Dropping Angkor (III): The hijack

It's almost allegorical. A full month after the pictures and the words, come the thoughts.

I'd ended the previous post with the words:

Yes, they are a very pleasant pippole, gentle, smiling, bowing, courteous. Hindu and Buddhist monuments co-exist, and have done so for over a thousand years. Rulers of different faiths did not pull down their predecessors' temples, at worst they defaced them -- turning Buddhas into lingams and vice versa. Yet it's stunning to think that less than thirty years ago, some of these very same Cambodians killed off over one in five of their countrymen. Thousands of them are crippled to this day, and millions of landmines remain strewn over their fields and forests. The country is one of the poorest in the world. We talk about India as a land of contrasts, but this contrast, between the cruelty of the country's present and recent past, and the patina provided by the serenity of its heritage, could not have been starker for me. Whence the beauty, whence the horror? My mind is enmeshed in this contradiction, and I'll try and post my thoughts about it in a few days.

It's been a month and no, I have not been able to resolve this contradiction. But I've thought a lot about it since I wrote that, and I've read a lot of stuff as well, including a couple of very informative books that I bought in Siem Reap. And in the face of multiple recent posts encountered on the topic of happiness (1, 2, 3), I really felt like I needed to talk about what I have learned.

The first book I read about Cambodia was the thinner of the two that I had bought. It's called "Daughter of the Killing Fields". It is an autobiographical account of the terror of life under the Khmer Rouge, written by someone who was four when the regime took over in 1975. One can read the book on three different levels -- as a historical document, for what it reveals about the author, and simply for the narrative and the presentation, i.e., as a book in itself.

The book is probably weakest when considered along the third dimension. While it is an intensely moving and deeply searing narrative, it reads like a draft. There are repetitions, redundancies, and the language is often self-conscious. This is a little unfortunate since the story is so incredibly powerful. Theary Seng, the author, had her father killed by the Khmer Rouge soon after they came to power -- ostensibly for the crime of being a teacher. She, along with her mother and brothers, was imprisoned soon afterwards, and her mother too was taken away one night while the children slept by her side. Somehow the siblings survived, and fled the country in 1980 after the regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the book, the privations described are scarcely credible -- the family traversed the country mostly on foot, food was scarce, freedoms of all sorts non-existent, the country had been driven back to "year zero" and, of course, people were being killed everywhere. The fields were full of shallow graves that victims were made to dig before being bludgeoned on the back of the head with an axe. As one reads the book, the strength and desperation in the author's character flood through. It takes a special person to survive the killings of one in five of her compatriots, and the scars are still raw -- even after thirty years, even though she was too young to comprehend or analyze what was happening.

I know most will not have the time to read the book but do spare half an hour if you can and watch Theary Seng on BBC's HardTalk. Step out of your skin and look at the pain in the eyes of a truly remarkable person.

The third level at which one may read the book is as a historical document. I found it very useful as an introduction to this horrible piece of history that passed me by during the course of my lifetime. As I read the book, I couldn't believe that I had been stuffing my face happily in Bangkok only a few months after Thai soldiers had fired on scores of semi-starved Cambodian civilians at Dang Rek mountain, forcing them down through a minefield where the only safe path lay over fresh corpses since they had detonated any live mines directly underneath. But then, what else could I have been doing? This I realized after reading the second book: Washington Post journalist Elizabeth Becker's detailed history "When The War Was Over".

I gleaned two lessons from this very informative book. One, it signalled to me that what the world did to Cambodia in the 1970s and 80s -- a calamity born of the unhappy union of realpolitik with sheer neglect -- may well be what happened in Rwanda in the last decade, and in Darfur today. Does anyone really know what is going on there? Cambodia suffered bitterly as an aftermath of the Vietnam war -- caught in the crossfire of America's cussedness, China's ambition, and Vietnam's stupidity. No one knew what was going on there, everyone had their own version of events that they preferred to believe, and no one really cared anyway. Meanwhile, people died, so what. Life is but a breath, as Theary Seng's book keeps repeating.

The second lesson was, I thought, even more scary. What happened in Cambodia can happen anywhere. The Khmer Rouge wasn't a lunatic fringe bunch of homicidal maniacs to begin with. They started off as a group of young students in Paris, reading Sartre and writing intelligent papers on economics and democracy. Somewhere along the line, faced with a Cambodian status quo that went from a double-dealing quasi-monarchy to a crazed right-wing general, they went underground as guerillas and surfaced as a military force that took over the government. Even then, there wasn't very much to suggest at the genocidal machine they'd unleash -- peculiar in history as being one that was turned upon its own countrymen. Cities were evacuated, and anyone outside the party hierarchy who had any sign of intellect was summarily executed -- instantaneously if lucky, and after months of torture and forced 'confessions' at the Tuol Sleng concentration camp, if not. Soon, having exhausted itself of intellectuals, doctors, and the like (administration of the medical arts was left in the hands of uneducated workers), the machine turned its attentions to other enemies of the state, such as husbands and wives who dared to express their love for one another -- extracting confessions that justified their murder. As the years went by it turned even more inwards, decimating parts of itself until eventually it was so weakened that the neighbors walked in and helped themselves to the country. The details of this story are beyond macabre and gruesome, and are completely rivetting. I will not go into them in detail. The only thing I want to point out is a little detail that was common to the two books I read. Both the authors met key leaders of the Khmer Rouge -- Theary Seng met Khieu Samphan and Elizabeth Becker met Pol Pot. Both commented on how disarmingly pleasant they were.

The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were ordinary people. By some accounts, they were even pleasant to be with. There really wasn't anything, anything, that marked them aside as some of the most brutal murderers in history. This sort of fanatical absolutism could happen anywhere -- and who knows, bring with it the accompanying terror, misery, privation, and genocide. India almost went that way, with the Emergency in 1975. America brandishes its Patriot Act. Tomorrow it could be you or me, snatched out of our houses by a sudden change in the political climate, our four year old daughters left to fend for themselves in a long night tainted with the sound of bludgeoning axes.