Writing in the Guardian, John Pilger reviews what he describes as a
‘spell-binding’ new documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,
directed by the Cambodian film-maker, Rithy Panh.
“It is my duty,” wrote the correspondent of the Times at the
liberation of Belsen, “to describe something beyond the imagination of
mankind.” That was how I felt in the summer of 1979, arriving in
Cambodia in the wake of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.
In the silent, grey humidity, Phnom Penh, the size of Manchester, was
like a city that had sustained a nuclear cataclysm which had spared
only the buildings. Houses, flats, offices, schools, hotels stood empty
and open, as if vacated that day. Personal possessions lay trampled on a
path; traffic lights were jammed on red. There was almost no power, and
no water to drink. At the railway station, trains stood empty at
various stages of interrupted departure. Several carriages had been set
on fire and contained bodies on top of each other.
When the afternoon monsoon broke, the gutters were suddenly awash
with paper; but this was money. The streets ran with money, much of it
new and unused banknotes whose source, the National Bank of Cambodia,
had been blown up by the Khmer Rouge as they retreated before the
Vietnamese army. Inside, a pair of broken spectacles rested on an open
ledger; I slipped and fell hard on a floor brittle with coins. Money was
everywhere. In an abandoned Esso station, an old woman and three
emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots
and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money:
thousands of snapping, crackling riel, brand-new from the De La Rue
company in London.
With tiny swifts rising and falling almost to the ground the only
movement, I walked along a narrow dirt road at the end of which was a
former primary school called Tuol Sleng. During the Pol Pot years it was
run by a kind of gestapo, “S21”, which divided the classrooms into a
“torture unit” and an “interrogation unit”. I found blood and tufts of
hair still on the floor, where people had been mutilated on iron beds.
Some 17,000 inmates had died a kind of slow death here: a fact not
difficult to confirm because the killers photographed their victims
before and after they tortured and killed them at mass graves on the
edge of the city. Names and ages, height and weight were recorded. One
room was filled to the ceiling with victims’ clothes and shoes,
including those of many children.
Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political
death centre. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including
those who formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here,
usually after “confessing” that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB,
Hanoi: anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families
were confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept
naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written:
1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.
2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be obtained.
“Doing something” might mean only changing position in the cell, and
the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines
were small ammunition boxes labelled “Made in USA”. For upsetting a box
of excrement the punishment was licking the floor with your tongue,
torture or death, or all three.
This is described, perhaps as never before, in a remarkable
documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by Tuol Sleng’s few
survivors. The work of the Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, the
film has such power that, more than anything I have seen on Cambodia
since I was there almost 25 years ago, it moved me deeply, evoking the
dread and incredulity that was a presence then. Panh, whose parents died
in Pol Pot’s terror, succeeded in bringing together victims and
torturers and murderers at Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum.
Van Nath, a painter, is the principal survivor. He is grey-haired
now; I cannot be sure, but I may have met him at the camp in 1979;
certainly, a survivor told me his life had been saved when it was found
he was a sculptor and he was put to work making busts of Pol Pot. The
courage, dignity and patience of this man when, in the film, he
confronts former torturers, “the ordinary and obscure journeymen of the
genocide”, as Panh calls them, is unforgettable.
The film has a singular aim: a confrontation, in the best sense,
between the courage and determination of those like Nath, who want to
understand, and the jailers, whose catharsis is barely beginning. There
is Houy the deputy head of security, Khan the torturer, Thi who kept the
registers, who all seem detached as they recall, almost wistfully,
Khmer Rouge ideology; and there is Poeuv, indoctrinated as a guard at
the age of 12 or 13. In one spellbinding sequence, he becomes robotic,
as if seized by his memory and transported back. He shows us, with
moronic precision, how he intimidated prisoners, fastened their
handcuffs and shackles, gave or denied them food, ordered them to piss,
threatening to beat them with “the club” if a drop fell on the floor.
His actions confront all of us with the truth about human “cogs” in
machines whose inventors and senior managers politely disclaim
responsibility, like the still untried Khmer Rouge leaders and their
foreign sponsors.
Panh, whose film-making is itself an act of courage, sees something
positive in the mere act of bearing witness and, speaking of the
prisoners, in “the resistance [that is] a form of dignity that is
profoundly human”. He refers to the “little things, these unsubstantial
details, so slight and fragile, which make us what we are. You can never
entirely ‘destroy’ a human being. A trace always remains, even years
later … a refusal to accept humiliation can sometimes be conveyed by a
look of defiance, a chin slightly raised, a refusal to capitulate under
blows … The photographs of certain prisoners and the confessions
conserved at Tuol Sleng are there to remind us of it.”
It seems almost disrespectful to take issue at this point; but one
must. For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show
in the west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film,
it has to be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a
few years ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I
said I would, but that the role of “civilised” governments in bringing
him to power, sustaining his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical
component. He wasn’t interested.
The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year Zero”.
It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed an
estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and
dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of
peasant people and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more
tons of American bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on
Japan during the second world war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.
The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did this, secretly and
illegally.
Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was the
catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only
minority support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh’s
film, a torturer refers to the bombing as his reason for joining “the
maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot
completed. And having been driven out by the Vietnamese, who came from
the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge were restored in
Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher
government, who invented a “coalition” to provide the cover for
America’s continuing war against Vietnam.
Thank you, Rithy Panh, for your brave film; what is needed now is a
work as honest, which confronts “us” and relieves our amnesia about the
part played by our respectable leaders in Cambodia’s epic tragedy.
