Tuesday, May 5, 2009
from my internship journal
When I applied to be an intern in the Center for Development Studies, I didn’t realize that I was coming at such an opportune time. This is a classic case of being at the right place at the right time. It is May 2009 and the trials for those responsible for the Khmer Rouge are finally underway, 3 decades after the bloody period of 1975-1979.
On April 17, 1975, the beginning of Year Zero, after a period of civil war that tired out most Cambodians who longed for peace, the Khmer Rouge came into power and took over Phnom Penh. They drove Cambodians out of their homes by saying they needed to clear the city before the Americans bombed the place and set them off to forced marches into the countryside. From there, Pol Pot and the rest of his followers began their ultra-Communist idealogy. They attempted to build a utopian society where intellectuals where killed so everyone would be of equal stature and work communally in the fields.
But of course, the ideologies never turn out as well as they seem in theory. The Khmer Rouge marked the period of incredible genocide where a fifth of the Cambodian population died of torture, execution, starvation, labor, illness and inhumane conditions. Families were separated, people killed for the smallest suspicions, fear and paranoia bred into people, the uneducated illiterate given positions of power… it was a period too appalling to imagine.
I’ve visited other countries that have gone through bloody wars and revolutions. Gone to places where blood was spilled and hundreds killed. But I’ve never been to a place in Cambodia. I look at people above the age of 35 and realize that these are people who have gone through a period that I could not imagine, much less live through. These people survived a period of genocide, of four years of the worst conditions imaginable. I cannot fathom that the people I pass in the street had relatives who were tortured or executed, or they themselves went through it, starved, worked nearly to death, jailed, tortured.
I try to put myself in their shoes and I can’t. I wouldn’t have had the strength after those four years. I would have probably thought death was the better option than to have to relive the moments in my sleep or when triggered. But these people do. The percentage of people in Cambodia who still have post-traumatic stress disorder are as high as 55%. More than half the population has this, and the other half? Well, I believe they are the youth who were lucky enough to be born after 1979. That is their saving grace but the aftermath of poverty, complicated politics, certain freedoms still not practiced in Cambodia is what they have to experience.
What makes Cambodia so different is that I feel like that period is still lingering. The pain is still there and the loss. A number of the actors, both the victims and the responsible, are still alive. A visit to Tuol Sleng prison, the high school turned into the most notorious prison of the time, was worth only one visit for me because I cannot go back there. I’m not a superstitious person who believes in the unproved but I cannot shake the feelings of desolation in that place.
And now, there’s an opportunity, not to erase the past, as much as some Cambodians wish to bury it in their history, but to clear the air, a little. To place blame where it should be, to get the truth and the answers, and to have whatever justice you could settle for after millions have passed away.
As an outsider and an observer, I wonder how some Cambodians do not care or just wish to erase it from their memory. In spite of the fact that I am not from their country (or maybe because of it), I’d want answers to questions. I cannot understand how the fervor of an ideology can lead people to kill other people, so brutally and so lingeringly. I understand passion and dying for something to believe in. But I believe that I could never kill someone so gruesomely for something I believe in. And yet so many people did. I can begin to understand that they did it for fear of death to themselves or to their loved ones. But what about those on top, the ones who ordered it, who were on the top of the tier, who had nothing to fear but themselves. How could they? How could they order such things?
And to look at them now, so normal and ordinary, with diseases that afflict the elderly. With heart failures and respiratory problems and arthritis. It is even harder to imagine that these people were responsible for so many deaths. For the current state of Cambodia, that hints at the desperation and the poverty and still a little of the distrust.
The United Nations and the Royal Government of Cambodia signed an agreement to bring the senior leaders and those most responsible to trial for their crimes. It is an international war crime tribunal that is so belated, it is being hastened for fear that those accused will pass away before justice can be served. As it is, they are so old, the threat of life imprisonment won’t matter much. But it will be something, for those that still care about justice and reparation.
The accused number five people. Five people to be held on trial for a fifth of the population passing away from 1975-1979. This international war crime tribunal is a combination of common and civil law, with international personalities helping the Cambodian courts. Judges and lawyers from all over the world are participating to ensure that justice will be served and a sham trial will not be perpetrated.
I feel like I’m at the forefront of something important and I believe I am. Because though most are sure of what the convictions of these five will be, a new development for international tribunals is happening. Now victims can take part in the trial and accuse their oppressors in court. Civil parties can now claim reparation for the wrongs done to them. Reparation won’t be monetary or individual but it will be symbolic. Introducing this new concept is tricky and unprecedented. Debates ensue over whether they should take part, how they should take part, even what justice they can possibly get.
It’s a constant work-in-progress but what is sure is, Cambodia is doing something different. And the world, with all its many oppressions and crises, in countries like Darfur or Burma, well, the world should sit up and take notice. The little people that were flattened so many times before? Well, you can smell that the way the wind is blowing is different now. Now is a chance to fight back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
