Photo by Alan M Thornton
Ask him again.
But we’ve already asked him.
Ask him in a different way.
But it doesn’t happen like this in our culture.
What do you mean? There is no cause and effect in Cambodia? I want to know how his treatment under the Khmer Rouge has impacted his life. I’m just not sure I’m asking the right question.
But he said there is no impact.
It’s not true; ask him again.
I was into my third hour interviewing a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, and everyone was tired. The survivor, a farmer from a province three hours north of Phnom Penh, had already described the most horrific experience––his pregnant wife’s stomach being cut open and the fetus removed by soldiers who planned to dry and consume it, supposedly to gain magical powers.
He spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone, though he was clearly upset, clenching his jaw, twitching in his seat and furiously rubbing tiger balm across his forehead and under his nose. I probably shouldn’t have pushed, but he had come seeking help. He wanted to tell his story, and I wanted to give him the opportunity to name what he was feeling and to admit that the horrors inflicted on him and his family under the Khmer Rouge were still impacting him. But he hadn’t considered the length or detail of such an interview, or that he would be asked to scrutinize his suffering. I looked at the evidence of his agitation––tiger balm now smeared across every inch of his face––and said that we were done. He was free to leave.
I was in Cambodia working through one of the country’s few psychosocial organizations, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO Cambodia), to record people’s testimonies about war. The patients who came to TPO were primarily witnesses chosen to testify in the country’s war crimes tribunal, called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or the ECCC. Charges had been brought against a handful of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, those deemed most responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians in the mid to late 1970s. Across Cambodia, the details of life under the Khmer Rouge regime were emerging through court testimony and in the press. TPO had been asked to counsel witnesses from the start and, each day of the six-month trial, staff members sat inside the courtroom, available for questions and support. The organization found itself bombarded with calls from people suddenly unable to sleep, overcome with anger and aggressive behavior, suffering from severe headaches or crying fits. Everyone wanted to know how to stop the pain.
TPO, overwhelmed and understaffed, agreed for me to work with them last summer as fieldwork for my research on storytelling in postconflict societies. It was one of the few organizations I had found trying testimony therapy, a method used to illicit traumatic memories and allow survivors to begin healing. My job was to interview and photograph official witnesses, as well as those rejected by the court process but who still desperately needed to have their testimonies heard. The goal was to compile historic records, aid emotional healing and encourage other Cambodians to speak.
I recruited a talented photographer friend and colleague, Alan M Thornton, to join me in Phnom Penh to create the survivor portraits, then packed up my then 3-year-old son and headed to Asia.
What I thought would be an experience similar to what I’d done in Iraq years earlier, documenting survivor stories and history, became a much larger journey into the politics of trauma and secondary trauma, and the immense differences in how cultures define, respond to and treat illness.
Thank you for allowing my story on Cambodia so much space in the recent issue of the Reporter, and for including so many portraits and testimonies of Khmer Rouge survivors. I was disappointed, however, that you chose to edit out the paragraph that justifies culturally sensitive psychosocial interventions, the learning of which was the entire reason I was in Cambodia. The point edited out is that regardless of the criticism of Western intervention methods -- of medical imperialism, jeopardizing local coping mechanisms, etc. -- the fact is that war and violence creates trauma. There is no reason to believe that the physiological and cognitive experiences that underlie the human response to trauma are any less active or relevant in an Asian culture than in a Western country. There are certainly resilience factors in many different communities, (and immense study on how people working with war-affected communities might enhance those factors) and manifestation of trauma greatly varies in both form and intensity. But many argue, myself included, that the neglect of the impact of trauma is more politically-motivated, allowing abuse and exploitation to go unchallenged. What is different in other countries is the social meaning attributed to the experiences and, more importantly, to the approach to recovery.
Beautiful and touching narrative of Zelie's compassionate work with TPO helps us better understand how humanity needs to grow and share!
I did not serve in Vietnam, rejected as unfit, details omitted.
I am so happy to hear of the work in Cambodia to help people abused past redemption by Pol Pot and his agrarian marxist vision. I have met vets and refugees from the Southeast Asian (SEA) Peninsula over the years. I wrote a paper in college, which concluded that as with other marxist revolutions, when "peace broke out" in SEA the killing would begin in earnest. That is the a feature of marxism, that non-believers who might offer resistance are dealt with switfly.
The vivisection of pregnant females to obtain a fetus for "fun" was not limited to Cambodia, but regularly practiced in Laos and South Vietnam, and a long time before it happened as related here. The consummate depravity and perfection of terrorism as a tool by communists in SEA is well documented, as early as 1960.
All this information was there if you dug into it, as I did. After April of 1975, the plight of all the people abandoned by our poltical class was similarly available and is documented, if not in the detail here. Totaling up, about 5M in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam perished at the hands of the communist masters so attractive to John Kerry and other luminaries.
Joan Baez tried to organize a concert to raise money to aid refugees, as the atrocities got too big for apologist media to hide, and could not attract any support from the former "peace" community. All I can say is I guess they are like good Germans in 1944. Anything goes as long as I am fine and the "right people" are getting hurt.
Is there a lesson in this project? Many, I think.
The first one is what will you do to prevent such atrocity in the future? This nightmare is the work of men, it is not ordained, and particularly this one was created by a US Congress too afraid of "peace activists" to sell rifle ammo to the South Vietnamese as the communists came across the DMZ in bald violation of the Paris Peace Accords.
The second is what did the great moralists of peace do when the killing shifted into high gear? Nothing. What does that say about them as people? The numbers (and damn McNamara, too) are that the "peacetime" body count escalated by multiples from the height of US engagement in the war.
Where was Jane Fonda when this was going on? She wasn't walking in the street, protesting organized murder even more effective than the Final Solution.
I find it very admirable that SFR has printed this article. I am in awe of Zelie and Alan, that they could do this and retain their sanity and hope. I hope deeply that some in Cambodia may appreciate that we here care a bit, and forgive us our easy cowardice when, in fact, the war on the ground was going the right way. It was the war of politics where Pol Pot won, and turned loose on his countrymen. And this country turned its eyes away.
I remain, as for some time, disgusted and angry past redemption that Zelie and Alan, those went before them and told accurately of what was happening in SEA, have to witness a truth inconvenient to polticians and opportunists, current and past, pretenders to moral superiority in all manner of things. But that's my problem.
Unless you think the better solution is to prevent this kind of horror than try to help after it has done its work.
We cannot win all fights. I have no illusions about that. To understand what is happening on the ground in the horror of war (and it is a horror) you have to dig with an open mind.
John Kerry has announced from Pakistan that the tail rotor of the "...Navy helicopter" lost in the raid to get Osama. Kerry sells himself as a warrior and Vietnam vet, sometimes, a man of military experience.
If this quote is accurate, however, he didn't watch Obama's victory lap at Ft. Campbell. SEALs belong to the Navy, but all the aircraft in this op came from the 160th SOAR. Army aircraft, and no disrepect to USN, the 160th is just the best there is at doing this kind of op.
What else does Kerry not know?
I would also point out a huge difference between the US engagement in SEA and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US could walk from SEA without comebacks. Ho, the Pathet Lao and Pol Pot had all they could handle dealing with killing off any potential opposition, and later fighting among themselves for who would rule the Peninsula. Ho lost.
Pol Pot, Ho and others could talk about the success of communism in SEA and how history was on their side, but they really didn't have global ambitions, or by any means global reach.
Radical Islam, as opposed to people I have met in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has global ambitions, and has global reach. Er, if you didn't figure that out in 2001, just ride with me. It's true.
Not sure what the right path is, but we are in a fight we need to win. We cannot walk on this one and hunker down.
War is horrible. And the sorriest (worse) state of a person is that they have nothing at all they would fight for. Life is so empty one cannot be stirred to preserve it. Smarter people than me figured that out, but I will bet my life on the concept.
Life is not for the faint, sorry. You can be inoffensive, diverse and multicultural all you want. I've been there and done it, in the muslim world and other places. And bad people with ugly intent may or may not find you, appreciative of your willingness to be their victim.
Is that what you really want? What you bring to the world, your friends, you family?