Food, glorious food

Food, glorious food! Hot sausage and mustard! While we're in the mood. Cold jelly and custard! So goes the song, but here it could be changed to something with fish amok, fried rice and beef loklak – that’s if you don’t talk about the ants, cockroaches and boiled eggs with chicks inside that are all special snacks here.

You may remember me mentioning in the blog I wrote about a typical day in the field, that I’m vegetarian. Yes, I have been off and on since school and it is a battle of principled beliefs and the craving for a good schnitzel or burger; normally I am vegetarian for a couple of years and then go on a big trip to a country with no vegetarian infrastructure and thus am forced to eat meat (the first time it was excruciatingly difficult as meat repelled me at the time). And back in Europe I often just stuck with it, until a conversation with my best friend and vegetarian pain in the arse Paul (who I originally converted induced, stupid me!).

The first half of this year I craved meat, and was quite looking forward to the opportunity of being in Cambodia for six months to renege on my principles and go for it. So my first evening here, it was grilled beef with lime, chili, garlic and pepper. YUM! But then a friend pointed out that it was actually quite easy in Phnom Penh to be vegetarian. And I realised it was. So after two days of enjoying meat again, I was back off the bandwagon. And in Phnom Penh it’s easy – there is delicious food from all over the world for reasonable prices and everywhere has a vegetarian option or two or more on the menu. And at the end of the alley I live is a restaurant called ‘Vegetarian’ – now if that doesn’t give me the ‘vegetarian infrastructure’ I lamented, I don’t know what I am expecting!

It gets a little trickier out in the provinces. There are conspicuously no vegetarian cafés, Lebanese falafel shops or Mexican burrito places, and this is hardly surprising. I was positively charmed by Phnom Penh when I arrived at the diversity of the international cuisine and also the availability of traditional Khmer food adapted for veggies. Well, in the provinces, it gets a little more meaty and thus difficult.

Most places, if not in the centre of a provincial town, have a system reminiscent of a cafeteria, in which there is a table with several pots of different dishes from which you choose the meal of choice and get some rice to go with it. I have not yet seen a pot without fish, chicken, pork or beef. I just don’t think those dishes exist. And so normally I’ll be able to order some fried rice or if lucky they may even make me some fried vegetables to go with some rice, and if I’m less lucky at the beginning I would eat something from one of the pots, something with chunks of meat which look least likely to fall right off the bone and thus let me pick them out. Nowadays I tend to just go without the meal and by dinner time we can normally rustle up some fried rice somewhere.

Am I a fussy eater? Not really. I struggle with the thought that I come to a place and then make extra demands as I don’t want to eat the food of this country. Does that make me an arrogant Western person, unwilling to let himself be immersed by the culture of the country he is researching? Or does it make me a pragmatist who is happy to be in the provinces and eat a bland diet of fried rice and vegetables day after day, to uphold his dietary principles, but still enable him to do his research? Obviously, I come down on the latter side of the debate, but it does worry me what the people in the places we eat think. Particularly in a country overrun by Western development workers, many of whom seem ignorant of the people and the culture around them (but more on that another time!)

And then we return to Phnom Penh at some point and I breath a culinary sigh of relief. And off I go to my favourite café Java for coffee and scones, and maybe a pumpkin and carrot soup.

So, why did you participate in genocide? (Part II)

Oh dear me, it has been a good three or four weeks since the last blog. And there are a lot of good reasons for this – hard at work, had my mother and brother to visit and spent the evenings with them instead of working, and all sorts – but the main one is that I have writer’s block regarding the topic I promised you. I promised to give you some first results from my interviews, but every time I get out my big black and red notebook and look through the pages, I have literally no idea where to start telling you about the many conversations I have had, the many stories I have heard, the lives which have been laid out before me. The type of academic I am, I feel I don’t want to start talking about it before I have combed through the interviews in detail and found the patterns. So I have decided to start simply by telling you just one story, randomly chosen.

The interviewee spoke to me at a restaurant near his home in the province of Kampong Chhnang. After the Khmer Rouge entered the area he grew up in, he was evacuated to a different part of the district to avoid being on the frontlines, and collective work under the Khmer Rouge began. In 1972, he was called to a meeting by the commune chief along with all the other young villagers. Here, the village chief spoke to the young people and assigned them all to different tasks. My interviewee (whose name I even don’t know myself to enhance his anonymity) was assigned to the village militia, called chlop in Khmer. He didn’t really mind this assignment, he said, and most of his friends didn’t seem to mind either – as everyone went along with it you could hardly stay behind. His main task was to patrol the village and watch out for Lon Nol spies (the enemies during the civil war) entering the village, but none ever came by. This task was easier than growing rice in the fields which is what he had been doing prior to that so he became quite accustomed to his new role.

From here he was assigned to be a soldier at the front and when the Khmer Rouge had taken Phnom Penh and gained power over the country he was assigned to become a guard at one prison, and then a second. This was preceded by intense background checks into whether he or his family had any involvement with the previous enemy and checks that he was from the poorest classes and thus a true peasant and revolutionary. The prison he ended up was security office number 21, S-21, the now infamous Tuol Sleng which today houses the country’s goriest genocide museum. My interviewee says he was a guard here, in charge of watching over the people, chained together in small rooms, and making sure they didn’t commit suicide – the people were needed for interrogation (oftentimes brutal with the prisoners coming back covered in blood) in order for his colleagues to find out about their treacherous activities and about other people in their ‘strings’ of foreign agents, so the story goes.

‘I was scared for my security,’ says my interviewee, even though he had a good life with three meals a day. While this fear may strike one as strange to hear from the guard of a prison, this is a recurring motif in many interviews – all guards (all cadres at all for that matter) were potentially also moles of the enemy. If someone committed suicide, immediately the guard would have been arrested (and many of his comrades were), as this was seen as suspicious of him being a member of a treacherous string also. And in the space of a fateful few minutes he could change from guard to prisoner. Several people died on his watch, but always from starvation or the consequences of the torturous interrogation, never suicide leaving him in the clear.

One day, though, he has to work all night guarding and standing up, and eventually he dozes off on his feet and is caught. Thrown into a cell with no food or water for several days (and fed after three days only through the compassion of a fellow guard), he is suspected of trying to sabotage the prison, but in the end he is let out again, but now guards the perimeter of the prison rather than the prisoners themselves. The man is arrested again later for being suspected of graffiti-painting a slogan against Ângkar but again can persuade his superiors of his innocence. It would seem his fear ‘for his security’ was quite justified. Only when the Vietnamese invade is he relieved of his duties – while fleeing he saw a huge pit filled with dead people and mused to his friend ‘If we had stayed any longer, we would have been killed too – Vietnam has saved our lives.’

When I asked him, why he believed others at the prison had killed prisoners, he said that he believed there was one reason, and one reason only: orders. He acted because of orders and nothing else and he assumes the same is true for others. If he had ever been asked to kill, he would have done so, but he was never asked.

Although I chose this interview randomly, it does talk about events others have experienced, it shows the complex dynamics of the time, and the manifold roles that people were thrust into. Displaced person and later Khmer Rouge cadre; guard at Tuol Sleng and twice prisoner at the same. Assigned with everyone else. Orders to be obeyed. Fears for security. Context and conditions beyond imagination. Did not kill. But close to the action, so close that prisoners die on his watch. My interviews seldom paint pictures of black and white, and this interview was no exception. It is a messy picture of why people participate in genocide, but it is a picture with contours, which opens important questions which I am slowly finding answers to.