Chea Phalla
Democratic Kampuchea was a malicious regime that abused many Cambodians and took the lives of approximately 2 million innocent people. Although the regime has been over for over three decades, those who experienced that brutal era cannot forget what happened to them. A case in point is Nob Bunna—a teacher participating in a training organized by the Documentation Center of Cambodia in cooperation with Ministry of Education on how to teach the textbook “History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)”—who still vividly remembers what happened to him.
Nob Bunna was born in 1960 in Bram Bey Mom village, Treang district, and Takeo province. Wanting to have education, Bunna decided to leave his parents and went to live at a pagoda with Chouch, chief of the pagoda, and Chin, a teacher at the pagoda. In 1970, when the Khmer Rouge army and Lon Nol troops battled against each other in the village, Bunna was injured by an artillery shell. When the Lon Nol army withdrew to Takeo town, Bunna asked them for a lift to a provincial hospital in the town in order to receive treatment. After staying in the hospital for three months, Bunna settled with his aunt’s family in the town and furthered his studies at Bros Primary School. The situation in town, however, was not convenient since Bunna and other inhabitants were unable to travel to far since the Khmer Rouge army had captured many areas in the province.
With the Lon Nol government’s power becoming weak, in 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured all of Takeo province. Not long after, the Khmer Rouge evacuated all residents in the town to the countryside. At night, the Khmer Rouge arrested people who had served in the army or worked for the previous government in order to interrogate them. Later, the Khmer Rouge used Trakuon Tek (a kind of vine) to tie the hands of those who had been arrested behind their backs and escorted them away. Every ten people were accompanied by a Khmer Rouge soldier who wore a black uniform and was armed with a gun. Unfortunately, Bunna’s uncle was one of those taken away and no one has ever heard anything of him since. The remaining people were classified as “new people” or “17 April people,” and evacuated to Champa pagoda located in Ang Tasom sub-district.
A week after he was evacuated, Bunna was assigned by Angkar to live in his home village. However, Bunna was able to live with his parents for short time only because he then was sent to work in mobile unit consisting of 30-40 members and supervised by a unit chief named Tong. At first, Bunna’s unit was appointed to build dike at the rate of 15 meters of land a day, and then 25 meters per-day. Afraid of not completing the task, all members in the unit tried to work very hard. However, they were only allotted watery porridge; three cans of rice for ten people.
One day, Bunna’s brother called him to a rice field in order to find fishes. There, Bunna saw plenty of rice. In a state of hunger and exhaustion, Bunna grasped three bunches of rice. Sadly, the Khmer Rouge arrived; they arrested him and sent him to a prison in Svay Seh village. While walking to the prison, Bunna was terrified and thought that his life was going to end soon. After reaching the prison, Bunna became more frightened because he saw prisoners tortured by being fought, kicked, and sometimes cut with palm leaves or left in a chicken cage under the sun. Moreover, Bunna witnessed some prisoners disappear after being interrogated. Those who still alive were forced to do work such as transferring water from ponds to water plantation fields, planting crops, and building dikes. Fortunately, the Khmer Rouge did not hurt Bunna because it was his first time making a mistake. He was ordered to carry water from a pond to water the crops 300-400 times a day. Three months later he was released and sent back to his cooperative.
Even though he was freed, Bunna was still investigated by the Khmer Rouge, and ordered to carry earth with a digging hoe every day until his neck became swollen. Seeing many people got sick because of overwork, some 17 April people refused to follow the Khmer Rouge’s order. The Khmer Rouge then pushed their head in water to torture them. Later, in mid-1978, Bunna received the bad news that his parents had gotten a serious illness and passed away because of not receiving treatment.
In 1979, after the Khmer Rouge collapsed, Bunna went to live with his brother in his home village. However, because of living in terrible conditions Bunna made up his mind to be ordained a monk at Bram Bey Mom pagoda where he had previously studied. At the pagoda, Chouch, the chief of the pagoda, and Bunna found nothing so they traveled to Phnom Penh to find books for study materials and supplies to use at the pagoda. Shortly after, he found a case of books including law books and scriptures from an abandon library, and transported them by train back to the pagoda.
Because of his love of learning and the return of stability to the country, in 1983, Bunna was able to restart his studies again from grade 4. Subsequently, he went to study in Prey Sandek Secondary School situated in Treang district. After that, he entered Takeo pedagogy school. Today, Bunna is a history teacher at Sonlong High School, Treang district, Takeo province.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Friday, June 4, 2010
BOU MENG: A SURVIVOR FROM KHMER ROUGE PRISON S-21 Justice for the Future, Not Just for the Victims
By Huy Vannak
Foreword by Seth Mydans
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, a survivor of its ruthless torture machine emerges from history to announce: “I am still alive.”
The Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured 14,000 Cambodians at its notorious Toul Sleng Prison, also known as “S-21.” Imprisonment at S-21 was a certain death sentence--only a handful of men walked out alive. Among them was Bou Meng, an artist. Years after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, one of the most horrific in history (1975-1979), and three decades after S-21 was closed, Bou Meng was believed dead. In January 2002, an English local newspaper in Phnom Penh reported that he had died in 1997 or 1998, and in October 2002, a Cambodian magazine called Searching for the Truth ran a photo of S-21 survivors gathered at the former prison site, reporting that Bou Meng had “disappeared.”
But Bou Meng actually survived, an astonishing escape from execution made possible only because of his skill as a portrait artist. During his imprisonment at S-21, Bou Meng was forced to paint propaganda portraits of Pol Pot and other Communist leaders. Only because of his unique talent did the murderous leaders of S-21 keep him alive. But it could not save Bou Meng's wife, Ma Yoeun, or his two children. Ma Yoeun was tortured and died at the killing site, Choeung Ek. Bou Meng's children starved to death at a Khmer Rouge child center.
Bou Meng’s story is the story of millions of Cambodians who endured relentless suffering, torture and imprisonment during a vicious and murderous regime. Today, Bou Meng’s story has also become the particular story of one man’s quest to use his memory as a tool in the search of truth and justice.
Documentation Center of Cambodia -- Documentation Series No. 15
Funding for this project was generously provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Foreword by Seth Mydans
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, a survivor of its ruthless torture machine emerges from history to announce: “I am still alive.”
The Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured 14,000 Cambodians at its notorious Toul Sleng Prison, also known as “S-21.” Imprisonment at S-21 was a certain death sentence--only a handful of men walked out alive. Among them was Bou Meng, an artist. Years after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, one of the most horrific in history (1975-1979), and three decades after S-21 was closed, Bou Meng was believed dead. In January 2002, an English local newspaper in Phnom Penh reported that he had died in 1997 or 1998, and in October 2002, a Cambodian magazine called Searching for the Truth ran a photo of S-21 survivors gathered at the former prison site, reporting that Bou Meng had “disappeared.”
But Bou Meng actually survived, an astonishing escape from execution made possible only because of his skill as a portrait artist. During his imprisonment at S-21, Bou Meng was forced to paint propaganda portraits of Pol Pot and other Communist leaders. Only because of his unique talent did the murderous leaders of S-21 keep him alive. But it could not save Bou Meng's wife, Ma Yoeun, or his two children. Ma Yoeun was tortured and died at the killing site, Choeung Ek. Bou Meng's children starved to death at a Khmer Rouge child center.
Bou Meng’s story is the story of millions of Cambodians who endured relentless suffering, torture and imprisonment during a vicious and murderous regime. Today, Bou Meng’s story has also become the particular story of one man’s quest to use his memory as a tool in the search of truth and justice.
Documentation Center of Cambodia -- Documentation Series No. 15
Funding for this project was generously provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Saing Sarin: Khmer Rouge Killed My Father
Som Bunthorn
Saing Sarin, 41 years old, was born in Bralay Meas village, Bralay Meas sub-district, Kampong Leng district, Kampong Chhnang province. The Khmer Rouge killed Sarin’s father after accusing him of being a Lon Nol ME 50 Khnang (a person in charge of taking care of 50 families in the village, but not a village chief) and his mother died of illness because of a lack of treatment. As a consequence he was an orphan at 11 years old. After that he lived with his grandmother.
In 1974, Sarin went to school in grade 12 at a local village school. After studying there for a while, Sarin stopped going because the village was in chaos. There were Khmer Rouge soldiers coming to the village to make propaganda and call for villagers’ support against the Lon Nol Regime. At Sarin’s house, there were guns because his father was ME 50 Khnang. Every night, he saw people come to get guns from his father in order to guard the village.
Later, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge soldiers took complete control of the village. Soon after that the soldier asked the villagers to leave their homes for two or three days, saying that they did not need to bring along any belongings because they would soon return. His entire family including his parents, grandmother, brother and sister, were evacuated to Po village of Po sub-district. His family brought only plates, pots, rice and clothes. At that village, there were hundreds of families coming from Dok village, Thmei village and Bralay village gathered together. Not long after, Angkar separated the evacuees. Sarin’s family was sent to live in Chheu Ak cooperative while his grandmother was selected to work as midwife in Po sub-district. Because she had pity on her grandson, she requested Angkar to allow Sarin to live with her in the sub-district hospital. Angkar assigned Sarin to help in make wine and mold medicine into small pills and then dry them.
After his parents were displaced by Angkar to Chheu Ak cooperative in Po sub-district, they were separated from the base people. At first Angkar divided people into a children unit, women’s unit and youth unit to work in the village. When work was finished, Angkar allowed each unit to return to their parents and relatives. Later on, Angkar started to separate children from their parents. Those children were collected in a children’s center. Children who looked well built were soon transferred to join the mobile youth unit. Sarin’s parents, however, were assigned to work in the rice fields. Not long after, her mother became sick and was transferred to the hospital in Po sub-district. Because her illness became worse and worse, she was sent to Kampong Leng district hospital for an operation. After that he didn’t hear anything new from her about her illness. Later on, he was told that his mother was dead.
After the death of his mother, Sarin had no chance to see his father and brother anymore because Angkar sent all children living in the hospital to live in another cooperative. Only staff was left working at the hospital. Sarin was asked to work in the rice fields at the Prey Chakeang workplace located in Dar village. There he worked in a children’s unit consisting of about 50 children. He had to pull out the rice seedlings, transplant them, and tend cattle. However, he got only two or three ladles for his food ration. Every half month or month, Angkar transferred Sarin to work at a different workplace in Kampong Leng district without allowing him to return home. Even with this restriction, Sarin’s father often brought dried coconut fresh for him.
One day, while Sarin’s father was working in Chheu Ork cooperative, a Khmer Rouge spy arrested him and accused him of being a spy during the Lon Nol era. The spy then escorted him to be killed in Laban prison located in district 16 (Kompong Leng district). After executing Sarin’s father, the spy told the unit chief to look for Sarin’s brother Sokea in the list of names. Because Sarin’s brother had changed his name from Sokea to Son, the unit chief of unit could not find him. Soon after the spy left Sokea was frightened and got a fever and could not eat. Sokea’s relatives who worked in the same unit told him not to be scared and tried to work hard so Angkar would not suspect. Sarin, who was young and worked in the cooperative, was not investigated.
When Khmer Rouge troops reached Kompong Chhnang in 1979, Sarin, his brother and grandmother were forced to move to the forest. Although aware of the liberation, Sarin’s family did not dare to go back his hometown due to fear of the Khmer Rouge. Later, the Khmer Rouge announced that all people could go home. Hence, Sarin decided to settle in Kompong Chhnang until today.
Sarin said that when he recalls the past he always cries “because I experienced it directly, and my parents who took care of me were killed,” Sarin often use his experiences to teach his students. However, some of them do not believe his stories. He suggests that there should be more Khmer Rouge documentation in order to show students and let them understand about the Khmer Rouge regime more broadly.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Saing Sarin, 41 years old, was born in Bralay Meas village, Bralay Meas sub-district, Kampong Leng district, Kampong Chhnang province. The Khmer Rouge killed Sarin’s father after accusing him of being a Lon Nol ME 50 Khnang (a person in charge of taking care of 50 families in the village, but not a village chief) and his mother died of illness because of a lack of treatment. As a consequence he was an orphan at 11 years old. After that he lived with his grandmother.
In 1974, Sarin went to school in grade 12 at a local village school. After studying there for a while, Sarin stopped going because the village was in chaos. There were Khmer Rouge soldiers coming to the village to make propaganda and call for villagers’ support against the Lon Nol Regime. At Sarin’s house, there were guns because his father was ME 50 Khnang. Every night, he saw people come to get guns from his father in order to guard the village.
Later, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge soldiers took complete control of the village. Soon after that the soldier asked the villagers to leave their homes for two or three days, saying that they did not need to bring along any belongings because they would soon return. His entire family including his parents, grandmother, brother and sister, were evacuated to Po village of Po sub-district. His family brought only plates, pots, rice and clothes. At that village, there were hundreds of families coming from Dok village, Thmei village and Bralay village gathered together. Not long after, Angkar separated the evacuees. Sarin’s family was sent to live in Chheu Ak cooperative while his grandmother was selected to work as midwife in Po sub-district. Because she had pity on her grandson, she requested Angkar to allow Sarin to live with her in the sub-district hospital. Angkar assigned Sarin to help in make wine and mold medicine into small pills and then dry them.
After his parents were displaced by Angkar to Chheu Ak cooperative in Po sub-district, they were separated from the base people. At first Angkar divided people into a children unit, women’s unit and youth unit to work in the village. When work was finished, Angkar allowed each unit to return to their parents and relatives. Later on, Angkar started to separate children from their parents. Those children were collected in a children’s center. Children who looked well built were soon transferred to join the mobile youth unit. Sarin’s parents, however, were assigned to work in the rice fields. Not long after, her mother became sick and was transferred to the hospital in Po sub-district. Because her illness became worse and worse, she was sent to Kampong Leng district hospital for an operation. After that he didn’t hear anything new from her about her illness. Later on, he was told that his mother was dead.
After the death of his mother, Sarin had no chance to see his father and brother anymore because Angkar sent all children living in the hospital to live in another cooperative. Only staff was left working at the hospital. Sarin was asked to work in the rice fields at the Prey Chakeang workplace located in Dar village. There he worked in a children’s unit consisting of about 50 children. He had to pull out the rice seedlings, transplant them, and tend cattle. However, he got only two or three ladles for his food ration. Every half month or month, Angkar transferred Sarin to work at a different workplace in Kampong Leng district without allowing him to return home. Even with this restriction, Sarin’s father often brought dried coconut fresh for him.
One day, while Sarin’s father was working in Chheu Ork cooperative, a Khmer Rouge spy arrested him and accused him of being a spy during the Lon Nol era. The spy then escorted him to be killed in Laban prison located in district 16 (Kompong Leng district). After executing Sarin’s father, the spy told the unit chief to look for Sarin’s brother Sokea in the list of names. Because Sarin’s brother had changed his name from Sokea to Son, the unit chief of unit could not find him. Soon after the spy left Sokea was frightened and got a fever and could not eat. Sokea’s relatives who worked in the same unit told him not to be scared and tried to work hard so Angkar would not suspect. Sarin, who was young and worked in the cooperative, was not investigated.
When Khmer Rouge troops reached Kompong Chhnang in 1979, Sarin, his brother and grandmother were forced to move to the forest. Although aware of the liberation, Sarin’s family did not dare to go back his hometown due to fear of the Khmer Rouge. Later, the Khmer Rouge announced that all people could go home. Hence, Sarin decided to settle in Kompong Chhnang until today.
Sarin said that when he recalls the past he always cries “because I experienced it directly, and my parents who took care of me were killed,” Sarin often use his experiences to teach his students. However, some of them do not believe his stories. He suggests that there should be more Khmer Rouge documentation in order to show students and let them understand about the Khmer Rouge regime more broadly.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Transitional justice essential for healing
Thursday, 13 May 2010 17:26
AFTER any conflict, whether it is civil war or an independence struggle, there will be unresolved grievances and schisms that require healing.
Whether an unintended consequence of combat operations, or a deliberate act, harm will be inflicted upon innocent victims and crimes will be committed. The damage and loss of life and property cries out for justice.
Life, however, is never simple. The passions and schisms that exist after a conflict, particularly when there is a follow-on struggle for control and power, make getting absolute justice (if, in fact there is such a thing) problematic. This, I believe, is where the concept of transitional justice plays a critical role.
I must first make it clear, I am not a development or legal expert, so my definition of transitional justice will probably differ from theirs. I am not addressing this to experts, though, but to average people like me who just want the world to make sense; who want to be able to get on with life without the burden of unresolved grievances pressing down upon them.
So, what do I mean by “transitional” justice? I believe the situation in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia best illustrates it.
During the rule of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, millions of Cambodians were taken from their homes and forced to work under abysmal conditions without adequate food or medical attention. Those seen as enemies of the “state” were imprisoned and often brutally executed for no reason other than wearing glasses. Millions died, either from execution or starvation. The institutions that people depended upon were destroyed or debased, and the bonds of trust that hold a society together were severed.
If ever there was a situation that cried out for justice, this was it. The practical reality, however, made it impossible. A long war between the Khmer Rouge and the government in Phnom Penh was ended only when it was agreed that this murderous band of thugs would be incorporated into the nation and the rank and file would not be prosecuted. Subsequently, many years of negotiations were required to come up with the Khmer Rouge tribunal which is underway. Purists would argue that this is not enough.
The people of Cambodia who suffered might disagree. Seeking to prosecute everyone responsible for a crime during the Khmer Rouge period would plunge the nation into civil war and more suffering. By creating a tribunal designed to hold those most responsible accountable, the people at long last received official and formal acknowledgement of their suffering. They have been able to tell their stories, and those stories have become a part of the official historical record. A healing catharsis is underway and beginning to reconstruct the trust people have in their government and each other.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa at the end of apartheid is another example of transitional justice. Transitional justice, in my layman’s view, is not about punishing those who have committed wrongs. It is about acknowledging that a wrong has been done; about allowing the victim a voice, and perhaps the opportunity to forgive his or her transgressor. It is also about allowing the transgressor to acknowledge that he too is a victim of his own misdeed.
If a post-conflict society is ever to put itself back together and move on to peace and prosperity, it will not be the experts who do it. It will be every man, woman and child who has suffered or who has inflicted suffering, deciding to acknowledge the past, and resolve to make a better future.
Charles Ray,
US Ambassador to Zimbabwe.
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Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
AFTER any conflict, whether it is civil war or an independence struggle, there will be unresolved grievances and schisms that require healing.
Whether an unintended consequence of combat operations, or a deliberate act, harm will be inflicted upon innocent victims and crimes will be committed. The damage and loss of life and property cries out for justice.
Life, however, is never simple. The passions and schisms that exist after a conflict, particularly when there is a follow-on struggle for control and power, make getting absolute justice (if, in fact there is such a thing) problematic. This, I believe, is where the concept of transitional justice plays a critical role.
I must first make it clear, I am not a development or legal expert, so my definition of transitional justice will probably differ from theirs. I am not addressing this to experts, though, but to average people like me who just want the world to make sense; who want to be able to get on with life without the burden of unresolved grievances pressing down upon them.
So, what do I mean by “transitional” justice? I believe the situation in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia best illustrates it.
During the rule of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, millions of Cambodians were taken from their homes and forced to work under abysmal conditions without adequate food or medical attention. Those seen as enemies of the “state” were imprisoned and often brutally executed for no reason other than wearing glasses. Millions died, either from execution or starvation. The institutions that people depended upon were destroyed or debased, and the bonds of trust that hold a society together were severed.
If ever there was a situation that cried out for justice, this was it. The practical reality, however, made it impossible. A long war between the Khmer Rouge and the government in Phnom Penh was ended only when it was agreed that this murderous band of thugs would be incorporated into the nation and the rank and file would not be prosecuted. Subsequently, many years of negotiations were required to come up with the Khmer Rouge tribunal which is underway. Purists would argue that this is not enough.
The people of Cambodia who suffered might disagree. Seeking to prosecute everyone responsible for a crime during the Khmer Rouge period would plunge the nation into civil war and more suffering. By creating a tribunal designed to hold those most responsible accountable, the people at long last received official and formal acknowledgement of their suffering. They have been able to tell their stories, and those stories have become a part of the official historical record. A healing catharsis is underway and beginning to reconstruct the trust people have in their government and each other.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa at the end of apartheid is another example of transitional justice. Transitional justice, in my layman’s view, is not about punishing those who have committed wrongs. It is about acknowledging that a wrong has been done; about allowing the victim a voice, and perhaps the opportunity to forgive his or her transgressor. It is also about allowing the transgressor to acknowledge that he too is a victim of his own misdeed.
If a post-conflict society is ever to put itself back together and move on to peace and prosperity, it will not be the experts who do it. It will be every man, woman and child who has suffered or who has inflicted suffering, deciding to acknowledge the past, and resolve to make a better future.
Charles Ray,
US Ambassador to Zimbabwe.
Copyright | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
A Hidden History of Evil Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Claire Berlinski
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?” The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that, of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?” The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that, of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Tribunal Prosecutor Allays Cham Concerns
Posted by Socheata on May 13th, 2010
Cambodian Muslims view photographs of former top leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime at Tuol Sleng. (Photo: AP)
Pich Samnang, VOA Khmer
Preah Sihanoukville province Wednesday, 12 May 2010
“Before the presence of the prosecutor, the villagers did not seem to be aware of the court’s procedures.” White-haired and toothless, Leb Sarem was riding his bicycle from his home to pray at a nearby mosque in Preah Sihanouk province. Along the way, he stopped at a neighbor’s housing compound where last month he and other residents here in the village of Prek Torl met with an international prosecutor from the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal.
The visit, from UN prosecutor Andrew Cayley, set his mind at ease, Leb Sarem told VOA Khmer at the compound last week.
“Before he came here, I felt very tense,” the 67-year-old Muslim said. “But now I feel more relieved, because I hope that he will find justice for me by taking the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial sooner.”
Cayley came to this village, in Prey Nop district, to learn more about the treatment of Cham Muslims by the Khmer Rouge. Under the regime, Chams were forced to denounce their religion, uncover their heads, burn their Qurans and eat pork. Their mosques were destroyed and many of their religious leaders were killed.
Like other villagers here, Leb Sarem said he wants Cayley and the tribunal to bring aging Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for those actions before they die. Before the visit, he said, he was losing hope this would happen.
Cayley was appointed to the tribunal in November 2009, and since then he has met with villagers in the provinces of Siem Reap, Kampong Cham and Preah Sihanouk—listening to their stories and learning about Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Cayley explained to them the processes of the court and sought to assure them that he was working as quickly as he could while maintaining the integrity of the tribunal.
Se Yob, chief of Prek Torl village and a religious leader here, said the 178 Muslim families in the village now better understand the process of the court, following direct explanation by the prosecutor.
“Before the presence of the prosecutor, the villagers did not seem to be aware of the court’s procedures,” Se Yob said, speaking with his wife and daughter listening nearby. “After the prosecutor’s explanation, however, the villagers regained their trust in the court—when he assured them that he would get the job done. So the people hope he can do it 100 percent.”
An estimated 500,000 Cambodian Muslims died under the Khmer Rouge, through overwork, starvation or execution.
Here in Prek Torl, some Chams were executed; others were evicted to neighboring Kampot province, after they were caught planning to rise up against the policies of the Khmer Rouge.
With the tribunal now preparing for a trial of four Khmer Rouge leaders, including on charges of genocide, cases like those in Prek Torl may come into play.
Se Yob, who has filed testimony as a civil party complainant at the tribunal, said he wants justice and an expedient trial. He also wants reparation, to reconstruct the mosque and religious school here that the Khmer Rouge destroyed.
Copyright © hi everybody - Just another WordPress weblog
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Cambodian Muslims view photographs of former top leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime at Tuol Sleng. (Photo: AP)
Pich Samnang, VOA Khmer
Preah Sihanoukville province Wednesday, 12 May 2010
“Before the presence of the prosecutor, the villagers did not seem to be aware of the court’s procedures.” White-haired and toothless, Leb Sarem was riding his bicycle from his home to pray at a nearby mosque in Preah Sihanouk province. Along the way, he stopped at a neighbor’s housing compound where last month he and other residents here in the village of Prek Torl met with an international prosecutor from the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal.
The visit, from UN prosecutor Andrew Cayley, set his mind at ease, Leb Sarem told VOA Khmer at the compound last week.
“Before he came here, I felt very tense,” the 67-year-old Muslim said. “But now I feel more relieved, because I hope that he will find justice for me by taking the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial sooner.”
Cayley came to this village, in Prey Nop district, to learn more about the treatment of Cham Muslims by the Khmer Rouge. Under the regime, Chams were forced to denounce their religion, uncover their heads, burn their Qurans and eat pork. Their mosques were destroyed and many of their religious leaders were killed.
Like other villagers here, Leb Sarem said he wants Cayley and the tribunal to bring aging Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for those actions before they die. Before the visit, he said, he was losing hope this would happen.
Cayley was appointed to the tribunal in November 2009, and since then he has met with villagers in the provinces of Siem Reap, Kampong Cham and Preah Sihanouk—listening to their stories and learning about Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Cayley explained to them the processes of the court and sought to assure them that he was working as quickly as he could while maintaining the integrity of the tribunal.
Se Yob, chief of Prek Torl village and a religious leader here, said the 178 Muslim families in the village now better understand the process of the court, following direct explanation by the prosecutor.
“Before the presence of the prosecutor, the villagers did not seem to be aware of the court’s procedures,” Se Yob said, speaking with his wife and daughter listening nearby. “After the prosecutor’s explanation, however, the villagers regained their trust in the court—when he assured them that he would get the job done. So the people hope he can do it 100 percent.”
An estimated 500,000 Cambodian Muslims died under the Khmer Rouge, through overwork, starvation or execution.
Here in Prek Torl, some Chams were executed; others were evicted to neighboring Kampot province, after they were caught planning to rise up against the policies of the Khmer Rouge.
With the tribunal now preparing for a trial of four Khmer Rouge leaders, including on charges of genocide, cases like those in Prek Torl may come into play.
Se Yob, who has filed testimony as a civil party complainant at the tribunal, said he wants justice and an expedient trial. He also wants reparation, to reconstruct the mosque and religious school here that the Khmer Rouge destroyed.
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Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Center Seeks Recognition From Tribunal
Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Photo: AP
Head of the Documention Centre Chhang Youk examines the genocide documents
at his office in Phnom Penh.
The Documentation Center of Cambodia says it has performed around $300,000
in unrecognized work for the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal for services
related to copying and distributing thousands of documents for the court.
The Documentation Center has spent more than a decade investigating the
atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and has provided a wealth of documents to
the court, often at its own cost.
According to court documents obtained Wednesday, Chhang Youk, director of
the center, has written to tribunal administrators to say assistance from
the center "now amounts to more than" $300,000 for the past four years.
Chhang Youk requested in a letter that the Documentation Center be
credited as the source of the original copies and said the court could
duplicate documentary material "with the exception of photographs and
films for both official and related public use."
The center has provided 500,000 pages of documents to the court since
2006, including to offices of prosecutors, investigating judges, the
defense support section, defense teams and civil party lawyers, according
to the letter. It has also provided around 650 books, nearly 2,000 CDs and
DVDs of films and photographs and 254 microfilm reels.
Chhang Youk told VOA Khmer Wednesday it was important the court
"recognize" the state of affairs, as it is a model for similar courts in
the future.
Tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said Wednesday the court was considering
the letter.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Photo: AP
Head of the Documention Centre Chhang Youk examines the genocide documents
at his office in Phnom Penh.
The Documentation Center of Cambodia says it has performed around $300,000
in unrecognized work for the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal for services
related to copying and distributing thousands of documents for the court.
The Documentation Center has spent more than a decade investigating the
atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and has provided a wealth of documents to
the court, often at its own cost.
According to court documents obtained Wednesday, Chhang Youk, director of
the center, has written to tribunal administrators to say assistance from
the center "now amounts to more than" $300,000 for the past four years.
Chhang Youk requested in a letter that the Documentation Center be
credited as the source of the original copies and said the court could
duplicate documentary material "with the exception of photographs and
films for both official and related public use."
The center has provided 500,000 pages of documents to the court since
2006, including to offices of prosecutors, investigating judges, the
defense support section, defense teams and civil party lawyers, according
to the letter. It has also provided around 650 books, nearly 2,000 CDs and
DVDs of films and photographs and 254 microfilm reels.
Chhang Youk told VOA Khmer Wednesday it was important the court
"recognize" the state of affairs, as it is a model for similar courts in
the future.
Tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said Wednesday the court was considering
the letter.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
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About Me
- Duong Dara
- Dara Duong was born in 1971 in Battambang province, Cambodia. His life changed forever at age four, when the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. During the regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975-1979, Dara’s father, grandparents, uncle and aunt were executed, along with almost 3 million other Cambodians. Dara’s mother managed to keep him and his brothers and sisters together and survive the years of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, when the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, she did not want to live under Communist rule. She fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, where they lived for more than ten years. Since arriving in the United States, Dara’s goal has been to educate people about the rich Cambodian culture that the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy and about the genocide, so that the world will not stand by and allow such atrocities to occur again. Toward that end, he has created the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which began in his garage and is now in White Center, Washington. Dara’s story is one of survival against enormous odds, one of perseverance, one of courage and hope.