Democratic Kampuchea

The Khmer Rouge regime, initially celebrated for its potential end to years of conflict,Footnote ⁸ devastated Cambodia. Their Maoist revolution, aimed at creating a self-sufficient and independent country, included urban evacuation, collectivisation, and the attempted destruction of all state institutions.Footnote ⁹ Following their seizure of power in April 1975, they immediately emptied the cities, sending people into the countryside to work on massive projects designed to bring about an idealised agrarian nation:Footnote ¹⁰ to make way for this they disbanded the old life, attempting to destroy customary forms of family life, religion, education, healthcare and law. As part of their millenarian aims they created a new political time and nation: the year 1975 was declared Year Zero, and in 1976 the country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea.Footnote ¹¹

Nobody knows exactly how many people died in the three years, eight months and twenty days the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, nor how many were executed rather than died from disease or starvation.Footnote ¹² Many authors settle on a figure of around 1.7 million dead, representing between one-quarter and one-third of the population of the time,Footnote ¹³ although numbers vary considerably, with estimates ranging from the most conservative 740,800Footnote ¹⁴ to the most liberal 3.4 million.Footnote ¹⁵ What is certain is that the death toll was huge, and the effects devastating.Footnote ¹⁶ Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people died from disease, starvation, and the executions practised in the prison network across the country. The bodies of those who perished were buried or abandoned: many thousands of mass graves in many hundreds of locations.Footnote ¹⁷ The disposal methods varied: in some locations bodies were disposed of in already existing features such as caves, rivers, and wells.Footnote ¹⁸ Some bodies were buried; others were left scattered across the surface of the fields and forests in which they were killed.Footnote ¹⁹ When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in December 1978 to end the regime, they found a trail of death as they moved through the country.

It took the Vietnamese army only 13 days to overthrow the Khmer Rouge rule.Footnote ²⁰ In its place they installed a new government — the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) — consisting of Khmer defectors, backed by Saigon. The new government quickly began to exploit evidence that could be used to legitimate both the invasion of Cambodia and its rule throughout the 1980s (viewed by some as an illegal occupation).Footnote ²¹ Democratic Kampuchea had not hidden the damage it had wrought — the population was emaciated, starving, and rife with disease;Footnote ²² the dead littered the landscape. The PRK put the physical evidence to work, collecting the dead that lay on the surface, digging up others, and erecting memorials displaying the remains across the country.Footnote ²³ In their own efforts to rebuild their lives, local people, meanwhile, looted the graves searching for valuables. Beyond these initial disturbances, however, the majority of graves have never been excavated, and most of the dead are still in the ground. Apart from a few sites preserved for political use, the graves have been returned to everyday living space, and the dead from the regime no longer disturb the land.

Post-conflict ghosts

The concepts of ghosts and haunting provide useful historical metaphors, particularly for events contemporaneously deemed as negative; as such they are often used in the post-conflict literature as rhetorical devices to explore how contemporary society is influenced by the past.Footnote ²⁴ However, as Heonik Kwon argues in his work on post-war Vietnam, the position of ghosts as valid and vital social beings has been largely ignored, and, until recently, they have remained outside the lens of much social theory.Footnote ²⁵ This is a problematic exclusion in Southeast Asia, where ghosts and other manifestations of the dead are integral to the ongoing construction of social identity. As Kwon shows, the social lives of the dead often mirror the political lives of the living;Footnote ²⁶ as such, the dead can be central to understanding social identity and experience, particularly after periods of extreme violence and disruption of socio-religious practices.

Spirits resulting from violence often appear in the anthropological literature as signs of suffering and/or social marginalisation made material through spirit interactions: possession, haunting, and other, usually malevolent, encounters. Sasanka Perera, for example, argues that following the Janata Vimukti Peramuna-led violent insurrection and state-led counterinsurgency in Sri Lanka (1988–91), possession by wandering spirits became a mode of dealing with the terror caused by enforced disappearances, tortures and killings, enabling people to give symbolic meaning to the events and thus providing a means of coping with fear as well as remembering the past.Footnote ²⁷ Judith Bovensiepen, meanwhile, explains how the landscape of Timor-Leste became more dangerous for people returning to their homes after the military invasions and forced resettlements of the 1970s and 1980s, because an excess of spirits of those killed, but not properly buried, saturated the landscape.Footnote ²⁸ This saturation caused a rise in the number of land spirits and an increase of lulik — a spiritual potency inhabiting the land. Despite those returning re-establishing reciprocal relations with the spiritual realm, the potency of lulik remained high during her fieldwork; a physical and metaphysical reminder of the disjunctures caused by the conflicts.

Although not directly engaging with the dead from mass violence, Andrew Johnson's work in northern Thailand shows how in times of crisis, concern about ghosts and spirits become prevalent as people try to negotiate insecurity and assert control over rapidly changing environments.Footnote ²⁹ Michael Lambek, meanwhile, argues that every time spirits appear, they provide new ways of conceiving and revising narratives of the past, functioning as vehicles for memory rather than being representations of memory.Footnote ³⁰ In Cambodia, however, ghosts are more than metaphorical depictions or performances of memory. They are socially vital beings who interact in the lives of the living in ways that effect social change and whose management is necessary for security.

The dead of Cambodia

Cambodia is home to a plethora of ghosts and spirits, many of which are socially active, and, like the living, are organised into hierarchies of power and belonging.Footnote ³¹ They are vital beings belonging to the accepted realms of existence that Khmer Buddhists can be reborn into, many of which are shared by the human world.Footnote ³² As such, they are subject to the same disjunctures, chaos, and disorder as the living, and as emotional and vital entities, need care and attention to ensure their comfort.Footnote ³³ Many interact with, and make demands on, humans and animals as part of everyday life, and much of the annual ritual cycle is structured around rituals providing conciliation to the dead and various other supernatural entities.Footnote ³⁴ Pchum Benh, for example, the primary ritual of the Khmer Buddhist calendar, is aimed at providing offerings to the dead, particularly preta (hungry ghosts), to placate them and to ensure mutually supportive relationships between the living and the dead.Footnote ³⁵

Death in Cambodia is usually followed by particular rituals that control the dead and help them move on to their next life, while also providing the appropriate social mechanism for reordering the social life of those surviving. While Theravada Buddhism allows four different types of corpse disposal (burial, cremation, abandonment in the forest, and abandonment in water), in Cambodia most people are either buried or cremated, depending on ethnicity and class.Footnote ³⁶ Funerary rituals provide the correct management of the dead, ensuring the corpse is transformed into a relic, and the spirit into a benevolent ancestor rather than a confused (and therefore potentially dangerous) spirit.Footnote ³⁷ The seven days immediately after death are critical — during this period the deceased does not realise that it is dead, and is thus a threat to its home and family. Rituals during this period aim to bind the spirits to the body, to prevent them disturbing the living or returning after cremation or burial. On the seventh day, with the corpse appropriately disposed of, the dead moves on to its next life.Footnote ³⁸

During Democratic Kampuchea such formal rituals were impossible.Footnote ³⁹ This continued after the fall of the regime, with Buddhism still strictly controlled during the PRK.Footnote ⁴⁰ With the exception of Choeung Ek, no state-led rituals were conducted for the dead, and while a few informal, local ceremonies were organised,Footnote ⁴¹ in the majority of locations I visited, none occurred. The lack of ritual was partly due to ongoing conflict, famine, and attempts to rebuild the country;Footnote ⁴² it was also a result of the physical disconnection of the dead from their families under the Khmer Rouge. Repeated relocation led to many families and communities being separated, often deliberately, as the regime attempted to break existing bonds to the old way of life, and create new ties to the regime.Footnote ⁴³ When people returned home after the regime fell, most did not know to whom the corpses they encountered belonged: the mass graves made the dead unrecognisable and muddled their remains. Several people told me they felt they could not initiate rituals for the dead: ‘Normally when we cremate the bones there has to be a family member to represent each family and take the ash to put in an urn to pay respects to,’ an elderly informant told me. ‘However, in this case we don't know which bones belong to who.’ Despite people feeling that they did not have the right, or the means, to perform Buddhist rituals, they still needed to manage the dead and find ways to live with them, particularly those who had suffered a violent death.

Violent death and becoming kmoac

During Democratic Kampuchea, those who were executed or tortured suffered sudden and violent deaths and as such were kmoac tay hoang — corpses of violence who died without ceremony. Those who died of disease and/or starvation often passed away slowly, but they were considered to be kmoac ckae (lit., ‘dead dogs’) — also corpses who died without ceremony. Kmoac tay hoang are at risk of becoming malevolent spirits, such as preay, or ghosts (kmoac) that haunt the living, potentially causing illness, misfortune, and even death. These spirits, according to Ang Chouléan, can be calmed, but are rarely completely placated, and annual ceremonies are required to manage them.Footnote ⁴⁴ My informants were certain that most of those killed under the Khmer Rouge had not become preay, but were initially kmoac.

The word kmoac has an ambiguous meaning, referring to the ghost of a recently deceased person, the corpse of the recently deceased, or other incarnations of the dead that interact with the living.Footnote ⁴⁵ They are powerful and can be dangerous, causing misfortune, ill health, and sometimes death. They often live in the forests or other wild, uninhabited, areas (prei), and can be nervous of the living; yet, people told me that kmoac often crave human company and it is this that causes them to haunt. Kmoac can change form and often do so to trick people into following or conversing with them, as one informant explained:

In Cambodia any death risks the presence of kmoac, and they are common across the country. Erik Davis argues that during the Khmer Rouge there were fewer ghosts than today, because the years of control meant many could not be fed, and therefore died.Footnote ⁴⁶ Like Davis, many informants told me that during the regime they were not afraid of the dead because there were so many. On evacuations out of the cities, people slept amongst corpses and remains, and the sight and smell of the dead became a common aspect of Khmer Rouge life. In my research sites, however, the years immediately following the regime saw a large number of kmoac who disturbed the living and added to the insecurity of the country at the time. Their corpses littered the land, and many people were haunted.Footnote ⁴⁷ As the following stories show, the hauntings at my fieldsites were the result of the kmoac’s own confused emotional state, and although they frightened some people, and made others sick, they were not malevolent. In the absence of formal rituals, the living interacted directly with the dead, providing the means of creating reciprocal relations of support, needed by both to re-establish security after the Khmer Rouge era.

Rebuilding lives: The dead at Koh Sap

Koh Sap is one of a string of islands in the Bassac River that were used as prisons and killing sites during Democratic Kampuchea; the perfect materialisation of the regime's ‘kuk et chonhcheang’: prison without walls. Its sole occupants during the regime were prisoners and their guards. Dara was imprisoned in Koh Sap in 1976 after being captured trying to escape a youth unit.Footnote ⁴⁸ ‘They put me on a boat to Koh Sap, and when I reached there, I knew it was hopeless because I heard that if you got to Koh Sap there was no way back.’ He reported that people were killed on the island every day — some because they did not work hard enough, others because they disobeyed the guards, or did something that was seen as resistant — complaining too much, or eating insects or other small creatures to supplement their rations. An old man was shot at night because he made too much noise. People were killed because they took too long to come out of the river from bathing. ‘If you looked at their faces, you would get hit by an axe,’ he said. A revered monk was brutally beaten until ‘he was screaming like a cow [being slaughtered]’. People were killed where they stood, or taken to the bamboo grove at the end of the island and executed there. Others died of starvation, disease, or exhaustion. People across the river could see the prisoners working, being used instead of cows to plough the land. An elderly woman, who had worked downriver, said they saw bodies floating in the river: though they wanted to retrieve them, they could not leave their workstations, and the bodies were soon washed away.

When Democratic Kampuchea fell, the island slowly reverted to a farming community. Some families who had lived there before the regime returned straight away, but many were initially afraid. When Saley and Samnang arrived in the early 1980s, the land was still covered with rotting cadavers and the time without organised farming had let the wildness encroach. Houses from before the regime had been dismantled and the materials used to build prison facilities. Graves covered one end of the land and piles of dead lay in other areas. Corpses littered the shallow streams running the length of the island. ‘They looked like fermented fish,’ Saley told me; ‘they smelled ma hes’ — a damp, mouldy kind of smell, like a wet towel. Yei Malis described the smell as ‘sticky’ — to get rid of the smell from their skin, people washed their hands with guava or pineapple; the acid from the fruit cut through the smell better than soap.

Needing places to live and farm, people had to clear the dead. Yei Mean burnt the bones she found, and then ‘collected the ashes and threw them in the river’. Yei Malis collected the remains and piled them under a large quinine tree, home to one of the island's neak ta — guardian spirits: ‘It was full of bodies, it was very haunted at the quinine tree,’ she said. Some people, such as Saley, did not uncover the bodies. ‘I put soil on them. When there is flooding, the land sinks, but I was too lazy to dig them up.’

Encounters with the dead were inevitable at this time. ‘When I first came,’ Saley told me, ‘people did not dare to come here. They asked me if I was scared living here. People on the other side [of the river] saw lights flying about — like far.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The island was prei kmoac — the forest of the dead. Even after the Khmer Rouge had left, people from across the river said they saw soldiers marching and heard their shouts echoing through the air.Footnote ⁵⁰ On some nights, at around eight o'clock, the village inhabitants heard kmoac dancing under the mango tree to the sound of beating drums.

In the early years, the ground moved with the dead: rising and cracking as the bodies bloated with decomposition; sinking when the rains came and compressed the land. Bodies often surfaced in the rivers or ponds, or in the ground as people ploughed the land for farming.Footnote ⁵¹ Samnang once pulled a decomposing head out of the water while fishing; he took the eels that were hiding in its mouth for food. After feasting on the flesh of the corpses, the crabs and the fish grew enormous. Samnang described them as covered in algae. Saley said that even the fruit was affected:

The first fruit of the prin treeFootnote ⁵² was ‘full of blood’, Yei Pich reported. When they took the fish or fruit to market, no one would buy them. On the island, however, people were poor and food was scarce. They ate the fruit and the fish. And after a year or two, Samnang said, the dead were not in the food anymore.

People were afraid at this time, and some became sick. Yei Touch had to dismantle and relocate her house because it was built on top of the graves and the family was haunted — sometimes at night the house spun, and the children started sleep-walking.Footnote ⁵³ A feng shui expert came to assess the house:Footnote ⁵⁴ ‘he told me that we would not be able to live safely (sok sru ǝl) because we lived on [top of] others,’ she said.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘All of this land was full of kmoac. I was scared to walk at noon.’Footnote ⁵⁶ After finding a piece of clothing in the paddy where she was transplanting rice, Yei Malis felt kmoac on her body and when she returned to her hut to rest, the kmoac pinned her to the bed, causing unconsciousness for several hours:Footnote ⁵⁷ ‘I saw thousands of hands catching my legs and I couldn't move; I felt like the kmoac were all over me,’ she said.

Despite such difficulties, people accepted the dead as a fact of life. Part of the Khmer Rouge's programme was the reorganisation of much of the population by repeated and forced movement around the country, dismantling families and communities. Like the living, the dead were scared and confused; most of them had been killed far from home and had lost their families; their displacement caused them much anguish. Many people told me the dead were looking for their relatives: worried about their well-being, they roamed the land searching for them. With no monks, and no other ritual experts to take care of the dead, those moving to Koh Sap needed to find their own way of managing the dead, to secure their lives on the island and to care for the dead who, like them, had lost their families, friends, and dependants.

In the early 1980s, as part of the new government's political stabilisation and legitimation, people across Cambodia were paid by local authorities to collect human remains for display in pt ĕəh kmoac (houses of the dead; ghost houses) — wooden huts that housed the dead and at which the annual memorial events were held during the PRK.Footnote ⁵⁸ Srei Mom's father, who had lived on the island before the regime, and returned shortly afterwards, joined many of the other villagers of Koh Sap to collect the remains, piling them into heaps under the quinine tree, and helping to remove the flesh from the bones before leaving them to dry in the sun.

He also joined in the looting of the graves that began when a travelling group of men arrived from Battambang to loot the graves shortly afterwards.Footnote ⁵⁹ Local villagers were hired by the looters to help uncover gold and other valuables. They were allowed to keep other items such as clothing for themselves. When he found a well-dressed corpse, he called his daughter: ‘“Oun, that skirt is still new. You can take it and wear it.” So I took it and wore it to school,’ Srei Mom said. ‘They [the dead] always helped me …. They knew when I didn't have anything to eat … the kmoac felt pity for me and they always looked after me.’ She explained that the exchange was not one-sided, nor was it altruistic: ‘When I took the clothes to wear like that, they also got merit.’ Most of those who received support from the dead brought offerings and dedicated them to the dead. Others visited the pagoda to ask the monks to send them merit. On occasion the dead themselves demanded this in return for support.

One morning Yei Mean came across some gold: ‘I was digging the soil to grow the turmeric. I was tired so I sat down, and as I was sifting the soil I saw teeth — a set of false teeth .… One of the teeth was gold.’ As well as that gold tooth, others in the set were capped in gold. She took a hammer and smashed the teeth to free the gold. A night or two later the kmoac whose teeth they were visited her in a dream and told her of more fortune to be found. The dream was very vivid — to this day Yei Mean can remember clearly what the kmoac looked like: ‘His shirt was tucked inside his trousers. He was wearing a hat, and he was holding a walking stick.’ He was a general, and handsome, she said. Behind came his bodyguard, a little fatter, but with his shirt tucked in as well. The kmoac told Yei Mean that he had been killed during the Khmer Rouge. She thought he was likely to be her flesh and blood (sac-chi ǝm). She remembered a cousin of her mother's who had been rich during the Lon Nol period: ‘I always thought about it and told my mother, “Maybe it's my uncle; maybe it's your bong”.’ In exchange for his tooth the kmoac asked Yei Mean to take some food to the pagoda to pass merit to him. She did this, and for a long time she kept the tooth, only selling it when she had to pay medical bills for her daughter, many years later.

As time went on, and lives started to be rebuilt, the power of the kmoac started to wane, and their corpses to nourish rather than poison. Those living on the island used the bones to make medicine;Footnote ⁶⁰ others took their skulls as amulets to protect their houses,Footnote ⁶¹ children used them as drums, and as people started to grow food again, rather than making them inedible, the dead fertilised the land and enabled the crops to grow.

The haunting and help from the dead was not even. At the same time as the dead helped some people, others were haunted. But over time both began to wane. As the villages were rebuilt and security on the island improved, the help needed by the living lessened. As those engaged in reciprocal relations with the living received merit and were reborn, other, less benevolent spirits, who were not fed by the living, became weak and powerless, and eventually died. The land became free from haunting, and people safe and secure (sok sapbaay). When I asked Yei Touch about it, she told me that the land was now safe — people grew crops on the land where there were dead, and the land had become a village (phuum), and then a hometown (srok).

Rebuilding the country: The dead at Choeung Ek

Some 17 kilometres from the urban sprawl of Cambodia's capital city Phnom Penh, down dusty, pot-holed roads, past newly built garment factories, and empty fields bounded by fences, lies Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. The sound of children from the nearby school flows through the trees and flowers planted in recent years to create a garden of remembrance and encourage contemplation. Dogs and chickens roam around the site, searching for food and attention. And every day, hundreds of people come through the gates to encounter its horrors. I came to Choeung Ek because of its past — the killing site of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, but also because of its present — a highly visited tourist destination and national memorial to the regime.

Choeung Ek was the primary killing site for Tuol Sleng: a prison for high profile prisoners considered a particular threat to the regime, including Khmer Rouge cadre and their families.Footnote ⁶² In the initial months of the regime the killing occurred at the prison, but as increasing numbers of people were processed, a second location became necessary; somewhere outside the city and away from other communes. In 1976, Choeung Ek was transformed from a site housing Chinese officials brought over to advise the regime,Footnote ⁶³ to the main killing site for Tuol Sleng.

The role of Choeung Ek was a heavily guarded secret. Zinc fences were built around the site and although people from the local commune knew it was a Khmer Rouge facility, only those related to the regime knew what went on inside.Footnote ⁶⁴ Every two to three weeks, trucks arrived at the site, driven by a special corps of cadre, many of whom also worked as torturers and executioners.Footnote ⁶⁵ During the day, guards dug graves for the next arrival; once night fell, and the trucks arrived, the killings began. The methods were brutal: serrated palm leaves drawn across throats; shovels smashed over people's heads; children held by their feet and their skulls swung against trees.Footnote ⁶⁶ Music blared out of speakers hung from a tree, disguising the sounds of killing.Footnote ⁶⁷ The number killed each trip varied from a few dozen to over three hundred.Footnote ⁶⁸ Once a pit was filled with bodies the guards covered it with soil and moved on to the next.

The Khmer Rouge abandoned Choeung Ek in late 1978 as the Vietnamese made their way across the country, leaving it to be found by those returning to the villages close by. Ta Kosal, a man in his late eighties when I interviewed him in 2013, was one of the first to arrive back; during the regime he had been sent only a few kilometres away, so his journey back was swift. He soon discovered that the village houses had been dismantled and the materials used to build large halls a hundred or so metres from the site. He, and others returning, shared these halls as they rebuilt their houses. The site itself, however, was untouched. Before the regime it was a Chinese cemetery, and had never itself been a living space.Footnote ⁶⁹ It was only when government employees, under the direction of Mai Lam (the Vietnamese general in charge of transforming Tuol Sleng into a museum),Footnote ⁷⁰ unearthed the first graves that Ta Kosal and others realised what it was:

The smell of the dead affected many. Yei Chann, an elderly woman who lives behind Choeung Ek in a small hut built from scavenged wood and corrugated metal, told me when she arrived everything was wild, and it was overwhelming: ‘My children got sick. Even I got sick. It's only recently become ok; even a few years ago, the smell was still awful.’ A former guard told me cholera had spread.

The threat of the dead extended beyond the physicality: ‘A child died because of the dead,’ Yei Chann told me:

The wheel of the cart rolled over the child, who had fallen from the cart, and was killed as a result. The driver beat his cows to death after the incident, but Yei Chann said it was not their fault — she had seen the ghost that frightened them. Other people in the area were also haunted. A guard at the site woke suddenly one night to the sound of flip-flops, but when he went to check, there was no-one around, and no footprints. Others staying overnight as they travelled back to their hometowns told villagers they were disturbed by noises and crying.

Despite the haunting and the sickness, as the government employees began to unearth the graves, people from the local area came to loot them. Some were luckier than others. Bu Sot searched several graves, but found nothing. Piseth and his family, meanwhile, were able to find small amounts of gold to exchange for food when times got tough — an earring, a necklace, and several small pieces of gold. Initially the family was concerned that the dead would demand their belongings back, so they bought several offerings and dedicated them to those who had given them gold and helped them survive: chicken, fruit, rice and alcohol. The dead never haunted them, and continued helping them by letting them take any valuables they found. Hoping to make a connection between herself and the dead, Da travelled from a nearby village to the site. She touched the bones in case they had some fortune. Although she did not find any gold, the ghosts never haunted her, and her family remained well.

The looting continued for months, but was stopped under government orders in the early 1980s. In 1983 Tep Vong, one of the seven monks inaugurated by the PRK to help re-establish Buddhism in Cambodia,Footnote ⁷¹ brought a delegation of monks and foreign dignitaries from across Asia to Choeung Ek. One of his advisers told me the visit had two purposes — the first was to ‘calm the living people down’, and the second was to conduct a ceremony, during which merit was sent to the dead. The corpses were still stacked around the edges of the graves at this point; it was several months before a pt ĕəh kmoac was built to house them, and in the meantime they remained exposed on the surface, mostly defleshed, and degrading slowly in the humid conditions of Cambodia.Footnote ⁷² A caretaker commented that ‘they looked white like mushrooms’.

In the 1980s, most who visited Choeung Ek were journalists and dignitaries brought by government officials to witness the violence of Democratic Kampuchea. Following the United Nations-backed elections of 1993, Cambodia became increasingly open to foreign tourists, and Choeung Ek saw a steadily increasing number of visitors year by year. Today it arguably functions primarily as a tourist site — in the high season when I was there up to 1,000 foreigners visited per day.Footnote ⁷³ Although ghosts are usually frightened of the living (who emanate a vibrancy the dead cannot stand), Dara, who lives behind Choeung Ek, thought the visitors to the site were good for the dead:

Only three families (those of the guards) live on the site itself, so the building of relationships had less urgency and were less individually based than in Koh Sap, where the living personally needed to negotiate with the dead in order to live alongside them. At Choeung Ek the negotiation was not for living space, but for working space, and to enable the site to be used as a tourist site and state memorial. The visit of Tep Vong was an initial step in consoling the dead en masse to allow this, and following that, most of the dead left Choeung Ek.

Over the years people have criticised the commodification of Choeung Ek, particularly its 30-year lease in 2005 to the Japanese-Khmer company JC Royal & Co., deeming it disrespectful.Footnote ⁷⁴ One employee at the site told me he agrees with these criticisms, but when he reflected on it during our conversations, he said that maybe the dead do not mind, because they never visit people in their dreams anymore, and since the development of the site, the only person to become sick did so because he angered the local neak ta (guardian spirit). The company has been sure to encompass the care for the dead in their management of the site. Since they took over, there have been annual ceremonies at New Year and Pchum Benh. During these ceremonies merit is sent to the dead, but an important part of the care comes from direct interaction from the dead: ‘[My brother] dreamt of spirits asking for sticky rice cakes and samlor kari,’ a guard told me.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘Since then the company and myself have always offered both.’

Most I spoke to thought that the development of the site is permitted by the dead, who allow their graves to be displayed, their remains to be exhibited, and their clothing to be collected, because they want their country to develop, part of which they enable. One employee commented that:

Bong La, who works as a guide at the site, and who regularly interacts with spirits of the dead, considered this to be integral to why the dead at Choeung Ek have been able to move on in their incarnations. By receiving merit from those they help (individually and collectively), they have accumulated karma, and most have been reborn. In a dream a few years ago, several Vietnamese people visited his home in Phnom Penh.Footnote ⁷⁶ They were well dressed, wearing nice shirts, and told him that he should not worry; they are peaceful now. When he tried to talk to them, they disappeared. ‘They have a new life now,’ he told me, as we talked one afternoon. ‘They have gone somewhere good. They were telling me they were well.’

Living with the dead

In discussing the notion of memory as a moral practice, Michael Lambek argues that every time spirits appear, they provide new ways of conceiving and revising narratives of the past; that this performative and narrative function is central to their presence. Their being is dynamic and fluid, because they are ‘vehicles for memory rather than the frozen remnants of memory’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It could be argued that this is the case for the dead of the Khmer Rouge; that stories of the dead provide a culturally acceptable mode of narrating history and suffering, allowing for evolving relationships to the past in the present. However, to see them only as vehicles for narration and evolving understandings is somewhat limiting in Cambodia, where the dead are as constitutive of contemporary social order and stability as the living. As Langford states, in her examination of the ghosts encountered by the Khmer diaspora, the dead in Cambodia are ‘tangible participants in [the] violated socialities of living and dead’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Kmoac are ambiguous beings and this ambiguity arguably adds to people's insecurity with them; as corpses and ghosts they belong to both the worlds of the living and of the dead. With no monks to manage them, and no formal rituals, in the early years after the Khmer Rouge the dead were ‘matter out of place’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Their contravention of the social order was apparent in their haunting and their pollution of the environment. Working with the living enabled them to be transformed to matter in place — no longer polluting, but fertile — taking their rightful role as benevolent ancestorsFootnote ⁸⁰ and partners in the rebuilding of Cambodia.

Those killed by the Khmer Rouge were considered to have died like dogs (kmoac ckae), and to be kmoac tay hoang — sufferers of a violent death, who had died without ceremony. As such their place in the world was confused, and they would not as easily be able to move onto their next life.Footnote ⁸¹ Displaced from their families they became anonymous, wandering dead, full of fear and loneliness. Anne Yvonne Guillou shows how in her fieldsite in Pursat, these dead have become somewhat like neak ta (guardian spirits). Through the circulation of pāramī (a kind of circulating spiritual power), they imbue some kind of power to the mass graves that they inhabit and are ‘touchy’ and ‘ill tempered’, demanding respectful behaviour of those who pass through their space.Footnote ⁸² In order for the dead to accumulate karma to assist in their rebirth, they needed to receive merit; to do this they needed to engage in reciprocal relationships of support with the living. Kwon notes that in Vietnam the liberation of the ghosts from grievous death is a two-way process, in which the ghosts have a responsibility to work towards their freedom by showing their will and engaging in ritual intimacy with the living.Footnote ⁸³ The same can be said for the dead of the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, although their relationships were not made explicit through ritual initially, but through everyday interactions of support.

These everyday interactions were particularly important because of the lack of formal rituals in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, which meant that individual families could not care directly for their own dead.Footnote ⁸⁴ Kwon shows us how performing the correct rituals for the dead in Vietnam and being able to engage in appropriate care transactions, allowed the dead to be brought in from the streets (duong) to the home (nha). In Cambodia the distinction is not between the home and the streets, but between the town or homeland (srok) and the forest (prei): dead who are confused, wandering, and lonely, live in the forests, while those who have been properly integrated into social life belong to the srok.Footnote ⁸⁵ The changing relationships between the dead and the living after the Khmer Rouge allowed the living to bring the dead in from the forest. As one informant told me: ‘If I think about those who died in the forest, they are in the heat, scratching about everywhere …. These dead we collected; it is lucky for them.’

The forest remains a symbol of wildness and chaos in contemporary Cambodia; a metaphor for all that is inexplicable and out of human control.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, as Penny Edwards shows, it is also a site of production and genesis: a site of freedom and potential.Footnote ⁸⁷ The homeland was built out of controlling the forest, and as it became a symbol of terror during Democratic Kampuchea, the re-establishment of control and the creation of a ‘new’ Cambodia after the regime required wresting it back into control again afterwards.

Khmer Rouge propaganda enabled many cadre to dehumanise the living in order to work them to death, starve them of life, and for those who worked as executioners, to murder people and then abandon their bodies.Footnote ⁸⁸ In addition, the Khmer Rouge negated the dead as social beings, exposing the radical devaluation of both living and dead.Footnote ⁸⁹ The dehumanisation continued after Democratic Kampuchea, first in the international community's disinterest in the consequences of the regime, and then in the state's appropriation of the dead in their (re)writing of history. Some may consider the looting of the graves a continuation of this dehumanisation. Zuzanna Dziuban argues that in Jewish Poland, the looting of graves of Holocaust victims was a result of memory politics framing them in such a way that the Jewish dead were not only dehumanised, but rendered completely invisible.Footnote ⁹⁰ Their bodies could be pillaged and grave sites desecrated because they were no longer visible as ever having lived. In Cambodia, however, the dead were vital beings in the negotiation of grave looting; it could only occur if they allowed it.

The looting then, could be viewed not as dehumanisation, but as re-socialisation: by unearthing them, collecting their remains, and storing them together, the living brought the dead ‘in from the forest’, making them visible, and creating a connection between the living and the dead. The dead provided support to the living by allowing their graves and bodies to be plundered without punishing those who did so. By giving offerings to the dead, the living helped send them merit. Those who disrespected the dead became ill, or were visited in their dreams and told how to rectify the situation. Thus enfolded into the lives of the living, the dead were helped with their rebirths. This was not necessarily an easy transaction for either the living or the dead, but one that was necessary for both sides, as one informant explained:

In her book Consoling ghosts, Jean Langford argues that without reciprocal relations, the dead of the Khmer Rouge could never transition to be benevolent ancestors.Footnote ⁹¹ At both Koh Sap and Choeung Ek the dead were able to make this transition via negotiations between the living and the dead, where, in the absence of monks and formal ritual, the living became direct intermediaries with the dead.

Paying attention to the dead in the unstable years after the regime was not only important for those returning home — it was, and remains, an important part of political control. Politicians incorporated the dead from the Khmer Rouge into their campaigns: political events held at mass grave sites include ba ŋ-skoul ceremonies sending merit to the dead, and in their speeches, leading politicians not only reassured the public, but also the dead.Footnote ⁹² The calming of the dead that occurred when Tep Vong led a delegation to Choeung Ek enabled those who remained nameless and wild to be brought back into the appropriate ritual control, thus consoling both the living and the dead. Contemporaneously, the living also made direct relationships with the dead, and received benefits from doing so. The incorporation of the dead also provided spiritual legitimacy to the political rule, an important aspect of re-creating order and stability in the post-conflict era.Footnote ⁹³ The dead at Choeung Ek continue to play a central role in this; it is because they support peace and development that their bones can be displayed and their graves exploited. In Koh Sap, the dead helped the living through individual relationships of material support. This replicated the political positioning of those living there, who, distant from the national and international ambitions of the government, struggled individually to regain stability and security in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.