Brendan Brady (Southeast Asia)
Khaleej Times
Peter Klashorst says it was just another regular day of heat, hawkers and honking in Cambodia’s capital when his walking paintings caused a stir on the street.
Portraits more than six and a half feet high and nearly four feet wide floated by – the large canvases cloaking the men carrying them – leaving pedestrians befuddled and even distressed.
The Dutch artist thinks some people recognised the iconic faces he had rendered: Those of prisoners tortured in the Khmer Rouge’s infamous S-21 prison. Memories of this death machine and its victims remain among the most indelible images of Cambodia’s nightmare revolution in the late 1970s, in which an estimated 1.7 million people perished.
Klashorst himself was anxious to gain some distance from the paintings. Looking at the portraits one night in his Phnom Penh apartment, he said, he found the eyes of the victims had “taken on a life of their own.”
The exodus was Klashorst’s attempt to expunge the faces from his sleep. In the process, it appears that he introduced them back into the psyches of the unsuspecting denizens of Street No. 130, where people were chewing sugar cane or handing back change one minute, only to be caught by the stare of a tortured soul the next. By Klashorst’s measure, the effect his portraits of Khmer Rouge victims created on the street should have been a sign of his project’s success. Klashorst’s work tends to elicit a strong response. He’s been charged with indecency in Senegal and Gambia, and in Kenya, where he was charged with witchcraft, he narrowly evaded punishment by hiding in a forest.
Now, in Cambodia, the 54-year-old Klashorst has taken on a more intensely somber project, guided by the black-and-white photographs that the authorities at S-21 took of newly arrived prisoners.
These mug shots have been displayed on the grounds of the former prison since the 1980s, when it reopened as a museum, and they also appeared as court documents last year when a specially designed United Nations-backed war crimes court in Phnom Penh sentenced the commandant of S-21, Kaing Guek Eav, to 30 years in prison. Better known as Comrade Duch, he was the first high official of the Khmer Rouge to be held to account. Four other senior leaders await trial this year.
Klashorst told me he wanted to add depth to images that had until now been used only for forensic purposes. His technique was to combine an electric palette of spray paint over faces brush-painted in black. Klashorst said he was drawn to paint those prisoners who displayed defiance even on the eve of their annihilation. The beauty of the faces is perhaps the most prominent feature in Klashorst’s depictions.
The portraits were designed for an exhibit inside S-21 itself. But there was a last-minute hold-up when officials questioned whether the works’ unorthodox style qualified as art. Their objections were overcome and the paintings are currently on display in a building of S-21 that once housed shackled prisoners.
Klashorst said he saw no reason to apologise for his approach. Those imprisoned, he said, may have had aspirations as eclectic and colourful as the style in which he painted them. Pointing to a portrait of a young woman, he said: “Maybe she wanted to be a movie star or something like that.”
Cambodia’s war crimes court has focused on holding senior Khmer Rouge officials accountable for their crimes – an important endeavour in a country where rule of law is precarious and impunity rampant.
But with so many lives lost, a survivor of S-21 named Chum Mey told me, the stories of the victims are worth telling, even if imperfectly.
Sitting on a shaded bench on the grounds of the museum, Chum Mey told me how he managed to be among a handful of S-21’s estimated 14,000 prisoners to survive. Though he faced the same sadistic torture that other inmates suffered, his usefulness as a skilled car mechanic prevented his execution.
He says that the ghosts of his fellow prisoners still roam through his mind, and that it’s good for others to look at the portraits and share the experience, if only for a moment.
Brendan Brady is a journalist based in Cambodia
6 comments:
Koh Tral Island must not be forgotten
By Ms. Rattana Keo
Why do Koh Tral Island, known in Vietnam as Phu Quoc, a sea and land area covering proximately over 30,000 km2 [Note: the actual land size of Koh Tral itself is 574 square kilometres (222 sq miles)] have been lost to Vietnam by whose treaty? Why don’t Cambodia government be transparent and explain to Cambodia army at front line and the whole nation about this? Why don't they include this into education system? Why?
Cambodian armies are fighting at front line for 4.6 km2 on the Thai border and what's about over 30,000km2 of Cambodia to Vietnam. Nobody dare to talk about it! Why? Cambodian armies you are decide the fate of your nation, Cambodian army as well as Cambodian people must rethink about this again and again. Is it fair?
Koh Tral Island, the sea and land area of over 30,000 square kilometres have been lost to Vietnam by the 1979 to 1985 treaties. The Cambodian army at front line as well as all Cambodian people must rethink again about these issues. Are Cambodian army fighting to protect the Cambodia Nation or protecting a very small group that own big lands, big properties or only protecting a small group but disguising as protecting the Khmer nation?
The Cambodian army at front lines suffer under rain, wind, bullets, bombs, lack of foods, lack of nutrition and their families have no health care assistance, no securities after they died but a very small group eat well, sleep well, sleep in first class hotel with air conditioning system with message from young girls, have first class medical care from oversea medical treatments, they are billionaires, millionaires who sell out the country to be rich and make the Cambodian people suffer every day.
Who signed the treaty 1979-1985 that resulted in the loss over 30,000 km2 of Cambodia??? Why they are not being transparent and brave enough to inform all Cambodians and Cambodian army at front line about these issues? Why don't they include Koh Tral (Koh Tral size is bigger than the whole Phom Phen and bigger than Singapore [Note: Singapore's present land size is 704 km2 (271.8 sq mi)]) with heap of great natural resources, in the Cambodian education system?
Look at Hun Sen's families, relatives and friends- they are billionaires, millionaires. Where did they get the money from when we all just got out of war with empty hands [in 1979]? Hun Sen always say in his speeches that Cambodia had just risen up from the ashes of war, just got up from Year Zero with empty hands and how come they are billionaires, millionaires but 90% of innocent Cambodian people are so poor and struggling with their livelihood every day?
Koh Tral was a Cambodian island, and technically and legally, remained a Cambodian island until today.
Smart Khmer girl Ms. Rattana Keo,
Second, the mandate of the ECCC has been much politicized and is limited to trying the atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge period of April 1975 to January 1979.
In his interview with the Phnom Penh Post, Noam Chomsky, emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that “the leading US political establishment like Henry Kissinger, a member of the late president Richard Nixon’s administration…should also be held accountable for creating the conditions that paved the way for the rise of the [Khmer Rouge]”.
While acknowledging the mass atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime, we should never forget the level of atrocities committed during the US secretive bombing of Cambodia from 1968-1973. A declassified telephone discussion between Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig, Nixon's deputy assistant for national security affairs, recorded that Nixon had ordered a “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [to use] anything that flys [sic] on anything that moves”.
The map of US bombing targets released by Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program shows that more than half of the country was affected by the indiscriminate bombings. Professor Ben Kierman, director of the program, puts the casualties figure from the bombing at 150,000 deaths, while Edward Herman, a professor of Wharton School, and Noam Chomsky put the toll at 600,000 using figures provided by a Finnish Commission of Inquiry.
Based on this, we can never naively claim that US bombing led to the mass executions by the Khmer Rouge or refuted the regime's mass atrocities. But, to certain extent, the blanket bombing, which directly led to the destruction of livestock and agricultural land, could have definitely played a role in the mass starvation.
From new data released during the Clinton administration, Taylor Owen, a doctoral student at Oxford University, and Professor Kierman noted that 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia.
To put the figure into perspective, just over 2 million tons of bombs were dropped by the allies during all of World War II. The bombs dropped in Cambodia represented about 184 Hiroshima atomic bombs combined, making Cambodia the most bombed nation in the world. Based on the new data, Professor Kierman also stressed that the casualties might be much higher than his earlier predicted 150,000.
That is a very powerful image.
917 am
Forget about the island. It is history. It is now Vietnam's. You can have your children's children claimed it, but it is insurmountable.
Again, the island is no longer belonging to Cambodia--this is the fact.
Please take care of what you already have, and stop worrying about something that you don't have control over it.
10:04PM! you go to sleep boy! let other do their job!
10:04 PM is purely truely CPP and Vietnam who try very hard to brain wash all Cambodian young generation to confuse about their true identities.
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