Meeting "monsters"

Saturday, May 02, 2009
By Sim Chi Yin
The Straits Times (Singapore)

In Phnom Penh

Sim Chi Yin describes what it was like to meet the murderers from the Khmer Rouge regime.

I GUESS it was silly to imagine I was going to meet monsters.

Like all journalists writing about the Khmer Rouge - some veterans for a good two to three decades now - I was in search of the reasons for the bloody insanity that convulsed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.

On April 17, 34 years ago, the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and unleashed a "pure" Communist revolution that over a short three years, eight months and 20 days claimed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, overwork, disease or starvation.

Decades on, it’s still difficult to fully understand how this horror happened.

For the past month, the regime’s chief jailer Duch has been offering some clues - in the first trial by the United Nations-assisted Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The self-portrait he has sketched could well describe most members of the regime: devout revolutionaries blinded by a complete faith in the Angka ("Organisation").

But that merely excuses the man in the killing machine.

The tribunal seeks to lay down the personal culpability of each of the five senior regime leaders it now has in custody.

Ultimately, it was men (and women) like Duch and his underlings at his notorious S-21 prison who pulled out prisoners’ fingernails, fed them faeces, slit their throats or drained their bodies of blood and left them to die.

Yet, there was a strange disconnect watching Duch, a former maths teacher from Kampong Thom in central Cambodia, sit in his neat, collared shirt in a modern courtroom describing the monstrous medieval forms of torture.

Just as it was when I sought out the reputedly brutal former Khmer Rouge district chief Im Chaem in the movement’s one-time jungle holdout in Cambodia’s remote northwest and was a bit surprised to find a grinning – and not unlikeable – grandmotherly figure.

And when an avuncular, smiling man in a sarong slowly walked up from behind his cows at a village house, the translator had to shake me out of my puzzlement by telling me "That’s him".

It was the former S-21 top guard Him Huy who was described by ex-comrades as a "seasoned killer" who murdered "hundreds" in a book I had read. Over the next almost four hours, he answered every question calmly and in a somewhat practised manner, and admitted killing "five" people. While I had hardly thought I would get the full truth from any of these ex-cadres with lots to hide, he was of a rather more agreeable disposition than I had expected.

I suppose it’s a bit like how we picture murderers as mean and scar-faced.

But in the case of the Khmer Rouge, the disjuncture is perhaps all the more sinister, given the adamant denial of responsibility by former cadres and leaders – despite the long paper trail left by the regime itself and the reams of evidence that have been collected since its fall.

It may well be that atrocities like those committed by the Khmer Rouge will always feel almost beyond human understanding. Like those by the Nazis or in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, perhaps.

This, though, strikes closer to home. The Khmer Rouge terror unfolded in our own backyard, where men wear sarongs in their homes built on stilts and place names start with "kampong".

For Cambodians, the hope is that the tribunal and its trials over the next couple of years will finally help the regime’s victims and the younger post-Khmer Rouge generation of Cambodians come to grips with the whys and hows of the tragedy that has haunted their country for the past 30 years.

Many observers say the long-awaited tribunal – which has been repeatedly tripped up by allegations of corruption and political interference – needs to quickly deliver justice and even bring more former leaders to book. The country will only then at long last be able to move on, they say.

Others look at mushrooming of office blocks in Phnom Penh and the hardwon, steady 9.5 per cent average GDP growth Cambodia has chalked up over the past decade, and give their diagnosis: the country needs no more healing.

All that makes me think of China, where I’ve lived for almost two years. Even as Cambodia goes through the uncomfortable process of confronting its dark past, this country has not been able to talk about - or indeed allow much research into – its own deadly Cold War era political experiments, the Great Leap Forward (which claimed some 20 to 34 million lives) and the Cultural Revolution (which killed hundreds of thousands more) .

Old wounds and skeletons in the closet may not seem much of an impediment to the present, if China’s (up till recently) double-digit economic growth were the only indicator.

Over time, victims and memories do die out. But the ghosts of the past may still - eventually - need to be put to rest.