The Cambodian Genocide

Francis Deron's 'The Trial of the Khmer Rouge'
By Simon Leys
Created 2009-09-04 11:00
It is a mark of fundamental human decency to feel ashamed of living in the
twentieth century.

– Elias Canetti

One remembers the last lines of Kafka’s Trial: Josef K, an innocent citizen
who fell into an incomprehensible and endless web of judicial proceedings
for reasons that will never be revealed to him, is in the end taken by two
official-looking gentlemen to a deserted quarry; there, with a sort of
stupid bureaucratic formality, without violence, without anger and without a
single word, they undertake to execute him. As one of the two gentlemen
turns a knife twice in his heart, K has one last conscious feeling: “It was
as if the shame would outlive him.”

Many readers have experienced perplexity on encountering this last sentence.
Yet Primo Levi, who wrote a short essay on Kafka, was puzzled by their
puzzlement. He explained:

This last page takes my breath away. I, who survived Auschwitz, would never
have written it, or not in this way: out of inability, or insufficient
imagination, certainly, but also out of a sense of decency in the face of
death (which Kafka either ignored or rejected); or perhaps simply out of
lack of courage. The famous phrase – source of so much discussion – which
closes the book like a gravestone (“It was as if the shame would outlive
him”) presents no enigma to me at all. What should Josef K. be ashamed of?
He is ashamed of many contradictory things … Still, I feel there is, in his
shame, another element which I know well. At the end of his harrowing
journey, the fact that such a corrupt tribunal does exist and spreads its
infection to all its surroundings causes him shame … After all, this
tribunal was made by man, not by God, and K. with the knife already stuck in
his heart experiences the shame of being a man.

The horrors of the twentieth century were to confirm Kafka’s prophetic
intuition. At the end of that same century, the Cambodian genocide stands as
a most extreme and most grotesque epilogue: it was not only a monstrous
event, it was also the caricature of a monstrosity.

By simplifying forms and amplifying lines a caricature can reveal the inner
essence of its subject. In this sense, Khmer Rouge propaganda, in its
primitive crudity, grasped a central reality:

The whole world keeps its eyes on Democratic Kampuchea, for Khmer Revolution
is the most beautiful and the most pure.

Khmer Revolution is without a precedent in world history. It resolved the
eternal contradiction between city and country. It develops Lenin and goes
beyond Mao Zedong.

This is quite true, in fact; in the light of the Khmer Rouge experiment, one
can see more clearly the fundamental dynamics that informed the great
Hitlero–Lenino–Stalino–Maoist tradition. Twentieth-century totalitarianism
wore a variety of cultural garbs, with different degrees of sophistication,
yet its basic elements remained fairly simple and never greatly varied. A
quarter of a century ago, Kazimierz Brandys summed it up neatly (with the
clear-sightedness that characterises so many Polish intellectuals, who on
this subject have acquired a bitter expertise): “Contemporary history
teaches us that all you need is one mentally sick individual, two ideologues
and three hundred murderous thugs in order to take power and gag millions of
people.”

The Cambodian terror offers a perfect illustration of this outline, as shown
in Francis Deron’s monumental work Le Procès des Khmers rouges: trente ans d’enquête
sur le génocide du Cambodge [The Trial of the Khmer Rouge: a 30-year
investigation of the Cambodian genocide] (Gallimard, 465pp; €24.90), which
analyses the ascent of the Khmer Rouge movement, its victory, its brief and
bloody reign, its downfall, its lengthy artificial survival (thanks, among
others, to the culpable collusion of the West!) – and, at long last, its
approaching punishment, as justice is finally catching up with a handful of
still-surviving, semi-senile criminals.

It is a cliché to say that journalists are the historians of the present
time – but it is true. For his entire journalistic career, Deron was an
influential and respected correspondent, covering China at first, and then
South-East Asia. In his latest book he tackles 30 years of the Cambodian
tragedy; he unravels its complex threads, outlines the biographies of the
main protagonists, clarifies and interprets the sequence of events; now and
then he intersperses his historical narrative with vivid vignettes drawn
from his old reporter’s notebooks. The architecture of the book is
composite, but it is organised with method and clarity.

Deron benefited from his in-depth experience of Maoist China; his two
earlier books on the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and its aftermath superbly
prepared him to grasp the nature and significance of the Khmer Rouge
phenomenon. What Maoism took 20 years to achieve in China – the great purges
of intellectuals (‘The Hundred Flowers’ movement), the enforced lowering of
the entire nation to the primitive level of the countryside (the ‘Great Leap’
backward, with its makeshift village blast-furnaces, peasants confined to
‘People’s Communes’ dormitories – and the gigantic famine which ensued), and
finally the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and the murderous savagery of the Red
Guards – all these initiatives were to be found again in the brief
experiment of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, but they were recycled and compressed
within a period of only three years and ten months. The imitation was
therefore grossly simplified and exaggerated; the objectives were the same,
but they were pursued by means even more ferocious – and more dreadfully
stupid.

The Khmer Rouge achieved complete control over all of Cambodia from 17 April
1975 (conquest of Phnom Penh by Pol Pot) until 7 January 1979 (fall of Phnom
Penh, arrival of the Vietnamese army). During such a relatively short
period, the regime succeeded in its grandiose project: the total destruction
of society. From the outset, it had only modest means (which confirms
Brandys’ formula, quoted above): the Cambodian Communist Party numbered a
mere 18,000 members, who were leading an army of 85,000 men; with these
cadres, the regime was able to mobilise the bulk of its forces: a huge and
fearsome mass of illiterate and savage youngsters and children, fanatically
indoctrinated and heavily armed, and vested with discretionary powers over
the whole population. As a result, at the fall of the regime, Cambodia had
lost between one-quarter and one-third of its population: a self-genocide
the magnitude of which is without precedent in the history of humankind.

This program of National-Communism took form from the very moment Phnom Penh
was overtaken. On Pol Pot’s orders, the capital city was emptied of all its
inhabitants, within three weeks. The entire urban population – including
even sick patients in the hospitals – was forcibly deported on foot and
thrown on the highways of the country and the tracks of the bush. Those who
survived this exodus ended up reduced to the condition of slaves in crowded
agricultural camps. (When the Vietnamese army eventually entered Phnom Penh
three years later, they found there only 70 civilians wandering in a
ghost-city amidst the stench of rotting bodies.)

Having thus lobotomised the country (Phnom Penh was its very brains), the
regime could more easily eliminate in the provinces all forms of
administrative institution, education, public health, established religion
and all other expressions of civilised life.

Symbolic gesture: in deserted and lifeless Phnom Penh, the army that had
come out of the forest undertook to throw into the river all the electrical
and mechanical appliances they could grab from the city shops, offices and
private residences – in a word, all the equipment of modern life. (Note
that, outside the capital city, nine-tenths of Cambodia was without
electricity.) This anti-modern frenzy did not even spare the motorbikes of
the local Harley-Davidson club: the fact that these machines were in perfect
working condition and the bush cruelly lacked motorised transportation could
not save them from this watery ending. Another thing that attracted the
virulent hostility of the Khmer Rouge: people wearing glasses; spectacles
were to be confiscated and destroyed on the spot, and their owners arrested
and sent to labour camps to await eventual execution, on the suspicion that
they were educated and therefore belonged to the oppressor class. (By the
way, Son Sen – the chief enforcer of the regime – himself wore glasses; he
was eventually murdered by his own comrades in 1997, but not for that
reason.)

This wild delirium originated at the top; Pol Pot’s rare declarations
betrayed his complete divorce from reality. He was praising the splendid
progress of the country, the development of industrial and agricultural
production, of economy, of education and culture, at the very moment when
that part of the population which had temporarily escaped massacre was
tottering on the edge of starvation in a state of primeval deprivation –
schools had been destroyed, commerce had vanished, money had been abolished
and, in the bush, some executioners practised cannibalism.

The total inversion of reality that was expressed in the leader’s speeches
was not part of a propaganda effort – it reflected Pol Pot’s actual and
sincere beliefs; and these beliefs, in turn, proved contagious, since
neither his Chinese allies nor his Vietnamese enemies were ever able to
perceive the imminence of his downfall. Having laid the country to waste and
turned the population into deaf and mute beasts of burden, the ruling clique
started to self-destruct by indulging in demented purges. And then, in this
situation of instability and weakness, Pol Pot chose to launch border
attacks against the Vietnamese enemy. Reacting to these insane provocations,
the Vietnamese army, five times superior in strength, entered Phnom Penh
after a Blitzkrieg whose swiftness and ease took everyone by surprise,
including the invaders themselves.

Yet, after this complete and final collapse of their actual power, the Khmer
Rouge did not vanish entirely. In order to counter an imaginary
Soviet–Vietnamese menace (allegedly bent on subverting all South-East Asia),
an improbable Sino–American alliance enabled the Khmer Rouge to survive
artificially under two forms: in a few pockets of jungle on the Thai border,
as smugglers and traffickers of rubies and precious timber; and in New York,
as official representatives to the United Nations of a non-existent
‘Democratic Kampuchea’. Thus, for another dozen years, the votes of the
murderers carried in the General Assembly as much weight as the votes of –
let us say – Germany, Japan or … the Vatican. (After the fall of Saigon in
1975, Kissinger asked the foreign affairs minister of Thailand to convey to
Pol Pot the friendly wishes of the American people, adding for his
interlocutor’s benefit: “Of course, these people are murderous thugs, but
this should not affect our good relations.” The administration of Jimmy
Carter – under the influence of Brzezinski, and notwithstanding the
rhetorical emphasis which the president himself placed on human rights –
pursued essentially the same line.)

If, in the long run, the extreme irrationality of the Pol Pot regime
condemned it to disintegration, the recipe which ensured its absolute
authority in the short term can be described with a single word: terror.

Regarding the system of terror established by the Khmer Rouge, we are rather
well informed. At the highest level, the main centre for organised torture
and death in Phnom Penh, the prison of Tuol Sleng, kept voluminous, detailed
and meticulous archives. Its director, the chief torturer Duch, is also well
known: on this subject, we already have the invaluable testimony of the
French orientalist scholar François Bizot, who, before the Khmer Rouge came
to power, was Duch’s prisoner in the forest for several months in 1971. To
Bizot’s earlier report, first published in French in 2000 and later in
English as The Gate, should now be added the statements and confessions
which Duch himself has made since his arrest in 1999.

All the prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng were destined to be executed (of the
15,000 inmates that were successively processed in the prison during its
three years of activity, there were only 14 survivors). The task of the
centre was to extract from these people confessions that would
retrospectively justify their arrest and provide evidence and names for
further arrests. They were not arrested because they were guilty: they were
guilty because they were arrested. Guilty of what? Their confessions would
tell. Quite often, their transfer was accompanied with instructions
regarding the sort of crime it was required they should confess, and then
torture would ensure that an adequate confession be obtained. For the
accused person, the final outcome was already decided; only one thing still
depended upon his own choice: the length of his suffering under torture. The
only way of shortening this was to produce a confession with names of
accomplices, as suggested by the interrogator. All this senseless rubbish
was minutely collected and stored in files – with some confessions being 100
pages long!

At the very beginning, Tuol Sleng still dealt with genuine enemies: former
collaborators of the inept pro-American regime of Lon Nol. Very soon,
however, such customers became scarce and, by the second year (1976), inner
purges of the Khmer Rouge movement began to occupy all the attention and
energy of interrogators and executioners. Eventually, during its last months
of activity, the prison began to devour its own jailers!

When Phnom Penh fell into the hands of the Vietnamese, Duch, who had
organised and supervised with tireless and scrupulous zeal the whole
enterprise of interrogation, torture and death, vanished in the chaos of the
rout. Twenty years later, someone recognised him by accident: he was
employed in a remote town by a Christian association for humanitarian
relief – he himself (he said) had converted to Christianity. Right now, he
is being tried by the tribunal of Phnom Penh, a court jointly appointed by
Cambodia and the United Nations to judge the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. He
has already confessed: “I am profoundly sorry for all the murders, for the
past. My only desire was to be a good Communist.”

Tuol Sleng was merely the highest organ of a vast repressive system whose
tentacles embraced the entire country. In the south-west area alone, 38
small Tuol Sleng centres for interrogation and torture have been counted, at
a level immediately subordinate to that of Phnom Penh; furthermore, 78
‘killing fields’ have been identified, as well as 6000 charnel-houses. The
slaughtering of condemned people was a dreary task, done by hand: the
victims had their skulls smashed with a heavy club (their children were
disposed of with less effort: they were thrown from the upper floors of
buildings). In the conclusion of his book, Deron quotes the testimony of an
American officer, Rick Arrant, who, attached to an information service, had
to collect reports from Cambodian refugees at the Thai border; he remained
haunted by what a woman had told him of the sound of those clubs smashing
the skulls of prisoners kneeling on the edge of a freshly dug pit: “just
like the sound of fallen coconuts hitting the ground”. In 2003, this same
officer was to take part in the American invasion of Iraq, where he was sent
to … the prison of Abu Ghraib! (He has since changed his occupation: back in
the Far East, he is pursuing field research for a work on the martyrdom of
Cambodia.)

*
One mistake must be avoided. Descriptions of the Cambodian genocide strike
our imaginations and shock our feelings – the horror is unbearable, and
precisely because it is unbearable, we instinctively attempt to dismiss it
from consciousness by supposing that these events, in their exotic
remoteness, are so foreign to us that they might as well belong to another
planet.

In fact, they concern us directly.

When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, several Cambodians took refuge in
the French embassy. The Khmer Rouge soon came to the embassy and demanded
that these people be handed back to them, with the only exception being
those who were carrying French passports. They menaced the chargé d’affaires:
if their demand was not met within 24 hours, the embassy would be invaded
and all its occupants would be arrested. In order to protect at least the
200-odd French and other foreign nationals who were sheltering in the
embassy, the chargé d’affaires surrendered all his Cambodian guests into the
hands of the Khmer Rouge – thus sending them to their deaths. He made a
dreadful decision; but what was the alternative? Who would dare to judge
him? A French journalist, however, in order to save one Cambodian woman
(whom he did not know: he merely saw her despair) suggested that he marry
the woman on the spot. The chargé d’affaires still had some 200 blank
passports in his office – but he refused to proceed; he knew the journalist
was already married, therefore this would be bigamy – which the law
prohibits.

The Khmer Rouge perpetrated some two million murders. However, one of these
at least should be put on the account of a Western diplomat, a man unable to
perceive that, under a criminal authority, respect for the rules also
becomes a crime. This conscientious bureaucrat was truly one of us.

*

Coincidence: as I was finishing my reading of Deron’s book, I received a
letter from an old Parisian friend – a faithful correspondent who, from time
to time, keeps me informed of the latest happenings on the French literary
and intellectual scene. He was commenting upon the return to fashion of a
certain form of trendy Maoism:

I cannot repress a feeling of apprehension when I consider how criminal
Maoist lies manage to endure and to revive with complete impunity … Look for
instance at the popular success now enjoyed by the ‘radical’ thinker Alain
Badiou, who prides himself on being an emeritus defender of the ‘Cultural
Revolution’. Badiou now writes, for example: “Regarding figures such as
Robespierre, Saint-Just, Bakunin, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao
Zedong, Chou En-lai, Tito, Enver Hoxha, Guevara and a few others, it is of
essential importance that we do not allow reactionary critics to neutralise
and negate them, by means of outlandish anecdotes aiming at creating a
context of criminalisation.”

It is probably wrong of me to quote here this illustrious philosopher –
whose works I never read (and I do not forget the old Chinese proverb – in
fact invented by Jacques Maritain – “Never take stupidity too seriously”).
Yet I am shocked: what an injustice! The name of Pol Pot has been omitted
from Badiou’s little pantheon. He fully deserves a place there, especially
at this precise moment: the “outlandish anecdotes” collected in Deron’s book
and “the context of criminalisation” now created by the Phnom Penh trial
might otherwise “neutralise and negate” his glorious memory.