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.
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