A Cambodian woman confronts the man whom she holds responsible for the death of her family and other villagers under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime when she was a child.
This text will be replaced
Countdown. Video hosted on Youtube. Ahe man has never been brought to trial and still lives in the same village. Once again he holds a prominent position, working at a pagoda as a healer and 'Deacon of Death', or leader of cremation ceremonies. She decides to collect evidence against him. He must stand trial. The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the totalitarian ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan.
This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering and the deaths this caused. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Brutal and arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1976 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.
Khmer Rouge means 'Red Khmers' in French, the administrative language of colonial-era Cambodia (the Khmer people are the major ethnic group in Cambodia). The term was originally coined by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Cambodian Head of State between 1955 and 1970, to describe the Cambodian left.
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge era saw more than 1.5 million people die. The long awaited trial of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia passed a significant milestone this week, with the ground rules for the legal landmark finally being set. But the setting up of the court has come at an agonising slow pace. It is more than 27 years since the genocidal regime was ousted, following the deaths of at least one and a half million people. 101 East's Teymoor Nabili hears from those that suffered during the Khmer Rouge era and discusses the trial's impact on Cambodia with some of the leading experts on the country.
The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. The Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, combined extremist ideology, ethnic animosity, and a disregard for human life to produce murder on a massive scale. As hundreds of thousands of people slowly starved in the rice fields, a select number met their fate inside Khmer Rouge interrogation centers. The most famous of these centers, codenamed S-21, was located in the abandoned suburban Phnom Penh high school of Tuol Sleng ("hill of the poison tree"). To the Tuol Sleng neighborhood, S-21 was known simply as konlaenh choul min dael chenh - "the place where people go in but never come out." Over 17,000 prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed there - only a handful survived. For S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE, two survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters - prison guards, interrogators, a doctor and a photographer - return to the site, which now houses a genocide museum, to excavate the past. The singularity of the film lies in a confrontation between the survivors, who want to understand what happened so they can warn future generations, and the jailers, who seem stupefied as they re-live the horror to which they contributed. Poeuv, a prison guard, started at S21 when he was 12. He describes his daily task of preventing the prisoners, driven mad by their suffering, from breaking free of their handcuffs and jumping out the window. He and the other former guards sit, wearing embarrassed smiles, trying to explain why they did what they did. They evoke the slogans ("the sublime blood of workers and peasants" and "pulling out the weed at the root"), and recall the murder of entire families. When Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh was 11, his sisters and parents were murdered by the regime, and he was sent out to a labor camp. In 1979, he made it to France and managed to win entry to IDHEC (the leading French film school). "I wasn't born in the cinema world, but I had to find a way to tell this story." Although holding the Khmer Rouge accountable is important, where does one draw the line? Panh says he would like to see the highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders, who are still alive, put on trial. But he knows that, ultimately, a tribunal won't solve anything, it won't bring his parents back to life. What is more urgent is to help Cambodians work on their personal memories. He hopes his films will be a stimulus for just that, "It is a question of who we are, where we come from, how we explain ourselves to our children." And it is important not just for Cambodians, but for all of us.
From: AlJazeera.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
