“I wish for you two boys and two girls,” the elderly man pronounced. He was addressing both myself and my fiancé as he reached out to shake our hands as we were leaving his traditional wooden house. He had told us earlier that he spends his days in this late chapter of his life enjoying his grandchildren and tending his vegetable plot. Now at the door ready to leave I hesitated, not wanting to extend my hand, but then I did so anyway. This grandfather was Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The year was 2002. My fiancé, a cameraman, was working with reporter and author Tom Fawthrop on a documentary about former Khmer Rouge leaders' evasion of justice and I had been invited to come along.
A few months later I began my own research project as a sociocultural anthropologist in a village 300 to 400 kilometers southeast of Nuon Chea's home in Pailin. Here I sometimes found myself speaking to another grandfather in his home, a thatch hut that the grandfather had recently built when he returned to this village, his ancestral home. Like the other grandfather, this man, whom I call Ta Kam, was affable and polite and in this case I had no idea that he was not simply what he appeared to be: a kindly, gracious grandfather. Months later I learned that Ta Kam was blamed by some of his neighbors for the executions of their family members during the Khmer Rouge revolution in the early 1970s. He is certainly not the only individual within his community to have reported on his neighbors, as the villagers remarked that his generation “committed bad deeds” against one another in the atmosphere of distrust and terror that reigned during the Khmer Rouge revolution. But villagers focused on this one man, perhaps because they saw him as a leader at that time or perhaps because he survived. In any case, by focusing on this one man they place the immorality of the acts that occurred within their village during this period on him, perhaps erasing the blemish on the community as a whole. I learned that the villagers had little to do with Ta Kam. They did not speak to him. They told me that he kept to himself and his daughter during his brief, infrequent visits to the village in 2002 and 2003. The rest of the time Ta Kam stayed with his sister in the neighboring commune. The house he was building when I met him later became the home of his daughter.
In a neighboring commune, where his history was less well known, Ta Kam bore a different face within his community. There he was active in the local temple, doing the duties of a Buddhist layman and achieving a degree of respect from the community there as a result.
Since 2002 the situation has changed for these two grandfathers. Nuon Chea was arrested in 2007 and was taken to trial at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He is charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, and “grave breaches of the Geneva Convention of 1949.”Footnote 1 His trial commenced in 2011 and continues today. Nuon Chea, now 87, has expressed remorse for the deaths that occurred under his leadership and announced his condolences to the families of those who suffered.Footnote 2
As for Ta Kam, he has returned to live in his ancestral village, and residents there say that he has been accepted back into the community and that “it is nothing now.” When I saw him in 2010, it was clear that his health had deteriorated over the years, although his mental faculties still seemed quite intact. His only explanation for his return was that it is his home. Now in his early nineties, it can be said that his life has come full circle with his return to his village. His grandson left the neighboring commune to join him and in 2010 was one of the three village development leaders of this village. To the best of my knowledge, Ta Kam has never admitted to any role in the killings that occurred in the village under the Khmer Rouge or that he ever held a leadership role at that time.
The accusations against these two men, one formally, the other informally, were similar in that they were both accused of bearing responsibility for deaths that occurred during the Khmer Rouge revolution and regime. However, that is the only similarity. The levels of responsibility within the regime and the scale of the atrocities they are accused of are vastly different. Their lives in the post-Khmer Rouge era also diverged. After a period of living as a free citizen in Pailin, Nuon Chea was formally accused, arrested, and taken to court, and presently stands trial. Ta Kam, on the other hand, after years of living outside the village and taking up the role of a Buddhist layman in the neighboring commune, has returned to his village. He appears to have redeemed himself to the extent that he is tolerated by those of the generation that remembers his role in the treacherous period of village history, and he is treated as a village elder by those born after the Khmer Rouge and who know little or nothing about his past.
Ta Kam is one of many Khmer Rouge village chiefs and local leaders who continue to live amongst their neighbors today. In 2003, from the accounts I heard, there were many such situations in villages across Cambodia, where the presence of these former persecutors was endured by survivors who chose not to seek revenge despite the pain of the past and instead avoid them and have little to do with them.
In 2010, as I was learning about Ta Kam's surprising reintegration into the village, I visited the publicity office of the ECCC to interview Chief of Public Affairs Sambath Reach. I asked him for his thoughts on the story of Ta Kam. He told me that Ta Kam's situation was similar to many former Khmer Rouge village chiefs and low-level leaders who have since taken up a variety of virtuous roles within their communities, such as serving the Buddhist temples and becoming traditional healers. To illustrate his point, he located a DVD copy of the film Deacon of Death on his bookshelf and gave it to me. Deacon of Death is a 2004 documentary made by Jan van den Berg and Willem van de Put that tells the story of a woman, Sok Chea, coming to confront a local Khmer Rouge village chief, Karoby, about the death of her father during Democratic Kampuchea. At the time the film was made, Karoby enjoyed a certain amount of status within the village community and played an active role in assisting with preparations for Buddhist festivals and other religious events and providing services as a traditional healer. Like Ta Kam, Karoby managed to reintegrate himself into the village community and enjoyed a certain amount of status and respect. Moreover, he too denies his role in the killings that took place, and appears to be intent upon proving himself to be a decent and even virtuous person.
These village leaders contribute to their communities through their roles as traditional healers and Buddhist laymen. In a country whose population is 93 percent Buddhist,Footnote 3 this makes sense. Proactively taking steps to influence karmic destiny is part of every Buddhist's life and is a concern of many Buddhists as they reach their later years and contemplate their next lives. In this way such service can be seen as a means of redemption that may not be fully achieved in this life but has the potential to influence the karmic destiny of their next life after this one is over. Nonetheless, as noted by Lucien Hanks,Footnote 4 the accumulation or loss of merit also has an effect on an individual's position in the existing social order. Hanks observed that people do not occupy “fixed positions within the social order” but, rather, may move “in their fixed setting, like players with their rules and tactics on a football field,” through the accumulation and loss of merit.Footnote 5 In other words, individuals' acts affect their positions not only in their next life but also in the present, within certain limits. Nonetheless, the extent of their potential redemption in the eyes of the community is difficult to ascertain. It would seem that Ta Kam's acceptance back into his community may have been predicated on his virtuous behavior in serving the temple and his humble demeanor enacted through his long walks between communes in blistering heat and his modest dress and disposition. It is possible then that he and other former persecutors have redeemed themselves (at least on some level) in the eyes of their communities. However, as Un suggests in this volume of JAS, Footnote 6 the communities may have just accepted them with the solace that their karmic destiny will be fulfilled and justice will come this way. In either case, there is some form of reconciliation and healing occurring that is derived from within Cambodian culture rather than from the court and international law.
Ta Kam's case suggests one of the means whereby village communities have dealt with the individuals who perpetuated the deaths and cruelties during the Khmer Rouge era. The positioning of individuals like Ta Kam in relation to their communities and society as a whole has significant implications in the moral terrain of “justice” and in the domain of social memory.
Other Pathways to Reconciling the Past
Up until recently, most discussions and policies concerning Cambodia's recovery from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime have focused on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. There are good reasons for this. Up until a few years ago the most senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people, were living freely in Cambodia. Moreover, some, such as Ieng Sary, the former deputy prime minister of foreign affairs for the Khmer Rouge, were even granted a pardon from the late King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996. Many individuals and organizations, both Cambodian and foreign, have contributed to the Tribunal with the hope that it will at last provide some level of justice and even reconciliation to Cambodians who suffered and lost their family members to the Khmer Rouge. Unfortunately the political process in the negotiations between the UN and the Cambodian government often impeded the judicial process, resulting in repeated delays of the Tribunal and reducing the number of defendants likely to be tried.Footnote 7 Moreover, had the Tribunal happened earlier, there is the possibility that Ta Mok and Ieng Sary would have lived long enough to stand trial. Despite these shortcomings, however, most Cambodians express positive views about the Tribunal and see it as making positive steps toward delivering justice, rebuilding trust, and delivering justice to the victims of the Khmer Rouge.Footnote 8 But is the Tribunal the only source of potential reconciliation and healing?
Cultures endure because they manifest a variety of coping strategies in dealing with trauma and rupture. Cambodian culture is no exception. Drawing on the work of Maurice Bloch, Guillou and Vignato suggest that “researchers have to go far beyond the narrow scene of catastrophe and look at what ‘past’, ‘forgetting’ and ‘memory’ mean for the people with whom they do their research.”Footnote 9 In other words, the catastrophe is not an isolated event but is situated within a larger sociocultural matrix of history and ideology. The experience of the Khmer Rouge regime and genocide was not the first catastrophic period for Cambodians. The nineteenth century marked another such time when Cambodia was occupied by Vietnam and suffered a series of invasions by the Thai. Thousands of Cambodians lost their lives, their king was held in captivity, their capitol was destroyed repeatedly, and they were forced into exile from their homes.Footnote 10 How did Cambodia recover from such devastation and what connection might this have to the rupture inflicted by the Khmer Rouge?
In writing about the devastation of the nineteenth century, historian David Chandler makes a relevant observation. Towards the end of that ruinous time, the story of Preah Koh Preah Keo first appeared in writing. This tale, about two brothers, a sacred ox, and a boy, relates to the Thai sacking of Longvek in 1594, and, as Chandler notes, may also be tied to the sacking of Angkor by the Thai in 1431. The significance here is that another story of devastation was being told at a time of extreme hardship suggesting that some type of association was being made between these events.Footnote 11 In the village communities where I worked, stories about the Khmer Rouge period were often interchanged with stories about the nineteenth-century Thai invasions. One informant even made a connection further back to Angkor. These stories would often be triggered by or simply tethered to features of the landscape, such as a tree or a pond. A particular feature of the landscape would elicit a tale that was sometimes mythical, often historical, or both. During my fieldwork I was told many stories about the Thai invasions and the hardships imposed. Such stories usually included some comparison to the Khmer Rouge period.
In either case, it is interesting that the Thai invasions should feature so prominently in people's imaginations in the period just following the Khmer Rouge genocide. These stories appear to provide a template for talking about the Khmer Rouge period and situating it within the collective narrative. This employment of a cultural framework to discuss and attempt to narrate the traumatic rupture that occurred may provide a means to express what is otherwise inexpressible. As Laurence Kirmayer has observed, Holocaust survivors' accounts of their experiences immediately after liberation depicted such a “public catastrophe” and their stories were so “corrosive to the moral order,” that their stories were met with incomprehension or even rejection. It was not until the 1960s, when Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews was published, that a discourse became available through which survivors were able to share their experiences.Footnote 12 Therefore, it was not until the event was framed within a set of narratives establishing the Holocaust as a historical event that survivors began to talk, and have the means to talk, about their experience. Perhaps the stories of Thai invasions and the stories of the fall of Angkor provide means of expressing the experience of the Khmer Rouge. The stories provide a moral template that has already been established within the sociohistorical matrix to narrate the events. These stories of traumatic events in Cambodian history seem to absorb and generate stories of other traumatic events. In some ways this is reminiscent of how stories of the Holocaust are often included within the Passover story of the Jews' slavery and exodus from Egypt.Footnote 13 In both cases we see myth serving to lend direction and an understanding of a traumatic event with the positive outcome of having collectively survived the ordeal as a people and as a culture. “Myth,” as Peter Gow has observed, “solves new problems” by creating analogies with old problems that have already been solved and are therefore historical products.Footnote 14 For the Cambodian villagers I worked with, perhaps connecting to the nineteenth-century Thai invasion may help in situating the Khmer Rouge experience within the larger historical matrix.Footnote 15
Global and Local Frameworks
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal is a product of an international human rights ideology born out of the genocide and wide-scale human rights atrocities of World War II. While the main purpose of the Tribunal is to bring justice to the victims of the Cambodian genocide through the identification and punishment of the perpetrators, it also aims to provide victim support and promote knowledge and understanding of the Khmer Rouge period through educational outreach programs. Given that the Tribunal is trying the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, it is natural that it is the site that most look to for justice, reconciliation, and healing in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime; it is also the site most reported on.
Nonetheless, other pathways do exist. Local-level perpetrators’ reintegration into their communities implies the potential for erasure or forgetting some of the more intimate dimensions of the atrocities at the local level. This process implies a degree of normalization of social relations within communities over time that may enable a measure of healing. Other scholars, such as Un and Tallyn Gray, have recognized that Buddhism provides a local or cultural pathway for Cambodians to see justice enacted through karmic consequences. Judy Ledgerwood's study of Pachum Ben, the “festival of the dead,”Footnote 16 and Anne Guillou's work on the mass graves and the Neak Ta (guardian spirits)Footnote 17 identify other ways in which Cambodians contend with the Khmer Rouge past. There is also the work of Maurice Eisenbruch, who, in partnership with the Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, identified and studied the role of traditional healers and spirit mediums in enabling individuals, their families, and communities to deal with the effects of the trauma of the past and created an intervention program based on these findings.Footnote 18 Given that the roles of ancestral and guardian spirits, traditional healers, and spirit mediums are as pervasive in Cambodian daily life as Buddhism, it is not surprising that these are sites where justice, healing, and reconciliation are played out. Finally there is also the weaving of the rupture into the tapestry of the Cambodian landscape and stories of its past, as described above. Together, these local practices, entities, and institutions are an important part of the discussion of justice and recovery.
Some of these local processes of recovery may appear to be at odds with the techniques and ideology employed by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and its associated programs; however, this may not be entirely the case. Beginning with the local/global dichotomy, the boundaries between the two can be said to be more fluid than solid. Cambodians, like most people in the world, influence and are influenced by a myriad of global processes and connections, whether it be through family relations, interest groups, or economic or political relations. Many of the concepts employed by the Tribunal would be familiar to Cambodians through their connections abroad and their experiences with the human rights and development presence in their country for the last couple of decades. Moreover, it is fair to say that Cambodians were hardly isolated before the Khmer Rouge came and at least those in the cities were already versed in Western ideology. At the same time, what might be seen as local mediums for negotiating the past are not necessarily local. For example, spirit mediums and ancestral spirits are not confined to Cambodia but play a role in Cambodians' lives abroad as well.
Secondly, the local ways I have discussed of contending with the past through the changing roles of perpetrators within their communities and the connecting to earlier traumatic episodes in Cambodian history are not necessarily at odds with the Tribunal. In fact, the Tribunal may even be smoothing the reconciliation at the local level by turning the focus of blame to the high-level leaders, thereby providing an opportunity for lower-level perpetrators to attempt to redeem themselves as much as possible and allow communities to heal. Moreover, the narration and recall of the traumatic past through stories of earlier pasts is not at odds with the personal recollections and narrations in courtroom testimonies or within victim support groups. Finally, the establishment of a historical record through the judicial process and educational programs does not necessarily imply that the stories of the Khmer Rouge will not still be connected to other tragic periods in Cambodia's past; the landscape may still serve as a vessel for those memories.
Nonetheless, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that Cambodian culture has its own means of overcoming catastrophic rupture that are augmented, but not replaced, by the means employed by the Tribunal. Perhaps the biggest testament to this assertion is the flourishing of Cambodians and Cambodian culture despite the devastation inflicted by the Khmer Rouge.
Two Grandfathers, Two Paths
Returning to the two grandfathers, Nuon Chea and Ta Kam, it is interesting to reflect on how they will be remembered by future generations. It is without doubt that Nuon Chea will be recalled as one of the key architects of the treachery and catastrophic horror of the Khmer Rouge regime. As for Ta Kam, however, it looks like the fate of his memory will be quite different. Those who remember his role in the executions that occurred during the Khmer Rouge period say little about what occurred and are more likely to say that people of that generation committed bad deeds against one another without naming names. With his reentry into the village and his neighbors' willingness to accept him back, there is little to keep the memory alive. Moreover, the fact that he has made efforts to live in a meritorious manner through his service at the Buddhist temple, combined with his humble demeanor, may have served to take some of the sting out of his presence in the village.
The two cases then offer two very different forms of healing. One becomes the repository of the blame, whereas for the other the blame seems to dissipate. Focusing on the top leadership and allowing the low-level perpetrators to reenter Cambodian society to the extent that is possible and acceptable to their fellow Cambodians may allow a pathway to healing and reconciliation on a number of levels, especially in combination with other forms of healing found within Cambodian culture. It will likely take generations, but the processes of healing appear to be in place.
