Cambodia’s Silent War
During the years of 1975-1979, Cambodia suffered one of the most brutal and effective genocidal terrors in the history of mankind. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army killed up to 2 million people through execution, torture, forced labor and starvation. Pot separated families, removed all intellectuals (even those who wore glasses were threatened), documented meticulously the torture of thousands of individuals, and sent hundreds of thousands into work camps in the countryside. The physical onslaught stopped when Vietnam invaded in 1979; but the psychological scars have yet––more than 30 years later––to be reckoned with.
The Cambodian government calls it a kind of reconciliation that its citizens, majority Buddhist, prefer silence to evoking any “spirit of revenge.” Today, former Khmer leaders have found their way back into positions of power without much outcry, and many textbooks devote no more than 10 lines of description to the years of the regime.
Some who have pushed for public displays of remembrance have been accused of trying to provoke violence. Rather than partake in any meaningful process to reconcile the past, the prime minister (himself former Khmer Rouge) once famously stated that victims of the regime should “dig a hole and bury the past.”
While survivors may have found a coping mechanism in keeping stories of their experience to themselves (particularly while those who committed atrocities have yet to be prosecuted), succeeding generations are demanding more accountability. Many feel that accurate documentation is one important way to make sure history is known, and to ensure that something like Pol Pot’s regime is never repeated.
It was into this setting of silence and repression, beginning to lift under court testimony, that Alan and I walked. Our entrée into Cambodian society was through TPO’s director, Dr. Sotheara Chhim. I had first written to Dr. Chhim after reading his expert testimony on trauma for the ECCC during the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch.
A survivor of the Khmer Rouge and one of the country’s first psychiatrists, Dr Chhim was formally trained as a medical doctor, but came upon so many cases of post-Khmer Rouge psychological disturbances that he turned to psychiatry.
“After the regime ended in 1979, Cambodians had lost the structures that would have allowed them to heal from trauma. There was no family, no teachers, no doctors, no monks, no honoring of the dead, no comfort, no closure and no justice. The very institutions that would help Cambodia recover from the immense trauma no longer existed,” Chhim told the court.
One of Chhim’s methods of treatment included testimony therapy.
Testimony therapy was first developed by Chilean psychologists Elizabeth Lira and Eugenia Weinstein following the Augusto Pinochet regime. Using the pseudonyms Cienfuegos and Monelli, the two initially set out to interview former political prisoners in order to document the oppression. They realized the process of giving testimony seemed to help the survivors of the regime: It restructured an idea of self and provided new perspectives about the past in a person’s own voice, replacing the voice of the perpetrator.
In Cambodia, testimony therapy is combined with a public reading and sometimes a purification ritual. TPO’s participants were taken to the notorious killing fields, where thousands of people were murdered during the regime. There, a Buddhist monk blessed the testimonies and the survivors. During one session, a man wailed for two hours without pause. He phoned TPO the next day to offer thanks. After 30 years, he said, a painful thorn had been removed from his heart.
For me, working in Cambodia was a chance to see first-hand how testimony therapy worked in postconflict societies, and if such a process could be administered by nontherapeutically trained professionals. Cambodia was a window into how one could face and overcome trauma through testimony, even decades later.
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?