The Killers in the Killing Fields

I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.

Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."

The book spares no detail in describing the gross physical cruelty of the torture regime. More surprising - at times, almost amusing - is the feebleness of the charges that were brought against those condemned to suffer there: the cooks who "confessed" to breaking plates, overcooking soup, and sending food to foreign visitors on dirty plates "to spoil relations with China"; the guards tortured for "forrgetting to water plants", "talking about women", "planning" to fall asleep on duty, and "planning to cause contradictions" by bungling a film projection.

But Chandler's most important and impressive observation, supported by quotations from Holocaust literature, is how ordinary, normal, how like us, the killers of the Khmer Rouge were.

it is . . . easy to judge the interrogators, guards, or excutiones too severely. They could disobey orders only on pain of death. Without similar experiences, temptations and pressures it is impossible for any of us to say how we might have behaved had we been interrogators ourselves, locked in a cell facing a helpless and devalued "enemy" alongside a pair of colleagues, either of whom might report us to the authorities for failing to inflict torture or for "counter-revolutionary" hesitation. Similarly, we cannot say what we would have done at Choeung Ek [the S-21 killing field] if a superior gave us an iron bar with which to smash the skull of a kneeling victim. Faced with so many threats and ambiguities, did the torturers and killers hesitate, barge ahead, or make choices on a case-by-case basis? No refusals to inflict torture or to execute prisoners have surfaced . . .

Condemning bad things and bad people is easy - can do it. (It always amazes me to hear, say, George W. Bush denouncing  - for example - Kim Jong Il, apparently in the belief that he is saying something original, perspicacious and morally praiseworthy.) It takes a much rarer intelligence to understand extreme cruelty, and to see the humanity in inhumanity. "Many of us," Chandler writes, "could become accustomed to doing something (such as torturing or killing people) when people we respected told us to do it and when there were no institutional constraints on doing what we were told."

But Chandler declines to extend his understanding to those at the top of the Khmer Rouge, including the 82-year old Nuon Chea, who was arrested yesterday. "There are limits to the contextualisation of mass killing and terror," he records. "No 'context' is spacious enough to contain Son Sen, Duch and the 'upper brothers'. No explanation can let the murderers of fourteen thousand people [in S-21 alone - there were many other similar places] off the hook."

That's why they had to arrest Nuon Chea yesterday - however old he has become, however harmless and  pathetic. Not merely in the cause of justice in his own case, or for the sake of the Cambodians, living and dead, whom he condemned to such suffering. But because a message has to be sent to the much younger, still vigorous, still active killers and sadists and Thought Policemen in North Korea, in Burma, in Iran and Syria, and not excluding Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay - that wherever you are, and however old you get, you will be sought out, and that whether or not we understand what you did, you will be brought to justice.

Comments

[Chen]

'No Man is an Island'- one should keep his fortune for himself but must share tragedy with every others. Thus, it tolls for weee.

[chen]

excuse me for my ignorance - I have thougt that 'Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay' are not the names of government, am I wrong?