Behind the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields

Gina Chon, Sambath Thet. Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Illustrations. 178 pp. $49.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8122-4245-4. Reviewed by Douglas Irvin Published on H-Human-Rights (June, 2011) Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey) More than three decades after Phnom Penh graphic history based on more than one thousand fell in April 17, 1975, and the Khmer Rouge took hours and six years worth of interviews with the power of the country, four surviving leaders of elusive and secretive leader. "What is hiding in‐ the brutal regime stand trial in a United Nations- side the events?" Noun Chea continues: "The hus‐ backed court in Cambodia on charges of genocide, band beats the wife and the wife beats the hus‐ war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Foreign band, so the violence is in the family and out‐ Minister Ieng Sary; his wife, Minister of Social siders cannot understand" (p. 7). Noun Chea's Welfare Ieng Thirith; Head of State Khieu Sam‐ question and analogy frame much of the book's phan; and Noun Chea, the second in command to inquiry, which traces the historical development Pol Pot are all charged with the deaths of at least of Khmer Rouge ideology and power by balancing 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979, during standard historical accounts of the genocide their attempt to manufacture an ideal agrarian against the personal stories of the Khmer Rouge's society free of corrupting imperial forces and cap‐ second most powerful leader and the stories of a italist tendencies. Legal justice may have been a victim and survivor, coauthor Sambath Thet. long time in the works, but historical truth seems What emerges is not a history textbook, but to have concluded that Noun Chea, with the three rather a window into the psyche of the Khmer other defendants and Pol Pot, who died in 1998, Rouge regime's most senior surviving leader. are guilty of genocide.[1] Yet, as Noun Chea awaits The second in command to Pol Pot, Noun his trial, he remains defiant of the historians' ver‐ Chea is known as Brother Number Two. The intel‐ dict. lectual architect of the regime's utopian ideals, he "What is the real truth and how do you fnd it remains a loyal adherent to the Khmer Rouge's out?" Noun Chea asks Gina Chon and Sambath revolutionary cause to end poverty and purify Thet, authors of Behind the Killing Fields, a bio‐ Cambodian society. He justifies the deaths of so H-Net Reviews many as the necessary price of progress, and present himself as the defender of the people and blames the Khmer Rouge's failure on the weak morality, bizarrely recounting how he instructed spirit of Cambodians who had been corrupted by the starving to plant more vegetables for their the forces of modernity and foreign domination. health and "smashed" the perpetrators who raped At times, he seems oblivious to the regime's direct girls and orchestrated state marriages to hide the contribution to the lasting poverty of the country. pregnancies. A loving grandfather and loyal husband, an ideal‐ Noun Chea is no Adolf Eichmann, an unthink‐ ist, a reflective intellectual, Noun Chea is charac‐ ing traveling salesman who is swept up into the terized by his devotion to self-discipline and his tide of Nazi history and comes to command the abstention from indulgence. The most searing rail system that ships its human cargo toward criticisms of those who fell victim to his wrath are ghastly doom, in Hannah Arendt's classic account reserved for those he accuses of betraying the Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality Khmer Rouge party through immorality--drinking of Evil (1965). Critical, scholarly, and astute, the too much alcohol or using their political power banality of Noun Chea's evil is not that he lost his for sexual exploits. These "worms of the fesh" faculties of moral judgment, but that he thought were enemies of the state because they could of the Khmer Rouge policies as fundamental good. have "struggled" to improve Cambodia with the This is in keeping with the most daring aspect of Khmer Rouge through hard work and devotion to Arendt's thesis on the inversion of moral systems revolutionary ideology (p. 5). The statement is ab‐ during genocides and mass atrocities. Neither is surd given that the Khmer Rouge turned the coun‐ Noun Chea a Franz Stangl, the commandant of the try into a "prison without walls," as Cambodians Treblinka extermination camp who adamantly commonly refer to the time period, and forced told his interviewer Gitta Sereny that he had no people into village-sized work camps where near‐ hate in his heart when he sent hundreds of thou‐ ly one-quarter of the country's population died sands to their deaths (Into That Darkness: An Ex‐ from over work and starvation. amination of Conscience [1983]). To the contrary, Chon and Thet, journalists for the Wall Street Noun Chea's account is flled with rage that Journal and the Phnom Penh Post respectively, emerges from the historical context of his youth. present the story of Noun Chea evenhandedly, al‐ In the psyche of Noun Chea, we fnd that the lowing his statements to speak for themselves. violence of the Khmer Rouge genocide has its an‐ This produces a curious set of incongruities as tecedents in the colonial past, in economic ex‐ Noun Chea's account and interpretation diverge ploitation following World War II, and in the in‐ from that of historians and survivors. For in‐ discriminate U.S. bombing of the Ho Chi Minh stance, he says that the decision to evacuate Ph‐ Trail. In his memories, he rails against the brutali‐ nom Penh's residents to countryside work camps ty of French colonial rule; the Cambodian people was pragmatic, not ideological. It was not that the who supported the French system; and systems of Khmer Rouge were attempting to cleanse the state torture under the Sihanouk and Lon Nol country of corrupt urbanites and city life; rather, regimes during the 1950s and 60s that left his par‐ he claims, the city was emptied because there was ty members and friends paralyzed, blind, or dead. not sufficient rice, oil, and food. Besides, "Phnom Regardless of the validity of Noun Chea's self- Penh was in disorder and confused and Lon Nol constructed mythic origins as an anticolonial soldiers had weapons. Who would protect their leader, this account allows us to further under‐ safety?" (p. 15). In addition to presenting himself stand that genocidal violence is neither meaning‐ as the guarantor of human security (a paradox in less nor ahistorical.[2] As in his analogy of vio‐ and of itself), Noun Chea goes on to repeatedly 2 H-Net Reviews lence within a family that can never be under‐ tol, "a relic from his glory days as Pol Pot's most stood from outside of the family, Noun Chea senior lieutenant in charge of Cambodia," which traces his desires to radically and violently realign remained by the side during the interview ses‐ Cambodian society to the political oppression un‐ sions "just in case" (p. 1). der successive generations of Cambodian govern‐ This book serves as an important reminder ments. He presents the Cambodian regimes be‐ that the coldest of despots remain human beings, tween 1930 and 1975 as little more than the will‐ filled with love and hate in what only appears to ing colonial clients of the patron states of France, be a paradoxical capacity toward both compas‐ China, Japan, and the United States. His heroes sion and vengeance. are the students shot down by U.S. troops at Kent Notes State University and George Washington, whose biography left a strong impression on him when [1]. On the Khmer Rouge regime as genocide, he studied it as a young man. These details, com‐ see Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Democracy in ing from a savvy political actor, feel like calculat‐ Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, ed attempts to garner sympathy from an Ameri‐ and the International Community (New Haven: can audience. And he clearly is attempting to cast Yale University Press, 1993); and Ben Kiernan, The himself as a liberation leader in just rebellion Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in against oppression, and not as a genocidaire. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). The history presented in this book is known to historians. Chon and Thet's greatest contribu‐ [2]. See Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did tion to our understanding of this dark chapter in They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide Cambodian history is that they allow a rare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). glimpse into the order of the madness of geno‐ And, for a political history of the Khmer Rouge, cide. When Noun Chea tells us of how he would see David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian stand on the roofs of cars in Bangkok in the 1930s, History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945 speaking to crowds about "how the Cambodian (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1993). people were slaves to France," we are reminded that solidarity and conviction, no matter how dark, are political variables of the heart that are not easily measured (p. 25). Against Noun Chea's persistent conviction in the righteousness of the Khmer Rouge cause, Chon and Thet present the brutal historical actuality of the genocide he is ac‐ cused of leading with Pol Pot.

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