Rithy Panh. Rithy Panh’s films include Site 2 (1989), Cambodia: Between War and Peace (1991) Rice People (1994) and One Evening after the War (1997).
Survivors should have the courage to confront their history as “a debt owed to the dead and an obligation to their children”.
Film director Rithy Panh in Cambodia in March 1999 during the shooting of a documentary film about the installation of a trans-Cambodian optic fibre cable. Human bones were discovered when trenches for the cable were dug.
|
We live in a world where a man is more likely to be tried if he kills a single person than if he kills 100,000. Kofi Annan, Ghanaian diplomat, Secretary General of the UN (1938- ) |
|
Timeline 1953: Cambodia, a French protectorate
since 1863, gains independence, becoming a constitutional monarchy under King Norodom
Sihanouk. |
|
The best memory is that which forgets nothing but pardons injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in dust. Persian proverb |
A Cambodian
film-maker describes how he came to terms with horror. His country will never recover
its lost identity, he says, unless it puts the past on trial
left Cambodia
when I was 15 with a spiritual wound I knew would never heal. I had survived the
terrible ordeal of the Khmer Rouge genocide, which killed a quarter of the country’s
population. I didn’t understand how such a massacre had been possible. Even now,
I hardly do.
As soon as I reached the camp at Mairut, in Thailand, I stopped fearing for my life,
but I felt a profound sadness, whereas I should have been happy. I felt my whole
life was already behind me, that it belonged to those years of struggle for survival.
I wanted to forget. Go somewhere else, where I’d have no memory and no recollections,
where nobody would know what I’d been through. I’d seen and heard my relatives suffer.
Our family had been deported from Phnom Penh to Chrey, a village in the middle of
nowhere. One of my sisters was brought back to my parents, physically and psychologically
exhausted after building dikes and digging canals. Soon afterwards, my father died.
He was a peasant’s son who had become a teacher and then a primary school inspector.
He decided to stop eating. He chose to die as an act of rebellion, a last act of
freedom. Then, one after another, my mother, my sisters and my nephews died of hunger
or exhaustion.
Survivor’s
guilt
I didn’t want to talk
about any of that. I had made it part of myself, and it became almost the mainspring
of my survival. When I was living as an exile in France, there was a long period
when I refused to speak my native language and rejected any link with Cambodia. I
had been uprooted and I felt somehow incomplete, torn between forgetting and remembering,
between past and present, always ill at ease. I lived with memories of my relatives,
with the anxiety–the certainty–that the same tragic story would repeat itself. It
was burned into my flesh forever, as if with a branding iron, that this is what the
world is like: a place where there’s a lot of indifference and hypocrisy and little
compassion.
When you come out of a war, you’re not sure that you’ve left violence behind you.
You are locked in a culture of survival. And when you’ve survived genocide1,
you always feel guilty about being a survivor.
When the Italian writer Primo Levi came back from the Nazi death camps, he said that
“you feel others have died in your place, that we’re alive because of a privilege
we haven’t deserved, because of an injustice done to the dead. It isn’t wrong to
be alive, but we feel it is.”
Long afterwards, I learned to speak again and to accept what had happened to me.
Then I rediscovered my memories, my ability to imagine, to laugh, to dream, to rebuild
my life. In Cambodia, they say people who’ve died a violent death can’t be reincarnated,
that the souls of dead people who haven’t had a religious funeral and burial wander
the earth forever, haunting the living. There are bones all over the place in the
countryside. People find them whenever they start building.
A machine
to destroy memory
If you can’t grieve,
the violence continues. The Cambodian mother of a model family, well integrated in
France, cut off her child’s head just as the Khmer Rouge killers had chopped off
her father’s. Similar cases have occurred in Cambodia. At Preah Sihanouk Hospital
in Phnom Penh, the only department that provides psychiatric treatment takes patients
from all over the country. Sometimes there are 250 of them waiting in the corridor.
You only have to see how many are depressive and destitute to realize that something
must be done. There is a massive collective wound.
The terrible thing about past wars and about the Cambodian genocide is not only the
millions of dead, the widows, the orphans, the amputees and the depressed, it’s also
our shattered identity, the ruins of our social cohesion.
The first political decisions of the Khmer Rouge, after they won power on April 17,
1975, were unutterably violent. They emptied towns and hospitals, closed schools,
abolished money, deported people en masse to the countryside, defrocked monks and
looted old houses.2 “Absolutely everything belongs to Angkar
[the communist party],” they said. “If the party tells you to do something you must
do it! Anyone who objects is an enemy, anyone who opposes is a corpse.” People had
to dress in black, change the way they spoke, use certain words and exclude others
from their vocabulary. It was forbidden to sing, dance, say prayers and even talk
to other people. My father, who had spent all his life trying to improve Cambodia’s
public education system, was particularly worried about the decision to ban teaching.
“The spade is your pen, the rice-paddy is your paper,” was the message Angkar drove
home.
All social classes were affected to varying degrees by mass deportations to the countryside,
forced labour, summary executions and famine. Paradoxically, all these absurd sacrifices
were made in the name of restoring the glory of the Angkor era. All the roots of
our culture and identity, the basic social relationships and symbolic links which
attached Cambodians to their world were methodically and deliberately attacked and
destroyed.
Most of the detention centres were set up in pagodas, places of prayer and compassion,
or in schools, places of knowledge. Angkar was a machine for destroying identity
and wiping out memory.
Before they executed their victims, the killers tortured them and made them write
hundreds of pages of false confessions dictated by Khmer Rouge officials. After being
forced to denounce their families and friends, the prisoners were executed. “By eliminating
you,” Angkar said, “we don’t lose anything. It’s better to wrongly arrest somebody
than to wrongly let somebody go.”
One of the executioners at Camp S-21, in Tuol Sleng–Pol Pot’s main torture centre–today
only expresses his “regrets”; he doesn’t feel guilty. He destroyed non-persons, people
the Khmer Rouge had stripped of all humanity.
This genocide was “silent”. The Khmer Rouge imposed a reign of terror, and most executions
were carried out without witnesses and without noise. The world let Cambodians die
and didn’t seem to care. Not many people denounced the massacres.
When I arrived in France in 1979, I was amazed to find that the Khmer Rouge still
occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. A few years later, I took the absence
of the word “genocide” from the Paris peace accords as a refusal to allow the survivors
to remember, as an insult to the victims’ dignity.
I went back to Cambodia in 1990 after 11 years in exile. I wanted to find the survivors
of my family and recover the remains of the dead and give them a proper burial, so
their souls would stop wandering the earth and could be reincarnated in the cycle
of life and death. I wanted at least to confirm they had died, so I could start to
mourn properly.
I went to Tuol Sleng camp, which has been turned into a “genocide museum”. I wanted
to try to find a photo of my uncle among the hundreds of pictures of the dead pinned
on the walls. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in. I went back in 1991 to film the
few survivors of the camp (only seven out of some 15,000 people who passed through
it). I wanted to understand the banalization of evil and the dehumanizing machinery
of the Khmer Rouge.
But we’re afraid of this recent past. Cambodians who dare to talk about it are divided.
Some think we should forget and look to the future, that there’s no point in inflicting
another ordeal on ourselves by trying to bring back memories and pick over old wounds.
They fear that if trials are held they will revive serious political quarrels which
might set off another civil war. Or else they generalize about Cambodians and say
most of them are “fatalistic” and accept a history of war and genocide as their “karma”.
This approach was dismissed by a 30-year-old peasant called Torng, who was typical
of many people I spoke to while I was filming. “The Khmer Rouge didn’t just kill
people,” he said. “They turned our generation into ignoramuses, animals, idiots,
who don’t know where they’re going. We didn’t study. All we know is how to use our
physical strength. So we can only get jobs as peasants or labourers. The Khmer Rouge
should be put on trial. If they aren’t, people like me will be tempted to take revenge.”
I believe, and so do others, that we should face up to our history, so that our relatives
and friends didn’t die in vain. Mourning won’t be possible unless moral and political
responsibility for the Cambodian genocide is established. A trial of the Khmer Rouge,
before the Cambodian people, is absolutely essential. We have to give meaning to
basic ideas of law and justice in this country. In a democratic society, you can’t
kill without being punished.
We must give our memory a fair and dignified trial in order to understand the past.
I’m not bothered about the sentences that would be handed down. Only the truth can
free us–the whole truth, however horrific. The other point of such a trial, which
is just as important, would be to restore our identity. The Khmer Rouge have plunged
generations of Cambodians into a vicious circle of cultural loss.
Not many Cambodians tell their children about the genocide, which is a fuzzy corner
of their memory. But we can’t build our future by forgetting. The survivors must
tell their stories and ensure that the memory of what happened is handed down from
the past to the present. We owe a debt to the dead and we have an obligation to our
children.
We shan’t be able to get rid of this 30-year culture of violence, cast out the monster
that is fear and put behind us the collective guilt we feel as survivors unless we
manage to understand our history.
1. The autor use this word in its broader sense; contrast UN's stricter definition, see page 20.