Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (12 page)

Retribution and resignation can be found in the Khmer Rouge era of Cambodia and its aftermath, but we also find here an ethics of recognition and a struggle to see the face of the Other. This ethics is exemplified in the work of filmmaker Rithy Panh, the most important artist to confront the genocide. For him and many others, the policies and horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime are symbolized in S-21, the infamous prison and death camp located in the capital of Phnom Penh.
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During the Khmer Rouge reign of 1975 to 1979, some seventeen thousand men, women, and children entered S-21, where they were photographed, interrogated, tortured, and killed. Seven survived by one count, a dozen by another, perhaps a couple hundred at most (as is usually the case in a poor country, the bureaucracy has yet to catch up with the disaster). S-21 was the most extreme manifestation of an extreme regime whose policies of execution and forced labor led to the death, through murder, starvation, and illness, of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of about 7 million. During this time, the Khmer Rouge created the faceless Angkar, or Organization, that ruled all of Cambodian society, mandating uniform haircuts and clothing, eliminating family relations and human affections, and transforming the entire population into a compulsory labor force. Khmer Rouge policies were retribution against an entire society and the “new people,” a population who embodied Western influence and class inequality (in contrast to the “base people,” the peasantry).
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“Only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive,” becoming faceless parts of a revolutionary society, a utopia that would erase the unequal past and begin anew from Year Zero.
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This was the drive for totality of which Levinas speaks, the impulse to subsume everything, all difference, all others, into the same. Colonialism was also an expression of this drive for totality. What the French did to the Khmer foreshadowed the extermination that the Khmer would do to themselves and any others they found in Cambodia.

The United Nations refuses to use
genocide
to describe what happened to the Cambodian people, reasoning that it was Khmer killing Khmer in most instances, while a genocide is one ethnic group singling out another. Rithy Panh refuses this bureaucratic interpretation when he (along with cowriter Christophe Bataille) says that “the invention of a group within a larger group, of a group of human beings considered different, dangerous, toxic, suitable for destruction—is that not the very definition of genocide?”
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Panh calls this culling “the elimination,” the title of his powerful, spare, unsentimental memoir of having survived the genocide as a teenager and ultimately confronting the only Khmer Rouge official convicted at that time of any crimes against humanity, the commandant of S-21, Duch.
The Elimination
is a meditation on the effects of the genocide and the psychology of the perpetrators, represented by Duch, who allows Panh to interview him repeatedly, face to face. “He’s a man who searches out and seizes upon the weaknesses of others. A man who stalks his humanity. A disturbing man. I don’t remember that he ever left me without a laugh or a smile.”
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Duch’s defense lawyer, Kar Savuth, himself a genocide survivor, said

when he first met Duch, the former Khmer Rouge commandant had cried, overwhelmed by guilt, then gathered himself, pointing out that the first commandant of S-21 had been killed and that he knew it was only a matter of time before he himself would have been killed, too. Duch asked Kar Savuth a question: If they told you they were going to kill your family, what would you have done? And Kar Savuth said, “I would have done exactly what you did.”
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Duch tries to impress on Panh that he, too, would have done the same, an implication that Panh refuses. While Duch says he convinced Kar Savuth that he might have done the same things, Panh tries to convince Duch that he must take responsibility for his actions. Both are versions of this ethical need to recognize the inhuman within the human, and vice versa. “He’s human at every instant,” Panh says of Duch. “That’s the reason why he can be judged and condemned. No one can rightly authorize himself to humanize or dehumanize anyone. But no one can occupy Duch’s place in the human community. No one can duplicate his biographical, intellectual, and psychological trajectory.”
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Duch is both man and human and someone outside of the human community. He is an other even as he eliminated others, a creature who can only reclaim his humanity through acknowledging what he has done.

Panh does not urge this recognition only at the level of the individual. Duch is “man, entirely man,” but he is also the face of the regime.
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Duch is a unique perpetrator, and perhaps victim, but the catalog of horrors he oversaw, exceeding anything dreamed up by Hollywood, are an outcome of history and the species:

The crimes committed by Democratic Kampuchea, and the intention behind those crimes, were incontrovertibly human; they involved man in his universality, man in his entirety, man in his history and in his politics. No one can consider those crimes as a geographical peculiarity or a historical oddity; on the contrary the twentieth century reached its fulfillment in that place; the crimes in Cambodia can even be taken to represent the whole twentieth century. This formulation is excessive, to be sure, but its very excess reveals a truth: It was in the Enlightenment that those crimes took place. At the same time I don’t believe that.
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Panh hesitates on whether the genocide is the culmination of Western thinking, but he does not hesitate, in the end, on demanding that we see how “the history of Cambodia is in the deepest sense our history, human history.”
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The genocide, while extreme, was not marginal, provincial, or aberrant, but as fundamental an expression of inhumanity—and therefore of humanity—as a number of horrific events before and since, as universal, in its abomination, as great art is in its beauty. “I believe in the universality of the Khmer Rouge’s crime,” Panh says, “just as the Khmer Rouge believed in the universality of their utopia.”
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Confronting this universality of the genocide and the simultaneous inhumanity and humanity of Duch, the Everyman of the Khmer Rouge, Panh does not allow himself either retribution or resignation. If one sign of inhumanity is destruction, then one sign of humanity is creation, something Panh knows well as an artist. Panh creates art to address Duch, the genocide, and his personal experience of survival and witnessing most of his family die from starvation and illness. He recounts the experience through
The Elimination
as well as through his feature film
The Missing Picture
, a moving and brilliant autobiography and documentary about his family’s and country’s fates. In an unexpected gesture, Panh recreates the world of the Khmer Rouge era through the use of hand-carved figurines that stand in for himself and the people of whom he talks. The aesthetic decision is as persuasive and satisfying as Art Spiegelman’s turn to comics in
Maus
for addressing the Holocaust. He drew Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, and Panh, facing an equally incomprehensible death world, turned to inhuman figurines as one way to approach inhumanity. The immobilized faces of these figurines achieve an expressive, emotional transfiguration when fused with the film’s music, narration, and miniature mise-en-scènes, the diorama-like recreations of the labor camps, fields, huts, and hospital where Panh’s family worked and died from starvation and illness, as well as the room where Panh, lying under a picture of Sigmund Freud, interrogates his memories as his dead relatives observe him. Immobility is part of the aesthetic, for like characters in photographs, these figurines do not move but are fixed, as memories sometimes are. Unlike photographs, however, these figurines and their settings are three-dimensional, carved into existence by the artist Mang Satire. Artistic efforts such as Panh’s and Mang’s are the opposite of resignation, and they are not retributions. Instead, these artists seek to return, again and again, to the scene of the crime in an effort to understand it. Their art is one crucial way of seeing the faces of others, possibly even the face of the Other.

Addressing the past and the most horrific of horrors, Panh expresses faith in the power of his art: “My films are oriented toward knowledge; everything is based on reading, reflection, research work. But I also believe in form, in colors, in light, in framing and editing. I believe in poetry. Is that a shocking thought? No. The Khmer Rouge didn’t break everything.”
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Form also interested the Khmer Rouge. People needed to behave, dress, and speak in certain ways, on penalty of death. “Control of bodies, control of minds: the program was clear. I was without a place, without a face, without a name, without a family. I’d been subsumed into the big, black tunic of the organization.”
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Once free from that Organization, Panh would endeavor over decades and multiple works of art to find the form that could speak to the past and to the difficulty of seeing the human in the inhuman, and vice versa. The result,
The Elimination
and
The Missing Picture
, are two of the finest works of art and memory to deal with the genocide, powerful partly because they abolish the sentimentality, the aesthetic weaknesses, and the fear of assigning responsibility to Western countries that limit so many works from other Cambodians about the genocide. He confronts the difficult possibility that

after thirty years, the Khmer Rouge remain victorious: The dead are dead, and they’ve been erased from the face of the earth. Their commemorative stele is us. But there’s another stele: the work of research, of understanding, of explication. This isn’t some sad passion; it’s a struggle against elimination. Of course such work doesn’t raise the dead. It doesn’t seek out bad ground or ashes. And of course this work doesn’t bring us rest. Doesn’t mellow us. But it gives us back our humanity, our intelligence, our history. Sometime it even ennobles us. It makes us alive.
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The elimination was characterized by erasing not only the dead but effacing the living, stripped of their individuality. “I had no family. I had no name. I had no face. And so, because I was nothing anymore, I was still alive,” Panh says.
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“When you don’t have a name it’s as though you don’t have a face; you’re easy to forget.”
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As he works to remember, Panh is concerned with “the faces of the torturers. Obviously I’ve met a certain number of them. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they’re arrogant. Sometimes they’re agitated. Often they seem insensible. Stubborn. Yes, torturers can be sad too.”
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In his documentary
S-21
, Panh meets several of the prison’s guards and torturers and persuades them to recreate and repeat their daily actions, their acts of interrogation and torture, grown men recalling their lives as teenagers. From Panh’s point of view, these men are others, living embodiments of a mystery he seeks to understand—how did this genocide happen? How did people do this? Why is no one held responsible? These questions also interest filmmaker Socheata Poeuv. In her documentary
New Year Baby
, she brings her father from America back to Cambodia and surprises him by arranging a meeting with a former Khmer Rouge cadre. Her father, a survivor of the era, hates the Khmer Rouge and does not want to meet the cadre, but Poeuv says, “I want to see his face.” Like many others, “I didn’t understand how a whole country could suffer through this and not demand justice.” But in a country divided into new people and base people, in which many were the active agents of death but many more were silent witnesses and complicit spectators who did nothing in order to survive, is it a surprise how difficult it is to achieve justice? Who is responsible? While the United Nations and the Cambodian government are jointly involved in prosecuting the five highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders (of whom Duch, the lowest-ranking, was the first convicted), the legal effort to bring justice is at best symbolic, since thousands of real murderers will not be prosecuted, and hundreds of thousands of complicit Khmer will not be touched or named.

Like some of the Khmer Rouge who have, more or less, confessed, Duch admits to certain actions (and not others), but deflects his responsibility by pointing to a force beyond him, Angkar, or the Organization, whose faceless presence so terrified the victims of the Khmer Rouge. The Organization spoke through its cadres, but it was unclear to almost everyone, including most of the cadres, who the Organization was. To Cambodians, was the Organization not power itself, separated from any individual man? Is this excision what allows Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era to deny responsibility, eliminating themselves from power, from being a part of or complicit with the Organization? Even the most senior Khmer Rouge, the ones on trial, deny knowledge of hundreds of thousands dying (if, they said, hundreds of thousands even died). Would reconciliation be possible between the victims and the victimizers if the victimizers recognized even their complicity, much less their responsibility? The problem is that few are willing to acknowledge themselves as victimizers, even after admitting to performing certain harmful deeds. Can they face their deeds? Can they face their inaction? Can they come face to face with themselves?

At S-21, Panh films the former guards and notes: “The torturer’s face: lost amid the images that none of them explicates, as if there were an insuperable boundary. The unnameable.”
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Panh alludes here to both the images of horror that exist in the mind’s eye for witnesses and for those who have only heard of the crimes, and also to the faces of all the prisoners, photographed on entry to S-21. Some of those photos are now featured in the museum that S-21 has become. They are victims, but given the lack of captions, names, and identification, most visitors do not know that a good number of these victims were themselves Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen afoul of the Organization, including former torturers and guards at S-21.
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The Khmer Rouge used S-21 to torture and kill its own cadres, as well as foreigners, minorities, intellectuals, and so on. The faces of victimizers who became victims are the most visible rendition of the general problem that the Khmer Rouge era and its aftermath represents for a human and inhuman history: the reluctance to recognize and to reconcile with one’s capacity to harm others. When we refuse to see victims as capable of violence, we allow ourselves to imagine that we are the same way.