Learning to Forget in Cambodia

“Every time my wife hears the name Khmer Rouge, she starts sobbing uncontrollably” Neng Bunrong, a thirty-five-year-old tour guide from Kampung Chan in Eastern Cambodia mechanically states, interrupting a short summary of Cambodian history in front of the main entrance to the temple complex of Angkor Wat on a humid January afternoon. His wife, forty and mother of four children, witnessed the killing of twenty-four members of her family in the 1970s when Pol Pot’s young henchman came to her village. According to Bunrong, she only survived because after shooting her family, the perpetrators ran out of bullets when they came to her and instead smashed the young girl’s head and left her for dead in a shallow ditch until villagers rescued her a few hours later.

He stands next to two stone columns flanking the entrance to the Ankor Wat temple complex. They are littered with bullet holes—a silent testimony to Cambodia’s violent past and tacitly amplifying Bunrong’s horrid story.

It is cliché for a westerner to begin an article on present day Cambodia with a reference to the Khmer Rouge (or with Angkor Wat for that matter) similar to any overhasty reference to the Third Reich when discussing aspects of present day German culture. Yet as George Orwell argued in an essay in the 1940s, “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.” Thus, to leave out the Khmer Rouge in discussing present day Cambodia appears to be similar to disowning a disreputable family member; by the act of physical exclusion, they manage to permeate every family gathering more powerfully than they ever could in person.

A similar process appears to be still in the works in Cambodia where the country still has a long way to go to confront its murderous past. For example, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), having spent more than US$200 million since their establishment in 1997, has managed only to indict five people for genocide, crimes against humanity, and/or war crimes. Only Kaing Guek Eav (Comrade Duch), the warden of the infamous S-21 prison camp where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and executed, got life imprisonment. One accused died during the trial, while the proceedings were suspended for a second culprit.

Brad Adams, the director of Human Rights Watch in Asia is quoted as saying that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has spent years obstructing the proceedings of the court, a statement supported amply by many experts. One of the reasons is that the incumbent government and Hun Sen’s party, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), is still permeated with former Khmer Rouge members. Sen himself was a Khmer Rouge battalion commander before he defected to Vietnam in the 1970s. He surreptitiously took an interest in the proceedings and tried to exercise control by handpicking Cambodian judges and legal staff.

Many circles of society feel that the government should simply “let sleeping dogs lie.” When Nuon Chea, second in Pol Pot’s regime, which killed about 1.7 million Cambodians, surrendered to Hun Sen along with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge who had been hiding in the jungles of Thailand and Western Cambodia for decades, Sen stated, “The time has come to dig a hole and bury the past.” It took more than nine years to have Chea arrested and put on trial. A verdict is expected in early 2014.

This attitude is also supported by the Buddhist notion of individual helplessness (95 percent of Cambodians are Theravada Buddhists) and a belief in the supernatural where it is thought not unwise to literally disturb the sleep of the ghosts of the past. Traveling in Cambodia, one encounters many little temple shrines in villages and towns filled with offerings for the spirits haunting the innumerable “Killing Fields”. In Tuol Sleng prison (S-21), where at least 15000 inmates were murdered, every lunchtime staff member of the prison-turned-genocide-museum leaves food out for the ghosts.

One of the results of the unwillingness to publicly (and privately) accept the horrors of the Khmer Rouge is the exceptionally high rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) cases in the country. One psychiatrist estimates that 47 percent of the Cambodian population is suffering from PTSD, with around 50 percent of children born to Khmer Rouge survivors suffering from secondary PTSD. According to the journalist Joel Brinkley’s account, even Khieu Kanharith, the government information minister, is suffering from PTSD-induced recurring nightmares of finding his family on the ground on their knees when he returned home for execution in the 1970s. One of the automatic coping mechanisms of people affected by PTSD is the avoidance of people, places, and situations that trigger memories of the traumatic event, yet merely relying on this one coping strategy will guarantee violent throwbacks and continued suffering if otherwise left untreated.

Cambodia has experienced high economic growth rates in the last decade fuelled by the garment industry, which employs around 500,000 (mostly female) workers and accounts for some US$5 billion in exports each year, which constitutes around 70 percent of all exports. The current protests by the garment industry workers that have pressured the government also have seen its fair share of Khmer Rouge analogies. As Sun Thun, a protester and teacher from Kampong Thom province, put it, "During the Pol Pot regime, the government was very cruel and killed people. It is the same today." Due to the inadequate public debate on the subject, Pol Pot still seems to surreptitiously insert himself into the political discourse; this has belittled the magnitude of the slaughter in the 1970s.

In one way, all of this is understandable; there is some truth to Hun Sen’s statement that it is necessary to bury the past in order to move on—at least for a while. Under Hun Sen, despite being a despicable ruthless power-obsessed quasi-autocrat, the country has lived in relative peace and seen unprecedented economic development for the last decade—something quite revolutionary given Cambodia’s recent history. Perhaps then it is necessary to temporally practice “strategic forgetfulness” rather than quixotically embark on a crusade to do justice, even if the heavens fall.

Something like strategic forgetfulness—a temporary forced amnesia until memories of the past are not as fresh and vivid—can of course never be official government policy; however, even in Europe, countries such as Austria and Germany after the Second World War subconsciously (often with both tacit and open government support) practiced strategic forgetfulness. In both countries, there was a silent and a tacit consensus not to talk openly about what had happened between 1933 and 1945, a consensus that was often amplified by PTSD. As a result, many lower-ranking mass murderers, war criminals, and architects of the Holocaust were never brought to justice, and former Nazis occupied high positions in both the private and public sectors for decades.

Inadvertently, this code of silence also inhibited the expansion of a more open democratic discourse in both countries well into the later decades of the twentieth century by generating an atmosphere where certain debates could just not be held and people in power not challenged. As a consequence, it took the wider public in both countries decades to grasp the magnitude of what happened during the Nazi dictatorship. As was the case in Europe in the twentieth century, in Cambodia today, time is justice’s biggest opponent.

Austria and Germany were of course democracies during this period in a way that Cambodia has never been. Cambodia’s autocratic structure—formed in spite of its ostensibly democratic institutions—only strengthens the code of silence, and vice versa. It is a small step from personally refusing to talk about one subject (one’s own history during the Khmer Rouge period) to accepting external censorship from powers above (the Cambodian government’s suppression of opposition activities). Self-censorship and censorship require the same mindset.

As the saying goes, “you can throw nature out the window with a pitchfork, and yet she will always return through the backdoor.” By subconsciously suppressing discussions on the genocide in Cambodia, the nation guarantees that the effects will linger, poisoning politics for years to come. The more the public and the government refuse to deal with this period, the more forcefully it will return through the backdoor.

Franz-Stefan Gady is a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute, where he was a program associate and founding member of the Worldwide Cybersecurity Initiative. Follow him on Twitter (@HoansSolo).

Photo Credit: Earth Hour Global

The ideas presented in Threading the Needle have received positive coverage in Chinese-language media, from the Global Times, Xinhua, Sohu and Sina, as well as on many other significant media and social media platforms. 

Global Times - http://world.huanqiu.com/interview/2014-02/4829899.html

China Jiangsu - http://news.jschina.com.cn/system/2014/02/14/020250830.shtml

Sina - http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2014-02-14/023529470416.shtml

Sohu - http://mil.sohu.com/20140214/n394988608.shtml

EastDay - http://news.eastday.com/eastday/13news/auto/news/world/u7ai747904_K4.html

Renren - http://share.renren.com/keywords/2403508

Rise of China - http://risechina.blogspot.com/2014/02/threading-needle-concurrent.html

USA Life Online - http://www.usalifeonline.com/news/bencandy.php?&fid=54&id=73242

China Review News - http://hk.crntt.com/crn-webapp/touch/detail.jsp?coluid=148&kindid=0&docid=103025387

Net Ease - http://news.163.com/14/0214/08/9L1G7RIO000146BE.html

21CN - http://news.21cn.com/hotnews/a/2014/0214/08/26407789.shtml

Kaixian.tv - http://www.kaixian.tv/gd/2014/0214/2023116.html

April Media - http://news.m4.cn/2014-02/1224214.shtml

VHTeam - http://www.vhteam.cn/feed/1259095

Photo Credit: ArtsieAspie

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In a February 14 Global Times interview, Firestein details the findings of Threading the Needle, which he co-authored with Piin-Fen Kok, Director of EWI’s China, East Asia and United States program.

Firestein emphasized the major innovations set forth in the report. One that drew particular attention was the idea of “concurrent unilateralism.” This concept recommends that the U.S. and China take actions unilaterally and not as part of a deal, as U.S. policy prevents Washington from making deals or directly consulting with China on the issue of arms sales to Taiwan. But they both could take their own actions on this issue at the same time. 

Other innovations include proposing a monetary cap on arms sales that would bring the U.S. into compliance with its commitments as stipulated in the 1982 Communique. The report also calls on China to move one of its short-range ballistic missile brigades out of range of Taiwan as a proportional confidence-building gesture. 

Firestein noted that the report grew out of extensive consultations in Washington, Beijing and Taipei, and that policymakers and scholars in all three cities provided valuable input that strengthened the report. He added that the findings of the report are being communicated to policymakers and officials in both the U.S. and Chinese governments, and that the initial response to these ideas has been encouraging.

The interview also touched on other issues pertaining to the U.S.-China relationship, including President Obama’s upcoming visit to Asia, China’s new leadership and the idea of a “new type of great power relations.” Below are some highlights from Firestein’s interview.

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On developing a cap on arms sales:

“This process essentially ‘modernizes’ the Communique and translates it into current dollar terms so that policymakers now have a very precise sense for what the 1982 Communique means today for U.S. arms sales to Taiwan… No other scholars had ever crunched these numbers, but now, as a result of our work, the numbers are on the table and, as George Shultz, who was U.S. Secreary of State when the 1982 Communique was signed, has stated, they are now ‘demystified.’”  

On the role of U.S. business interests in arms sales to Taiwan:

“We see the driving consideration in the U.S.-mainland China-Taiwan dynamic as ideology, not money. What drives arms sales—including Taiwan’s own requests for U.S. arms—is the stark disparity between the mainland’s and Taiwan’s political and social systems and, relatedly, Taiwan’s sense of insecurity relative to the mainland, not profit-seeking by U.S. defense contractors. As we noted in our report, as long as there is such a stark disparity between the mainland and Taiwan’s political and social systems, arms sales will continue.”

On a “new type of great power relations”:

“China places a lot of stock in the notion of a ‘new model of great power relations’… I don’t think the concept resonates that well in Washington. I think most people in Washington believe that foreign policy is driven principally by a nation’s interests and values. In this way of looking at things, how U.S.-China relations develop over the coming years or decades will primarily be a function of the degree to which U.S. and Chinese interests converge or diverge, and this tends to unfold ‘case by case,’ ‘issue by issue.’ I don’t think any overarching intellectual construct, such as ‘new type of great power relations,’ fundamentally changes this dynamic.”  

On President Obama’s “real intentions toward China” with regards to arms sales:

“There is a broad and enduring bipartisan consensus in the United States that continuing to sell arms to Taiwan advances U.S. interests and helps maintain the region’s peace and stability. That said, I don’t think the issue of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan is the right litmus test (from a Chinese perspective) for a U.S. president’s ‘real intentions toward China.’ All U.S. presidents sell significant quantities of U.S. arms to Taiwan—on average, about a billion dollars a year worth. Perhaps a better litmus test of presidential intentions is his willingness to invest personal time and energy in meeting his counterpart and personally set the tone for the relationship. By this measure, I think President Obama can rightly be regarded as one of the most active advocates of and contributors to improved U.S.-China ties in recent years.”  

Click here for the full interview (in Chinese). 

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Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, discussed U.S.-Russian relations from both historic and present-day standpoints. Though the two countries share common interests, their perspectives diverge significantly on three issues: Snowden, Syria and Sochi.

EWI President John Mroz introduced Stent at the event, which was well attended by members of the foreign policy community and press. A lively discussion followed her presentation. 

Building on President Barack Obama’s comments that he wants to “pause and reassess” ties with Russia, Stent echoed that we are now in a down cycle of collaboration, particularly fueled by the Snowden issue, which is a “new low point in the bilateral relationship.” 

As detailed in her book, Stent defined a series of four “resets” in U.S.–Russian relations since the Soviet Union’s collapse, beginning with nuclear disarmament and ending with the 2011 Moscow protests. Stent highlighted the disproportionate importance of personal relations between the two countries’ leaders in how the states have interacted post-Cold War. She described the varying rapport between top officials—from President Obama and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. 

Stent pointed to several instances where the U.S. has hindered a more productive bilateral relationship over the years, including, most recently, the Magntisky Act, a bill passed by the U.S. Congress that specifically targeted Russian citizens accused of corruption and human rights abuses. She noted that when it comes to criticizing Russia for human rights violations, it’s important for the U.S. to “sit back and do a cost-benefit analysis.” But she also argued that the United States should not retreat from its principles, particularly when there are issues such as the Kremlin’s increased pressure on NGOs  and legislation targeting gays.

While recognizing the role that public rhetoric plays in U.S.–Russian relations, Stent pointed to opportunities for the two countries to collaborate, with a “cadre of people below the top level” who can communicate and build trust.

Although there is “no golden key” to change the nature of the relationship, Stent urged the U.S. to adopt a more balanced and realistic approach to Russia. She mentioned a key issue of respect, which some have accused the U.S. of lacking, amounting to “an empathy deficit disorder.” The areas she highlighted as opportunities for future partnership include Iran, Syria and economic growth, particularly trade. Right now, she pointed out, U.S.–Russia trade amounts to $40 billion a year, which constitutes less than 2 percent of U.S. total trade. 

The Limits of Partnership has received praise in international news outlets, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. “Her compelling book provides perhaps the most comprehensive and sober—as well as sobering—assessment of relations across the past two decades,” the FT wrote. For more information on Stent’s book, and to purchase a copy, visit Princeton University Press. 

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“Her compelling book provides perhaps the most comprehensive and sober–as well as sobering–assessment of relations across the past two decades.”  
Financial Times, Frosty Points in Post-Cold War Politics

“Ms. Stent tells the story clearly and dispassionately.”
The Economist, Russia and America: Testy Relations

“Ms. Stent gives a comprehensive overview of the obstacles that have prevented a closer relationship.” 
The Wall Street Journal, Book Review: The Limits of Partnership

Stent is professor of government and foreign service and director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. She is also the author of Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe. 

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