“Please Don’t Walk Through The Mass Grave”
Does this Message Reflect the Memorialization
of the Cambodian Genocide?
Max de Kruiff
10886230
June 2015
Supervisor: Nanci Adler
Word Count: 22.910
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Table of Contents
Introduction 2
The Struggle of Politicized Memorialization 11
The Cambodian People and their Past: Memorializing 25 the Genocide from the Bottom Up
Memorialization in Cambodia and the International Community 37
Conclusion 48
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Introduction
Fourteen kilometers southeast from the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh lies Choeung Ek. For those who do not wish to engage themselves in history, this site seems to be a calm part of the Cambodian rural landscape. A beautiful place, untouched by busy urban influences, Choeung Ek is Cambodia in its purest form. Sadly, Choeung Ek is an example of how something that seems so innocent at first sight is in fact a dark place which echoes the voices of death. Visiting Choeung Ek anno 2015 is a visit to one of history’s darkest pages. The well-preserved Killing Fields of Choeung Ek give a horrible and interesting peek in the terror of the Red Khmer regime at the same time. When entering the memorial site, the large stupa comes immediately into sight. Before reaching this building, the visitor is warned about the content of what will be seen at Choeung Ek. In the stupa, hundreds of skulls are shown to the visitor, a rather unpleasant but unfortunately realistic illustration of what happened there. I had the chance to visit Choeung Ek in 2011. The things that I experienced there and in Cambodia as a whole, inspired me to write this thesis. What follows after the stupa, is a tour over the former Killing Fields. I remember walking on the path, seeing small white pieces on the surface of the grass. It was as if those pieces were part of the ground, a strange sort of ground surface. However, our guide told us, these were remains of the bones of the Cambodians who were brutally slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge.
One has to be constantly aware of what you are looking at when it comes to a
historical subject like this. However, as a human being, some things seem so unreal, that it is impossible sometimes to fully engage yourself with the historical context. I had this
experience when I saw a sign which said: “Please Don’t Walk Through the Mass Grave”. Clinical was the word that came to my mind. A clinical sign, like a warning in traffic. Was that really how the Cambodian genocide was remembered?
Cambodia’s history cannot be studied openly. This is for a large part the result of the genocide which happened in the 1970s and its aftermath. The genocide was a devastating episode in the country’s rich history. Cambodia was a wealthy nation during the Khmer empire, which lasted from the ninth till the thirteenth century. This was the time in which the Angkor Wat temples were built. After the Khmer empire had fallen, influences from outside increased in the country. First, Spanish and Portuguese travelers made it to Cambodia. Later, in the nineteenth century, Cambodia became part of French Indochina. The French ruled the colony until 1953. In 1941, the French appointed Norodom Sihanouk as the king of
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Cambodia, which made the country a monarchy. Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the throne in 1955, after which he became leader of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, a socialist party. Sihanouk won the elections and became prime minister. He stayed in this function until 1970, when he was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Nol led a coup against Sihanouk, who was popular at first – he led the struggle for Cambodian independence -, but opposition was simply a matter of time. The Vietnam War had a great impact on former Indochina. Sihanouk did not want to cooperate with the Americans, which has fed ideas that the Americans were behind Nol’s takeover of Cambodia. The General ruled the country until 1975: the year in which
Cambodia’s history would take a dramatic turn. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took over the country and installed a Maoist communist regime. The Khmer Rouge killed one third of the
Cambodian population during its reign which lasted until 1979.1
Remembering Cambodia’s history today is not the same as it was before the Khmer Rouge took over the country. The current Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in the
government since the end of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. His administration has been struggling with the genocidal past ever since. However, the government has been able to make this struggle slightly more comfortable by implementing a narrative about Cambodia’s past which makes it easier for the elite to memorialize the past: the past is made usable. On the other side, we have the Cambodian population. They are struggling with the past as well. Since more than twenty percent of the population was killed during the genocidal years, almost every Cambodian has a direct link with the events of the 1970s. Therefore, the population is heavily traumatized. However, they are not able to express this trauma and to resolve it. This will be made clear if we see how the Cambodian leadership memorializes the genocidal past and how this narrative of memorialization is implemented in the Cambodian population. This narrative is not only implemented in the Cambodian people. A third force has a role in the Cambodian memorialization as well: the international community. In this thesis, I will argue that the memorialization of the Cambodian genocide is particularly
influenced by the Cambodian government. Moreover, the memorialization is influenced from the outside, which is the international community. As a consequence, the memorialization of the Cambodian people has been suppressed.
1 Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-1979,” in Century of Genocide, Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, eds. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 84.
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Memorialization and Lieux de Mémoire
In order to understand the context of this thesis, it is important to explain what is meant here while speaking about memorialization. According to Jay Winter, memory is ‘performed at the heart of the collective memory. When individuals and groups express or embody or interpret or repeat a social script about the past, they galvanize the ties that binds groups together and deposit additional memory traces about the past in their own minds.’2 What individuals and groups are doing is performing their memory. This helps them remembering the past. In this thesis, when the term memorialization is used, I mean the performing of memory through rituals (for instance religious rituals), stories (personal stories of the past), cultural phenomena (museums), grand narrative (the official lecture of the past), or a metanarrative (the counter narrative of the grand narrative). These last two definitions are closely linked to the idea of the lieux de mémoire on which I will come back in this section. They are especially important since the two types of narratives point to the major problem in Cambodia, which is that the government’s narrative overshadows that of the Cambodian population.
Memorialization of the Cambodian genocide will be discussed by looking into the initiatives of memorialization of three different groups: the Cambodian government, the Cambodian population, and the international community. These three groups have their own way of memorializing the Cambodian genocide: they perform memory differently.
Cambodia’s main sites of memorialization are the Tuol Sleng Museum (S-21) and Choeung Ek. Besides these two places where crimes were actually committed, the government installed two official holidays which remind of the Khmer Rouge period: Victory Day on January 7 and the Day of Remembrance on May 20 – which was formerly known as the Day of Hatred. Although the Cambodian government made these efforts to keep the memory of the genocide alive, criticism has never been off the table. This criticism has particularly been coming from the international community. Especially in the late 1990s, calls for justice and truthful
memorialization became louder. The Cambodian people are primarily concerned that good memorialization will never come to exist. Their quest for memorialization and justice is still going. As we will see in chapter 2, Cambodian people do not feel that the government are handling their past well. The most notorious example is the refusal of the Cambodian
government to burn the remains of the people which are now displayed on the former killing
2 Jay Winter, “The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
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field. As Paul Williams has put it, Choeung Ek’s historical significance is ‘dwarfed’ by the government.3 Therefore, the question if the efforts of memorialization undertaken by the government help the Cambodian people is best answered with a no. Why is this the case? This thesis will show how the Cambodian government’s efforts of memorialization have failed to serve the people’s needs: the initiatives taken by the government do not help the Cambodian people in remembering the genocidal past correctly.4
In 1989, Pierre Nora defined the concept lieux de mémoire. According to Nora, lieux
de mémoire are ‘fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial
consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.’5 Nora uses some examples from the French history to clarify this term. One of them is the Arc de Triomphe. This monument was built to celebrate Napoleon Bonaparte’s victories in Austerlitz. In Nora’s vision, this Arc represents a significant part of the French history. The monument is a symbol which cannot be forgotten, since it is a
fundamental remainder of the past. Nora calls this an elementary tool and a symbolic object of our memory.6 By looking at the Arc de Triomphe, one immediately recalls the French history. Examples of lieux de mémoire at work can be found everywhere. For example in Rome, the grand old city of the Romans with its Pantheon or the Colosseum. Cambodia has these places as well: the Tuol Sleng museum and the Choeung Ek killing field are only two examples where Cambodian lieux de mémoire is at work.
Lieux de mémoire does not occur spontaneously. It is created by people and can
therefore be twisted. It is essential for a minority to illuminate the truth of lieux de mémoire, since without ‘commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away.’7 In
Cambodia, lieux de mémoire has been created by the government. Here, the difficult relationship between history and memory is very clear. If history is not told correctly, memory of the past gets troubled as well.8 In other words, it is almost impossible for the Cambodian people to memorialize their genocidal past correctly as long as the government
3 Paul Williams, “The Atrocity Exhibition: Touring Cambodian Genocide Memorials,” in On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, eds. Smith and Wevers (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), 204. 4 In fact, many Cambodians do not believe that the genocide even happened, Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (London: Praeger, 2005), 3.
5 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 12. 6 Ibid., 12.
7 Ibid.
8 Or as Nora calls it, memory is seized here by history (“Lieux de Mémoire,” 13-15). For another explanation of
Nora’s concept, see Nancy Wood, “Memory Remains: Les lieux de mémoire,” History & Memory 6 (1994): 126-7.
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does not offer rightful education in the country’s history.9 Objective archives which could be entered by Cambodians did not exist until 1995, when the Documentation Center of
Cambodia (DCC) was opened. The DCC is a non-governmental research institute which has provided the means for scholars (Cambodian and non-Cambodian) to study the country’s past. Whereas Nora specifically points to lieux de mémoire as official places of
memorialization, Jens Meierhenrich believes that the concept is also at work in what he calls ‘underprivileged memory.’ He states that places of commemoration can also be found in non-official places. Taking the Nyabarango River in Rwanda as an example, Meierhenrich shows how the Tutsis see this place as far more important than officially installed places of
remembrance, since a river like the Nyabarango is much better accessible and therefore a very practical place to remember the past.10 What is good about this form of lieux de mémoire is that it was created by the people themselves and not by the government, which might make it a more truthful place of memorialization. In this thesis, the Cambodian lieux de mémoire will be defined. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are examples of Nora’s definition of lieux de
mémoire, but are there also sites of underprivileged memory? In here, I will show how
Cambodia memorializes its past and what is good and bad about it.
First, it is reasonable to ask ourselves how we can determine what good memorialization is. Does such a thing even exist? According to Lisa M. Moore, memorialization is good when the past is embalmed and memory is ordered correctly. Moore states that memorialization can often be seen at places where crimes were actually committed. She states that this can work, as long as the site is signified as authentic. According to Moore, the presentation of physical evidence at a site of memorialization can help as well in memorializing the past rightfully.11 Although the argument that a visitor to the site can memorialize better when confronted with the past directly, one cannot say that physical evidence is always a condition for good memorialization. This will be made clear in the second chapter of this thesis.
Another way to look at memorialization in Cambodia is to compare it with other cases. According to Rebecca Jinks, most of the literature about memorialization in general has been
9 For a more theoretical piece on the framing of memory, see Aleida Assmann. “Re-framing Memory. Between
individual and collective forms of constructing the past,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History, and Identity
in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 35-50. 10 Jens Meierhenrich, “The Transformation of Lieux de Mémoire: The Nyabarongo River in Rwanda,
1992-2009,” Anthropology Today 25 (2009): 13.
11 Lisa M. Moore, “(Re)Covering the Past, Remembering Trauma: the Politics of Commemoration at Sites of
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written on single cases, such as one genocide museum or a public form of remembrance.12 However, memorialization of a genocide can be done in various ways and these ways should all be included in order to create a complete picture of how the remembrance of a genocide is experienced in a country. Therefore, instead of discussing one single museum, various topics will be discussed in this thesis. Nevertheless, most often memorialization can be seen in museums, set up by the government to show a certain narrative of the past. Initiatives like these are often supported by keywords like empathy, experience and education.13
These narratives promoted by a state are often misleading. There is not so much attention for the victims and it is questionable whether the museum helps preventing violence in the future. Moreover, it does not help the population with recovering from a genocide. Jenny Edkins states that people do not remember mass violence correctly since they are often highly influenced by a narrative promoted by the state: they suffer from the grand narrative and are not able to promote their own metanarrative.14 Although Edkins primary focus of study is the Holocaust, we have seen this happening in Cambodia as well. Another example may be how the Bosnian war in the 1990s has been remembered by people whom experienced the conflict.15
How people experience genocide and how they remember such an event may also for a large part be linked to culture. Genocides have occurred on all continents. Mass violence is therefore not unique for one culture or one place. In each separate example of genocide, the crimes were different, but the aftermath was different as well. How a society brings those responsible for the crimes to justice is highly dependent on its culture. For example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was successful in South Africa, but an
initiative like this may not have worked after another conflict. In Bosnia, for example, initiatives for truth commissions were made as well, but they failed.16 This teaches us that culture is crucial in genocide as a whole, but in remembering a genocide as well.
This brings us to the question how a genocide should be remembered. The answer is not easy to give. It differs in every situation and it is therefore hard to compare cases of
12 Rebecca Jinks, “Thinking Comparatively about Genocide Memorialization,” Journal of Genocide Research 16
(2014): 425.
13 Ibid., 426.
14 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. 15 For examples of Bosnian lieux de mémoire at work, see the articles by Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik,
“Knowledge, Acknowledgement and Denial in Serbia’s Responses to the Srebrenica Massacre,” Journal of
Contemporary European Studies 17 (2009), and Christine Lavrence, “Between Monumental History and
Experience: Remembering and Forgetting War in Belgrade,” Ethnologie Française 37 (2007).
16 Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, “Perpetrators and Victims: Local Responses to the International Criminal
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genocide with each other. However, to make a start in answering this question, it is valuable to have an idea how the culture of the country which suffered from a genocide, in this case Cambodia, functions. What should be mentioned here first, however, is that it was nearly impossible for Cambodia to start the process of memorializing right after the Cambodian genocide. Cambodia was a country in chaos after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. The
Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1979, which made an end to the Pol Pot regime. What followed were years of civil war, with an unpopular new regime. Nearly fifteen years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the United Nations started to intervene in the country, which marked the beginning of efforts to bring those responsible for the Cambodian genocide to justice. In the first chapter, I will elaborate on this. Efforts of memorialization did start earlier, though. Already in 1979, the Tuol Sleng museum was opened, but this was done in times of civil war by a Vietnamese-Cambodian government.
Khmer Culture
The initiatives for memorialization in Cambodia had to fit in with Cambodian culture, the Khmer culture. Understanding Cambodian culture may help to understand how the
Cambodian people experience their past and the way its darkest pages are memorialized. The
Cambodian is best described as a ‘peaceful, compassionate, gentle’ human being. Religion is
very important in Khmer culture. The Khmer religion is largely influenced by both Indian Brahmanism and Theravada Buddhism.17 Within this religion, the concepts of reincarnation and karma are interesting and important. Reincarnation means that a person comes back to earth in another form after one dies. In which form this is, is decided by karma. All actions, good and bad, influence how one will reincarnate. Therefore, the Cambodian believes that everything that happens during lifetime, is more or less decided beforehand because it is a result of the actions in a former life.18 This cultural asset may be important in defining how the Cambodians experience their genocide memorialization: after all, do the Cambodian people see the genocide as an event which was inevitable and maybe, in a way, something which they deserved based on their previous life? These notions will be elaborated on in the second chapter.
Cambodian culture was largely contested during the Khmer Rouge period. One of the
17 Abdulgaffar Peang-Meth, “Understanding the Khmer: Sociological-Cultural Observations,” Asian Survey 31,
(1991): 445-46.
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first acts of the regime was to target the Buddhist monks in the country. Religion was forbidden in Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge made a division between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ people. Religion was considered as ‘old’ and therefore dangerous, it had to be destroyed. The cultural genocide had started.19 Family life was destroyed as well, together with the Cambodian intellectual elite. Those who were highly educated did not fit the peasant-loving ideology of the Khmer Rouge. The result is that anno 2015, Cambodian people are mostly low-educated. Most of their parents died during the 1970s. After this time, education was hard to get, especially non-biased education.20 This may be influencing Cambodian memorialization as well.
This thesis will focus on how the Cambodian genocide is memorialized by the Cambodian government, the Cambodian people and the international community. In my opinion, these three actors have all influenced memorialization in Cambodia on their own way. The
Cambodian government did this top down. The result has been a state implemented narrative on the Cambodian people and the international community in which victims do not play a role. The government acknowledges that crimes were committed during the Khmer Rouge period, but the policies towards these crimes have been changing many times. The result has been impunity for the perpetrators and frustration for the victims of the genocide. These victims have been trying to take initiatives to memorialize the past on their own way. However, this is not allowed by the government. Therefore, the bottom up initiatives cannot work. The international community has been trying to help the population with this, but has not succeeded so far. As will be made clear in chapter 3, efforts to stabilize Cambodia’s political situation have been undertaken, but none of them have truly worked.
The three chapters of this thesis will each deal with one of these actors. The sources that will be used to develop the argument differ. For years, the Cambodian genocide was not a subject which was studied on a large level. In the past decade, this seems to have changed.21 Nevertheless, a study on memorialization in which these three actors have been involved has not been done yet.
For those interested in studying Cambodia, there has been an increase of primary and
19 For a definition of the term cultural genocide, see David Nersessian, “Cultural Genocide,” in Genocide, A Reader, ed. Jens Meierhenrich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For this part of the Cambodian
genocide, see also the chapter on Cambodia in Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide, Utopias of Race and
Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
20 Ben Kiernan, “Cambodia: Coming to Term with the Past,” History Today 54 (2004).
21 This notion is made by many scholars who have been studying Cambodia for a longer time. Craig Etcheson,
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secondary sources in the last ten years, which is particularly the result of the efforts of the Yale Project on the Cambodian genocide, led by Ben Kiernan and the Documentation Center of Cambodia. One disadvantage of many primary sources is that Khmer is a very complicated language, which is not easy to read. In this thesis, all sources, primary and secondary, were originally written in English or French.
Secondary sources come plenty in number, but do not answer all questions. Literature on how Cambodian people experience memorialization of their past is scarce. Therefore, the use of oral history has been a major part of my research. Besides that, Rachel Hughes has made a great start in studying some aspects of memorialization in Cambodia. Craig Etcheson and Evan Gottesman wrote a useful monograph on post-genocidal Cambodia. These two works will be useful for the historical context in which the argument will unfold. For more specific works on memorialization in Cambodia is it necessary to turn to the literature on tourism as well, since here it is often described how a memorial place is decorated. Primary sources are mostly derived from the Documentation Center of Cambodia, newspapers and the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia, as well as some international databases on which I have based the facts and numbers presented through the chapters.
With help of the literature, I will argue that memorialization of the Cambodian genocide is influenced by three actors: the Cambodian government, the Cambodian people and the international community. The government is responsible for the grand narrative, which cannot be countered by the metanarrative of the people. Whereas the international community should help the Cambodian people in countering the state narrative, we will see that the efforts to do so have failed.
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The Struggle of Politicized Memorialization
In 1998, prime minister Hun Sen held a press conference in which he welcomed Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan back to Cambodian society. In his speech on December 28, Sen stated that the two top leaders of the Khmer Rouge should ‘be welcomed with bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs.’22 The past was the past, and had to be buried.23 The words delivered by Cambodia’s prime minister were remarkable. At the end of the 1990s, the United Nations and Cambodia were finally working towards a solution regarding the country’s genocidal past. A tribunal was to be established, only the dots on the i’s and the crosses on the t’s missed. The reluctant attitude shown by Sen was a setback for the United Nations
operation. Did Cambodia really want justice? After all, its people hoped that the tribunal would help in giving them some peace with the past.
In order to understand the politicized memorialization of the Cambodian genocide, it is useful to discuss the issue of impunity briefly for this concept is highly influential to the political way of dealing with the country’s past. The December 1998 speech by Hun Sen is only one example out of many in which impunity is deeply rooted in Cambodian political life.24 Since Norodom Sihanouk became king in the 1950s, impunity seems to be a ‘consistent characteristic’ in Cambodian politics, the Khmer Rouge being the most famous and notorious example. Other examples can be found in present Cambodia as well. For instance, in 1997 political violence broke out between supporters of the Cambodian’s People Party and the FUNCINPEC, the royalist party. According to Craig Etcheson, more than 100 people were killed during this period, but no one has ever been charged with a crime.25 As we will see, especially when the Vietnamese left Cambodia in 1989, the Cambodian government was not keen on punishing those who were responsible for the mass crimes which occurred in the 1970s during the Khmer Rouge period.
At the end of the 1990s, the United Nations tried hard to establish an international criminal tribunal in Cambodia which would deal with the perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide, based on similar experiences in Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and South Africa (South African Reconciliation- and Truth Commission (SATRC). The first step towards a
22 Seth Mydans, “Cambodian Leader Resists Punishing Top Khmer Rouge,” The New York Times, December 29,
1998.
23 “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate” – quote by Hun
Sen in Mydans, “Cambodian Leader Resists Punishing Top Khmer Rouge”.
24 See Steve Heder, “Cultures of Genocide, Impunity and Victors’ Justice in Cambodia, 1945-1999: Colonial
Communist and Other International Sources,” (unpublished transcript, 2000) 5f.
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tribunal was made in 1997, when Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen – the first and second prime minster of the Cambodian government at the time - asked for ‘the assistance of the United Nations and the international community in bringing justice to those persons responsible for the genocides and crimes against humanity during the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.’26 The reaction of the United Nations was skeptical. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote in a letter to the Secretary-General Assembly that ‘the facts which gave rise to the request remain unclear.’27 Nevertheless, Annan stated that the representative of the United Nations in Cambodia was looking into the situation. What followed was a time in which the UN tried to negotiate with the Cambodians, but these negotiations were not fruitful for five years. Despite the request which was sent to the UN in 1997, the Cambodian
government was not willing to make concessions to the United Nations. According to Craig Etcheson, this is typical for Cambodian culture, which he calls a ‘culture of impunity.’28 The Cambodian culture is one which has ‘a set of social expectations – structured by supporting laws, customs and behaviors – that the strong can do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must.’29 In this context, we should see the attitude of the Cambodian government, not only to the establishment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, but to the past as a whole. In 2003, Cambodia finally came to an agreement with the United Nations. The argument which was used by Hun Sen’s government to turn down the United Nations
proposals up to 2003, was that Cambodia wanted to work on a tribunal without help from the international community, stating that a national tribunal would work better against the culture of impunity.30 This argument contrasts the request of 1997, but can nevertheless be explained. The Cambodian government is still largely influenced by the genocidal past: former Khmer Rouge members have been in the government ever since the Vietnamese takeover in 1979. Therefore, the realization that the United Nations, or any other party, would intervene in the process of punishing perpetrators, was not alluring for those in the government who had a contaminated past. Moreover, the decision of the Cambodian government to seek assistance had in the first place a political goal, which was gaining recognition from the United Nations. As Phuong N. Pham and Patrick Vinck notice, this political goal had a higher priority than the
26 Letter sent by Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen to the United Nations on 21 June, 1997,
http://www.unakrt-online.org/sites/default/files/documents/June_21_1997_letters_from_PMs-2-1.pdf.
27 Letter sent by Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan to the General Assembly of the United
Nations on 23 June 1997,
http://www.unakrt-online.org/sites/default/files/documents/June_21_1997_letters_from_PMs-2-1.pdf.
28 Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, 167. 29 Ibid.
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abstract notions of truth and reconciliation. Once the United Nations had noticed Cambodia’s existence, the need for a tribunal had fallen away.31
Pressure from the international community, especially from NGOs such as Amnesty International, made Cambodia finally decide otherwise. The result was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), in which international judges and lawyers cooperated with Cambodian fellow workers.
Although the establishment of the tribunal was a first step towards justice, in practice the tribunal has known some serious problems. The tribunal has only been trying high-level perpetrators - of which Kang Kiek Iew alias Duch, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted. The number of cases which is handled by the ECCC is limited as well.32 Low-level perpetrators are still profiting from the Cambodian culture of impunity.33 This is a problem, since low-level perpetrators in Cambodia are plenty in number. The Khmer Rouge separated families, broke up villages and destroyed city life. In this chaotic time, especially young children were made to participate in the Khmer Rouge crimes. One account of a former Khmer Rouge fighter is that of Sayon Soeun, who was six years old when the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia. In the years that followed, Soeun was ordered to kill people. He had no choice: it was kill or being killed. The story of Sayon Soeun has been recorded in the documentary Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey. The example of Soeun is interesting, since he is both a victim and a perpetrator. There are many more people in Cambodia like him. However, they have not had the opportunity to confront the past. What might be a good approach for these types of perpetrators in finding justice and peace with their actions is a truth
commission. Since the Khmer Rouge Tribunal only tries high-level perpetrators, truth commissions could be helpful for the perpetrators to confess what they did. Moreover, the victims might be able to process the past better. However, this idea cannot be executed, since the government does not allow the Cambodian people to openly speak about or recall the past. This is a missed opportunity, since the Khmer Rouge Tribunal cannot cover Cambodia’s past by itself. A major reason is that the tribunal lacks funds. As a result, is it questionable whether the tribunal will still exist in a while and if it will be able to reach its goals.34 It will be a tough
31 Phuong N. Pham and Patrick Vinck, “Cambodia,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, Volume 2, eds.
Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 88.
32 On the website of the ECCC, http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/caseload, information can be found about the cases
which are handled by the ECCC. There are only four cases handled (Cases 001, 002, 003 and 004), of which the content of the last two are unknown to the general public.
33 Khatharya Um, “The Perpetrators of the Cambodian Genocide Are Still Eluding Justice,” History News Network, January 27, 2014.
34 Holly Robertson, "UN Asked to Prove $29M to Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” The Cambodia Daily, November 20,
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challenge to break the culture of impunity. In chapter two and three, I will come back to these problems.
The Cambodian-Vietnamese Narrative
The troubles surrounding the tribunal are exemplary for the Cambodian way of dealing with its past. The last twenty years have shown that Cambodia has always had troubles in the aftermath of their genocide. The Cambodian government has made it through a few waves in which they handled their past differently. First, the genocide was used as a propaganda tool: the Vietnamese used the events of 1975-79 to condemn the Khmer Rouge and to justify the Vietnamese takeover and the measures which came along with this takeover. Second, the government acted as if the genocide had never happened. In the third wave, which is the current situation, Cambodia seems to be working towards a more truthful narrative, although there are still many problems; for instance, in classrooms, history about the genocidal past is not taught.35
The political narrative in which the genocide is memorialized started directly after the Khmer rouge fell in 1979. When the Vietnamese entered Cambodia and made an end to the regime of Pol Pot, the national narrative of the years of genocidal violence was immediately a point of attention for them. In fact, what the Vietnamese did was creating a usable past. The Vietnamese made the genocidal past one in which the crimes committed could be relativized. By pointing to other criminal regimes, such as Nazi-Germany, the Vietnamese made
Cambodia’s past explicable. This notion of the usable past is not a Vietnamese-Cambodia invention. After the Holocaust, the same was done in Nazi-Germany. As Omer Bartov states, relativizing the Holocaust was done in post-Nazi-Germany as well by ‘shifting the focus to the allegedly positive elements in Nazi society and rejecting the centrality of the Holocaust.’36 In this chapter will be shown how the creation of this usable past influenced the Cambodian official narrative of the genocide. The development of this narrative, what its characteristics are and how it affects the official memorialization of the genocide will be the central theme in
35 Ben Kiernan, “Cambodia: Coming to Terms with the Past.”
36 Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 34. For more information on the notion of the usable past, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable
Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
William James Bouwsma, A Usable past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1990); Tad Tuleja, ed., Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America (Salt Lake City: Logan, 1997); Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Usable past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of
15
the pages to come.
Whereas the new government did not officially promote revenge against the Khmer Rouge, reality proved different. After Cambodia was taken over in January 1979, the Vietnamese-Cambodian government encountered a period of chaos. The Khmer Rouge soldiers and supporters fled to the edges of Cambodian territory and some moved into
Thailand. Cambodia turned into a scattered country on many levels: the economy was bad, the new government had to find its way and the Cambodian people were recovering from a
disastrous period in their country’s history. In this time of chaos, Cambodians were looking for revenge and acts of it were not discouraged at all. Account of violence against Khmer Rouge soldiers are plenty in number. This violence remained unpunished.37 As a result of this violence, it took some time for the new regime to install their authority. Gradually, however, this authority came. The Vietnamese were careful in their attitude towards local initiatives made by Cambodians to restore society. They saw the importance of these initiatives, since they understood that Cambodians at this point recognized and accepted these forms of
leadership.38 For example, the Vietnamese allowed the Cambodian people to come back to the cities. The Cambodians were eager to start their search for the family members and friends that they had lost during the Khmer Rouge regime. As Evan Gottesman points out, it was for the first time in four years that Cambodians felt a sense of freedom: they were able to speak about the Vietnamese takeover and had the opportunity to trade food and consumer goods in a relatively open way.39
Slowly, the Vietnamese were able to take over Cambodian society and to restore the order in the country. This took some time, since the newly installed regime in Phnom Pen was not able to focus on reconstructing Cambodian society: the Third Indochina War was fought at the same time. As Stephen Morris stated, the main goal for the Vietnamese in this war was to achieve complete domination over Cambodia.40 However, this was not as easy as it
seemed. Not only the fractions of the Khmer Rouge were battling with the Vietnamese, the Thai and the Chinese were involved in the war as well. The Thai did support the Khmer
37 For some of these accounts, see Loung Ung’s well known novel First they Killed my Father (New York:
HarperCollins, 2000). Revenge violence is something which can be seen in other countries in transition periods as well. For instance, in South Africa violence and crime numbers increased strongly after the end of the Apartheid. For literature on this subject, see the Violence and Transition Series of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
38 Evan Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge, Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 55-56.
39 Ibid., 39.
40 Sophie Quinn-Judge, “Victory on the Battlefield; Isolation in Asia: Vietnam’s Cambodia decade, 1979-1989,”
in The Third Indochina War, Conflict between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 1972-79, eds. Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (New York: Routledge, 2006), 207.
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Rouge rebels, with the motivation that they did not want the Vietnamese to get to much power in the Indochina region.41 The Chinese did not approve of the show of strength of the
Vietnamese either. The powerful Chinese were determined to isolate Vietnam and turn the country into a ‘Cuba of the East.’42
Therefore, 1979 was a year in which military matters were more important than working on a new national narrative of the past. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese saw it as their duty to interfere in Cambodia. The motivation to do so was primarily out of nationalist rhetoric. As Stephen Morris states, the Vietnamese saw the Cambodians as ‘barbarians’ who needed to be civilized. The Vietnamese saw themselves as morally superior.43 Already in the second half of 1979, priorities shifted slowly. Although the Third Indochina War was still raging, the PRK (People’s Republic of Kampuchea) was taking shape. The new republic was found by Vietnamese standards: power was in the hands of an unnamed communist party, which was led by former Khmer Rouge commander Heng Samrin. He was selected as head of state by the Vietnamese. Amongst the top leaders was Hun Sen as well, serving as foreign minister.44
The Vietnamese tried to convince Cambodians that they had the right intentions for their country. The government showed this by installing the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal (PRT), a court in which Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were tried (in absence). However, the trial against the Khmer Rouge leaders was nothing more than a show trial.45 Both Pol Pot and Ieng Sary had fled when the Vietnamese took over Cambodia. Therefore, the start of a trial against the two top leaders of the Khmer Rouge did not lead to a concrete result. Later, the
Cambodian government granted amnesty to those who were indicted in 1979.46
Being reliable and trustworthy or not, the PRT may serve as an example of how the Vietnamese were concerned of how Cambodians thought about the leadership. The
Vietnamese made work of the implementation of their narrative of Cambodia’s past.
The installation of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is another example of this. In 1979, the Vietnamese Colonel Mai Lam was ordered by the government to turn the torture prison S-21 into a museum: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The choice for Lam was a logical one, since this Vietnamese man had experience in this field: he was responsible for the curation of
41 Ibid., 213. 42 Ibid.
43 Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, Political Culture and the Causes of War (New York:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 235.
44 Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, 45-46. 45 Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, 16.
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the American War Crimes museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).47
Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek
The Tuol Sleng museum was established for several reasons. First of all, with this initiative the Vietnamese based their legitimacy of their presence in the country. Moreover, the
legitimacy of the PRK, the party which had ruled the country since the Vietnamese takeover, was ensured. This was done by pointing out to the public that it were the Vietnamese who had freed the Cambodian people from Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.48 A second reason why the genocide museum was built was that the Vietnamese needed an official narrative of the past in which the Communist character of the Khmer Rouge could be tucked away. This was a strong wish not only from within the Vietnamese Communist party, but also from their communist allies, especially the Soviet Union.49 The third major reason for the installation of Tuol Sleng was that the reign of the Khmer Rouge had to be remembered as a genocidal one.50
Mai Lam did not change the composition of the museum, things were left mostly how the Vietnamese army had found them. The horrific scenes which the Vietnamese saw when entering S-21 for the first time, fitted precisely in the set-up for the museum.51 However, one major contribution was made to the museum, a notorious map of Cambodia made from skulls and blood. This rather repulsive image of what happened in the country was a typical example of how the Vietnamese wanted the Cambodians to remember their past. The official narrative which was promoted by the regime was one of hate. Feelings of hate towards the Khmer Rouge had to be promoted so that every Cambodian would see the Khmer Rouge as a ‘fascist regime, like Nazi-Germany, rather than a Communist one.’52
The Tuol Sleng museum was a perfect place for the Vietnamese to promote this narrative: they made it the museum’s mission to evoke feelings of hate against the Khmer Rouge, combined with a propagandist agenda in which the Vietnamese were depicted as the
47 Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia (New York: Colombia University Press, 2005), 84.
48 David Chandler, “Tuol Sleng and S-21,” Searching for the Truth, Documentation Center of Cambodia, 18
(2001): 28.
49 This should be seen in the context of the Cold War. The Vietnamese, Soviets and the Chinese wanted the
crimes which happened in Cambodia not to be remembered as a communist act, but rather as a fascist act (David Chandler, “Tuol Sleng and S-21”). If communism would take the blame for the genocide, this could weaken the position of communism in the world in general.
50 Ibid., 29.
51 Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia, 84. 52 David Chandler, “Tuol Sleng and S-21,” 29.
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saviors of the Cambodian people. The museum had to be a place of hope as well. After all, the genocide had only just ended and many Cambodians were still looking for family members. The museum gave people the opportunity to find their loved ones: one of the major features of the museum was – and still is – the vast amount of photographs of those who were
imprisoned. Through these photographs, a lot of Cambodians were able to find out what happened to their relatives.53 Therefore, the photographs served as a useful tool as well in the legitimizing of the regime. By showing the photos of the Tuol Sleng prisoners, the
Vietnamese could show how concerned they were with the Cambodian people.
Only seven people survived S-21, so visiting the museum was not exactly a visit of hope.54 The highest a Cambodian could expect was seeing a photograph of someone he knew. By visiting the museum, some of the visitors got to know more knowledge about what
happened to their loved ones, but still many questions were yet to be answered. Why did so many people get killed for no reason? Did they suffer a lot? The photographer, Nhem En, remembered mostly the fear he saw in the eyes of the people while taking pictures of them. En stated that he felt that the photographs displayed in the Tuol Sleng museum were received by him with a mix of ‘pride and regret.’ The international attention that he got through his photos felt good, but the fact that the pictures were made in tragic circumstances made his feelings disappear.55 A critical reaction to the museum was made by Sopheara Chey. Chey has been working in the museum since it opened in 1979. He stated that the photographs had never left Tuol Sleng and were displayed to the public immediately after the museum was opened.56 What he remembered most vividly about the establishment of the museum, was the making of the map of skulls and blood. According to Chey, the map was more than a
‘ghoulish overstatement’ made by Mai Lam: it was a ‘religious transgression’, since the dead were not able to rest properly.57
At first, the Tuol Sleng museum was not accessible to the public. In 1979, the first people did enter the former prison, but they were not Cambodian. According to Lisa M.
53 For an example of such a story, see a clip from VOA Khmer, Hope for the Future (film by Ouch Makara),
Documentation Center of Cambodia, December 31, 2014. This video is openly accessible through Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152739335678800&set=vb.154829473799&type=2&theater.
54 For more information on these people, see Huy Vannak, Bou Meng, A Survivor from Khmer Rouge Prison S-21, Justice for the Future, Not Just for the Victims (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2010). 55 Testimony by Nhem En which can be found in Peter Maguire, “Cambodia Genocide – Memories from Tuol
Sleng Prison,” American Suburb X, April 20, 2012.
56 “Written Record of Interview of CHEY Sopheara,” document no. E3/4641, November 25, 2008, on the
website of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia, http://www.eccc.gov.kh.
57 Interview with Sopheara Chey, conducted by Peter Maguire in Facing Death in Cambodia, 22. The connection
between the Buddhist values and the memorialization of the Cambodian genocide will be further explored in the second chapter of this thesis.
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Moore, the reason for this decision was that the museum was at first not meant for the Cambodian population, but for foreigners only.58 One year later, on July 13, 1980, the Tuol Sleng genocide museum was openly accessible. Why the Vietnamese decided to change their visitor policy is not answered by Moore, but, as mentioned above, there were reasons to use Tuol Sleng in a Vietnamese advantage, so this turnaround is not completely surprising. Before the public was allowed access to Tuol Sleng, the government wanted to show delegates from allied socialist countries what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime.59
According to numbers from the Ministry of Culture, Information and Propaganda, the opening of Tuol Sleng for the public was a huge success. In the first week, the museum welcomed 32.000 guests. Only a minor number (1930) of them were foreigners. According to the report in which these numbers can be found, the total number of visitors to the museum were 320.241 (in the period January-October 1980).60 These numbers show that there was in fact a need for the Cambodians to visit the site.
However, this success was far from everlasting. Judy Ledgerwood states that the museum’s underlying text was the ‘reconciling of the horrors of one failed communist regime with the logic of an inevitable march of progress.’61 The state showed a narrative to the public in which the revolution of 1975 was hijacked by the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. As
mentioned above, the depiction of the Vietnamese as liberators of the Cambodian people was a major asset of the museum’s context. Although many Cambodians wanted to visit the museum to search for their loved ones, the state narrative which was presented to them did not feel right.62 Most importantly, the museum did almost nothing to honor those who died during the genocide. This notion is supported by the drop in number of visitors. Whereas the visitor numbers of Tuol Sleng in 1980 show that mainly Cambodians visited Tuol Sleng, this trend has shifted hugely towards a more international interest in the museum.63 The former prison has turned into a perfect example of dark tourism, rather than serving as a place in
58 Lisa M. Moore, “(Re)Covering the Past, Remembering Trauma: the Politics of Commemoration at Sites of
Atrocity,” 55.
59 One of the major features of the Khmer Rouge was that it sealed off the country: practically all diplomatic ties
were broken. Cambodia became isolated. The genocide happened out of sight of the international community. Although rumors existed about what happened in the country, no one knew for sure. Therefore, the Vietnamese-Cambodian government was even more able to influence the memorialization of Cambodia’s genocidal past. By showing around outside parties before the Cambodians themselves had the chance to do so, the Vietnamese narrative became already accepted by a significant part of the international community.
60 Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” Museum Anthropology 21 (1997): 88.
61 Ibid., 90. 62 Ibid.
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which the victims of the Cambodian genocide are memorialized.
The same can be seen at another major site of memorialization: Choeung Ek. Just as was the case with Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek was also shaped by Mai Lam. In the former prison, Lam shocked the visitors with the map of skulls, at the killing field of Choeung Ek a similar shock was delivered to its visitors. This was done in the form of a large stupa which was filled with skulls of people who had perished at the killing field. A major difference between Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek is that the former killing field could be visited by the public much later. Choeung Ek opened its doors as a museum of genocide in 1989. Officially, the goal of Choeung Ek is to a) educate Americans, Cambodian Americans and other
nationalities about the factual history of the Khmer Rouge atrocities and help prevent future crimes against humanity, b) provide students, scholars, journalists and the public access to information, photographs, artifacts and documents relating to the holocaust, c) honor and remember the victims and survivors of the Khmer Rouge holocaust, d) help preserve the art and literature of Cambodia – nearly extinguished by Khmer Rouge policies through exhibits, performances and lectures, and e) serve as a fund-raising channel to humanitarian, cultural and educational projects benefiting Cambodians, Cambodian Americans and the community at large.64
In theory these are fine-looking goals, but in reality the killing field of Choeung Ek is primarily a tourist attraction, instead of a place of memorialization. The third goal of the museum, honoring the victims and survivors of the genocide, seems therefore awkward. Near the stupa of Choeung Ek, a small exhibition tells the visitor background information of what happened on the killing field during the genocide. However, the information which is
provided is far from complete. Little background information is given on how the Khmer Rouge functioned, what drove them and how they implemented the genocide.65 This raises the question whether the museum takes its mission seriously. Moreover, the first two goals do not really fit the interests of the Cambodian people. Whereas Tuol Sleng was able to provide significant information for survivors of the genocide, Choeung Ek has not been of interest for Cambodians as a place of closure or memorialization.66 This is particularly so because of their religious belief system, which is not, in any way, recognized at the site. This point will be elaborated on in the next chapter.
64 The goals of the Killing Field Museum of Choeung as presented on its official website,
http://www.killingfieldsmuseum.com/about-us.html, consulted on 29-04-2015.
65 Sion, “Confliction Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” 8. 66 Ibid., 8-9.
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The connection between tourism and memorialization is a problematic issue in Cambodia. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are major tourist attractions in which the emphasis is on the crimes and the perpetrators who committed these crimes, instead of on the victims of the genocide. A third example of this problem is Anlong Veng. Colin Long and Keir Reeves analyzed the situation in this village in the south of Cambodia, the final resting place of Pol Pot and the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge before the organization was defeated. Long and Reeves describe how they visited the village and went to the house of Ta Mok, the
Butcher of Cambodia, responsible for many massacres. According to the authors, the
government of Cambodia has been primarily concerned with turning Anlong Veng into a third major tourist attraction. They raise the question why Anlong Veng, a perpetrator site, has to be turned into a tourist attraction.67 The result will be that there is no respect for the victims at a place so important for memorialization of the genocide. According to Long and Reeves, the grave of Pol Pot should not be tourist bait. Instead, both authors plead for forgetting Anlong Veng, because they believe that reconciliation and a healing of the national trauma can only happen when no one pays attention to Khmer Rouge sites. According to Long and Reeves, the perpetrators will be silenced then forever.68 This conclusion is slightly problematic. Although the authors have a point in raising the question why Anlong Veng should be a tourist
attraction, ignoring and forgetting a place like Anlong Veng does not help Cambodia in memorializing its past. On the contrary, by arguing that the past needs to be ignored, both authors state exactly what the Cambodian government wanted after the Vietnamese left the country in 1989, which was to ‘dig a hole and bury the past in it.’69
The current government seems to use the genocidal past to attract tourists. It raises the question whether the large sites of memorialization are nowadays meant for Cambodians, those who really suffered from the genocide, or if they are meant for tourists. Cambodia benefits largely from the commercialization of its genocide. If we look at the number of tourists that have been visiting Cambodia over the years, we see a rapid increase in numbers. In 1993, official numbers from the Tourism Office of Cambodia show that 118,183 tourists visited Cambodia. Five years later, this number had been increased to a total of 286,524. Past year, in 2014, Cambodia welcomed 4,502,775 tourists.70 The enormous increase in tourists have made tourism one of the major sources of income for the Cambodian economy.
67 Colin Long and Keir Reeves, “Dig a hole and bury the past in it,” in Places of Pain and Shame, Dealing with ‘Difficult’ Heritage, eds. William Logan and Keir Reeves (London/New York: Routledge, 2009), 72.
68 Ibid., 80-81.
69 Mydans, “Cambodian Leader Resists Punishing Top Khmer Rouge.”
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According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, tourism determines 23.4 percent of the Cambodian GDP. The expectation is that this share will be growing even more in the near future. In comparison with 184 other countries, Cambodia’s tourist branch is one of the fastest growing.71 The government welcomes tourism as a major source of income for Cambodia. However, the problems that tourism brings with it in regard to memorialization of the
genocide – in particular the lack of respect for victims of the genocide - has not been an issue for the people in charge. On the contrary: the government encourages them by following a specific policy of memorialization of the genocide in which the difficult parts of the past seem irrelevant.72
National Holidays
After the Vietnamese left Cambodia in 1989, a new era of dealing with the genocidal past began. A time came in which the Cambodian government conducted a policy in which the past had to be buried. What happened, happened, and people were encouraged not to look back anymore but to focus on the future instead. The grand narrative of what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime which was promoted for a decade by the Vietnamese was not countered or critically reviewed. On the contrary: the government did not seem to feel that Cambodia’s past was important enough to pay attention to it. As a result, many Cambodians did not have the chance to learn about what happened during the period of genocide.73 The government’s most important concern became the market economy, in which tourism has been playing a significant role.74 As a result, memorialization of the genocide has become largely neglected. The first state narrative which was developed by the Vietnamese, has not changed much since. The focus in this narrative has always been on the victors on the one hand and the evil deeds of the Khmer rouge on the other. Victims do not have a place in the state narrative: there is a lack of respect and attention for the victims and survivors of the genocide.75
71 World Travel & Tourism Council, Economic Impact 2014 “Cambodia”, 2.
72 David Chandler, “Cambodia deals with its Past: Collective Memory, Demonisation and Induced Amnesia,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9 (2008).
73 Ben Kiernan, “Coming to Terms with the Past: Cambodia.”
74 Timothy Dylan Wood, “Touring Memories of the Khmer Rouge,” in Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity and Change, eds. Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tom Winter (London/New York:
Routledge, 2006), 192.
75 This conclusion has been made by various authors who are specialized in this field. See for example Dylan
Wood, “Touring Memories of the Khmer Rouge,” 191-92, Rachel Hughes, Memory and Sovereignty in
Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials (New Haven: MacMillan Center for International
23
A good example of this is the installation of two national holidays by the Vietnamese-Cambodian government after the takeover in 1979. These two holidays were named Victors’ Day (January 7) and the Day of Hatred (May 20). Victors’ Day celebrates the Vietnamese takeover of Cambodia. This day fitted perfectly in how the Vietnamese wanted the
Cambodians to see the past. The Vietnamese were liberators who freed the Cambodians from the Khmer Rouge. In other words, this holiday was completely focused on how great the Vietnamese communists were. Attention for the victims did not matter. Not surprisingly, this holiday was not that popular by the Cambodian people. At first, they were thankful for the Vietnamese takeover, but after a while it became clear that the Vietnamese were occupiers as well.76 Even more striking was the second holiday which was installed by the Vietnamese-Cambodian government, the Day of Hatred. The goal of this day was to remind Vietnamese-Cambodians how evil the Khmer Rouge was. By organizing speeches and rallies, the Vietnamese hoped to win the Cambodians for their case, which was portraying the Khmer Rouge as genocidal and fascist, a motivation which is to be seen in the reasoning to build the Tuol Sleng Museum as well. Victims and survivors did not get the chance to officially memorialize the past the way they wanted.77 Instead, they were encouraged by the regime to have feelings of hate, which did not help to resolve their trauma.
After the Vietnamese had left Cambodia, the official name of the Day of Hatred changed into Remembrance Day. The reason for doing this was that the government wanted to show the people that they were in fact concerned with memorializing the past correctly. However, the day kept lacking popular support.
On March 26, 2015, Deputy Prime Minister Sok An of Cambodia presided over a ceremony in which a new monument at the Tuol Sleng museum was inaugurated. Sok An stated that the monument would ‘serve as an educational tool for the next generations to remember and prevent the return of such a dark regime.’78 More or less the same was stated when Tuol Sleng was opened for the public in 1980. Again, in 1989, when Choeung Ek became a museum, statements like these were offered. Has anything changed from 1980 to 2015? It is
questionable. The narrative of the government has stayed largely intact. This is the result of a policy in which the government wants to bury the past, which has led to a major problem
76 Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, 150.
77 Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, and Sion, “Confliction Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia.” 78 The Associated Press, “Cambodia Inaugurates Memorial at Khmer Rouge Genocide Museum,” The New York Times, March 26, 2015.
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which is a lack of good education in the country. This problem is not only the current government’s fault, since many highly educated people were killed during the genocide and the country is still recovering from this lack of highly educated people.79 As a result of all of this, the memorialization of the past which is delivered by the Cambodian government is turned into a one-sided affair: one in which the government has decided how to remember the genocidal past and how to deal with the sites of memorialization linked to that past. This raises the question how the Cambodian people experience this. Do they feel that the government has done a good job in memorializing the genocide? Is the state narrative
supported by the population? And, if not, how do the Cambodian people memorialize the past themselves?
25
The Cambodian People and their Past:
Memorializing the Genocide from the Bottom Up
On a muggy day in July, 2011, I was walking with a friend through the streets in Phnom Penh. We did not have a clear destination in our minds, but this was not necessary since walking through any big Asian city is an experience in itself. The streets were busy, filled with cars. People were everywhere, selling all kinds of stuff. However, in Phnom Penh, the streets were far less crowded than in Ho Chi Minh City, the Vietnamese capitol. The Cambodian genocide has influenced the population number significantly until today.80
According to a 2004 survey of the Cambodian National Institute of Statistics, only 12 percent of the Cambodian people is older than 50. It is clear that a whole generation has been killed in the genocide. As a result, Cambodia has a very young population. According to the numbers of the same 2004 survey, 60.4 percent of the Cambodian population is between 0 and 24 years old.81
We were staying in Phnom Penh for a couple of days at the time we went for a walk on that summer day in 2011 and we were surprised how quiet the streets were. Not long after this realization, we walked into the Olympic Stadium of Phnom Penh. The stadium is located near Preah Sihanouk Boulevard, one of Phnom Penh’s major roads, not far from where the Documentation Center of Cambodia is housed. After the Khmer Rouge had taken over Phnom Penh, the stadium was used as an execution site where officials and supporters of the Lon Nol regime were killed.82 We were surprised to walk into the stadium without being asked to show a ticket. Clearly, something was going on, since the stadium and the ground surrounding it was filled with people. Children were playing all kinds of sports, people were dancing and singing. While in the stadium, we were surprised to see a Cambodian football league match going on. Even more interesting was that people on top of the stands of the stadium were dancing a hypnotic dance. No one except us seemed to pay attention to the game on the field. I wondered what was going on.
One day later, I visited the Tuol Sleng museum and Choeung Ek. After an emotional day, I thought of the massive gathering I encountered the day before. What did it mean? The
80 According to Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program the number of people that were killed during
the Cambodian genocide was approximately 1,7 million, which was 21 percent of the Cambodian population, data can be found on the website of the Yale CGP, www.yale.edu/CGP.
81 National Institute of Statistics, Cambodia Inter-Censal Population Survey, 2004 (CIPS). The figure can be
found on http://www.nis.gov.kh/nis/CIPS%202004/p_pyramid.htm.
82 Huy Vannak, The Khmer Rouge Division 703: From Victory to Self-destruction (Phnom Penh: Documentation
26
spontaneous vibe of the gathering and the hypnotic dance performed on top of the stadium made me think. Could it have been a form of trauma processing? The Cambodian people have not had an easy past to confront. Together with a government which has not been helping in creating a truthful memorialization, it surely has not been easy to memorialize their past rightfully. This chapter will explore how Cambodians deal with the genocidal past of their country. How do they see their past? How can we define the Cambodian lieux de memoire of the people?
Souls and Bones
When the Vietnamese took over Cambodia in 1979, it seemed to be a liberation. However, the takeover turned out to be a substitution of one harsh regime with another. The Vietnamese did not commit genocide of course, but as Evan Gottesman states, they did kill Cambodian
history by declining to memorialize the past rightly.83 As shown in the previous chapter, the installment of Victors’ Day and the Day of Hatred were major examples of this. The
population was more or less forced to be involved, particularly in the latter. They had to memorialize the genocide in a way which was prescribed by the government. The Khmer Rouge got publicly condemned through ‘political rallies and speeches, banners and posters bearing slogans, song and prayers recited in schools, and wreath laying at memorial sites such as Choeung Ek.’84 Survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime had to share their stories in villages, all dominated by a message of hate. However, the anger which raged through Cambodia in the direct aftermath of the genocide slowly disappeared. More and more, Cambodians did not want to be angry anymore: they wanted peace, reconciliation and justice.85 Ceremonies of the Day of Hatred became less popular over the years, precisely because of this reason.
Cambodians did not want to celebrate a day in which there was no attention at all for the victims of the genocide. After the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement – when the Vietnamese left Cambodia – the Day of Hatred became suspended.86 This was done because the government felt it was time for a new policy concerning the past, one in which the crimes of the past were largely buried.87 Nevertheless, the holiday was not completely removed from the official agenda. In 2001, efforts were made to reinstate the holiday. The Day of Hatred got renamed
83 Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge, 50.
84 Sion, “Confliction Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” 17. 85 Huy Vannak, Bou Meng, A Survivor from Khmer Rouge Prison S-21, 71. 86 Sion, “Confliction Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” 17. 87 David Chandler, “Cambodia deals with its Past,” 362.
