“Please Don't Walk Through the Mass Grave”

“Please Don’t Walk Through The Mass Grave” Does this Message Reflect the Memorialization of the Cambodian Genocide? Max de Kruiff 10886230 June 2015 Supervisor: Nanci Adler Word Count: 22.910 Table of Contents Introduction 2 The Struggle of Politicized Memorialization 11 The Cambodian People and their Past: Memorializing 25 the Genocide from the Bottom Up Memorialization in Cambodia and the International Community 37 Conclusion 48 Bibliography 52 1 Introduction Fourteen kilometers southeast from the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh lies Choeung Ek. For those who do not wish to engage themselves in history, this site seems to be a calm part of the Cambodian rural landscape. A beautiful place, untouched by busy urban influences, Choeung Ek is Cambodia in its purest form. Sadly, Choeung Ek is an example of how something that seems so innocent at first sight is in fact a dark place which echoes the voices of death. Visiting Choeung Ek anno 2015 is a visit to one of history’s darkest pages. The well- preserved Killing Fields of Choeung Ek give a horrible and interesting peek in the terror of the Red Khmer regime at the same time. When entering the memorial site, the large stupa comes immediately into sight. Before reaching this building, the visitor is warned about the content of what will be seen at Choeung Ek. In the stupa, hundreds of skulls are shown to the visitor, a rather unpleasant but unfortunately realistic illustration of what happened there. I had the chance to visit Choeung Ek in 2011. The things that I experienced there and in Cambodia as a whole, inspired me to write this thesis. What follows after the stupa, is a tour over the former Killing Fields. I remember walking on the path, seeing small white pieces on the surface of the grass. It was as if those pieces were part of the ground, a strange sort of ground surface. However, our guide told us, these were remains of the bones of the Cambodians who were brutally slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge. One has to be constantly aware of what you are looking at when it comes to a historical subject like this. However, as a human being, some things seem so unreal, that it is impossible sometimes to fully engage yourself with the historical context. I had this experience when I saw a sign which said: “Please Don’t Walk Through the Mass Grave”. Clinical was the word that came to my mind. A clinical sign, like a warning in traffic. Was that really how the Cambodian genocide was remembered? Cambodia’s history cannot be studied openly. This is for a large part the result of the genocide which happened in the 1970s and its aftermath. The genocide was a devastating episode in the country’s rich history. Cambodia was a wealthy nation during the Khmer empire, which lasted from the ninth till the thirteenth century. This was the time in which the Angkor Wat temples were built. After the Khmer empire had fallen, influences from outside increased in the country. First, Spanish and Portuguese travelers made it to Cambodia. Later, in the nineteenth century, Cambodia became part of French Indochina. The French ruled the colony until 1953. In 1941, the French appointed Norodom Sihanouk as the king of 2 Cambodia, which made the country a monarchy. Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the throne in 1955, after which he became leader of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, a socialist party. Sihanouk won the elections and became prime minister. He stayed in this function until 1970, when he was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Nol led a coup against Sihanouk, who was popular at first – he led the struggle for Cambodian independence -, but opposition was simply a matter of time. The Vietnam War had a great impact on former Indochina. Sihanouk did not want to cooperate with the Americans, which has fed ideas that the Americans were behind Nol’s takeover of Cambodia. The General ruled the country until 1975: the year in which Cambodia’s history would take a dramatic turn. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took over the country and installed a Maoist communist regime. The Khmer Rouge killed one third of the Cambodian population during its reign which lasted until 1979.1 Remembering Cambodia’s history today is not the same as it was before the Khmer Rouge took over the country. The current Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in the government since the end of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. His administration has been struggling with the genocidal past ever since. However, the government has been able to make this struggle slightly more comfortable by implementing a narrative about Cambodia’s past which makes it easier for the elite to memorialize the past: the past is made usable. On the other side, we have the Cambodian population. They are struggling with the past as well. Since more than twenty percent of the population was killed during the genocidal years, almost every Cambodian has a direct link with the events of the 1970s. Therefore, the population is heavily traumatized. However, they are not able to express this trauma and to resolve it. This will be made clear if we see how the Cambodian leadership memorializes the genocidal past and how this narrative of memorialization is implemented in the Cambodian population. This narrative is not only implemented in the Cambodian people. A third force has a role in the Cambodian memorialization as well: the international community. In this thesis, I will argue that the memorialization of the Cambodian genocide is particularly influenced by the Cambodian government. Moreover, the memorialization is influenced from the outside, which is the international community. As a consequence, the memorialization of the Cambodian people has been suppressed. 1 Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-1979,” in Century of Genocide, Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, eds. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 84. 3 Memorialization and Lieux de Mémoire In order to understand the context of this thesis, it is important to explain what is meant here while speaking about memorialization. According to Jay Winter, memory is ‘performed at the heart of the collective memory. When individuals and groups express or embody or interpret or repeat a social script about the past, they galvanize the ties that binds groups together and deposit additional memory traces about the past in their own minds.’2 What individuals and groups are doing is performing their memory. This helps them remembering the past. In this thesis, when the term memorialization is used, I mean the performing of memory through rituals (for instance religious rituals), stories (personal stories of the past), cultural phenomena (museums), grand narrative (the official lecture of the past), or a metanarrative (the counter narrative of the grand narrative). These last two definitions are closely linked to the idea of the lieux de mémoire on which I will come back in this section. They are especially important since the two types of narratives point to the major problem in Cambodia, which is that the government’s narrative overshadows that of the Cambodian population. Memorialization of the Cambodian genocide will be discussed by looking into the initiatives of memorialization of three different groups: the Cambodian government, the Cambodian population, and the international community. These three groups have their own way of memorializing the Cambodian genocide: they perform memory differently. Cambodia’s main sites of memorialization are the Tuol Sleng Museum (S-21) and Choeung Ek. Besides these two places where crimes were actually committed, the government installed two official holidays which remind of the Khmer Rouge period: Victory Day on January 7 and the Day of Remembrance on May 20 – which was formerly known as the Day of Hatred. Although the Cambodian government made these efforts to keep the memory of the genocide alive, criticism has never been off the table. This criticism has particularly been coming from the international community. Especially in the late 1990s, calls for justice and truthful memorialization became louder. The Cambodian people are primarily concerned that good memorialization will never come to exist. Their quest for memorialization and justice is still going. As we will see in chapter 2, Cambodian people do not feel that the government are handling their past well. The most notorious example is the refusal of the Cambodian government to burn the remains of the people which are now displayed on the former killing 2 Jay Winter, “The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 11. 4 field. As Paul Williams has put it, Choeung Ek’s historical significance is ‘dwarfed’ by the government.3 Therefore, the question if the efforts of memorialization undertaken by the government help the Cambodian people is best answered with a no. Why is this the case? This thesis will show how the Cambodian government’s efforts of memorialization have failed to serve the people’s needs: the initiatives taken by the government do not help the Cambodian people in remembering the genocidal past correctly.4 In 1989, Pierre Nora defined the concept lieux de mémoire. According to Nora, lieux de mémoire are ‘fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.’5 Nora uses some examples from the French history to clarify this term. One of them is the Arc de Triomphe. This monument was built to celebrate Napoleon Bonaparte’s victories in Austerlitz. In Nora’s vision, this Arc represents a significant part of the French history.

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