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<font face="times" size=6 color="#CC3300"><b>Recalling Pol Pot's Terror,
But Forgetting His Backers</b></font><font size=3> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=4 color="#CC3300"><b>by John
Pilger</b></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=3> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2 color="#4C4C4C"><b>January 30,
2004<br>
<a href="http://www.zmag.org">www.zmag.org<br><br>
</a></b></font><font face="arial" size=2>"It is my duty," wrote
the correspondent of the Times at the liberation of Belsen, "to
describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how
I felt in the summer of 1979, arriving in Cambodia in the wake of Pol
Pot's genocidal regime. <br><br>
In the silent, grey humidity, Phnom Penh, the size of Manchester, was
like a city that had sustained a nuclear cataclysm which had spared only
the buildings. Houses, flats, offices, schools, hotels stood empty and
open, as if vacated that day. Personal possessions lay trampled on a
path; traffic lights were jammed on red. There was almost no power, and
no water to drink. At the railway station, trains stood empty at various
stages of interrupted departure. Several carriages had been set on fire
and contained bodies on top of each other. <br><br>
When the afternoon monsoon broke, the gutters were suddenly awash with
paper; but this was money. The streets ran with money, much of it new and
unused banknotes whose source, the National Bank of Cambodia, had been
blown up by the Khmer Rouge as they retreated before the Vietnamese army.
Inside, a pair of broken spectacles rested on an open ledger; I slipped
and fell hard on a floor brittle with coins. Money was everywhere. In an
abandoned Esso station, an old woman and three emaciated children
squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which
bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money: thousands of snapping,
crackling riel, brand-new from the De La Rue company in London.
<br><br>
With tiny swifts rising and falling almost to the ground the only
movement, I walked along a narrow dirt road at the end of which was a
former primary school called Tuol Sleng. During the Pol Pot years it was
run by a kind of gestapo, "S21", which divided the classrooms
into a "torture unit" and an "interrogation unit". I
found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor, where people had been
mutilated on iron beds. Some 17,000 inmates had died a kind of slow death
here: a fact not difficult to confirm because the killers photographed
their victims before and after they tortured and killed them at mass
graves on the edge of the city. Names and ages, height and weight were
recorded. One room was filled to the ceiling with victims' clothes and
shoes, including those of many children. <br><br>
Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death
centre. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who
formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after
"confessing" that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi:
anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families were
confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept naked
on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written: <br><br>
1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.<br>
2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be
obtained. <br><br>
"Doing something" might mean only changing position in the
cell, and the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip.
Latrines were small ammunition boxes labelled "Made in USA".
For upsetting a box of excrement the punishment was licking the floor
with your tongue, torture or death, or all three. <br><br>
This is described, perhaps as never before, in a remarkable documentary,
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by Tuol Sleng's few survivors. The
work of the Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, the film has such
power that, more than anything I have seen on Cambodia since I was there
almost 25 years ago, it moved me deeply, evoking the dread and
incredulity that was a presence then. Panh, whose parents died in Pol
Pot's terror, succeeded in bringing together victims and torturers and
murderers at Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum. <br><br>
Van Nath, a painter, is the principal survivor. He is grey-haired now; I
cannot be sure, but I may have met him at the camp in 1979; certainly, a
survivor told me his life had been saved when it was found he was a
sculptor and he was put to work making busts of Pol Pot. The courage,
dignity and patience of this man when, in the film, he confronts former
torturers, "the ordinary and obscure journeymen of the
genocide", as Panh calls them, is unforgettable. <br><br>
The film has a singular aim: a confrontation, in the best sense, between
the courage and determination of those like Nath, who want to understand,
and the jailers, whose catharsis is barely beginning. There is Houy the
deputy head of security, Khan the torturer, Thi who kept the registers,
who all seem detached as they recall, almost wistfully, Khmer Rouge
ideology; and there is Poeuv, indoctrinated as a guard at the age of 12
or 13. In one spellbinding sequence, he becomes robotic, as if seized by
his memory and transported back. He shows us, with moronic precision, how
he intimidated prisoners, fastened their handcuffs and shackles, gave or
denied them food, ordered them to piss, threatening to beat them with
"the club" if a drop fell on the floor. His actions confront
all of us with the truth about human "cogs" in machines whose
inventors and senior managers politely disclaim responsibility, like the
still untried Khmer Rouge leaders and their foreign sponsors. <br><br>
Panh, whose film-making is itself an act of courage, sees something
positive in the mere act of bearing witness and, speaking of the
prisoners, in "the resistance [that is] a form of dignity that is
profoundly human". He refers to the "little things, these
unsubstantial details, so slight and fragile, which make us what we are.
You can never entirely 'destroy' a human being. A trace always remains,
even years later ... a refusal to accept humiliation can sometimes be
conveyed by a look of defiance, a chin slightly raised, a refusal to
capitulate under blows ... The photographs of certain prisoners and the
confessions conserved at Tuol Sleng are there to remind us of it."
<br><br>
It seems almost disrespectful to take issue at this point; but one must.
For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show in the
west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has to
be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years
ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I said I would,
but that the role of "civilised" governments in bringing him to
power, sustaining his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical
component. He wasn't interested. <br><br>
The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, "Year
Zero". It began more than five years earlier when American bombers
killed an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs,
napalm and dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral
country of peasant people and straw huts. In one six-month period in
1973, more tons of American bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were
dropped on Japan during the second world war: the equivalent of five
Hiroshimas. The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did this,
secretly and illegally. <br><br>
Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was the
catalyst for Pol Pot's fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only
minority support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh's film,
a torturer refers to the bombing as his reason for joining "the
maquis": the Khmer Rouge. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot
completed. And having been driven out by the Vietnamese, who came from
the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge were restored in Thailand
by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government, who
invented a "coalition" to provide the cover for America's
continuing war against Vietnam. <br><br>
Thank you, Rithy Panh, for your brave film; what is needed now is a work
as honest, which confronts "us" and relieves our amnesia about
the part played by our respectable leaders in Cambodia's epic tragedy.
<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
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