Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
... Im Falle Kambodschas dürfte auch klar sein, dass die Sprache auf jenen so genannten Vietnamkrieg verweist, des- sen Ausmaß der Zerstörung Kambodschas bei wei- tem die Vorstellungen noch der kritischsten KritikerInnen übertroffen hat 11 14 . Die logisch fol- gende Suche nach den Volksschädlingen, die in ge- meiner Sabotage die Setzlinge am Stängel abbre- chen, der Drang, sie zu "entlarven" und zu "liqui- dieren", wurde jungen Khmer-Rouge-Kadern in ih- ren Fortbildungs-und "Kritik und Selbstkritik- Seminaren" regelrecht eingetrichtert -wie die Erinnerungen ehemaliger Kader belegt: "Peng [Kommandant der Wärter in Tuol Sleng 15 "Amtszeiten" der Khmer Rouge erklären will, muss sich mit der Herausbildung ihrer Kriegsökonomie und Gegen-Staatlichkeit zu Anfang des Jahrzehnts auseinandersetzen. ...
Porovnáním významu slovesa vykořisťovat v 19. a 20. století odhalíme jeho dramatickou proměnu: z pojmu neutrálního se stává pojem silně záporný a objevuje se v okolí nových slov jako kapitalista, měšťák, proletář. Tento průnik Marxova idiolektu do češtiny (a do jiných jazyků) s sebou nese několik otázek: proč vnímá Marx tyto pojmy tak vyhraněně? Z jaké pozice, když odmítá morálku jako buržoazní přežitek, odsuzuje vykořisťování? Jeho eschatologicko-dějinný rámec umožňuje čistě negativní polaritu slovesa vykořisťovat a také, bohužel, zakládá jeho autogenocidní potenciál. When comparing the meaning of the verb to exploit between the nineteenth and twentieth century we discover a dramatic transformation: from a neutral term it becomes a purely negative one and collocates with new words such as capitalist, bourgeoisie, proletarian. This penetration of the idiolect of Marx into Czech (as well as other languages) raises several questions: why does Marx use these words in such a categorical way? From what position, having rejected morality as a bourgeois prejudice, does he condemn exploitation? We find that it is his apocalyptic historical frame which enables the purely negative polarity of the verb to exploit as well as its autogenocidal potential.
Academic Abstract
The present article discusses victimization, perpetration, and denial in mass atrocities, using four recent case studies from Southeast Asia. The four cases include Indonesia (in which hundreds of thousands died in anti-Communist violence), Cambodia (in which the Khmer Rouge killed more than one million civilians), East Timor (in which more than one hundred thousand civilians died during the Indonesian occupation), and Myanmar (in which the state/army is accused of genocide toward the Rohingyas). Our aim is to bring a psychological lens to these histories, with a focus on three processes relevant to genocide. We examine, first, how the victims were targeted; second, how the perpetrators were mobilized; and third, the denial, justification, meaning-making, and commemoration of the atrocities. We propose a novel theoretical model, TOPASC: A Theory of the Psychology of Atrocities in Societal Contexts, highlighting the psychology of atrocities as involving factors across the macro, meso, and micro contexts.
Public Abstract
We introduce a new model, “TOPASC: A Theory of the Psychology of Atrocities in Societal Contexts,” to explain why people justify mass killings and why certain group members are consistently targeted. In our model, we explore how mass atrocities against specific groups are influenced by psychological dynamics in intergroup situations which, in turn, are shaped by socio-historical contexts and individual psychologies. To illustrate these ideas, we analyze four cases of mass atrocities in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Cambodia, East Timor, and Myanmar. These cases highlight how different social groups, characterized by diverse ideologies, ethnicities, genders, or religions, exhibit varying vulnerabilities as perpetrators or victims based on their social and power status. Mass atrocities are not sudden occurrences but rather result from a series of complex processes and events.
Across the world, non-state actors are documenting international crimes and creating archives for accountability purposes. In this article, we consider how archives and their records are ‘pressed into’ legal service. At a time of wider archive creations, we suggest the archives pertaining to the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) provide insights as a compelling ‘post-accountability’ case of the continuum of archival processes. By examining four Khmer Rouge archives, we demonstrate how records are activated in legal processes across different spacetimes, and how the records themselves ‘(im)press upon’ on the legal process. In these processes, different actors seek to control the narrative of the past through archival holdings. We find that entrepreneurial justice, especially in the crucible of a legal process, can create fierce competition between actors over the economic and social capital inherent in record-keeping that is ultimately detrimental to understanding and pluralising the past.
This study investigates differences in torture-related witness statements during the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. It follows a three-phased sequential mixed methods design to identify disparities between testimonies of former detainees and interrogators and to examine how different methods complement each other for a comprehensive perspective on witness accounts. This includes training a natural language processing (NLP) model, sentiment analysis (SA), and qualitative content analysis (QCA). The qualitative and NLP-based analyses showed apparent differences between witness groups; a significant difference in sentiment values could not be detected. This study presents the first mixed methods approach based on court transcripts in genocide research. Its digital approach contributes to mixed methods research (MMR) by showing how NLP and data transformation can contribute to integration.
This article reviews the social scientific literature on the causes of and prevention of torture, analyzes its successes and failures, and proposes a way forward. Many researchers have adopted a rational-actor, principal-agent framework, which fails to fully account for the multiple and often irrational motives of actors who work within complex bureaucracies. Researchers have also tended to follow the lead of practitioners, critiquing their approaches at prevention but not providing their own evidence-based recommendations. Future research should examine the role of irrational motives, multiple actors, and complex bureaucracies in causing torture to happen, at the level of individuals, governmental institutions, and nation-states. The lessons from this research can help advocates better convince individual actors that torture is unethical and ineffective, better direct interventions into the structure of complex bureaucracies, and better direct international advocacy, providing other solutions besides “naming and shaming” campaigns.
International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. This book examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others. In doing so, it identifies various, seemingly banal ways through which international crimes may be committed and demonstrates how the criminality of such forms of violence and abuse tends to be obfuscated. This book suggests that the failure to address these 'invisible atrocities' represents a major flaw in the current international criminal justice system, one that produces a host of problematic repercussions and undermines the legal legitimacy of international criminal law itself.
This book analyzes the individual and collective experience of and response to trauma from a wide range of perspectives including basic neuroscience, clinical science, and cultural anthropology. Each perspective presents critical and creative challenges to the other. The first section reviews the effects of early life stress on the development of neural systems and vulnerability to persistent effects of trauma. The second section of the book reviews a wide range of clinical approaches to the treatment of the effects of trauma. The final section of the book presents cultural analyses of personal, social, and political responses to massive trauma and genocidal events in a variety of societies. This work goes well beyond the neurobiological models of conditioned fear and clinical syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder to examine how massive traumatic events affect the whole fabric of a society, calling forth collective responses of resilience and moral transformation.
Ethics are fundamentally important to all forms of archaeological theory and practice and are embedded within many professional codes of conduct. The ethics of archaeological engagement with conflicts around the world have also been subject to scrutiny and debate. While archaeology and archaeological heritage are increasingly viewed as significant elements of post-conflict work, with much to contribute to rebuilding stable and secure societies, there has been limited acknowledgement and debate of post-conflict ethical issues and challenges for archaeologists. This paper is intended to stimulate discussion around major ethical issues, the problems and possible ways forward for post-conflict archaeology and archaeological heritage.
This paper examines the role of human remains in genocide memorials and museums to evoke and narrate individual experiences of genocide. Understanding that the display of human remains is contested, I suggest that their presence in memorials and museums can play a valuable, but hitherto neglected, role in the development of individualized and evidentiary narratives of genocide. Such narratives, developed through explicit information regarding the provenance of the remains and the forensic analysis conducted, can deepen the engagement with and understanding of the victims of genocide by museum visitors. Based on the Forensics Exhibition in Tuol Sleng, Cambodia, I argue that explicitly displaying and explicating the remains develops a powerful evidentiary narrative complementing those developed in more familiar exhibitions. In so doing, I expand on debates regarding the liminal position of human remains as person and object, arguing that the display of such remains in a forensic and public context supports engagement with the remains as individuals. In so doing, the paper provides an opportunity to consider the management of the dead and human remains in the aftermath of mass violence and genocide, attempting to marry the emotional and social needs of the survivors with the desire for “evidence” articulated in the legal, historical, and pedagogical realms.
Individuals can assume—and be assigned—multiple roles throughout a conflict: perpetrators can be victims, and vice versa; heroes can be reassessed as complicit and compromised. However, accepting this more accurate representation of the narrativized identities of violence presents a conundrum for accountability and justice mechanisms premised on clear roles. This book considers these complex, sometimes overlapping roles, as people respond to mass violence in various contexts, from international tribunals to NGO-based social movements. Bringing the literature on perpetration in conversation with the more recent field of victim studies, it suggests a new, more effective, and reflexive approach to engagement in post-conflict contexts. Long-term positive peace requires understanding the narrative dynamics within and between groups, demonstrating that the blurring of victim-perpetrator boundaries, and acknowledging their overlapping roles, is a crucial part of peacebuilding processes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Since gaining its independence from France in 1953, Cambodia has endured nearly 30 years of conflict, followed by a precarious road towards recovery and socioeconomic development. Cambodia represents a complex case where historic and modern-day foreign interventionism coupled with geopolitical conditions contributed to the outbreak of a civil war, leading to the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), bringing about mass killings and resulting in a ten-year foreign occupation. Cambodia’s modern-day legal and political systems continue to be impacted by the brutal legacy of its past. From the 1990s onwards, the involvement of the United Nations, the dispensation of foreign aid and the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid court to try atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge era, have had a positive effect on strengthening the rule of law and (re)building the legal and judicial system in the country. At the same time, these events have inadvertently contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the ruling elite, which, in turn, has weakened the democratisation process and stalled the advancement of the rule of law in Cambodia.KeywordsCambodiaCambodian lawExtraordinary Chambers in the Courts of CambodiaRule of lawKhmer RougeTransitional justice
Genocide films have long contributed to public criminology’s exploration into ethics, responsibility and witnessing after atrocity. Whereas post-Holocaust theorisations of testimony have focused on victim testimony (and its limits), a recent wave of documentary films are instead centering on the perpetrators of atrocity. These are raising the question of how to engage with that shared by a person who experienced an atrocity not as its victim but as its perpetrator. This article examines this question through a close reading of Rithy Panh’s documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing machine (2003), a film that ‘compare[s] eye-witness accounts’ of a handful of men who all experienced notorious Khmer Rouge security centre S-21 either as its prisoners or its staff. I suggest that the confrontations and the bodily gestures by the former staff in S21 constitute forms of testimony, something which has implications for the understanding of both testimony and responsibility, as well as for the positionality of the spectator. The film, I suggest, provides a way to listen to the experiences of the perpetrators of the atrocity, without diminishing the suffering they caused.
This article examines how the legacies and experiences of the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) are expressed by contemporary dancers in Cambodia. It stems from the recognition that such works do not always resort to particular performative formats for their power and effect—specifically those that rely upon testimonial forms that promote the desire for showing, documenting, witnessing and healing. This is not to deny those dynamics in these works, nor the importance of them for artistic expression, but it is to consider how creative praxis can potentially open up additional, and culturally specific, responses to a genocidal era. In particular, the article draws upon ideas of remaining and performing remains to argue that the multiple temporalities of history are leading some artists to express experiences of the regime through forms of performance that articulate hope for the future.
Much has been written about Cambodia's strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power since 1985. Yet, the history of Hun Sen's early rise to a position of power in the Vietnam-initiated Cambodian revolution after June 1977 remains murky. Relying on Vietnamese and Cambodian archival documents, memoirs and interviews with former veterans of Unit 125 as well as Hun Sen's speeches and personal recollection of his historic journey to Vietnam on 20 June 1977, we make a two-fold argument. First, Hanoi's decision to establish an anti-Pol Pot Cambodian revolution in southern Vietnam to take over Cambodia—after toppling Democratic Kampuchea—was part of Hanoi's strategic plan to handle a double challenge: (1) to avoid being branded as an invader and (2) to establish a capable and friendly regime in Cambodia after the war. This provided an opportunity for a young Khmer Rouge defector, Hun Sen, to change his fortune by quickly earning the Vietnamese military leadership's trust and confidence based on his competence to organize and command the first army unit of the new Cambodian revolution, i.e. Unit 125. Second, as lucky as he was to flee across the heavily militarized border into Vietnam unharmed, Hun Sen's early rise to power is attributed to his survivalist instinct combined with shrewd strategic thinking.
This article examines the phenomenon of Cambodian intellectual curiosity about China through the social experiences of Phouk Chhay, a prominent leftist activist-critic and Pol Pot's one-time secretary. Amid Phnom Penh's urban radical culture, Phouk transformed from rural student to Communist guerrilla. He associated with Communists, formed pro-China student associations, and through his networks, went on trips that left lasting impressions. This study draws from issues of the Cambodian-Chinese newspaper Mianhua ribao (Sino-Khmer Daily) and several forced confessions to tell a story of becoming that examines community and network in charting the course of ‘China-curiosity’ as intertwined with Phouk's life trajectory.
In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard ( Night and Fog ) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog . In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal , Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.
Nuestro trabajo se enmarca en una investigación en torno a los debates sociológicos acerca del genocidio, encontrándonos en esta etapa en el estudio sobre los perpetradores.
Actor polémico en las investigaciones sobre la temática, las primeras aproximaciones, al calor de los Juicios de Nuremberg entre 1945 y 1946, tendieron a asociar y a exponer a los perpetradores a partir de explicaciones que los ubicaron bajo parámetros de anormalidad y de sadismo, atribuyéndoles al mismo tiempo características demoníacas. En la década de 1960 se produjo un giro sustancial a partir del desarrollo del juicio a Adolph Eichmann, responsable de la Solución final nazi, como también en el campo de la psicología experimental. De este modo, y a pesar de los debates y controversias que generaron en su momento, la obra pionera de Hannah Arendt (2005) así como los experimentos llevados adelante por Stanley Milgram (1969) permitieron un cambio sustancial en el análisis de los perpetradores, siendo uno de sus aportes fundamentales la comprensión del carácter “normal” de estos.
Relegada en las décadas sucesivas, en los últimos años ha habido un creciente interés en el estudio de esta figura, en parte debido a la reiteración de casos de genocidios y otros tipos de violencia en masa, y se han hecho diversas investigaciones tanto en el campo de la psicología como en el de la sociología.
En el desarrollo de nuestra investigación, hemos pensando la noción de marcos sociales del mal para comprender cómo la gente común puede convertirse en genocida. En esa dirección, este artículo tiene dos objetivos: por un lado, nos proponemos explorar y presentar algunas de las diversas perspectivas con las que se ha analizado esta figura; por el otro, al partir de la posibilidad de analizar al genocidio como una acción social, nos aventuramos a reparar en los posibles aportes que puede hacer la teoría de Alfred Schutz al análisis de esta cuestión. Si bien el sociólogo de origen austríaco no reflexionó sobre la temática, creemos que sus escritos pueden aportar a la comprensión sociológica del genocidio.
Within the study and practice of transitional justice, the roles played by the arts in addressing past human rights violations have become increasingly well accepted. This article examines the role of the arts in Cambodia’s transitional justice process, from the initial coupling of attempts to revive the arts with the pursuit of human rights in the early 1980s to the reparations orders provided by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). It identifies five main contributions the arts may make to transitional justice processes—evidence, complementary justice, outreach, activism, and critique—and demonstrates not only that various art forms have assumed each of these roles in Cambodia but also that this case extends the place of the arts in transitional justice. In particular, by highlighting the role played by local activists in seeking to revive the arts in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge period, this article reveals the significance of arts initiatives, instigated in the absence of a formal justice process, for formal processes once they eventually emerge. In doing so, it argues that without the arts initiatives and activism that preceded it, the formal inclusion of the arts in the ECCC process would not have been possible.
Between 1975 and 1979 upwards of two million men, women, and children died in the Cambodia genocide. Decades after the cessation of direct violence, the question of reconciliation in Cambodia remains fraught, in part because of competing claims over the meaning of reconciliation; and also because of the ‘authorship’ of Cambodia’s past. Coincident with the contestation over the meaning and memory, there has been an effort to promote the genocide as an investment strategy, that is, to cultivate the growing number of ‘dark tourists’ wanting to visit sites associated with the genocide. Simply put, to not forget, in this context, is to profit. In this chapter, I consider both the positive and negative aspects of the marketing and memorialization of the Cambodian genocide from the standpoint of urban regeneration. The genocide was largely rural in practice, as urban areas were depopulated, with men, women, and children forced onto agricultural cooperatives. Sites of remembrance, however, are largely urban-based. The promotion of dark tourism in Cambodia, ironically, potentially facilitates urban regeneration to the neglect of rural areas. This has profound implications, both for the authorship and interpretation of the genocide and for the survivors.
Between 1975 and 1979 upwards of two million men, women, and children died from exposure, exhaustion, disease, starvation, and murder under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Pervasive to the widespread forms of structural and physical violence was a complex security apparatus. In this paper, my direct concern lies not in the legalities of surveillance and control but instead with the violence that emanates from the material practices of bureaucratic surveillance and the politics of anonymity. Drawing on the organizational structure and activities of the CPK I critically interrogate the dialectics of anonymity that preconfigured the Cambodian genocide. More precisely, I call attention to the dialectics of self- and state-anonymity, of the violent contradictions of men, women, and children who wanted to remain unknown yet became known and a governmental structure that drew power from its being simultaneously known but unknown. In so doing, I draw on several fields of study, including insights from the literature on surveillance and space; the scholarly study of bureaucracies; and studies on the geopolitics of anonymity. In so doing I demonstrate the salience of a political economic perspective for the study of bureaucratic state surveillance.
On the 17th April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, colloquially known as the Khmer Rouge, marched into Phnom Penh and took control of Cambodia. During their rule of three years, eight months, and twenty days, an estimated 1.7 million people died. Their remains were buried or abandoned across the country. Since the deposal of the regime in January 1979, the human remains of those who died have been central to memorialisation and political rendering of the Khmer Rouge regime. This chapter offers a case study of the treatment of these remains, outlining the Khmer social, political, and religious frameworks affecting their treatment. By doing so it offers a consideration of ethics and human rights related to the location, identification, and treatment of human remains from the Khmer Rouge regime in contemporary Cambodia.
After a genocide, leaders compete to fill the postwar power vacuum and establish their preferred story of the past. Memorialisation, including through building memorials, provides a cornerstone of political power. The dominant public narrative determines the plotline; it labels victims and perpetrators, interprets history, assigns meaning to suffering, and sets the post-atrocity political agenda. Therefore, ownership of the past, in terms of the public account, is deeply contested. Although many factors affect the emergence of a dominant atrocity narrative, this article highlights the role of international interactions with genocide memorials, particularly how Western visitors, funders, and consultants influence the government's narrative. Western consumption of memorials often reinforces aspects of dark tourism that dehumanise victims and discourage adequate context for the uninformed visitor. Funding and consultation provided by Western states and organisations – while offering distinct benefits – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative, which reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience. As shown in the cases of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, Western involvement in public memory projects often strengthens the power of government narratives, which control the present by controlling the past.
The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature - edited by Crystal Parikh July 2019
In Post-Gewalt-Kambodscha ist Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum zusammen mit den „killing fields“ Choeung Ek zu einem der wichtigsten Gedenkorte geworden. Dieser Ort ist zentral für den dominanten Diskurs über die Bedeutung vergangener Gewalt während der Herrschaft der Roten Khmer. Das in der Gedenkstätte vorgestellte Narrativ dämonisiert einerseits die Roten Khmer als die Gruppe, die für die exzessive Grausamkeit der späten 1970er Jahre verantwortlich ist. Gleichzeitig konstruiert es eine Opferschaft aller Menschen, die unter dem Regime gelebt haben, auch ehemaliger Kader der Roten Khmer. Diese Konkurrenz verschiedener Narrative wird durch eine Ellipse ermöglicht, bei welcher verschwiegen wird, dass ein Großteil der hier gefolterten und dann getöteten Menschen selbst Kader der Roten Khmer waren, die Säuberungen zum Opfer gefallen sind. Dieses Schweigen manifestiert sich in einer Ellipse im Audio-Guide, der auf Leiden und Schmerz in den Mittelpunkt stellt, sowie im Mangel an weiterführenden Informationen in der Dauerausstellung. Während temporäre Ausstellungen sich auch mit den einzelnen Tätern beschäftigen, wird hier ein Opferschicksal konstruiert. Auf dieser Art und Weise wird die Gedenkstätte genutzt, um ein breiteres Narrativ zu erzählen, welches die Regierung in ihrer Erinnerungspolitik stützt.
This paper demonstrates how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be utilized to study the effects of spatial phenomena. Since experimental designs such as Randomized Controlled Trials are generally not feasible for spatial problems, researchers need to rely on quasi-experimental approaches using observational data. We provide a regression-based framework of the key procedures for GIS-based empirical research design using georeferenced point data for both spatial events of interest and subjects exposed to the events. We illustrate its utility and implementation through a case study on the impacts of the Cambodian genocide under the Pol Pot regime on post-conflict education.
The Khmer Rouge archives that are now held by the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh are not the same archives as the ones that were built up during the Khmer Rouge regime. The largest archive, the archive of the Tuol Sleng incarceration centre, comprises records that were found in several places and brought together in one archive. In the upheaval of the first months following the breakdown of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, many records were lost, stolen, misappropriated or destroyed. During the 1980s, the remaining records were kept in poor conditions and remained uncatalogued. Some records known to have been in the archive in 1979 later disappeared, and some records were later added to the archive. By retracing the history of the Tuol Sleng Archive and looking through a Records Continuum lens at the archival processes that were applied when the archive was appropriated by the successor government and reconstructed into an archive that supported their political aims, this paper uncovers some problems that have affected the way the records were managed, which have serious implications for the reuse of the records as instruments of evidence, accountability and memory. The author argues that the work that was done on the archive by foreign organisations amounted to a neo-colonial exploitation of the archive. She concludes that there is a clear need to rethink the way the records are accessed and used and she advocates for an archival system based on Cambodian values and ethics that takes into account the rights of the subjects of the records and of their communities.
This article is an account of the trial of Duch, the Khmer Rouge prison chief who commanded S-21 where up to 14,000 men, women and children were incarcerated, interrogated, tortured and killed. The Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia, a combined UN and Cambodian Government tribunal, conducted the trial. It is argued that despite many criticisms of the trial—no financial reparations for victims, an inadequate sentence, and delays between the detention of Duch and the trial itself—the tribunal convicting Duch achieved some historical successes including the fact that this was the first time a Khmer Rouge official was held accountable by an international court. The impact within Cambodia itself of this trial and the ones that follow it remains to be seen.
Victim participation and elaborate outreach programs are becoming increasingly important features of international and hybrid criminal courts. The aspiration is that these programs will increase the local relevance of these courts' work, enhance the sustainability of justice processes after international actors leave, and empower victims en passant. In the last decade, considerable attention and resources have been dedicated to the development of state-of-the-art outreach and participation programs, resulting in exciting new engagement models that are then, on average, evaluated in legal and technical terms. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the more long-term and indirect effects of exposure to certain – unidimensional and hierarchically organized – narratives about justice. In a first step to systematically analyze this question, this article maps the discursive priorities and structure of one of the tribunals (Cambodia) where victim participation and outreach played a central role. The article uses innovative large-n qualitative computational text analysis methods and raises critical questions about (a) the disconnect between prosecutorial prioritization strategies and popular priorities for the justice process, (b) the success of outreach programs in bringing a locally relevant message, and (c) the extent to which outreach and victim participation succeeded in bridging the gap between the work of the ECCC and the realities of people on the ground.
The people of Cambodia were subjected to widespread forced migration and labor, disease, starvation, torture, murder, and indeed, genocide over a period of four years during the control of the country by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. While the country awaits some form of justice from the hybrid tribunal hearing cases against a few of the perpetrators of these crimes, it has undertaken to memorialize the dead in visible monuments in order that the people remember and never allow it to happen again.
This paper outlines the few forensic investigations which have been undertaken on the remains of the deceased from this period in Cambodia's history. The current status of the legal proceedings and the current death investigation system in Cambodia are also presented. There is a wealth of objective forensic information that can be gathered from analyzing the remains that have been disturbed and placed in monuments (stupas), and also in the undisturbed graves across the country. This information cannot only assist in any legal proceedings, but can aide in training medicolegal experts in Cambodia for the future good of the country and its rule of law.
The lives of kings, poets, authors, criminals and celebrities are a perpetual fascination in the media and popular culture, and for decades anthropologists and other scientists have participated in 'post-mortem dissections' of the lives of historical figures. In this field of biohistory, researchers have identified and analyzed these figures' bodies using technologies such as DNA fingerprinting, biochemical assays, and skeletal biology. This book brings together biohistorical case studies for the first time, and considers the role of the anthropologist in the writing of historical narratives surrounding the deceased. Contributors theorize biohistory with respect to the sociology of the body, examining the ethical implications of biohistorical work and the diversity of social theoretical perspectives that researchers' work may relate to. The volume defines scales of biohistorical engagement, providing readers with a critical sense of scale and the different paths to 'historical notoriety' that can emerge with respect to human remains.
Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. By Alexander Laban Hinton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. 360 pp. ISBN: 9780822362739 (paper, also available in cloth and as e-book). - Volume 77 Issue 2 - Thierry Cruvellier
In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge embarked on a radical campaign to remake Cambodia, one that, in under four years, claimed the lives of approximately 2 million people. We take a critical genocide studies perspective to examine this mass death, arguing that a key dynamic driving the violence was an “impassability.” If the revolutionary society was “to come,” to borrow Derrida's phrase, the aspiration contained the seeds of its own undoing: the detritus – from the physical garbage of the old regime to its corrupt traditions to the contaminating incorrigibles – needed to constitute the imagined pure state to which it was opposed. First, we discuss how the genocide unfolded, focusing on a postwar campaign to “clean up” war refuse. Second, we examine how this effort to eliminate detritus persisted, albeit in changing form, throughout the Khmer Rouge period. Finally, we analyze the role of Khmer Rouge prisons in constituting enemies as “garbage.”
Cambodia is a low-income country in south-east Asia. It covers an area of 181 035 km ² and has a population of 14.5 million, of whom 42% are less than 15 years old. Life expectancy is 56.8 years and 36% of the population live on less than US$0.50 per day. Cambodia experienced a brutal civil war and genocide in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge regime, during which approximately 1.7 million Cambodians were killed (Chandler, 1999) and the social and medical infrastructure was almost completely destroyed. No mental health services existed throughout the conflict and subsequent Vietnamese occupation, despite the incalculable impact of the Khmer Rouge regime on Cambodians' mental health. The current political situation is more stable, although there remain concerns about human rights abuses (Khan, 2005).
As a harrowing sub-discipline of English and Comparative Literature, Trauma Studies is in need of geographical expansion beyond its moorings in European genocides of the 20th century. In this article, the authors chart the institutional and cinematic appropriation of atrocity images in relation to the Khmer Rouge’s auto-genocide from 1975–1979 in Cambodia. They analyse the cultural and scholarly value of these images in conjunction with genocide studies to reveal principles often overlooked, taken for granted, or pushed to the periphery in photography studies and film studies. Through grim appropriations of archival or news footage to more experimental approaches in documentary, such as the use of dioramas, the authors examine the commercial and artistic articulations of trauma, reconciliation and testimony in two case studies: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Photographs from S-21: 1975–1979 (1997) and Pithy Panh’s documentary The Missing Picture (2013). The authors first focus on the relatively obscure scholarship devoted to contextualizing images from international genocides outside the Euro-American canon for genocide study in order to build their critical formulations; they go on to explore whether these atrocity-themed still and moving images are capable of defying aspects of commodification and sensationalism to instead convey positive notions of commemoration and memory. Finally, their contribution to this debate regarding the merit of appropriating atrocity imagery is viewed from two perspectives: ‘commodified witnessing’ (a negative descriptor for the MoMA exhibition) and ‘commemorative witnessing’ (a positive term for the Cambodian film).
This chapter reviews recent research examining community reconciliation in Cambodia wherein many communities’ victims and perpetrators still live side by side. After almost four years of a devastating Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 when one quarter of the population perished, followed by decades of civil war, Cambodian people suffered immensely. Based upon 135 interviews, the author concludes that Cambodian society is still not reconciled, rather reaching states of surface or moderate coexistence in several case studies. The story of an accused perpetrator and his victims involved in a dialogue project, as well as other choice quotes are used to illustrate the ways in which Cambodians have managed to live together in spite of their difficult pasts. In addition, the author also examines the effects on reconciliation, of the ongoing trials for senior leaders of the KR (the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia or ECCC).
How do people come to participate in violent display? By ‘violent display’, I mean a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, or take in. Violent displays occur in diverse contexts and involve a range of actors: state and non-state, men and women, adults and children. The puzzle is why they occur at all given the risks and costs. Socialization helps to resolve this puzzle by showing how actors who have consciously adopted or internalized group norms might take part, despite the risks. Socialization is more limited in explaining how and why actors who are not bound by group norms also manage to put violence on display. To account for these other pathways, I propose a theory of ‘casting’. Casting is the process by which actors take on roles and roles take on actors. Roles enable actors to do things they would not normally do. They give the display its form, content, and meaning. Paying attention to this process reveals how violent displays come into being and how the most eager actors as well as unwitting and unwilling participants come to take part in these grisly shows. To explore variation in the casting process, I investigate violent displays that occurred in two different contexts: the Bosnian war and Jim Crow Maryland. Data come from interviews, trial testimonies, and primary sources.
How do people become torturers? And how do we stop that transformation? This article addresses these questions by calling on academics and practitioners to consider caring for – expressing sympathy, understanding, and working with – the figure of the “not-quite-yet” torturer. We begin by noting the globality of torture across space and regime type, and suggest that this globality indicates how torture is – very frequently – not the result of any decision or order. This is followed by a discussion of the “consciousness” of the torturer vis-à-vis (1) their paradoxical emotional scarring by their own actions, and (2) their frequent descriptions of having, indeed, never themselves “intended” to torture someone. Drawing on recent developments in the theory of consciousness, we then argue that this non-purposeful enaction of torture can be understood in terms of certain somatic markers that lead, in particular material-situational settings, to people slipping towards violence. Drawing on the theory of the emergence of violence put forward by Jonathan Luke Austin, we then sketch out more fully the process of becoming a torturer in terms of the situational and material dynamics that encourage these slippages, as well as a global circulatory system of violent knowledges through various sources that become activated in particular settings. We thus suggest that becoming a torturer is more a process of transition than of decision, before noting that this distinction is often lost in the cultural cycle of torture that emerges once torture has begun. Finally, we move to outlining the implications of this non-purposeful understanding of torture by arguing for a new preventive strategy based on the principles of ergonomics and modifying the training regimes of the most common professions from which torturers emerge (the military, the police, etc.) in order to make it harder to slip towards violence. We suggest, ultimately, that this strategy of prevention requires placing ourselves in the uncomfortable position of working to care for both the becoming-torturer and the torturers themselves, in order to help them both preserve their own humanity.
La imagen perdida (L’image manquante / The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh, 2013) constituye una indagación, a la vez intimista e histórica, acerca de las posibilidades, y por tanto también los límites, de cualquier imagen para capturar acontecimientos extremos de la historia y de la experiencia humana del dolor, en este caso ante el teatro del genocidio camboyano perpetrado por los Jemeres Rojos (1975-1979). En realidad, las imágenes que se utilizan en ámbitos documentales y ficcionales para representar el genocidio son de muy diversa condición. En primer lugar, este artículo expone las modalidades de dichas imágenes en función de su relación con los hechos y el tipo de mirada que las funda (imágenes de perpetradores, de liberadores, testimoniales, post facto…) para adentrarse más tarde en el estudio de otras formas carentes de soporte físico (imágenes espectrales, traumáticas o interiores). Una vez considerada su migración en el tiempo y el tejido icónico que entre todas conforman, el artículo estudia cómo actúan estos distintos tipos de imagen en el film y cómo, además de imágenes socializadas, Rithy Panh da forma a imágenes memorísticas incorpóreas.Palabras clave: imagen y atrocidades, genocidio camboyano, Rithy Panh, cine documental.Abstract: L’image manquante / The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013) might be considered an investigation, both intimate and historical, on the possibilities and limits for any image to represent atrocities and the experience of atrocities. The theatre of this reflection is the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979). As a matter of fact, the range of images commonly used to embody the extermination perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge are extremely varied. First, this article analyzes their modality in relation to the facts they are supposed to convey, in particular, the kind of gaze they put forward so as to distinguish among perpetrators images, liberators images, testimonial images, images post facto. Then, it takes into consideration other images lacking physical support, such as spectral images, traumatic images and inner images. Once these cases have been studied in their interaction as well as in their temporal migration, this article closely examines how they intervened in the film and the way Rithy Panh gives shape to these incorporeal memorial images.Keywords: image and atrocities, Cambodian genocide, Rithy Panh, documentary film.
The ‘Cambodian model’ of the ECCC—a domestic court with international participation and assistance—emerged through years of tough negotiations between the Cambodian government and the UN, after the massive crimes had been ignored by the international community for 20 years. This contested history provided the backdrop to the work of the Court and to the judicial and non-judicial challenges it has faced, giving alternate prisms through which to assess its achievements and failings.
During the Cambodian Genocide (1975–79), about 12,272 to 20,000 people were jailed in the infamous Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison. Only a handful survived. This study focuses on how former S21 perpetrators relate today to their role in the genocide. Through a vast network of fear and torture, the Khmer Rouge instituted a program of “thought reform” in order to accomplish total obedience. Based on court testimonies, archival material, and semi-structured interviews with surviving S-21 guards and interrogators, this study shows how the former S-21 personnel manifest a lingering obedience orientation toward authority, limited reflection about the past, and little empathy toward their victims. The study demonstrates the long-lasting implications of the mindset that was established by the Khmer Rouge. More needs to be done to face the past and to “remove the guards from their prisons” in Cambodia.
From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia, under the leadership of Pol Pot and other leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea,1 was forcibly returned to an agrarian, Marxist-Leninist state in which education, money, religion, and class divisions were violently dismantled. During this period—which was preceded by civil war and tense, violent conflict with Vietnam and the United States—an estimated 2 million members of the Cambodian population perished.
The geographical and historical analysis of mass violence, such as genocide, has been limited by incomplete data sets. Accordingly, geographers and other social scientists have in recent years attempted to synthesize disparate sources of information in order to provide more robust analyses of the patterns and trends of mass violence. In this article we explore the limitations and opportunities of a unique data set associated with the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979). Specifically, we detail the development of a database using information from a security-center (S-21) associated with the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979). Our intent is to highlight both the challenges and benefits of data analysis in the context of genocide, thus contributing both to the epistemological issues associated with the rigorous analysis of inchoate data sources and also to our concrete knowledge of atrocities associated with Cambodia.
The concept of humanity takes up a prominent place in the discourse on international (criminal) law. It remains, however, unclear what exactly is meant by an invocation of humanity. In this article, I aim to contribute to an elucidation of this concept. For this purpose, I will first analyse how the concept of crimes against humanity and the related notions of dehumanization and rehumanization are employed in the case of Duch, the chairman of the infamous Cambodian S-21 prison which functioned under the Khmer Rouge. Second, I will put these findings in a philosophical context. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt, I will devise a conceptual framework to analyse crimes against humanity, dehumanization and rehumanization in order to tease out what is at issue in the concept of humanity in international (criminal) law.
This chapter describes and critiques existing theories of the causes of torture and political violence and theories of human rights advocacy. It first defines torture and provides an overview of its history; it then examines existing literature on its causes. It concludes with a discussion of the literature on the nature of human rights debate, both how advocates make charges of human rights abuses and how governments defend themselves.
All that remains of Keat Sophal is a photograph (Figure 1.1). We know little about her death, and even less about her life. Documentary evidence indicates that she was arrested on 13 April 1977. She was detained at Tuol Sleng, the infamous ‘security center’ code-named ‘S-21’, for 99 days until the day of her ‘termination’ on 22 July 1977. Her remains have never been identified; it is not known if anyone remembers her in life.
Traveling to sites that relate to disaster, tragedy and death has become an established form of tourism. The aim of this chapter is to explain the conflicted role travel journalism can play in promoting this so-called dark tourism. The question is how travel journalists — who tend to focus on more positive, light-hearted stories — produce and negotiate the boundaries, motivations and ethics of this type of macabre tourism. As a case study, this chapter investigates the ways in which US-based travel journalists have participated in the public discourses that surround Tuol Sleng, a former Cambodian primary school that became a secret prison during the Khmer Rouge era and now exists as museum. Cambodia sits on the cusp of modernity, as tourists are lured to the country by the promises of exotic beauty but also by the darkness of a violent recent history, fueling a booming tourism industry that has led to real economic gains for the country (Chheang, 2009). By examining travel journalism articles +that document visits to and histories of the site, this chapter posits that travel journalism can operate as a realm of discursive practice that helps make sense of complex realities by offering, beyond tourism’s broader commercial concerns, a mode for engaging with dark sites that preserves empathy.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.