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

As promised, here goes with a blog about why people participate in genocide. To begin with it is worth mentioning that I am not coming here with a blank slate – I am coming here having developed a theoretical model of why people participate which I want to test and see if it holds true in Cambodia. Almost all research so far on the participation in genocide has concentrated on the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, so it is quite exciting to see whether it applies also to another, very different genocide.

Hopefully, my model will be published at some point (at the latest as part of my thesis), but if you are interested, there is a slightly earlier version already out there in the academia-sphere. Basically what I try to show is that there is no one reason why people participate but many different pathways – in all I identify eleven such pathways, each with different variations and manifestations and also a whole host of, what I call, facilitative factors, that is factors which don’t actually motivate people to participate, but do make it a whole lot easier. But here is the bigger picture: there are really only three broad types of motivations for people to participate in genocide.

First, it is because of their social group, what social psychologists call their ‘ingroup’. In the case of genocide that is the group of perpetrators. For instance, people may want to be obedient to an authority who they think is legitimate in giving them orders. Or they may not want to fall out of line in a group of friends and try to act in conformity to what they think is expected of them. Alternatively, the group can actually exert pressure on an individual to participate or even issue outright threats. In the most extreme version, this can result in the group threatening to kill someone if they don’t participate, or even actually doing it.

The second batch of motivations revolve around the so-called ‘outgroup’, here these are the victims, the people to be killed. For example, participants in the genocide can actually genuinely believe that it is the right thing to do, that the victim group must be annihilated and that they should be lauded for their actions. These ideological killers are pretty much what a lot of films or books paint perpetrators to be, but they really are only one of several types. Another motivation can stem from emotions which the perpetrator experiences towards the victims, notably anger, fear, resentment, and several more.

The last types of perpetrator motivations are an eclectic mix of ‘intrinsic’ motivations. These motivations have nothing to do with the victims or the other perpetrators but are really focussed pretty much on the perpetrator him or herself. Being a sadist, seizing a grotesque opportunity to profit economically or in their career, taking on a role and acting it out to its fullest, enjoying the thrill and excitement of doing something wrong or wanting to attain additional status or an ego-boost.

Of course, each of these merit a lot more differentiation and I could elaborate on each a lot more, but I think you get the gist – the current chapter version is 81 pages, but I’ll spare you that! All of these have been well-documented for the Holocaust and Rwanda, although obviously not all equally frequent, and it is my mission here in Cambodia to try and find out whether it is the same motivations underlying the violent dynamics of the 1970s here, too, or if there are different reasons. Next blog, I’ll let you in on a couple of first insights.

Tim’s ‘State of the Blog’ Address

Dearest readers, I have been very pleased to receive a lot of emails and messages from you about the blog, some positive, some critical, some thought-provoking, all interesting. And I would like to respond to some of the comments I have received (some, although very important issues, don’t lend themselves to a wider audience).

In the past few weeks, I have written quite a bit about how my life is here and about the process of doing field research, and I will continue to share these anecdotes and impressions with you. A lot of the experiences I am having, many of you will have had also when you have been to another country, whether for field work or to emigrate, or just on holiday, language barriers, adapting to a different way of doing things and so on – I am certainly not special in this regard. Many things are trivial, some would happen to me whether it were in Phnom Penh or Paris, Battambang or Buenos Aires or Berlin, Samlaut or Siena, and I hope that you appreciate my sometimes cynical or bemused musings on them for what they are, small insights into my life here, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes reflective, sometimes boringly straight out. I have been in Cambodia for two and a half months now and I am growing to love the country and its people – like any country in the world it is different, it is special and it is bewildering to the outsider, and I am enjoying discovering that.

But this is not a travel blog, obviously, and while I have been writing about the process of how my research is unfolding here, I haven’t really given you much insight into what I have actually been finding out. As of today I have conducted 57 interviews with 45 different people in nine different provinces, almost all former Khmer Rouge (the odd person slipped in who we thought was Khmer Rouge but turned out not to be!). And their life stories are – as expected – all very different and I feel privileged to have been able to hear so many – and hopefully many more to come. So far, as I mentioned a while ago, only one person has admitted to killing himself, but in interviews with others I have been able to ask a wealth of related questions and thus can slowly paint a mosaic of what motivated people at the time to participate in the genocide; it is still early days and it will be a hectic few months of research still to go. Over the next few weeks and months, I hope to be able to share some of these insights from these interviews with you, probably the reason you decided to read this blog, but given the popular demand I will also continue with the other topics I have been blogging on so far. End of the address. Rapturous applause.

**the long open road ahead**

 

Have you met... Duong?

My name is Duong Keo, 27 years old. I got married a couple years ago to my lovely wife, Sethy, and we have one daughter, Bolin, a name I got from Berlin, the first European city I have been to. I studied bachelor of art degree in history at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for four years from 2004 to 2008, the period that history of Democratic Kampuchea became the headline topic for education, research, media and other organizations after the official establishment of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in 2003. After my graduation, I was shortly employed by Austrians Film Production to be a correspondent of the trial at ECCC covering case 001 where I also learned from the trial procedure and where my interest about history of this period built up. Later I worked at Youth For Peace, a local peace NGO working with young people, and the project I worked on was Voice of Former Khmer Rouge. Through the project, I had the chance to meet and interview close to a hundred former Khmer Rouge cadres to record their biographies and their thoughts about their experiences and the establishment of the ECCC.

 At the same time, I was also the research assistant of Dr. Andrew Mertha, Associate Professor at Cornell University, interviewing former Khmer Rouge cadres for his project in which the outcome of the project is the book entitled: Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to Democratic Kampuchea. Working with a researcher somehow gave me a different way to approach interviewees and get information from them. With Youth For Peace, my interview was quite general while working with Andrew’s interview were more detailed in a particular topic that allowed me to experience another technique to get detailed information. In 2011, I won a fellowship training program called the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Tribunal Fellowship Program organized by German Development Program (GIZ) in Cambodia and Germany. And in 2012, I was granted a scholarship to pursue my master degree at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, in the subject of Southeast Asian Studies. I graduated from this university with my thesis on Cambodian Nationalism and Its Relations to Mass Killing and Genocide (1975-1979). To fulfill this thesis research, I also interviewed former Khmer Rouge cadres to understand about their perception toward the regime that they had served and the leaders of the regime. So, my background is pretty much involved in interviews with former Khmer Rouge cadres.

 

When I almost finished my master degree in Thailand, I came into contact with Timothy Williams through a former colleague, Sonja Meyer and a director of Kdei Karuna organization, Tim Minea. After the introduction of the project, I quickly agreed to be part of the project as the assistant. Three main reasons I decided to participate in this project. Firstly, I have worked with former Khmer Rouge cadres for years. My experiences in the field research are sufficient to assist related work involving former Khmer Rouge cadres. Secondly, the Khmer Rouge topic is still an unfinished topic and researchers should find what made the regime as it was from different perspectives. Timothy studies individual motivation of those who participated in mass violence of genocide. This study matches my interest as I also study nationalism motivation against Vietnam from former Khmer Rouge cadres’ perspectives. Finally, I actually want to learn more from the research project and the project implementer, especially from the outstanding academic person like Timothy Williams. I have a dream to achieve a Ph.D scholarship in a foreign country, especially in Europe. Therefore, being involved in this project will partly be a basic foundation for my future academic career. 

After two months working with Timothy Williams, I experienced and learnt several good things from him. He is very punctual, well-planned, and hard-working. Punctuality is something that I have already been comfortably practiced, but working with a punctual person is my pleasure. Moreover, his well-planned work shapes me to be well-organized from time to time and hopefully, I will be fully well-planned person like he is. More importantly, he is a young hard-working academic person such as I rarely meet. I normally could not read or work on the bus as I would feel dizzy. He doesn’t want to let time go free; he works comfortably even though the bus is bumpy.  He is a purely academic person. However, it is new for him to be in the country that has a different culture. Sometimes his logical idea and thought is not implementable in this country. All in all, up to this point, I am really pleased to be part of the project and work directly with Timothy Williams. I am looking forwards to fulfill the project with fruitful results.  

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!