“POV: Enemies of the People.”
11 p.m. -12:30 a.m. Tuesday. WPBT-PBS 2.
By Glenn Garvin
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
Writing about Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat-in-chief of Nazi genocide, the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her point was that humanity’s most monstrous crimes have been carried out not by fanatics or sociopaths but by ordinary people who accepted the ideology of their government and regarded the slaughter of their victims as just another job.
I don’t know if I fully comprehended Arendt’s theory until I watched Enemies of the People, a documentary on Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge government that airs Tuesday as part of the PBS documentary series POV. It is a singular experience to listen as former Khmer Rouge executioners reminisce about sucking on gall bladders torn from the bodies of their victims in order to cool off from all that clubbing and stabbing and shooting out in the jungle.
Enemies of the People speaks softly but carries a big stick. It does not use a lot of facts and figures to describe the reign of communist terror by the Khmer Rouge, who killed millions of their countrymen — perhaps a third of Cambodia’s 7.5 million population — in just four years. Nor is there much use of gory atrocity footage, the vast mounds of skulls and bones the Khmer Rouge left behind when they were finally driven from power in 1979.
The documentary’s power derives almost entirely from casual moments: A chance encounter with an old woman walking a country road who mentions that the nearby river used to bubble and hiss with the gas escaping from all the corpses rotting on its bottom. A former executioner recalling that a rural meadow was once cross-hatched with ditches because “I didn’t want to bury too many bodies in one ditch.” Another complaining how difficult it was to relax with a good dinner after day of slashing throats because no matter how hard he scrubbed, he just couldn’t get the smell of blood off his hands.
Enemies of the People is actually a film within a film. Co-directed by Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath and veteran British filmmaker Rob Lemkin, it is an account of Sambath’s low-key but relentless effort to produce a documentary on Khmer Rouge crimes. Sambath spent 10 years gently coaxing former Khmer Rouge to talk about the hows and whys of the country’s killing fields.
The task was seemingly impossible. Unlike Germany, which has endlessly picked at the scabs left by Nazi rule, or Russia, where an impressive array of scholarship on the crimes of communism has been produced, Cambodians rarely discuss what happened in their country between 1975 and 1979. Sambath’s friends and even the surviving remnants of his family (his mother, father and brother all died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge) couldn’t understand why he didn’t move on. “I just wonder why he’s so different than other people,” says Sambath’s wife, wistfully.
Watching Sambath gingerly employ misdirection and understatement to wheedle confessions from the former Khmer Rouge is a fascinating lesson in the craft of reporting.
“You did not kill many,” he says, urging on a recalcitrant former executioner. “Just a few toward the end.” The man obdurately claims to remember nothing, then admits: “I only killed one. That’s the truth.”
Another only responds when Sambath playfully volunteers a friend for a throat-slitting demonstration. “You hold them like this so they cannot scream,” the retired killer says, the fingers of one hand splayed across the forehead of the “prisoner” as he swipes a toy plastic knife across the throat. “After I’d slit so many throats like this, my hand hurt. So I switched to stabbing the neck.”
Sambath’s most dogged efforts were concentrated on Nuon Chea, the notorious second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge and their senior surviving member. It took three solid years of interviewing Chea before he admitted knowing that Cambodia was an orgy of murder during his rule, even then insisting the orders were given by someone else.
Finally Chea admits he and other senior officials ordered the killings to prevent ideological deviation from the Khmer Rouge program, which abolished not only property but the very concept of ownership. “We had to solve the traitor problem in the way we did so it didn’t get out of our control and infect the innocent people lower down,” he says.
Chea is no more emotional in confessing to the killings than he is to denying them. One of the few times he displays any passion is when he views a newscast on the execution of Saddam Hussein.
“This was the end of a patriot in an unfair society!” declares the agitated Chea: A civics lesson from Hell.
3 comments:
The first things , we better to find
out whom was led all these suffer to
contaminate of communism in Cambodia.
First things French had control Khmer
100 yrs so all Khmer peoples lived
under France colonize 2nd Cold war
was threaten 3rd the person whom was
lead to block communist .
So all these person they had kill
all these peoples .
CHAO KHMER MA USA
The guilty verdict pointed to the Vietnam, France, USA, China and Cambodia's leadership. Khmer Rouge was supported by China and USA, while North Vietnam trained them and feed them with fighting techniques. Both Thailand and Vietnam created paranoid feeling among Cambodia's leadership due to their agreesive behavior toward Cambodia territory from the past. Cambodia suffered lost of Khmer Krom to Vietnam in the 1949 ceded by France colonial inlcuded 26 provinces and 8.2 million Khmer Krom people. The massacred of 1975 is a combination of extreme patriotic acts and sophisticated manipulation infiltrated the Khmer Rouge regime caused paranoid feelings reached the boiling point of extreme without judgement from right and wrong. American secret bombing helped feul Khmer Rouge nationalism against super power. Sihanouk played into the Khmer Rouge hand by legitimized the movement and encourage Khmer peasant to take up arms as you can see how PM Hun Sen became the player in Cambodia today. Khmer Rouge were trained and supplied weapons by Vietnam and China to fight emperial power which was the American, although both China and Vietnam doesnt see each other eyes to eyes but they have common interests which was to remove any outside power from deeping it influence in Southeast Asia. American public doesnt have apetite to fight long loosing war without clear purposes; they started making noise in Washington DC of displease with the outcomes and certaintly the image of American bombing a small country doesnt help gain traction in American war in Vietnam. America abruptly decided to pull out left the Lon Nol regime to fence for itself agianst the fieces fighting machine of the Communist Khmer Rouge. Altimately, the entire Communist won the war in Southeast Asia with exception to Thailand because it has different master to pretect them from Communist influence but they were not immune from the influence. However Thailand managed to fight off Communism ideology from reaching its peak in Thailand. Khmer Rouge gained power in 1975, this is where the drama began. Khmer Rouge looked to China as their main supporter however Vietnam was not too happy with the outcome of the Khmer Rouge and its behavior towarded Vietnam therefore they already have back up plan which is the currently CPP group (remember the teacher doesnt teach the student all the tricks). Although CPP was not brutal as Khmer Rouge but they were trained by the same master and when they took over the country. It was more receptive to accept CPP and Vietnam during 1979 and many of us felt that they save our lives. What else Cambodian supposed to think if they faced killers daily during the Khmer Rouge?. Cambodia has two different types of Khmer Rouge (China Khmer Rouge and Vietnam Khmer Rouge). Let not forget about France responsibilities in this fiasco; the Khmer Rouge leaders were educated in France and learned Communism and socilism ideology from France while they were suffered from paraniod feelings that some day Cambodia will be swallowed by its neighboring countries particularly Vietnam. I didnt mean to write a long lectures rather a short comment so I will cut my thought here. I am not releasing these leaders and killers from it parts in killing its own people due to lack of leadership and judgement what is right and wrong. The Khmer Rouge leaders cannot simply wash their hands clean by pointing finger at others. Altimately their hind sight of the movement and enemies surrounded doesnt give you the excuse to kill every body without due processes. By eliminating the court, education system, money, market, religion etc are extreme view to find utopia in the movement. When you eliminated all of these structures, then you have nothing to depend your judgement and follow the path of the operations of the movement and altimately collapse without much hard work from the enemy to infiltrate your movement. Your paranoid thinking caused more damage then the actual work of the enemies.
ar lop post this web all the time, get some new man
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