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Well, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today about
one of the worst genocides of the 20th century
the Killing Fields of Cambodia
Before I do that, let me get into
what happened before the Killing Fields took place in Cambodia and describe to you
the situation in Cambodia in the 1960s
Cambodia was pretty much developing
a typical developing Asian country. It exported more
rice than it imported. It was such an example of development that
Lee Kuan Yew came to Cambodia when
Singapore became independent
to learn more about nation-building
Cambodia was at the time
really
an island of peace while the war raged on in Vietnam
To make it a little more personal, let me introduce you to my late mother who passed away in October
of last year. She was born in 1936
and had a pretty typical
childhood; she enjoyed the beach
She learned languages; one of which was Vietnamese which would come in handy later
on in
her life and in mine
Here she is with my father in 1969, the last year before
the
Vietnam War spilled into Cambodia and
descended the country into chaos
They were probably taking a vacation in the country at the time
So six years later the Khmer Rouge
come to power in Cambodia
They essentially
reorder society completely
My parents lived in Phnom Penh, where more than a million people had amassed
and they were moved to the countryside
They were made to work in the fields
One of the consequences when you have people who aren’t used to living in the
countryside
and they are made to work in the fields is they die
So one out of four Cambodians ends up dead, including my father of malnutrition and
dysentery
He died in a Khmer Rouge
rat-infested hospital, if you can even call it that
And the only reason why I'm here today
and why my four siblings are still alive is because my mother spoke Vietnamese and used
Vietnamese as a passport to freedom
She was given the opportunity to
leave Cambodia if she could prove she was Vietnamese by speaking the language and
her Vietnamese was in fact so bad that she gave all the boys
girls' names and all the girls boys' names and it wasn’t until a lady told her
you know you've made this mistake and tutored her for three days that she became aware and
was able to pass two exams, one by the Khmer rouge
and one by the Vietnamese cadres
as to her ability to prove herself as Vietnamese
She bundled us up in blankets to make it look like we were sick and couldn't
speak
at that moment; so that's how we made it out
What did the Khmer Rouge
promise the Cambodian people?
Well, they promised them a kind of Utopia, Agrarian Utopia, where
if you remember John Lennon’s song Imagine
no possessions
no religion
In fact the only thing that people had
was a spoon which they could use to eat
the daily porridge that was given to them
porridge that was
far insufficient for the work that they had to do
in the fields; this manual labor
What the Khmer Rouge achieved essentially
what they got was
1.7 million dead as a result
and the leader
of whom I'm sure you're very familiar with is Pol Pot
He was a man who could smile at you
and order your execution the same
the same night
And in fact he himself dies in 1998 without so much of the trial in
his sleep
and he’s burnt on a pile of tires
afterwards
Now let me take it
to a point where you might you know 1.7 million people, a million here a million
there, it doesn't make any sense
So let's
take a visit to a place called Tuol Sleng
a school that was turned into a torture center
16,000 people there died
About 12 are known to have survived
this place
these classrooms were turned into torture chambers
Beds
that became medieval torture devices
chains
extracting confessions from people
This is a scene from 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia
and discovered Tuol Sleng and they wanted to document the scene
Of course the bodies of the 16,000 were buried in killing fields
but this is what happened to them before they were buried
The rules at Tuol Sleng were insane; you couldn't cry
if you were being electrocuted because
you weren’t allowed to; you'd be electrocuted some more
You could be accused of being both KGB and CIA agents at the same time
It was impossible to defeat this Kafkaesque
system of regulations
some of the devices used to torture people
I'm gonna to go through a series of pictures now of the faces of people who were deemed
to be enemies of the revolution
enemies of the organization
and who were subsequently killed at Tuol Sleng. This young man here
wears the number 17
if you can see he's, it's not very clear here, but his
number is actually pinned
to his skin
he's not, of course, complaining about that
I think he knows what's gonna happen next
The faces of the men
and women
the boys grabbed to the arm there
who were killed at Tuol Sleng
What did they do?
Girls
A mother with her infant
all executed
tortured
before their death
and they didn't discriminate between
genders
they didn't discriminate
for age
What happened was
bludgeonings
What happened was death
And yet
if you will believe me
there were people in the West
who actually supported the Revolution
who believed that what was happening in Cambodia
was actually good
These people were individuals, individuals Like Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the School of
Oriental and African Studies
who happens to have interviewed Pol Pot
on Christmas 1978
and the same night
after the interview is himself murdered
528 kilometers from here, a conference took place in Stockholm
in which
people met
on 17-18 November 1979 after the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam
to talk about how to reinstall the Khmer Rouge
into power
It was a conference not unlike ours today
pretty much
a serious conference of individuals talking about serious issues
pressing human rights abuses
Jan Myrdal, for example, was a
keynote address
He's a famous Swedish journalist
Professor Sam Noumoff of McGill University talked about the role of the Soviet Union
in the present Kampuchean crisis; I'm sure he was blaming the Soviet Union for causing
this imbalance of power
He's actually
He actually spent 40 years on the faculty at McGill University
before retiring in 2006
fully tenured
a full professor
He last wrote about
recently on Vietnam vs. Iraq, “Is there a difference?” Perhaps he should have written about
Cambodia and Iraq, will there be a difference?
There was a man by the name of George Hildebrand
who with Gareth Porter wrote one of the first books
on the Khmer Revolution
In 1976 this book came out
and it talked about essentially what a wonderful revolution took place in Cambodia
It had propaganda pictures; a picture of an operating room in the hospital
run by the Khmer Rouge
to show just how advanced they were
Well, one of the people who didn't go to this
conference was Noam Chomsky, but he did have the following to say about
the book by Hildebrand and Porter
namely that it presents a
carefully documented study
of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian
revolutionaries in overcoming it
giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies based on
a wide range of sources. This is written in 1977 and repeated more or less in
1979 in a book
that he publishes with Edward Herman
But the star of the conference
was
a woman by the name of Ieng Thirith
she was
the Minister of Social Affairs for Democratic Kampuchea, what the Khmer Rouge renamed
Cambodia
and she was the head of delegation
that came to Stockholm
There she is
fêted by
other participants
in glasses
taking a standing ovation I’m sure
Well, justice
will catch up with her but not before she has freedom for the next 30 years
Here she is with her husband Ieng Sary, who is
was the Foreign Minister for Democratic Kampuchea
He, of course,
ends up a very well-to-do man after the Revolution
In a couple of years ago Ieng Thirith ends up at the docket of the Khmer Rouge
Tribunal
finally facing some measure of justice
as does her husband
and here
the head of the prison torture center at Tuol Sleng
He's also on the docket. His case is the first one to go before trial and after four years
and over $100 million
there hasn't been a verdict yet
Though, we might yet get one soon
So, what is
the importance of having an accurate historical record? I mean I'm a professor
I want the truth. But of course if we follow George Santayana’s plea about
those who
do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
Perhaps we can be more amused by the following
namely that
mistakes maybe could be
That the purpose of your life. Our lives as victims of genocide is that
we serve as a warning to others
But if not, then at least
that genocide should have no statute of limitations
and that we should never forget
and that we should remember everything that happens