Organizer: Jamie F. Metzl, Harvard Law School
Chair and Discussant: Judy Ledgerwood, Southern Illinois University
This panel will examine the ways in which the Cambodian historical record and the past histories of individuals have been used and manipulated by various regimes to define themselves and justify their actions. These include the Khmer Rouge regime's fanatical attempt to elicit confessions of past misdeeds in the Tuol Sleng torture center in Phnom Penh, the extreme ways of the Khmer Rouge internal security apparatus, and the struggle between the Democratic Kampuchea regime and the Vietnamese-installed People's Republic of Kampuchea to proclaim their own self-serving versions of Cambodian history.
While all history has its mythology, the struggle to define the history of the nation is highlighted in Cambodia where there have been so many drastic changes of course over past decades. The panel, therefore, will look at historical symbols such as Tuol Sleng and the killing fields, and examine how they were used to define the Khmer Rouge regime, the PRK, and the post-election government of Cambodia. It will consider what about these regimes can be learned from looking at their manipulation of the historical record and its symbols.
Inheritors of Genocide: The Struggle to Define the "True" Record of
Mass Death in Cambodia, 1979-80
Jamie F. Metzl, Harvard Law School
Following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, both the deposed Democratic Kampuchea regime and the Vietnamese-installed People's Republic of Kampuchea contended for international acceptance as the sole legitimate government of Cambodia. This struggle took place in the world media and in such places as the United Nations, the Red Cross, and the Non-Aligned Movement. One weapon which each side used to discredit the other was to accuse it of the genocide of the Cambodian people. This paper will examine the contours of this struggle and how it fit into and was influenced by political divisions between the United States and its Western allies, China, and ASEAN on one side and the Vietnamese and Soviet bloc on the other. The shifting of public presentations of genocide in Cambodia by Western governments paralleled a shift in US and Western government policies away from an outright condemnation of the Khmer Rouge and towards a more ambiguous position of supporting the continued representation of the Democratic Kampuchea regime in the UN.
Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
David Chandler, Monash University
Between 1976 and 1979 over 14,000 men and women, allegedly counter-revolutionaries, passed through the Khmer Rouge regime's secret prison in Phnom Penh, operating under the code name S-21. The written "confessions" of 4,000 of these prisoners have survived, and include abject, detailed admissions of guilt by many important cadre as well as less significant figures caught up in the nets of the regime's obsessive paranoia. All of those who confessed, and indeed all 14,000 prisoners, were put to death.
Since so many of the confessions are palpably untrue (e.g. prisoners admit to working simultaneously for the CLA, the KGB and Communist Vietnam), the purposes of the texts seem to be linked to the fantasies of the Khmer Rouge leadership and to their belief, derived from what Carney has called their unexpected victory, that they were simultaneously invulnerable and omniscient on the one hand and surrounded by enemies on the other. The confessions, which resemble the induced memories of "brainwashing" and unscrupulous psychotherapy, were used to resolve this contradiction and to construct an acceptable Khmer Rouge history that demonstrated the triumphal progress of the party's "clairvoyant" leadership as its purges spread more widely into the countryside and more deeply (as well as higher) into the ranks of the Communist Party itself. The paper will examine the confessions in the light of Khmer Rouge historiography and in terms of the texts' genealogy in earlier reigns of terror.
Digging in the Killing Fields: New Evidence About the Internal Security Apparatus
of Democratic Kampuchea
Craig Etcheson, Yale University
In the literature on the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea, there have been two schools of thought regarding the nature of the violence which took so many lives in such a short period of time. One school holds that the primary locus of the violence was local, and that it was largely the result of the spontaneous excesses of a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army. The other school holds that the locus of the violence was central, and that it was largely the result of a carefully planned and centrally controlled security apparatus. A wide range of new evidence uncovered by the Cambodian Genocide Program during 1995 and 1996 has laid this controversy to rest. The violence was centrally directed by the Politbureau of Angkar Leou, the High Organization.
Two classes of evidence are particularly compelling in driving the analysis to this conclusion. The first class of evidence is the result of a satellite mapping survey of several zones of Democratic Kampuchea, in which researchers attempted to create a comprehensive inventory of the prisons, execution centers and mass graves created during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. This evidence suggests that there was a centralized execution system which operated at high efficiency over the entire course of the Democratic Kampuchea regime, resulting in an estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand mass graves in Cambodia. The second class of evidence is a large collection of newly discovered official documents, consisting of the bureaucratic records of the region, zone and central execution centers of Democratic Kampuchea. This evidence confirms that the highest officials of the Communist Party of Kampuchea were in control of the Democratic Kampuchea security apparatus, and that they directed the extermination of a still unknown, but very high percentage of the population of the country.