Cambodia turns to the gray areas of its violent past

The black-and-white view of humanity is what's responsible for all the misery that undid the country and still haunts it today

Friday, Dec 14, 2007
By Putsata Reang
Asia Society

The appearance of the first former Khmer Rouge leader in a special hybrid court established in Cambodia to bring that movement's surviving leaders to justice provoked a question on which the tribunal's integrity will depend: should an accused mass murderer be released from prison pending his trial?

Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as "Duch," presided over the deaths of more than 14,000 people at S-21, a former Phnom Penh high school turned into a torture center. He is one of five former senior Khmer Rouge leaders who will be made to answer for their roles during Pol Pot's genocide, in which an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished. Until recently, Duch was the only one imprisoned, after being exposed in 1999.

The court -- with its improbable blend of Cambodian and foreign judges and attorneys as well as laws -- is meant to be a model for judicial reform and independent justice in a country where impunity has long been the rule.

The five red-robed judges who preside over the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia -- the tribunal's official name -- are the final arbiters of Duch's detention, but the question they are now considering belongs as much to the people of Cambodia as it does to the court. Should mass murderers be afforded the same rights as everyone else?

One of my aunts believes has a strong opinion on the matter. Khmer Rouge soldiers beat her father to death, and she remembers being shot at for sport by communist cadres as she and dozens of other peasants scuttled up a mountainside. She now lives one block from S-21.

"Human rights are for humans," she said emphatically when I asked her about Duch's case. "He is a monster."

I once believed that, too. When I first visited Duch's house of horrors in 1990, I was 15 and full of wonder about the country where I was born but had never lived. My family escaped the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, the day they claimed victory. When my mother and I journeyed home to reunite with relatives who had survived the genocide, S-21 (also known as Tuol Sleng) was among our first stops.

By then, the torture facility had been turned into a museum. I remember feeling claustrophobic as I walked down its narrow halls and into classrooms turned into crude cellblocks. The air was stale but heavy with the stench of death in interrogation chambers, barren save for a single bed frame, shackles and a chair. Flecks of dried blood peeled up from the floor.

This was a place where fingernails of countless victims were ripped out, where others were strung upside down and dunked in barrels of water, where many were brutalized with metal prongs and batons. This was a place of utter brokenness. This was Duch's place.

Mostly, I remember the hundreds of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners and victims that covered every inch of the walls -- a ghastly montage of human suffering that haunts me to this day. I couldn't help but think: This was somebody's daughter, somebody's son. This was somebody's mother or sister or brother.

Back then, I thought: What monster could do such things?

Now, that monster was sitting in a courtroom, looking scared and meek as prosecutors catalogued his alleged war crimes. Sitting in the packed auditorium where snatches of Duch's face flash by on a movie screen, I'm struck by what I see: A face that belongs to someone. This alleged perpetrator of unspeakable misdeeds is, like his victims, someone's son, someone's brother, someone's father.

This might have been only a fleeting thought had I not seen Duch's family members, who attended the hearings. Hang Seav Heang, 28, described the defendant as a gentle man, a good father. One of his sisters said he was a caring, protective brother and that she would always love him.

Outside the courtroom and in the community, most of the Khmers I talked to were, like my aunt, quick to categorize Duch as something other than human. Duch must have thought much the same thing about his victims when he ordered them to their deaths. When we start to see each other as less than human, we respond with inhuman acts.

It is this narrow, black-and-white view of humanity that has perpetuated a cycle of violence in Cambodia, where raging mobs beat to death robbery suspects and young mistresses suffer acid attacks by jealous wives. To say that Duch is a monster who does not deserve rights ignores the gray area between good and evil, between man and monster, where anything is possible.

This trial is about that gray area, about that place in us all where morality decays and evil takes root and grows, the way mold prevails given the right conditions. Each of us carries this potential for rot.

There is no dispute that Duch violated the rights of thousands of Khmers. But if the basic premise of these trials is to uphold human rights, then we are obliged to extend that same principle to Duch. What does it say to the country and the world if a court convened to mete out justice flouts the law? Isn't lawlessness the plague we are finally trying to eradicate in Cambodia?

The judges have offered no indication when they will make a decision. And no one would blame them for taking their time to consider their options. This is, after all, the court's first test of fairness before the trials of Duch and four of Pol Pot's other henchmen begin next year.

We all want justice, but that justice should not come at the cost of our humanity.

Putsata Reang is a fellow of the Asia Society

A Reporter Returns Home

From American Journalism Review (AJR),
October/November 2007

Teaching in Cambodia, and learning some tough lessons

By Putsata Reang

Just one month after I helped launch a pioneer project training Khmer journalists in investigative reporting, Cambodia's repressive government cracked down on dissent, arresting at least five human rights activists and journalists. In spite of the risks, I urged the reporters to continue their dangerous but critical work. They lashed back.

"It's easy for you to say," one journalist told me. "You can get on a plane and go back home. We have to stay."

I wanted to say: "But this is my home. I'm Khmer, just like you," until I realized the hollowness of those words. The shameful truth was that if Cambodia's political instability worsened, I would leave again. Only this time, by choice. Thirty-two years before, my family and I fled the Khmer Rouge.

Growing up in Corvallis, Oregon, I listened to my Ma spin stories about Cambodia, tales of climbing coconut trees and riding water buffalo through sun-smeared rice paddies. She said little about the war, only that we were lucky to be alive.

"When you are old enough," she'd say, "go help Cambodia."

I finally did, two years ago. Supported by an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, I was going to spend a year researching Cambodia's intractable problem of land grabbing. At Portland International Airport, my mother dabbed at big watery eyes. "Good luck, gohn ma [mother's child]," she said. "Be careful."

When I moved there in February 2005, Cambodia was volatile. The year before, popular labor rights activist Chea Vichea was gunned down while reading a newspaper. Garment workers and farmers alternately protested in front of the National Assembly. One month after I arrived, military police shot and killed five farmers during a forced eviction. Few Khmer journalists had the skills or resources to get beyond basic facts and dig deeper into such stories.

As my fellowship came to a close and I prepared to head home, Internews, an international media development organization, posted a job advising journalists in Cambodia. I read the description and knew it was made for me. I took a buyout from the San Jose Mercury News and then called my Ma to tell her I wasn't coming home. I was already there.

I thought I was the ideal candidate to push for media development in Cambodia. I had solid professional credentials and was qualified like no other candidate. I'm Khmer. I speak the language and understand the culture. The benefits were clear. The drawbacks were not.

Being able to communicate with journalists during training and one-on-one mentoring sessions meant greater efficiency. Understanding the culture meant there were things they did not need to explain, such as why stories never included ages (it's rude to ask) and few were infused with direct quotes (it's an affront to directly question authority).

I wasn't prepared for the more nuanced challenges that working in media development in my homeland would present — challenges that invariably pitted me against the journalists I was trying to help.

Forging trust and extracting respect from them would be my first obstacle. I was working in a field with few women, in a program where all the participants were male and mostly older than I. No one in Cambodia's male-dominated society wants to answer to a woman, much less a younger one. I had no credibility and a lot to prove. I was also what the journalists called "Khmer por[d]adeh ," or "Cambodian from abroad," a foreigner. A fraud. In America, I never felt truly American. Now in Cambodia, I was told I wasn't really Cambodian.

I soon started to appreciate the distinction. Nariddh, the assistant journalism adviser, and I habitually urged good ethics. Cambodian journalists routinely practice "reporting by envelope," where getting paid to attend press conferences by the people holding them was not the exception but the rule.

One afternoon, a few reporters from our group strolled into our office and joked loudly about a press conference they covered that morning, where journalists jostled afterward as government officials distributed envelopes stuffed with R10,000 (roughly $5).

"Did you take one?" I asked Sem Saroeun, a journalist who earns about $50 monthly.

He paused, then said: "Of course I did. What can I do? My children are hungry."

"How can we write about corruption if we are corrupt?" I asked the other reporters during one training session on objectivity, balance and fairness.

Averted eyes. Silence. Then one weighed in.

"How much do you make on your NGO salary?" Eng Mengleng asked.

My answer mimicked theirs. Averted eyes. Silence. We shared shame, but for different reasons.

That night, I cried. In a country where some journalists make in one month what I might spend on a good Cabernet, and where my international job paid international wages and extras, like housing and health insurance, my condemnation of their bribe-taking felt disingenuous. In Cambodia, depending upon who you were, professional ethics was either a sacrifice or a luxury.

Beyond their lack of writing and reporting experience, the journalists were operating in a country with no freedom of information law, a place where telling the truth meant risking their lives. The end result: stories populated by anonymous sources and rumors that reporters tried to pass off as fact. Ban Chandararith ("Rith") investigated generous tax breaks on farmland for wealthy and politically connected businessmen. He refused to name names.

"It kills credibility," I said.

"I don't want to get killed," Rith replied.

I dropped the matter.

The biggest challenge arrived quickly. Just as the program tottered to its feet, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen began targeting journalists who criticized his border treaty with Vietnam. The string of arrests left our reporters shaken. Some of them — even those who worked for pro-government newspapers — wanted to leave the program, while others threatened to drop out of journalism altogether. A few talked privately about fleeing to Thailand.

Now was not the time to quit, Nariddh and I pleaded, but rather to stay and fight. When the journalists pointed out that I had something they did not — freedom to leave — I felt betrayed, confused, guilty as charged. I had already prepared for my own escape, withdrawing several thousand dollars in cash and wedging it inside my passport. Just in case.

By virtue of escaping from Cambodia in 1975 — and the Khmer Rouge genocide these journalists had survived — I possessed a dark blue passport emblazoned with a bald eagle seal that was my golden ticket to safety.

There were no more arrests that year. The journalists' stories led to major changes, including an overhaul of hiring practices within the Ministry of Education, long overdue pension payments for demobilized soldiers and the firing of the Minister of Labor accused in a human trafficking scandal. The program grew. The guys and I did, too.

Throughout the year, I walked a fine line between nudging them to fight for a free press and being complicit in their self-censorship for safety's sake.

When my contract with Internews ended, I knew that for all the reasons I was right for the job, I was also wrong for it. I declined a promotion, even as the guys were asking me to stay.

It was time for me to go home.

Putsata Reang (Putsata@gmail.com) is a journalist and author of the true crime novel "Deadly Secrets." She is currently at work on a family biography.