Cambodia
- Siem Reap Rice Field ©Frederic Poirot (flickr.com)
Here you can find information about our research in Cambodia. News, background stories, photo galleries etc. can be found in the navigation column on the left side of this page.
Project description:
Cambodia looks back on almost thirty years of war and political instability, out of which the years of the regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (April 1975 - January 1979) stand out as the by far most violent part in recent Cambodian history. The coming into power of the Khmer Rouge in April 1975 ended five years of civil war (with involvement of the US) that took the lives of around half a million people. Hundreds of thousands fled from US bombings into the capital Phnom-Penh, but were then forced back to the countryside like most city-dwellers or sent into huge working camps by the Khmer Rouge. The projected restructuring of the society into a pure agricultural state in which Buddhism was forbidden and families were torn apart can be considered as one of the most radical revolutions in human history. So-called enemies of „Democratic Kampuchea“ were tortured to death in prisons and camps or killed in mass executions.
At the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, more than 1.6 million of the total 8 million Cambodian inhabitants had died. More than half of the victims died because of exhaustion, malnutrition and sickness. A critical evaluation of this terror was extremely delicate because of diverging political interests, which were also embedded into the global political alliances of the Cold War. It would take more than 30 years until these crimes were treated publicly in the form of a tribunal.
The goal of our research is an analysis of the memories of these acts of violence and the emotions related to them. Our interest is threefold:
First: The UN – tribunal, which began in June 2008. Though started through the initiative of the United Nations, the tribunal had to bend to certain restrictions of the Cambodian government, of which many of the members are former Khmer Rouge that defected to Vietnam in 1977. In contrast to similar institutions the trials can be observed in situ, thus allowing direct insights into the memories and emotions displayed by the participants of the trials. How is memory narrated? When and under what conditions are emotions expressed? As the atrocities already date back longer than the span of a generation, the question of collective memory and generational memory becomes crucial. The difficulty is further aggravated by an almost total absence of direct survivors of the torture prisons. Case 001 focuses on the former security prison S-21, also called Tuol Sleng. Only a handful of people survived. What are the consequences of the prolonged delay of an evaluation of the violence in the so-called security centres without testimonies? What is the tribunal’s primary goal: social reconciliation or revenge and gratification of the victims?
- Coconut Seller ©ethan.crowley (flickr.com)
Second: In the wake of the UN – tribunal emerges the question of a possible re-evaluation of the memorial sites Tuol Sleng (former torture prison) and Choeung Ek (Killing Fields). Both memorial sites were established by the Vietnamese occupying power after their invasion in 1979, also to present themselves to the world as the “liberators” of Cambodia. During the eighties many Cambodians came to Tuol Sleng to check the photos exhibited there in search of missing relatives or as participants of visitations organised by the government. However, the interest of the Cambodians in the memorial site has diminished since the nineties, until they became of primary interest mainly for the tourist industry. Therefore one can ask whether these sites of commemoration will be frequented more strongly by the local population during the course of the tribunal. Being at the center of case 001 we have to ask if Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek acquire new collective and individual meanings in the context of the trial.
Third: What is the relevance of the Theraveda Buddhism, now official state religion again, for the processes of evaluation, forgiveness, and reconciliation? What is its relation to the widespread cults of possession? In the form of a “counter-culture” these cults aim at finding independent paths to cure the suffering of the victims (and, probably, the perpetrators).