From the Land of Shadows

War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora

Khatharya Um

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479876327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.

Part I

Life and Death under the Khmer Rouge

The Prisoner

His eyes grow accustomed to the darkness of the room. The presences that his mind, dulled from extreme hunger and fatigue, has sensed earlier are human forms stretched out on the floor . . . twisted forms, some semi-naked, angling for comfort in this condensed pack of humanity. He tries to mentally feel his shackled legs. They are attached to a long wooden manacle, with an iron bar that was slid through to secure them. A picture flashes through his mind: “These are not humans!” They are like trey chhae, those smoked fish that his father used to take to the town’s market at the end of the fishing season, brittle and held together by a wooden stick pierced through their mouths [chakac trey chhae]. Some part of his mind laughs at the drollness of this mental image. One cannot say the Revolution has not achieved anything; even the shackles have been communalized.1

The Revolution has indeed changed its face. When he was a little boy, there were many months when his father would leave his family for the jungle. It was the time of the Issarak,2 the anticolonial resistance. He could still hear his father’s voice—low and pensive through the dim of the evening light—telling him that, in those days, there were only three principles that a revolutionary had to remember: to treat each other as equals, to assist one’s comrades in times of need, and to believe in one’s ability to achieve one’s goals. The movement has since been injected with new blood, and those ideals are long buried under secrecy, deception, and a revolutionary absolutism that justifies all. In the twilight of his years, his father could no longer discern that simple but binding spirit in the young village boys who came to urge his re-involvement with the movement. They spoke a different revolutionary language, of “class struggle,” of Khmers killing Khmers. He recalled his father softly uttering, “Others are painting our face.” The nocturnal visits became more frequent, and the appeal more insistent. When he finally left, it was without a word, without ceremony. By then, the nightly visits of persuasion had acquired a hard edge. | The Prisoner

Now he understands. In the pitch darkness of his cell, he sees things ever more clearly. Ideological rhetoric aside, Khmer hands are indeed taking Khmer lives. Many of the old faces, names, and heroic intentions have been consumed by the dust of history, made to “disappear” by a party whose paranoia has led it to view its own history as the ultimate contradiction. The Padevat (revolution) could easily be termed pak-devat3 (factionalism)—internecine, self-consuming, with roots that extended all the way to the genesis of the movement. The history of the party is a history of betrayal—betrayal by outsiders, betrayal by each other.

In the darkness of the makeshift prison, past and present weave a seamless reality. His mind, dulled with pain and confusion, gropes for reason, his lifeline out of the abyss. Somewhere in the recesses of the past lies the explanation for all this seeming irrationality. This is no madness, but a chartable course of the nation’s hopes and disenchantment; of myths and wounding reality; of blinding faith and betrayal; of utopian ideas and dystopia.

Somewhere down the corridor, a door slams, jerking him back to reality. A woman’s voice whimpers in the dark.

1

Violence in Utopia

And the black crows drop the lovea fruits all throughout the land. . . . Blood will flow until it reaches the belly of the elephant before peace would return. . . . During that cursed era, the people will be so driven by hunger and deprivation that they would run behind a dog, fighting over a grain of rice, stuck to its tail. . . . There will be houses but no people to live in them, roads but no one to walk on them.

—Puth Tomney (Predictions of Puth)1

He greeted my question about the Khmer Rouge era with a sigh, and with an unsteady gait that contrasted with his sinewy body, honed by years of toil, moved toward the altar that filled a corner of the prayer hall, a dimly lit converted carport of a well-worn bungalow that now serves as a place of worship. In his late seventies, widowed and childless from the genocide, Lok Ta (grandfather)2 Tip found whatever solace and meaning he could in this room, shielded from the disorder and cacophony of a life dislocated and estranged in America’s inner city. Lighting an incense, he uttered the stanza from the Puth Tomney, an ancient prophecy that, though few can recall it in its entirety, has been worked into the Khmer understanding of their own history. When life became reduced to an infernal existence, as it did for many who lived through samay a-pot (the Pol Pot era), some turned to these oracles for the meaning that eluded them. Even those looking cursorily at Democratic Kampuchea could discern a poignant resonance in the prophetic words uttered centuries ago, in the hunger so abject that it dehumanized and the loss measured by the emptiness of homes and villages. The Khmer Rouge khaek khmao (black crows) had indeed sown their ideological lovea in their promise of a new order, so tantalizing amidst the decadence and decay of the ancien régime. Like the fruit, enticing on the outside but filled with gnats, Khmer communism was exposed in its deceptiveness by the bloody hand of the revolution.

In a world where “gourds sink and shards float”3 (khlok lich, ambeng andet), in that seeming inversion of the natural order that defied human comprehension, the unreal reality of their experiences perhaps could be grasped only with the elemental fatalism of myths and prophecies. In times of flux, there is solace in the belief that even the most seemingly irrational experiences have been foretold. To those desperately grasping for meaning and order, these prophecies lend coherence to an uncertain world. Above all, they provided hope: “The reign of the thmils [infidels, nonbelievers] would last only seven years, seven months and seven days.” For many survivors, it was the belief in the inevitability of things that comforted them when reason failed, and it was the belief in the impermanence of things that sustained them through nearly four years of infernal existence.

The first stories that filtered out of Democratic Kampuchea stunned the world. Upon the Khmer Rouge seizure of power in April 1975, the country, led by a faceless leadership known only as “Angkar” (the Organization), was sealed off from outside scrutiny by a virtual autarky that was pried open only by the arrival of refugees at the Thai-Cambodian border. The gruesome tales they brought out with them only reinforced the impression of an “otherworldliness” that heretofore had been widely associated only with the Jewish Holocaust. Skeletal human beings, physically and psychically ravaged by starvation and terror, bore witness to some of the most unspeakable of human experiences. Horror became disbelief. Many in the West who supported the Khmer Rouge readily dismissed accounts of mass atrocities as a campaign by governments already implicated in past deception to discredit revolutionary Kampuchea. The denial that sprang from the visceral human need to avert our gaze from horror acquired an intellectual rationale with the appearance of “inconsistencies” in survivors’ accounts that were readily held up as self-serving “exaggerations and wholesale falsehood”4 fabricated by refugees accused of being on the payroll of the CIA5 or motivated by their desire for asylum.6 The thin whispers of truth were silenced. Of the complicity of the West, Francois Bizot wrote, “What oppresses me more still than the unclosed eyes of the dead . . . is the way the West applauded the Khmer Rouge. . . . The ovation was so frenzied as to drown out the protracted wailing of the millions being massacred.”7 If, as Terrence Des Pres asserts, “the worst torment is not being able to speak,”8 a greater tragedy is not to be believed, for where in the former there is always hope for voice, in the latter, the whole experience is nullified.

It has since been established that developments in Democratic Kampuchea were far more complex than previously thought, and that both the descriptions of and the explanations for what transpired in 1975–1979 were far from uniform or simplistic. Areal and temporal variations were features of the chaotic reality of Democratic Kampuchea. Rather than fabrications and half-truths, inconsistencies and even contradictions in survivor accounts reflected not just the constraints of the traumatic experience that kept their “eyes fixed to the ground by every single minute’s needs”9 and of traumatic recall,10 but also the prevailing structural and political conditions engendered by the existence of disparate power centers and the sanguinary push by the Pol Potist-dominated Party Center to consolidate its totalistic control.11 Following the seizure of power in 1975, Democratic Kampuchea was divided into seven administrative zones12—the Northwest, North, Northeast, East, Southwest, West, and Center, and two “special regions” of Kratie and Siemreap, which were later consolidated into six zones in 1977. These zones conformed not to prewar provincial borders but to Khmer Rouge wartime divisions, representing not only different administrative jurisdictions but also disparate and previously quasi-autonomous power bases. Differences among the Khmer Rouge groups were discernible during the evacuation of Phnom Penh in the information given to cadres, in the level of brutality with which the evacuations were carried out, and in the early administration of the zones.13

That the lack of uniformity could not be attributed to the chaos of the moment was underscored by the fact that it continued to register over time. Differences in the way policies were implemented, particularly with regard to the treatment of urban evacuees and presumed “class enemies,” were discernible from one area to another, and from one period to another within the same locale. In some places, mass relocation was conducted immediately after Khmer Rouge forces entered the area, markets and commerce were disallowed, and money largely ceased to have any value. There, traditional social practices were also banned and communal eating enforced soon thereafter. In some villages, Buddhist monks were forcibly defrocked and assigned tasks that violated Buddhist precepts; some were conscripted into military units.14 In those areas, policies regulating movement and activities were strictly enforced, while executions and disappearances began almost immediately. In certain locales, reprisals targeted only high-ranking individuals, while elsewhere they were also directed at rank-and-file soldiers and their families.

At the other extreme were places where population relocation was delayed, markets continued to function longer, communal eating was introduced much later, and religious and cultural activities, elsewhere considered “arcane traditionalism,” were tolerated. Surviving refugees recalled that in parts of the East, Buddhist monks were permitted to remain in the temples and preside over weddings and other traditional celebrations until 1976. Similarly, in the West, a former worker at a coffee plantation in Pailin noted that traditional ceremonies were still performed openly in his area as late as 1977,15 while nuns reportedly were allowed to reside at the local monastery in Boeung Reng until early 1976. In those comparatively benign areas, treatment of “class enemies” was relatively tempered, hunger never reached starvation level, and work quotas, though exacting, were manageable largely because of better food rations, and in some instances because urban relocatees were given time to ease into their new situation. With more lax surveillance and investigation, evacuees with “tainted” biographies could hide their background and elude Angkar’s terror web. Those whose identities were exposed were subjected to punitive sentences, including hard labor, but not necessarily executed. Many returning elites and intellectuals were sent to reeducation camps to “shed” (chamrous) their individualism and class consciousness rather than being summarily killed. In some cities, including Phnom Penh and Battambang, workers were retained at local factories, and others were brought back from the countryside, at least temporarily, to train new recruits.

Variations registered not only among locales and different segments of the population, but also temporally, largely coinciding with the internal strife that erupted soon after victory. As the Party Center,16 also known simply as the “Center,” aggressively moved to consolidate its control, arrests and purges not only of the leadership but often of entire networks intensified. The deployment of cadres from other zones into the area often resulted in changes in local conditions, in some cases for better and, in other cases, for worse.

For the most part, because of repeated relocation, individual experiences under the Khmer Rouge rarely fall into any one extreme, and were not constant. At any given time, one’s experience depended on a number of factors, such as class, age, and gender, when and where one was resettled, the nature of the leadership who had discretionary power over life and death, and above all, one’s sociopolitical classification. In Democratic Kampuchea, the class structure of the ancien régime was replaced by a new social order17 that differentiated among those officially classified as having full rights, candidates, and depositees,18 or more simply between base peasants (mulathan)19 or “old people” (neak chas), and neak chaleas (relocatees) or “new people” (neak thmey).20 While the Khmer Rouge professed to have done away with classism (vannak niyum), these sociopolitical categories in fact constituted a new social hierarchy, with base peasants at the zenith of the structure of power and privilege, with rights and access to resources not available to the “new” people. Of this new social reality, Locard observed, “In fact, this Marxist language was nothing but a cover to describe a reality, which in practice, had its origins in ancient Southeast Asian traditions: the victor had the right to make an entire people his prisoners, and to reduce them to some sort of slavery.”21 Like the war captives of ancient Cambodia, the “new people” were, in the eyes of the victorious regime, disfranchised chhleuy,22 stripped, as Giorgio Agamben contends, to “bare life,”23 stripped not just of their rights but of their humanity, to be exploited and discarded at will. Unlike chattel slaves, who could at least count on their economic worth to ensure survival, the majority of the “new people” had no such buffer in the necropolitical world24 of Democratic Kampuchea, where, to evoke Hannah Arendt, they had no right to have rights. Whereas Foucault’s panopticon is delimited by the bounded space, what survivors term kouk ot chanchaing (prison without walls) into which the entire country was transformed mirrors Achille Mbembe’s “death world,” in which social existence was defined by the “absolut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Historical Timeline
• Introduction
• Part I. Life and Death under the Khmer Rouge
• Part II. Historicizing Diaspora
• Part III. Cambodian/Americans and the Legacies of Genocide
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author