Death of a king

Published on Tuesday, 06 November 2012
The Malaya Business Insight 
Written by BERNARD KARGANILLA

‘Sihanouk’s kingdom and its neighbor-nations have become a living laboratory where memory and justice are intertwined.’

THE Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville (where mercury exposure and its poisonous consequences have been monitored by the World Health Organization) is named after a royal personage.

He was Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, where “Nation, Religion, King” has been a constitutional motto, and his passing (due to heart attack) last October 15 concluded Pchum Ben (annual festival for the dead), which is similar to Halloween and Undas.

Sihanouk was the Khmer king at age 18 in 1941 – the same year when the imperialist Japanese rampaged in East Asia, thereby chaining the Pacific War to the Second World War. And Sihanouk was the revered King-Father when he died a few weeks shy of age 90 this Dragon Year of 2012.

Sihanouk, whose reign spanned WW2, the Cold War and the Third Indochina War, is a study in accommodation, resistance, and especially historical reconciliation, which are life-changing themes, considering the black mark left by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in world history. Sihanouk, whose nationalism helped link Buddhism to Khmer Communism, lost children and grandchildren in the Cambodian version of the Reign of Terror, c. 1975-1979.

Coverage of Sihanouk’s demise and the coincident 2012 East Asian Conference of NGOs on History and Peace of October 17-19 gave us the opportunity to visit the Tuol Sleng Prison Museum and to review the tragedy of Khmer genocide and Oriental despotism.

Besides Sihanouk, the person symbolizing Khmer autocracy was Saloth Sar, a student of radio mechanics in Paris in the 1950s, whose social experiments with Political Potential turned him into the arch-villain known as Pol Pot. As a survivor of Sihanouk’s purge of the Left in 1962 and as chieftain of the triumphant Red Khmers in 1975, Saloth Sar originated a Cambodian hybrid of Russian Narodism and the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety.

This Saloth Sar/Pol Pot persona apparently wanted to re-invent Khmer society from scratch, privileging the rural and penalizing the urban. His Cambodian “killing fields” began as an emergency measure to “save” Phnom Penh from war-induced famine and ended as a simplistic scheme to reverse metropolitanization. “During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) urbanization in Cambodia totally stopped. Instead, an agrarian state was introduced in which the urban populations were forcefully evicted to rural areas. Urban areas were left to die and be destroyed by nature and neglect. Cities were considered by the Khmer Rouge regime as the symbol of capitalism, which was against the so-called revolution.” [Beng Hong Socheat Khemro, “Cambodia,” Urbanization and Sustainability in Asia]

Saloth Sar’s failed Narodnik extrapolations and the intensity of the class/civil/ethnic and anti-colonial war may explain the severity of the situation and the scale of casualties, but will not account for the brutality of the Khmer Rouge jailers toward their own captive comrades and the hapless civilians. Consider the following facts:

It was the odor of decayed flesh that led the Vietnamese troops into discovering the Khmer Rouge regime’s highest level security center (code-named “S-21”) where jailers consisting of 10-year-old boys and hot-blooded twenty-somethings tortured to death their fellow peasants and ordinary Cambodian citizens.

This barb-wired former school compound became the execution ground of 14,000 Khmers who were accused of betraying the Angkar (Khmer Rouge term for its own leadership as well as the Communist Party of Kampuchea) by purportedly collaborating with either the American CIA or the Soviet KGB.

The unfortunate prisoner was lashed and/or electrocuted into “revealing” (or inventing) a “string of traitors” that would amount to as high as 100 names.

The tortured prisoner was not allowed to even cry in pain.

This secret torture chamber, S-21 but better known now as Tuol Sleng Prison, was only one of the 196 Khmer Rouge death camps, and it encapsulates the “microcosm of the terror, paranoia and brutality” of the CPK from April 17, 1975 to January 6, 1979.

The high number of killed and the low number of survivors in S-21 make Tuol Sleng Prison as “one of the most lethal in the 20th century.”

The Cambodian killing field (which was made famous by Hollywood) was Boeung Choeung Ek, 15 kilometers from S-21, where the execution team of Teng and his nine teenagers disposed the inmates of Tuol Sleng.

Many Cambodians ordinarily hold grudges but keep animosities hidden from public view. But when the opportunity arises, the grudge-keeper harms the unknowing offender, using assassins or even so-called sorcerers. This may have been a factor in the Khmer Rouge torture-prison system.

Detainees at S-21 like Bou Meng and Vann Nath ate their prison meals next to corpses.

Children like Norng Chan Pal accompanied their parents into the atrocious Tuol Sleng.

Tuol Sleng is now a Genocide Museum and the Documentation Center of Cambodia perseveres in its mission of researching the Khmer Rouge era. DC-Cam produces fact sheets like “Pol Pot and his Prisoners at Secret Prison S-21,” which is the source for this article.

The Cambodian experience with genocide should be instructive to the rest of the world, especially Southeast Asia where the 10 Asean member-states are supposed to merge into a single regional community by 2015. Sihanouk’s kingdom and its neighbor-nations have become a living laboratory where memory and justice are intertwined.