In high school, my favorite teacher was a former journalist. It was she, I see now, who first taught me the trick of assigning popular press books in lieu of textbooks. With her, we read and dissected Kaffir Boy, Warriors Don't Cry, The Diary of Zlata Filipovic, The Diary of Anne Frank. War and apartheid and genocide were Lisa Walker's currency and so it is no surprise that her world civilizations course focused on the worst of humanity, from the obvious (Hitler and the Jews; Stalin and the Ukrainians) to the contemporary (Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda; Bosnians and Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslav states) to Armenia and, yes, the Khmer Rouge. Ms. Walker - unabashedly and unapologetically liberal Ms. Walker - was determined we would learn the ins and outs of worst regimes to have ruled in modern times.
So, I thought I knew something of Pol Pot and his KR cronies, but it turned out this was only the tip of the iceberg, for I was aware of the genocidal aspect of the regime, but nothing else. What else? The emptying of the cities - all cities; the elimination of all forms of currency, such that barter became the only means of procuring what little goods might be had; changing the name of the country - hell, changing the names of pronouns; shutting down the education system; forbidding marriage by choice/for love and assigning spouses...and then monitoring their sexual relations; instituting a national haircut.
As Panh writes, "the Khmer Rouge wanted to mold and shape everything: bodies, words, society, landscape" (p. 142). An official slogan of the regime: "Personal feelings are not allowed." They were, in short, not only cruel, but crazy. And then there was the famine. If it wasn't as devastating in raw numbers as the Holodomor, that's only because the actual population of Ukraine was so much larger than that of Cambodia, for ultimately roughly one out of every three Cambodians perished under the heel of the KR.
Rithy Panh lived all of this. The son of a renowned government minister, his family was evacuated from Phnom Penh and declared new people, set to work - like all Cambodians - digging canals, building dikes, diverting rivers. As Panh notes, "Democratic Kampuchea became a worksite. ... The worksite, it appeared, was in fact a labor camp" (p. 64). And when a population becomes no more than forced labor, those who force the labor no longer view them as human.
Human right didn't exist. This statement, poignant in its directness, comes directly from Comrade Duch, former commander of Tuol Sleng, or S-21, one of the country's most notorious prisons, a place where torture was the order of the day, and from which only a dozen prisoners left alive. Now, decades later, Duch is himself under interrogation by Panh, the child-turned-laborer-turned-refugee-turned award-winning film director. "Mr. Rithy, the Khmer Rouge were all about elimination. Human rights didn't exist" (p. 73). Another official slogan of the KR: If you don't work hard enough, the Angkar will transform you into fertilizer for the rice fields" (p. 170). This wasn't hyperbole. (The Angkar or "Organization" was how the Communist Party of Kampuchea referred to itself from 1975-77.)
Panh, whose Elimination, like a film, pans back and forth between his life in Paris, his interviews with Duch, his memories of labor and starvation and fear, conveys the horrors of the time through his concise use of language. For example, in describing the death toll inflicted by the KR - 1.7 million - he notes that this total was reached "without the means of mass extermination," (p. 110), a notable distinction as compared to the ovens of the Germans or the guns of the Hutus.
It's only fair to ask: how does this happen? While any meaningful explanation is far beyond the scope of this brief summary, Panh provides a clue when he mentions the gap between the cities and the countryside - between the peasants and the professional class. That gap, Panh notes, was immense - and "that injustice was the ground on which the Khmer Rouge prospered" (p. 67). I'll not take the trouble of drawing parallels between the ideologies prospering in certain countries today and the vast and growing gaps - in income, education, wealth, and culture - between segments of society therein.
Panh reserves some of his harshest words - outside of those for Duch, Pol Pot, and the rest of the KR apparatus - for Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In their 1980 book on the situation in Cambodia, After the Cataclysm, they wrote "it became virtually a matter of dogma in the West that the regime was the very incarnation of evil...how the 'nine men at the center' were able to achieve this feat or why they chose to pursue the strange course of 'autogenocide' were questions that were rarely pursued" (quoted by Panh, p. 234).
Panh's anger and revulsion is understandable, but I believe so too is Chomsky and Herman's bafflement (and that of Alain Badiou, whose work in Le Monde comes in for scorn a page earlier). This idea of 'autogenocide' is so intellectually challenging because throughout history, genocide, though literally meaning "only" the act of killing a race or people, has effectively meant the act of killing an other race or people. The Jews. The Ukrainians. The Armenians. The Tutsis. The Bosnians. In all cases, they were targeted for their religion, their race, their ethnicity: their otherness. The KR killed their own people, though, and did so indiscriminately and without distinction, on a scale that is difficult to imagine, even today.
As I was finishing The Elimination, Comrade Duch was dying. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53994189 One imagines Panh would agree with the woman quoted by the BBC, "He deserves to serve more prison terms." I'm less certain he would agree with her final words: "But now he has died, I can forgive him."
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