More than a glancing blowDec 13th 2007
The Economist
THREE decades have passed since the events being investigated, but early this month Cambodia's United Nations-backed war-crimes tribunal made its first decision. It refused to grant bail to the first suspect charged. He is known as Duch and ran the infamous Tuol Sleng torture centre in Phnom Penh during the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule from April 1975 to January 1979. Among those indicted so far, Duch, at just 67, is a juvenile. Khieu Samphan, the Khmers Rouges' former president, is 73 and suffered a stroke last month. Ieng Sary, their foreign minister, is 82. His brother-in-law, Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, died in 1998, a free man.
That the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, as the tribunal is known, is at last functional makes the publication in English of Denise Affonço's harrowing memoir a timely reminder of why its work still matters. One of the worst of 20th-century atrocities demands some accountability.
The half-French, half-Vietnamese “pure product of colonialism”, Mrs Affonço was always the sort of person likely to suffer badly under Pol Pot's millenarian madness. She did not take advantage of her cushy job at the French embassy to flee the country as the Khmers Rouges advanced, blaming her “daft” husband, Seng, a communist who greeted the glowering new arrivals in Phonm Penh with bottles of Chinese beer, and believed that their orders to evacuate the capital the next day were well-meaning.
He was soon executed. It was more than three years before his wife learned of his fate—when she and other emaciated, desperate women were told that the futile earthworks on which they were toiling would be called “Widows' Dyke”. By then she had also lost her daughter and almost all the rest of her family.
She survived, she recalls with the obsessive recollecting that so often haunts famine victims, on water plants, toads, raw termites, cockroaches, rats and grasshoppers. The Khmers Rouges are notorious for a wide range of atrocities and absurdities, such as the gruesome torture at Tuol Sleng the banning of spectacles (why should anybody need to read?). But their vilest crime was to create famine in a fertile land. Mrs Affonço believed they wanted “to see us all die, one after the other; of exhaustion, hunger and sickness”.
The unanswered question, of course, is “Why?” From Stalinism to the Taliban, totalitarian lunacy is the twisted offspring of naive idealism, and the Khmer Rouge had its roots in Mao's Cultural Revolution in China.
There is a certain symmetry in this book's appearance now. “To the End of Hell” started life as testimony for the show trials in absentia of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in 1979 after Vietnamese invaders had toppled their regime. These origins can be traced not just in the sober and moving retelling of a nightmare survived, but also in the portrayal of the Vietnamese as entirely beneficent liberators. The book, therefore, glosses over one reason it has taken so long for the surviving monsters to be brought to trial: that some of those now governing Cambodia, including the demagogic prime minister, Hun Sen, are themselves “reformed” Khmer Rouge cadres.
That the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, as the tribunal is known, is at last functional makes the publication in English of Denise Affonço's harrowing memoir a timely reminder of why its work still matters. One of the worst of 20th-century atrocities demands some accountability.
The half-French, half-Vietnamese “pure product of colonialism”, Mrs Affonço was always the sort of person likely to suffer badly under Pol Pot's millenarian madness. She did not take advantage of her cushy job at the French embassy to flee the country as the Khmers Rouges advanced, blaming her “daft” husband, Seng, a communist who greeted the glowering new arrivals in Phonm Penh with bottles of Chinese beer, and believed that their orders to evacuate the capital the next day were well-meaning.
He was soon executed. It was more than three years before his wife learned of his fate—when she and other emaciated, desperate women were told that the futile earthworks on which they were toiling would be called “Widows' Dyke”. By then she had also lost her daughter and almost all the rest of her family.
She survived, she recalls with the obsessive recollecting that so often haunts famine victims, on water plants, toads, raw termites, cockroaches, rats and grasshoppers. The Khmers Rouges are notorious for a wide range of atrocities and absurdities, such as the gruesome torture at Tuol Sleng the banning of spectacles (why should anybody need to read?). But their vilest crime was to create famine in a fertile land. Mrs Affonço believed they wanted “to see us all die, one after the other; of exhaustion, hunger and sickness”.
The unanswered question, of course, is “Why?” From Stalinism to the Taliban, totalitarian lunacy is the twisted offspring of naive idealism, and the Khmer Rouge had its roots in Mao's Cultural Revolution in China.
There is a certain symmetry in this book's appearance now. “To the End of Hell” started life as testimony for the show trials in absentia of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in 1979 after Vietnamese invaders had toppled their regime. These origins can be traced not just in the sober and moving retelling of a nightmare survived, but also in the portrayal of the Vietnamese as entirely beneficent liberators. The book, therefore, glosses over one reason it has taken so long for the surviving monsters to be brought to trial: that some of those now governing Cambodia, including the demagogic prime minister, Hun Sen, are themselves “reformed” Khmer Rouge cadres.
1 comment:
Sounds like a good book to read. Thanks.
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