Burned like old rubbish: Pol Pot’s funeral

The Phnom Penh Post’s “This week in history” feature includes an article on Pol Pot’s death and cremation back in 1998.

Worth checking out.

The Phnom Penh Post – Burned like old rubbish: Pol Pot’s funeral.

Khmer Rouge Tribunal Links

A few links here for reference, since I’m not posting actual content right now:

Duch, notorious former director of the S-21 torture and execution prison, and Christian convert, has apologized for his role as director of torture and mass murder in trial. Here’s the translation, via DAS. See also this article in the Mirror (and best wishes for a rapid and full recovery to Norbert Klein, the Mirror’s proprieter).

Famous scholar of Cambodian Buddhism François Bizot, who is also the only non-Cambodian to survive Duch’s ministrations, returned to Cambodia to testify on Duch. Article in French in Ka-Set, English version here, an AP article on the same subject at KI-Media, and a further article regarding Bizot in Ka-Set.

Finally, here are collections of trial video of Duch collected by KI-Media for April 7, and April 8.

Khmer Rouge Tribunal Links

This old story, about people praying to Pol Pot’s spirit (at his gravesite) is an old one, but they’re starting to recycle them for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. It’s true, by the way – lots of people seem to think Old Sar is particularly effective with lottery numbers (there’s a story there). [Chron]

Also in the deathpower category, this article, with pictures, of Ta Mok’s cement coffin and cetiya…. [Andy Brouwer]

KI Media has been collecting video from the trial of Duch:

30 March 2009

31 March 2009

01 April 2009

DAS notes that Duch, who said he was sorry [VOA], wants more freedoms in jail.

And Julio Jeldres and Gilles Cayatte are having a public discussion about the film “The Nine Lives of Norodom Sihanouk.” Always entertaining. [KI-Media]

Watchdog slams UN over KRT

Well, crap: this isn’t good. Emphasis mine:

UNLESS the UN reverses the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s latest anti-corruption plan, they risk “lowering the bar for all future efforts to try international crimes”, international watchdog the Open Society Justice Initiative said Wednesday.

Referring to a new agreement by the two sides of the court to work separately to protect the court against corruption, the New York-based monitoring group said there were no real changes made to the existing system, which had allowed for graft allegations to arise last year.

“Taken together, these provisions do nothing to alter the de facto Cambodian government veto, which has stymied genuine investigations of corruption to date,” a press release Wednesday said.

via The Phnom Penh Post – Watchdog slams UN over KRT.

Meanwhile, the Stanford Review compares the costs of three internatioal tribunals (The Hague, Lebanon, and Cambodia). While Cambodia comes out as the cheapest thus far, this is not a ringing endorsement of the KRT, which they specifically identify as stymied by accusations of corruption and job-buying. Instead, they conclude with this distressing observation:

The costs of international criminal justice largely escape under the radar, but these are not tiny sums. Surely there are ways to improve the efficiency of this process.

“Maybe the dead were starving…”

Excellent two-part documentary from Al Jazeera on the ongoing Cambodian tribunal of the Khmer Rouge. There’s little discussion (but some) on the extremely limited number of leaders in the dock, but some great discussion. The talented Nic Dunlop, author of The Lost Executioner, takes lead on this report.

In the clip above, starting at about 10:43, note the following quote, which is characteristic of the way in which people have talked to me about ghosts and the dead during the Khmer Rouge period (Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-1979). Seng Yao, 81 year old survivor of prison camp M-99, says

At least ten prisoners died each morning and we would take the bodies away. We kept moving the corpses. I was not afraid of ghosts at that time. I would sometimes sleep on graves but ghosts did not haunt me. Maybe the ghosts did not have the energy left to haunt us because they died of starvation.

[Note that the speech in Khmer is actually somewhat less conditional about the reasoning]

I only interviewed a few survivors of Khmer Rouge prisons during my fieldwork. But such expressions and reasoning about ghosts were common among many survivors, not just former prisoners.  I was frequently told that “there were no ghosts during the Pol Pot time,” because “they had nothing to eat.” I had a hard time understanding this at first, because it was my assumption that whenever there was mass death there would necessarily be more ghosts, not fewer.

But the explanations I received were consistent with what Seng Yao expresses in the documentary clip above. In January 2005, an 85 year old man in rural Kompong Cham province expressed it this way:

When the country is rich, there are lots of ghosts. When there is nothing to eat, what will the ghosts eat? Nowadays, there are lots more ghosts than during the Pol Pot time.

Note that the reciprocity between humans and the dead is assumed to be the basis of the ‘health’ of the dead, and that the basis of this reciprocity is food. This point underlies almost all my work thus far on death and deathpower in Cambodia.

Khmer Rouge Tribunal Begins Today

I haven’t talked much about the tribunal, largely because while I think a good tribunal would be truly beneficial for Cambodia, this tribunal, it is increasingly clear, is little more than another fig leaf for a political regime. The last one was a fig leaf for the recent invading Vietnamese; this one is a fig leaf for the international donor countries, some of who re-armed the Khmer Rouge in the eighties, while allowing their representatives to retain their seat in the UN.

My anger and disappointment about this entire thing is nearly incandescent.

more about “Khmer Rouge war crimes trial begins -…“, posted with vodpod

François Bizot, one of the greatest academic authorities on Cambodian Buddhism, has a somewhat more measured statement on the beginning of the trial. One of Duch’s few survivors, Bizot was held in a prison camp by Duch north of Siem Reap prior to the victory of April 17, 1975, and was one of the only prisoners of that camp released. He has told his story in the bestselling book The Gate. His opinion piece in today’s New York Times deals with Duch as his own personal savior (insofar, I suppose, as Duch released him) and as a murderer of tens of thousands, in his capacity as the head of S-21. It’s definitely worth reading.

AFTER 10 years of detention, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Comrade Duch, is to appear today before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was arrested in 1999, after 20 years of living incognito, for crimes committed on his orders as commander of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia and were responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.

Bizot, “My Savior, Their Killer.”

Also note that finally (FINALLY), a history of the Khmer Rouge period will be returned to the curriculum of Cambodian students, something which has been nonexistent for years (history ended in 1974). I have actually interviewed a man intimately connected with the destruction of the older, early PRK-era textbooks which did discuss the Khmer Rouge. There is no escaping of the fact that all these histories will be imperfect, intended to fit one political agenda or another, but the mere fact that the Khmer Rouge will be discussed in high school curriculum at all is already a major change.

Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge

Some footage from Khmer Rouge era Cambodia. Via Details Are Sketchy. Highlight – A warm embrace between Pol Pot and deposed king Norodom Sihanouk…

more about “Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge » Spiked…“, posted with vodpod

I have no idea why this video was posted to an internet ‘humor’ site….wtf.

Southeast Asian Link Dump for D5

IHT article on the current use of Khmer Rouge-era canals:

“There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation,” wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia’s irrigation system.

“The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals.” Some of the canals were poorly designed – “hydraulic nonsense,” says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable.

The Khmer Rouge built around three-quarters of Cambodia’s more than 1,000 canal networks, according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s.

Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world’s increasing demand for rice.

John Vink – photog extraordinaire, associated with Magnum and Ka-Set, had some of his photos censored by the Ministry of Culture during an exhibit at the French Cultural Center, for being ‘too political.’ Go check it out.

Awzar Thi at Rule of Lords has, as usual, the most compelling response to the recent judicial coup in Thailand. Thank goodness for Rule of Lords. Go. Read. Now.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court has again taken someone out of government, but it too has not added credibility to anyone or anything. Instead, it has once more played the fool, and once more made a mockery of the justice that it purportedly represents.

Did it have an alternative? Of course it did. It could, and should, simply have refused to decide. That it didn’t is not for want of an alternative. It’s because it wasn’t looking for one.

Link Dump N26

Back from my sister’s wedding! It was fantastic, by the way.

Somongkol has a nice short post on the repentance of European communists who allowed themselves to be fooled into silence and complicity by the Khmer Rouge. It’s a well-done piece which doesn’t give too short shrift to the basis for their ideologies (i.e., it’s not a triumphalist cheerleading piece for free-market capitalism), but doesn’t whitewash the horrors of state communism either. Go read it.

I have an interesting religious background and sensibility. The atheist son of a Lutheran pastor, teacher of Buddhism (and “Asian Religion”), I grew up knowing people of lots of different religious confessions. I’ve never once gotten to know a Mormon I didn’t think was absolutely lovely, though I’ve never allowed myself to be fooled by the church itself. So, I’m often torn when I read the vitriol that is written up after such horrendous events as the passing of California’s Proposition 8, which the Mormon church went to great lengths (some potentially illegal) to fund, eliminating the rights of my gay brothers and sisters to marry each other. And when friends of mine start saying things like “I just won’t trust Mormons after that,” I start looking for more concrete evidence of diversity of opinion within the Mormon church. And lo and behold, they turn out to be much like others – diverse, contestatory, and occasionally (I imagine, perhaps, on par with Baptists?) truly radical. Check out the Mormon Worker, inspired by the Catholic Worker (Dorothy Day’s radical Catholic anarchist newspaper). via anthropophagus.

The Worst Horse, of Dharma Burger fame, has posted a couple of nice video clips relating to the “Buddha Boy” of Nepal, who some believe is the ‘reincarnation’ of the Buddha (a weird idea according to orthodox Buddhism).

Kheum Met, Survivor of S-21?

Andy Brouwer posts on the new initiative of DC-CAM (The Documentation Center of Cambodia), to locate the survivors of S-21.

I find it hard to believe that this hasn’t already been part of DC-Cam’s investigations in the past – finding the survivors of Tuol Sleng. Youk Chhang, in response to the recent indictment order of Comrade Duch at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, is sending teams into the countryside to search for survivors, primarily to get their testimonies about life at the S-21 headquarters. Initially it was believed that only seven men survived the interrogation and slaughterhouse, but at least fourteen people were subsequently identified and many more have yet to be found.

Yes indeed. According to the article cited, at least 177 were released. I met one of these survivors myself, quite randomly, without even trying, during my three years of fieldwork in Cambodia, and managed to locate her paperwork. I can’t vouch for the veracity of her account (but see the paperwork and the number – S-21 – in the upper left hand), but did bring it to the attention of staff at DC-CAM back in 2005. I was told then that her story ‘was almost certainly not true,’ and that as a result, it would be difficult to find staff willing to follow up with her.

Good to hear that the tribunal has change the general attitude on such things. Maybe someone will give Met a call. I have obscured her telephone number on the form, but will give it to appropriate people who honestly desire to contact Met for her benefit.