A day in the life of Tim (27¼ years old)

After last blog’s somewhat heavy-in-the-stomach discussion of the history of the Khmer Rouge (yes I did notice it got a lot less discussion on social media than normal!), I think this one should be a little fluffier. So here is an excerpt from my fictitious diary on a typical day in the field.

06.15 – alarm rings and I grudgingly get up and shower (if at home with cold water, if in a guest house in the field blessedly warm) before grabbing my research satchel and heading out. I feel proud to be up ahead of the world, until I open my door and remember that this is not early in a society where most people get up no later than 5.30 (or even earlier) and actually I should feel bad for sleeping so long.

07.00 – meet Duong who is inevitably well-breakfasted and I am not as I want to lose weight. But to be honest, the allure of soup with chicken and noodles at 6.30 in the morning escapes me anyway. We hop on his moto (Khmer for moped) and trundle off through more or less busy streets of whichever town we are staying in. The journey now can be anywhere between twenty minutes and two and a half hours, depending on where we are going.

07.45 – pull up in front of a small house on stilts and fend off barking dogs and pass a couple of oxen to greet some puzzled looking people. Hardly anyone refuses to talk to us outright, so we are invited to sit on a low flat wooden structure which you could happily confuse for a hugely outsized coffee table, but is actually a bench on which Cambodian families sit, prepare food, lounge, and do everything on.

07.50 – after some small talk the recording device and notebooks are pulled out of our satchels and we launch into an interview.

09.30 – ‘thank you very much,’ we say and leave a very small token of our appreciation in the form of a couple of cans of condensed milk. And back onto the moto for a relaxing drive (sorry, I correct, bottom-crunchingly, back-grindingly bumpy ride along dirt roads) to the next interviewee on our list. We have a small de-brief while we drive, normally along the lines of ‘Well that was interesting, but I don’t think he’s hiding much and I don’t think we’ll need to return here anytime soon.

10.00 – we arrive at interviewee number 2 for the day and are reliably informed by his wife that sorry he is at the rice field and we can’t speak to him. Can we go visit him there? No, not really, but come back later? Yes, of course, around 2 or 3 would be good.  So off we hop, wondering if it was just an excuse or whether the person was genuinely not there.

10.45 – we arrive at interviewee number 3. Or so we thought. ‘Nope, sorry, who are you looking for? No, no, sorry, don’t know her. So we drive on a couple of houses. ‘Oh yes, we know her. You go along there and then turn off………. *check phone discreetly while Duong handles the directions*’  Well now it is nearly 11 and that means that they will be getting into lunch mode for half past eleven (remember they got up very early!), and you don’t want to be interviewing someone who would rather be eating.

11.00 – so we break for lunch ourselves. I look at the food briefly wondering how I thought it would be a good idea to remain vegetarian while living here. On the intricacies of this stupidity I’ll blog another time I think. We eat, we discuss the morning’s interview, sort out organisational things and plan the afternoon and then off we go again.

12.10 – after driving through the same village three times at last we find the right dirt track and the next person’s home and settle in for our next chat. It is getting hot now, it is midday and I’m careful to make sure I find a place in the shade and have a bottle of water with me. Not my prime time right after lunch any day, but dehydrated and with sunburn would not do my concentration any favours.

14.00 – wow, that went on a long time; she really did have an eye for details. A lot of details. But there were nuggets of interesting information in there and she agreed for us to be able to come back again sometime to continue our conversation.

14.30 – back to the person who was supposed to be back from the rice field. He’s not. ‘Are you sure we can’t go to him on the rice field?’ ‘Oh, of course, not a problem’ And so some little granddaughter or great-grandson is magically brought forth to guide us there, cycling on a bike which may be the right size in five or six years, but now is quite comical. And we follow, pootling along on our moto, me feeling quite pleased that this takes the edge out of the potholes.

14.45 – is that a canal we have to cross to get there? Please no! No, he’s coming over. Now I just feel bad, why should he have to wade through the water? Anyway he’s here now. Next time we’ll cross to him. Interview commences, squatting by a rice field, maybe behind a bush for shade, maybe by a tree.

16.30 – well that was interesting. Food for thought in that interview. Now it is only an hour or an hour and a half until sundown. No point looking for anyone else now, as I don’t like driving at night – and Duong doesn’t either. It is dangerous because we may be hit by cars, or targeted by robbers, or just not see a pothole and experience more pain than really necessary.

17.15 – back at guesthouse and time to take a shower and wash off the dirt and grime of the day. Check my emails and answer them pronto. Write my journal (not the teenager type, a research one), although I’m not nearly as diligent at this as I should be.

18.30 – dinner at a local place. Normally a place with a menu, not just pots offering up the various treats they have to sell. It’s often fried rice for me, but sometimes I get lucky and there are fried vegetables on the menu. We chat, we eat, we feel exhausted.

19.15 – back at the guesthouse and I feel like it’s midnight. But now the field research is done, I settle into my room for the evening. A skype or two for Beyond Violence (the web platform that I manage), finishing off those emails from earlier, reading some articles for a paper I’m co-authoring, a phone call or skype home. Or sometimes just lie on my bed and read a book or watch a series or film. Because I’m tired. It’s been a long day.

23.00 – if I haven’t drifted into the land of dreams by now, this is the time to go to sleep. Because tomorrow morning that alarm will be ringing again, bright and early. 

Below a couple of pictures of me 'in action' - conducting an interview next to rice fields, and sopping wet having been caught in a storm somewhere in the middle of nowhere!

Democratic Kampuchea – taking a step back to see the bigger picture

*Bell rings* Students filter into class looking glum. You know what this class is? You guessed correctly – it’s a history lesson!

As you know, dear readers, I am in Cambodia to search for former Khmer Rouge cadres who participated in Southeast Asia’s most prominent genocide. My focus is on the individual people’s motivations but it is obviously necessary to understand the context in which these people were acting to be able understand how they present their actions. And so in this blog I’d like to give a short introduction – a caveat, that I feel I need to add, is that this is a very reductionist presentation of the highly complex dynamics which engulfed the region during the 1970s, but I hope it gives you a good first impression if you are not familiar with this dark time in Cambodian history. The pictures show you two monuments which are important for this narrative: the independence monument and a statue honouring former King Sihanouk.

After King Sihanouk had successfully fought for independence for his country from France in 1953, he subsequently was in more political and ceremonial positions than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands. He was the political lynchpin for most of post-independence Cambodia until his death in 2012 and was immensely popular with the population. So when in 1970 his prime minister Lon Nol toppled him in a bloodless coup d’état, he only needed to say it once and many of his devote subjects/citizens joined an obscure revolutionary organisation which promised to put him back in power. This communist revolutionary  group was later known as the Khmer Rouge (a term first coined in the mid-60s for Cambodian communists) and they capitalised on Sihanouk’s call and recruited a lot of young people to fight in their ranks. Also, Lon Nol’s lenient policies towards the USA regarding neighbouring Vietnam made him deeply unpopular with a population increasingly falling victim to the over half a million tons of American bombs. The bombs were aimed at Vietcong who had pulled back behind the Cambodian border (and were supporting the Khmer Rouge struggles) but countless thousands of people were killed and even more livelihoods destroyed.

In 1975 the bitter civil war came to an end when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, and a population weary of the huge death toll of the battles between the rebels and government forces, tired of American bombing and yearning the return of Sihanouk welcomed the Khmer Rouge with open arms. 

The euphoria about peace turned quickly when all the cities were brutally ‘evacuated’ by the Khmer Rouge, purportedly to safeguard against American bombing, but in actual fact in order to pursue their vision of a peasant revolution going back to the year zero, in which the whole population would work the land and grow rice and the country could be independent of the imperialist Western economy. The emptying of the cities was accompanied by violence against anyone unwilling or unable to leave rapidly, but the fate of the people subsequently arriving in the villages around the country. Here they were called ‘new people’ (or April 17 people after the date Phnom Penh was taken) and were treated as second-class people compared with the ‘base’ people who were the ‘true peasants’ and the foundation of the revolution. Even ‘new people’ who had fled from the civil war to the burgeoning population of Phnom Penh were seen as former supporters of Lon Nol, putting their trust in him and his troops rather than in the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk was not re-instated but put under house arrest, and several members of the royal family were killed.

The living conditions under the Khmer Rouge were horrific and minor infractions would normally mean arrest and re-education for base people, but oftentimes pretty much immediate death for new people. I’m not going to go into the details of everyday life in this ‘prison without walls’ under the Khmer Rouge in this blog, but I will in a blog sometime soon.  

The regime ended 3 years, 8 months and 20 days after the fall of Phnom Penh, when the Vietnamese (whose friendship the Khmer Rouge had broken off and started eliminating all Vietnamese in the country and fighting Vietnamese forces) entered the country on 7 January 1979. The Khmer Rouge pulled back to the Northwest of the country and continued their fight for a radical communist regime until well into the 1990s, keeping the country in a continued civil war.

It’s a complicated history with alliances –secret and open– being formed and breaking down, political ideas being rolled out, retracted or punished, and a lot of killing on the battlefield and even more off it. 

Dead inside or professional detachment?

I have received some very complimentary feedback on my blog so far, so merci beaucoup for that. Luckily it was all digitally so no-one saw me blush. Being the British born lad that I am, it’s not easy to take a compliment. However, I also got one comment from one of my very best friends that he feels I am a little disrespectful in some parts. What he meant was that I am not sensitive enough about what the words I write could mean to people who read this considering the issues I am writing about. Short and simple, yes, this is probably true. I could end the blog response here, but I feel it wouldn’t be doing the issue justice. So here is a slightly longer retort.

Educated in the German school system and with a history teacher for the last three years who took our Holocaust education very seriously, by the time I received my Abitur I felt pretty much desensitised to the whole issue. I had heard so much about it; and yet six months later when I was auditioning for drama schools in Munich (yes, a long time ago!!) I was staying with acquaintances of the family in Dachau, just outside the city, and so I took the chance to look around the concentration camp there. And of course that experience made me pensive; I wasn’t dead inside.

And yet two years ago I went round Auschwitz when visiting a friend in Krakow. Nothing. Here in Cambodia on my preparatory visit I looked at the former Security Prison Tuol Sleng and the Killling Fields Choeung Ek. Nothing. And this July I visited Potocari Memorial Centre in Srebrenica, Bosnia, on an excursion with students. Again nothing. ‘What is the matter with me?’ I thought, ‘Am I dead inside?’ And this wouldn’t have surprised me considering that I spend literally all day every day reading, writing or discussing mass killing in general and in particular individual people who do it. But an esteemed colleague of mine said that she doesn’t think I’m desensitised or dead inside, but that I just have a different pair of glasses on through which I am viewing the world. When I visit these places I am there in academic interest mode, not in human Tim mode. And yes, this thought really resonated with me.

And here in Cambodia I am in permanent academic interest mode overdrive – everything I see, hear and experience I am trying to process for my understanding of what happened here, why people did what they did and for understanding what it has done to today’s society. That is what I am paid to be here for (tax payers’ money!) and that is what I raised money to pay my translator for by crowdfunding. I am here, most narrowly, to understand why people killed other people under the cloak of genocidal ideology and orders three and a half decades ago. And I am doing that with my academic pair of glasses glued to my face.

I do not condone in the least what my interviewees have done – neither the killing of which one man has spoken, nor other people’s participation in a totalitarian system of oppression, hate and murder. Naturally, also, all people who have lost loved ones during the killings here, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, have my heart-felt condolences and my sympathy. But I am not here as an activist, much less to judge the people I am interviewing, I am here as a researcher who wants to understand them. I talk to them at face level, and try to build their trust. And I am pleased if they are honest with me. I am pleased if they open up. I am pleased if they admit the things they have done. Because it doesn’t change the past, whether they talk to me about it or not. That has happened and cannot be unchanged. But for my research, it is pivotal that people open up and talk. So in my mind a good day in the field is a day when people talk to me about killing.

It may be macabre and it maybe won’t always stay as easy for me as it has been visiting memorials when I am talking to live people, but that is what I am here to do. And it is why you are reading this blog, dear reader. I apologise in advance if I sometimes tread too heavy-footedly when I write these blogs. I am giving you a slice of my impressions here in Cambodia. And those impressions are tainted by who I am and why I am here. I don’t make light of genocide on this blog – such humour, although pervasive amongst genocide scholars and within my circle of friends, does indeed appear a little out of place in a blog such as this – but equally this blog is about the search for why people kill. It is a blog on perpetrators, not on victims. It is a blog on killing, not on surviving. So please excuse the odd faux-pas along the way.  Maybe I am wrong or too blasé about it all – if so (or even if I’m right!) leave a comment below.

Oh and the picture has nothing to do with the blog - but I like it and  I bet it made you click on the article in the first place!

A wet day but with a moment of illumination

Dear readers, today I was reminded that it is actually rainy season here. Below there is a picture to prove it - I look a right fool, and far from the professional self I try to be in interviews. I shudder to think what the second interviewee of the day must have thought when he saw a bedraggled white guy and a Cambodian faring no better approaching his house, both of whose shoes were caked in mud and looked like they had been pushed into the Mekong.Yes, it is a very stylish plastic rain cape, thank you very much!

  

 Anyway, said interviewee number 2 of the day was the first interviewee yet (I know this is sad given my project, but it is the unfortunate truth!) who admitted killing anyone during the interview - not surprising as this is someone who has widely told his story and in this context already told the world of his transgressions - normally I try to find interview partners who are as 'unblemished' as possible by previous interviews, but as were in the area, we thought we would have a chat. What he had to say itself was extremely boring ('I was following orders, as was everyone else') and we have had more interesting chats with other people. But it was good to see at least one person admit to killing someone.

The weather-driven fun continued after this and suddenly it was dark in Kandal Province and we were in the middle of our last interview of the day - faced with the choice between 25 km to the Vietnamese border (and the nearest guesthouse) or 50km back to Phnom Penh we elected the second. My first night-time ride outside the city - and that with pouring rain. Not to be recommended! 

I end the day feeling tired but satisfied - the rain is helping the rice farmers (good for Cambodia!) and giving my friends and supporters a picture to amuse themselves with of me. I got my first 'confession' (please let it be the first of many!). And I treated myself to some take-away Mexican food (yum!). Good night!