was that slim neat-looking man rising to his feet amongst the defence.

Utterly self-possessed, with the ghost of a benign smile, this neat white-haired old man explained carefully and quietly that the witness was confused, that none of the people he spoke of had been at S-21 at the time he claimed, that such-and-such an official could not have been killed in 1976 because Duch himself had given the order for his death in 1978. When the defense lawyers began to interrogate the witness, he fell to pieces. Who remembers exactly what they did when they were eleven? He was not certain of dates, of names, of numbers. What about when the Vietnamese liberated the camp? Who was he with? What did he see? To the courtroom’s exasperation, he couldn’t answer. "All I knew was I wanted to get away".

It is striking and frightening, this discrepancy between people’s realities. The eleven-year-old child’s reality was of fear, bewilderment, and hunger, and, while that’s powerful, it wasn’t the kind of truth that the court was looking for. In effect, that was the bit of the picture they already had: what they needed were some hard facts to make the prosecution watertight. That was Duch’s kind of truth: the cold detached testimony of a man whose job it was to know all the names and numbers and motives and dates, and who was never so hungry that he ate medicine.

This sense of discrepancy ran throughout my whole Cambodian experience: Orientalist reverie versus landmines; high school versus death camp; moving on versus opening old wounds. In many ways, this amounts to present versus past, but that suggests that there is no connection between the two. Cambodia is flourishing, but, to move forward, there seems to be a need to look again at what happened thirty years ago. Sod the Orientalist reverie, if it exists at all it is as a small part of a powerful and conflicted whole. I did not go to Cambodia with any inclination to try to understand that whole, but going to that tribunal, and reading and talking and thinking, was a greater privilege and more enriching than lying on a beach ever could have been. Although the beaches were also awesome.

 

* Incidentally, Pol Pot got into Communism whilst at university in Paris.

 

 

IMOGEN GOWER
WRITER