Tat Marina had been a stunningly beautiful young actress who made her living by appearing in karaoke videos. The previous year she had come to the notice of a Cambodian government minister, Svay Sittha, who had seduced her and installed her in a cheap apartment as his concubine. The attack was carried out by Sittha’s wife, Khoun Sophal, whom an American woman-friend would describe later as ‘the gentlest soul you could imagine; a truly delightful person’.
The young woman survived, her head and body from the waist up made hideous by scar tissue. Her attackers were never questioned, still less charged with any offence.
Scores of teenage Cambodian girls are disfigured and in many cases blinded in acid attacks by rich men’s wives. Older Cambodian women say that Tat Marina and girls like her ‘steal other women’s husbands’ and get what they deserve. Men treat them as disposable, ‘like Kleenex, to be used and thrown away’.
The parallel with Khmer Rouge atrocities is striking. One way to try to understand why the Cambodian communists acted as they did is to enter into the mind of a well-educated, intelligent woman, who exacts vengeance by pouring acid over a young girl’s head, watching as it eats away her body and every hope of happiness in her life. What can be more odious than to destroy a child’s future? The Khmers Rouges, at least, could argue that they were acting for a cause, not out of personal evil. But the result was essentially the same. It was Orwell’s vision of the future: ‘A boot stamping on a human face, for ever.’
In any violent upheaval, whether war or revolution, innocent people suffer. US officials speak of ‘collateral damage’; Maoists talk of breaking eggs in order to make an omelette. In Democratic Kampuchea, ‘collateral damage’ knew no bounds. Everything outside the ‘revolution’ became a legitimate and necessary target.
It was not simply that life had no value; that killing became an act of no consequence. An entire country was put in thrall to a dystopian ideal that negated anything and everything that was human. And the question to which all Cambodians ceaselessly demand an answer is: Why? Why did such horrors descend on us? Why did it have to happen
here?
The unstated premise is that the horrors came from without — from the American bombing of Cambodian villages in the early 1970s; from
Maoism; from Stalinism; from the legacy of the French Revolution, transmitted by colonial schoolteachers; from the vicious, warped minds of a small group of evil men.
Cambodians — not just the present government, dominated by former Khmers Rouges who have no interest whatever in raking up the past, but the nation as a whole — are oddly reluctant to look deeper. To do so would require a degree of self-examination for which they are unprepared and which, instinctively, they prefer to avoid. To the extent that people want a reckoning, the goal is to condemn the big fish, the perpetrators — ‘them’; not ‘us’ — the small fry.
No one wants to make ‘shrimp soup’, as the Cambodian saying has it. The shrimps — the petty thugs and killers — abound in every village. The holocaust that consumed Cambodia required the complicity of so large a proportion of the population that one has to ask how the victims would have behaved if the roles had been reversed.
The question ‘Why?’ must be rephrased.
The cardinal issue is what it is about Cambodian society that has allowed, and continues to allow, people to turn their backs on all they know of gentleness and compassion, goodness and decency, and to commit appalling cruelties seemingly without conscience of the enormity of their acts and certainly without remorse. It is a question one can ask, in greater or lesser measure, about the Germans (and others) during the time of the Nazis; the Rwandans; the Turks (in Armenia); the Serbs (in Bosnia); the Bosnians (in Serbia); the Israelis in Palestine and the Palestinians in Israel; not to mention all the terrorist organisations occupying the moral high ground inspired by Islamic fundamentalism.
The explanation does not lie in some chromosomal abnormality, some genetic predisposition to violence, a neuropathic ‘Bell curve’ on the part of the nations concerned. Cambodians, or for that matter Rwandans, are not biologically more prone to cruelty than Americans or West Europeans. The causes are rooted in history — which creates the conditions for nations to seek extreme remedies to perceived ills; in geography — which generates the pressures that seem to justify them
(lebensraum,
said Hitler; ‘national survival’, said Pol Pot); in culture — which erects or fails to erect moral and intellectual prohibitions against them; and in the political and social system — which affords or denies the individual the right to act according to his own lights.
Context is not all, however. Evil is as evil does.
The individual, whatever the context, has a personal responsibility. Evil, at this level, consists in deliberately ignoring what one knows to be right. The weaker the moral code, the easier evil becomes to commit. Jacques
Vergès, a radical French lawyer who, as a student in the 1950s, befriended many of the future Cambodian communist leaders, maintains that what distinguishes men from animals is
crime.
Nature, knowing no human law, is savage. Man alone is criminal. Or, to put it in Old Testament terms, man alone is evil. When we contemplate what happened in Cambodia, we are looking not at some exotic horror story but into darkness, into the foul places of our own souls.
History, culture, geography, politics and millions of individuals have all played their part in the Cambodian nightmare, albeit in differing measures. The same is true of all such tragedies, which is why the particular agony of a small, distant country has a larger significance, on which those who make policy, and public opinion, would do well to ponder. That is reason enough for recounting the story of the man who became Pol Pot. For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.
1
Sâr
THE VILLAGE OF
Prek Sbauv
extends along the east bank of the River Sên, which flows southward from the town of Kompong Thom to the Great Lake, the Tonle Sap. Wooden stilt-houses stand half-hidden amid orange and purple bougainvillea, morning glory, yellow-flowering
anh kang
trees, cactus hedges and palms. Fishermen row flat-bottomed canoes, with a lazy sweeping motion, standing with a single oar at the stern, to string out nets on stakes in the shallows. The water gleams yellowish-brown. Buffalo with small, erect pink ears peer out suspiciously from the mud. It is a gentle, idyllic place.
Nhep’s home is set back about thirty yards from the river, separated from it by a cart-track which leads to the provincial capital, three miles distant. The stilts are a protection against flooding, although severe floods have come only once in Nhep’s lifetime, a few years back, the result of uncontrolled logging along the Mekong river, which Cambodians know as the ‘Mother of Waters’. As in all traditional Cambodian dwellings, everyone lives in one large room, occupying the whole of the first floor, which is reached by a flight of steep wooden steps leading up from the garden outside. The house where he and Sâr were born stood on the same spot, Nhep says, and was built in exactly the same way. It was destroyed in a bombing raid during the civil war.
The family was well-off, indeed, by local standards, wealthy. Their father, Loth, owned 50 acres of rice-paddy — ten times the average, comparable to the living of a junior mandarin — and their home was one of the biggest among the twenty or so houses in the village. At transplanting and harvest time, Loth hired his poorer neighbours to provide extra labour.
Nhep, the youngest child, was born in the summer of 1927, the Year of the Hare; Sâr, eighteen months older, in
March 1925
, the Year of the Ox;
*
and their brother, Chhay, in the Dog Year, 1922. There were three elder siblings — two boys and a girl — who had also been born within a year or two of each other, but more than a decade earlier. Three others had died young. Because they were so close in age, the three youngest were inseparable, particularly Sâr and Nhep. They played and swam in the river together, and in the evenings, by the light of a rush-lamp, listened to the old people of the village recounting stories and legends from the days before the French established the protectorate in the 1860s.
Their grandfather, Phem, was a link with that time. The children never knew him, but Loth used to tell them of his exploits. Phem had grown up during what were afterwards called the ‘Years of Calamity’, when Vietnamese and Thai invaders vied for suzerainty over what remained of the old Khmer kingdom, and court poets voiced the nation’s fears that soon ‘Cambodia would no longer exist’. The Royal Palace at Oudong was razed and Phnom Penh was destroyed. Among the populace, those who escaped the corvées imposed by the rival armies ‘fled to the forest to live on leaves and roots’. The Vietnamese were in the habit of gouging out their captives’ eyes, salting their wounds and burying them alive. A
French missionary
who witnessed the devastation left by the Thais reported that they were little better:
The Siamese method of warfare is to steal everything they can lay hands on; to burn and destroy wherever they pass; to enslave those men that they do not kill, and to carry off the women and children. They show no humanity towards their captives. If they cannot keep up with the march, they are beaten, maltreated or killed. Unmoved by tears and wailing, they slaughter small children in front of their mothers. They have no more scruple in killing a person than a fly, perhaps less, for their religion forbids them to kill animals.
Eventually a compromise was reached between the Thai court and the Vietnamese Emperor at Hue, peace was restored and Phem prospered. He became a notable — ‘Elder Phem’, the villagers called him — and, during the great rebellion against the French in 1885-6, he organised food supplies for loyalist troops, fighting to preserve the prerogatives of the monarchy against the inroads of colonial rule. But one day, Loth told the children, Phem and two friends walked into an ambush in a village on the other side of the river and were killed.
From that time on, the family received the favour of the provincial governor, a staunch royalist named Dekchoa Y, which gave them a place in the patronage network percolating down from the Throne. Loth’s sister, Cheng, obtained a post in the household of King Norodom, and around
the year of Sâr’s birth, her daughter, Meak, was chosen as a royal concubine for the heir apparent, Monivong. The Lady Meak, as she was now known, bore him a son, Prince Kossarak, and after Monivong became king, was appointed Head of the Royal Bedchamber with overall responsibility for all the palace women. With her help, in 1930, Loth’s eldest son, Suong, secured a grace-and-favour appointment as a palace officer. Soon afterwards Meak summoned his sister, Roeung, then sixteen years old, to join her in Phnom Penh, where she, too, became one of Monivong’s favourites, remaining at the King’s side until his death in 1941.
This was not such an unusual story in Cambodia in the early part of the twentieth century. The mother of Sâr’s contemporary Keng Vannsak was another of Monivong’s concubines. The King handed her on to his brother, but she then fell in love with Vannsak’s father and persuaded her royal master, who had a surfeit of women already, to restore her liberty. Monivong had more than thirty wives. King Norodom, who died in 1904, had 360 — as Sihanouk, his grandson and spiritual heir, was forever pointing out to justify his own philandering. Even a lesser figure, like the Lord Governor of Battambang, had more than a hundred consorts and insisted, to the dismay of the Buddhist clergy who visited him, that all the women in his household, from the lowest serving girl to his principal wife, should go about the official mansion nude from the waist up. Polygyny was a sign of virility, guaranteeing the fruitfulness of the realm.
Cambodian life has an earthy, elemental quality. Nature teems and fructifies. The sun beats like an iron hammer, the jungle steams, the land pulsates with the heat and colour of the tropics. In late spring the countryside is blotted out by dense, palpitating clouds of orange butterflies, several miles wide, which float across plains of lotus blossom and bright green paddy-fields. Girls flower into women as soon as they enter their teens, and fade when they reach twenty. Small boys run about naked; girl children stagger under the weight of their brothers, almost as big as themselves. In the days when Sâr and Nhep were young, herds of elephant used to pass by Prek Sbauv, heading for the water-meadows beside the Great Lake. At flood time, the villagers organised hunts on buffalo-back, usingjavelins to spear wild boar. When Loth’s eldest son, Suong, travelled for the first time to Phnom Penh, a hundred miles to the south, the choice was between an eighteen-hour journey in a Chinese merchant’s steam launch or three days in an ox-cart — but only during the dry season. During the rains, the roads disappeared.
The landscape, and the lifestyle, were, and are still, closer to Africa than China. Substitute baobabs for bamboo, and papyrus for lotus, and you could be in Kenya or Tanzania. Dark-skinned Cambodian peasants proudly call themselves ‘black Khmer’. At the country’s eastern border, the subtle,
sinicised world of the Vietnamese scholar-official — sustained by a meritocracy based on Confucian notions of propriety and virtue — butts up against the sensual harshness of Brahminism, against Buddhism and the mind-set of the Indian states.
Cambodia, even more than the other nations of the region that the French named Indo-China, lies on the fault-line between Asia’s two great founding civilisations.