Cambodian Traditional Music: A Revival

This week I watched the 2003 PBS documentary The Flute Player (conveniently available on Hulu) in preparation for the "Season of Cambodia" arts festival. The Season of Cambodian arts festival is happening throughout April and May in New York with multiple exhibits and talks throughout the city. The film gave a good background on the arts in Cambodia, and notably how Pol Pot stifled arts and culture during the Khmer Rouge and through the Cambodian Civil War. The Khmer Rouge (and multiple other dictatorships) targeted artists because they employed great amounts of self-expression--directly against the Rouge's dogma. The Cambodian Master Performers Program (now called Cambodian Living Arts) is attempting to revive Khmer art and culture, namely music, and make Cambodia not "known for [the] killing fields or political conflicts" but rather "arts and culture" as an "international signature" (Arn Chorn-Pond in The Flute Player).

Arn Chorn-Pond at a Thai
refugee camp.

Arn Chorn-Pond is the son of an opera performer and opera house owner--and was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge took over. He was forced into a labor camp, but when the Khmer Rouge wanted to create a music group spreading their propaganda, he was able to play the flute and save himself. He still feels immense "survivor's guilt" and to mitigate this, he teaches Cambodian children music at a school in Lowell, Massachusetts as well as founded the Cambodian Master Performers Program.

In The Flute Player, he goes to Cambodia to find former artists that were suppressed by the Khmer Rouge, interviews them, and records their music. He does this with a total of five artists in the film: Kung Nai, Chek Mach, Yim Saing, Nong Chok, and Youn Mek. He meets with Kung Nai (below), known as the "Cambodian Ray Charles" for his blues style music and the fact that he is blind. He plays the chapei dong veng, or a guitar-like instrument. During the Khmer Rouge, Nai was forced to sing about the landowning class and capitalist exploitation, and although he did not agree with this, it kept him from being killed like so many other artists. After the Khmer Rouge, he continued singing non-controversial songs for fear that they would reemerge from the forests, where many of the former soldiers and commanders lived after Vietnamese liberation in 1979. Today, he sings in Cambodia and around the world.

Chorn-Pond also interviews Chek Mach, a famous opera singer in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge. She claims that during the Khmer Rouge she would lay low in the rice fields with a basket on top of her head and walk from village to village singing. The people would give her food for her voice, ranging from bananas to MSG, she said (I like to believe this but am honestly skeptical). Most heart-wrenching was when Chorn-Pond reunitied with his flute teacher, Youn Mek, that he met in 1977 and taught him for the remainder of the Khmer Rouge. Mek thanks Chorn-Pond for sharing his food and keeping him alive (Chorn-Pond said that, along with not having to work in the rice fields, the Khmer Rouge gave him more food than the other children). The interviews combined with the music and Chorn-Pond's honest and raw emotions about the genocide makes the film very touching.

Chek Mach and Arn Chorn-Pond in
1999.

Ultimately the film proves that it is important to see Cambodia outside of a corruption-ridden and post-genocide context. Although a vital part of Cambodian history and a socio-demographic indicator, the Khmer Rouge history does not need to wholly define Cambodia and its people. Instead, the art forms emerging from this time can showcase Cambodia's rich culture that begin to move past genocide. The arts give more creative expression to the Cambodian people allowing them to define their agency in a world that still views their country as a Shangri-la-turned-death-camp.

While Chorn-Pond focuses on more traditional music, next week I will looking Cambodia's burgeoning contemporary art scene, going to Sopheap Pich's "Cambodia Rattan" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the "Bomb Ponds" exhibition at the Asia Society Museum (the latter if I have got the time!).

Works Cited:
The Flute Player. Glatzer, Jocelyn Dir. PBS, 2003. Film

Embedded video taken from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PukOTKXs3bQ. 

Angkor, UNESCO, and Identity in Cambodia

Angkor Wat at sunrise. Taken by yours truly in December
2009 (as are all of the photos in this post)

Angkor Wat is arguably the most recognized archeological site in Southeast Asia—perhaps in Asia at large save the Great Wall of China and Taj Mahal. Angkor Wat is the central iconic temple, although the entire complex is often referred to as “Angkor Wat” and used interchangeably with names such as “The Temples of Angkor” or “The Angkor Wat Complex.” Angkor Thom city complex was built during the thirteenth century, during which King Jayavarman VII ruled. In 1992, Angkor Wat Complex became a UNESCO World Heritage site, with today two million and counting tourists visiting each year.

Ta Prohm Temple at Angkor, made partially famous by
Angelina Jolie.

In 1861, the French colonists discovered and began excavating the archeological site. This included taking artifacts for French and European museums—instigating a looting trend that continues today. Although when the French first “discovered” Angkor, “a labyrinth of monumental structures entangled with tree roots and lichen,” they claimed it was “‘lost,’ even dead,” this is fundamentally not true (Winter 53). There were actually multiple local villages peppered throughout what is today the archeological park. The French used the aesthetics of Angkor as abandoned and wild to promote the romantic mythology of loss and rediscovery (Winter 53). This mythology perpetuates today, in tourism and in Cambodia’s political rhetoric (Winter 53). Even after Cambodian independence from France, France still took an active role in Angkor Wat’s and its surrounding temples' maintenance until approximately 1972, when the political situation was too unsafe to continue.

Cliché Angkor Wat pond reflection at sunrise

This coincided with the inauguration of the first United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention, also in 1972. The umbrella organization UNESCO was created in 1945 after World War II along with the United Nations.  UNESCO’s goal at its conception was to promote “solidarity, peace, and equality” through “the free exchange of ideas and knowledge,” because the lack of these qualities was the root of war (Nielson 274). The initial 1946 document of UNESCO “UNESCO Its Purpose and its Philosophy” states a need for diversity and global appreciation of the arts, all while stitching nations together in unity—politically and scientifically—to prevent another war and bombing. UNESCO good-willingly promoted a global culture and knowledge sharing to perpetuate peace (Huxley 14). “UNESCO Its Purpose and its Philosophy” does mention that all cultures should receive equal attention, yet are not worth the same; however, who is determining this “worth” (Huxley 42)? The rhetoric echoed throughout the paper centers on preventing war, although today, extreme unity among nations can be considered homogenizing or hegemonic. The video UNESCO – Its Evil Purpose and Philosophy mostly discusses how UNESCO stifles independence, rocks national sovereignty, and also has an “indoctrination” view of education. Although one can perceive “UNESCO Its Purpose and its Philosophy” today as stating this, it is important to remember that it was written after World War II and with good intentions to build global harmony and prevent war. That being said, much of UNESCO’s rhetoric is simple and idealistic and fails to fully grasp complex concepts (Nielson 284).

The 1972 convention set the groundwork for creating a list of UNESCO World Heritage sites, made official in 1978. Today, there is a broad range of 962 cultural, natural, and “mixed” UNESCO World Heritage sites, as well as multiple sites in the midst of being evaluated or on the “List of World Heritage in Danger." In general, the overwhelming majority of the sites are over two hundred years old and are not part of “industry,” “technology,” or “modernity.” Although sprinkled with good intentions, World Heritage sites emerge as more problematic, notably in developing countries, than positive due to their museumification and faulty temporal designation. UNESCO creates standards, often derived from Western forms of thought, for designating cultural objects and sites around the world. Oftentimes, a cultural site is not given UNESCO status if it is not deemed aesthetically pleasing or conflicts with western visions of heritage. Within UNESCO, according to archeologist Henry Cleere:

Culture manifests itself principally in the form of archeological sites and monuments from classical Greece and Rome, European architecture from the later Middle Ages to neo-classicism, and the art and architecture of the Indian subcontinent and imperial China (32-33).

World Heritage sites are preserved in the past as “untouched” or “ancient sites” as a means of asserting their discontinuity with the present—creating separated gems of culture. Indeed, UNESCO often constructs World Heritage sites as intrinsically antique, aesthetically pleasing, and societally detached without contemporary implications or interactions with surrounding communities. This is certainly true of Angkor, especially with reference to French perception of the site.

Intricate Angkor sandstone carvings

In 1993, the year of the United Nation’s sponsored first free elections in Cambodia, the government started being more active in preserving Angkor Wat, but was still at the mercy of international bodies. Attention to the archeological site was extremely needed given the mass amount of looting occurring since the Khmer Rouge era, and before with the institutionalized looting of the French. In 1992, Angkor Wat was named a UNESCO World Heritage site, but not without the help of multiple other governments, naming Japan and France. The Declaration of Tokyo, written in 1993, expressed “the urgent need for international assistance to prevent the Angkor monuments from further decay and destruction” (Di Giovane 335). Cambodia was not heavily involved in formulating the Angkor development project that would later be imposed. Because of this un-involvement, “understanding Angkor as a form of ‘living heritage’ remains neglected” within the current management framework: crafting Angkor as an ancient site belonging to the past, similar to how the French framed it (Winter 50).

Attempting to return to this past time of Khmer glory became the basis of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge reign—even though the Khmer Kingdom was during the thirteenth century and Pol Pot used the term “year zero.” He admired the intricate irrigation system that the Angkor kings had built, allowing for 3-4 crops a year, and tried and failed at replicating these in a quest for Cambodian self-sufficiency (Brinkley 20; Stark & Griffin 121-122). Pol Pot wanted to defy seasonality and plant rubber, coconut, rice, and cotton all year long (Winter 58). In reality, the “hydraulic theories of early 20^th-century French scholars” that Pol Pot copied was in “part historical fantasy” (Winter 58). Regardless of using Angkor Wat as a symbol during an awful period of turmoil, genocide, and civil war, the Angkor temples still hold great national importance in Cambodia.  

According to Miriam P. Stark and P. Bion Griffin, “Nowhere is this linkage between nationalism and heritage management more evident than in Cambodia.” Angkor Wat is “a vehicle of agency” to help Cambodians understand their identity (Winter, 50). Nonetheless, Angkor tourism is centered on “high price tourism,” as well as the overall high “quality of the [tourist] experience” (UNESCO in Winter 55). This bars local, and often poor, tourists from going to the site to visit (picnicking in the temple's fields was once a popular pastime) or for prayer at one of the many Buddhist pagodas in the temples. Pol Pot once denied Cambodians “a celebration of their own cultural heritage…[and]…traditional Cambodian holidays were not observed” as travel was not allowed (Winter 58). Not only was it recently opened up to the international tourist market, but also to Cambodians themselves. Angkor Wat, therefore, holds lots of meaning for the Cambodian people.  As Cambodia continues to reconstruct its society, living heritage can be used as a vital contributor “to the ongoing constitution of national, cultural, and ethnic identities,” but not when international bodies promote otherwise (Winter 64).

 

Although the government (international and Cambodian) and even some Cambodians wish to see Angkor as a modern tourist site, Cambodians generally agree that the complex must keep some of its traditional structures and management should allow the Khmer people to see their heritage and enjoy the temples (Winter). This cannot be done, however, if Cambodians cannot have their voice be heard in the mainly international bureaucracy governing the site. Their heritage has been marketed to be something beyond the Cambodians themselves and for other peoples’ consumption. Nonetheless, according to UNESCO, all of the cultures and sites in the world are for an international body to appreciate. Whose “heritage” is it? If “all the world’s a stage,” as sixteenth century English poet William Shakespeare once said, then UNESCO World Heritage sites emerge as “playhouses of diversity,” and platforms for re-presenting “imagined dramas” and settings for a global audience (Di Giovine 275). UNESCO removes agency from the people and spreads it globally—the consequences being positive or negative, depending on the point of view.

Works Cited:

Brinkley, Joel. Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. New York, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Print.

Cleere, Henry. “The World Heritage Convention as a Medium for Promoting the Industrial Heritage.” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 26.2 (2000): 31-42. Print.

Di Giovine, Michel A. The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism. New York, New York: Lexington Books, 2009. Print.

Huxley, Julian.  “UNESCO: its Purpose and its Philosophy.” Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. 1946. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000681/068197eo.pdf. Print.

Nielson, Bjarke. “UNESCO and the ‘right’ kind of culture: Bureaucratic production and articulation.” Critique of Anthropology 31.4. (2011): 273-292. Print.

Stark, Miriam T. and P. Bion Griffin. “Archeological Research and Cultural Heritage Management in Cambodia’s Mekong Delta: The Search for the ‘Cradle of Khmer Civilization.’” in Baram, Uzi and Yorke Rowan, eds. Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past. New York, New York: Altamira Press, 2004. Print.

UNESCO – It’s Evil Purpose and Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqv5Q8Ujj2s. Web.

UNESCO Website. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/en/. Web.

Winter, Tim. “Landscape, Memory, and Heritage: New Year Celebrations at Angkor, Cambodia.” in Harrison, David and Michael Hitchcock, eds. The Politics of World Heritage. Tanawanda, New York: Channel View Publications, 2005. Print.

The Politics of Aid and the Rouge Left Among Us

This week I watched two short films and read an analysis of Cambodia's post-Khmer Rouge demographics. I was wary to watch either of the films as recently I have been feeling swallowed up by all of the Khmer Rouge research and studying I have been doing. I do not mean to sound as though I advocate for an "out of sight, out of mind approach," but studying the Khmer Rouge so intently for the past five or so weeks has truly had an effect on me, and has given me great respect for the people who dedicate their lives studying genocide. When creating my independent study proposal, I set aside only a few weeks to look at the genocide, but now realize that a few weeks, nay a few years, would not do justice to studying the Khmer Rouge. There is an incredible wealth of research, and along with it, contradicting information intriguing me even more. And this research is not about insect mating patterns or derivatives--it is about actual people (or Nixon might say "collateral damage" during his and Kissinger's B-52 bombing rampage, the equivalent to five Hiroshimas). I feel disrespectful if I cannot look at every facet of the awful genocide all and do every single part of it justice in order to understand Cambodia more.

Female:Male ratio in Cambodia 2001. Taken from
Damien de Walque.

"The Socio-Demographic Legacy of the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia" by Damien de Walque was a good background reading about the Khmer Rouge's effect on Cambodia today. He discussed who the Khmer Rouge was most likely to kill--educated males from urban areas--and how this changed multiple other parts of Cambodian society, for example, marriages, disabilities, and education levels. After the Khmer Rouge, men were much more likely than women to suffer from disabilities due to land mines and war torture, and today this effect is manifested in men who are thirty-five to forty plus years old (223). The Khmer Rouge also paused the normal age difference between marriage partners because there was a dearth of men (227). There were barely any children born between 1975-1980 in Cambodia because of malnutrition and the fact that pregnancies were not encouraged in general (228). Adolescents during this time are on average shorter than normal because of poor nutrition--something I did not notice when I was in Cambodia in 2009, likely because at 6'1" I tower over everyone anyhow (228). I did notice there were more older women than men when I was there, but this article went into much more depth describing the legacy genocide and civil war left on Cambodia.

Nic Dunlop mentioned the film Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia as being very good in his book The Lost Executioner. The documentary was shot in 1979, the year the Vietnamese invaded and liberated the Cambodians from the Rouge, on location--I mean skulls were strewn about in the fields he walked through and women's hair was still chin-length. It is a film  about the aftermath of Khmer Rouge (and civil war taking place at that time) and the "caravan of conditions" that humanitarian aid comes with. What was also striking was that he procured footage from the Khmer Rouge camps of young children working together and doing something too fuzzy to make out. I was hesitant to watch Cambodia: Pol Pot's Shadow because I have watched a number of blasé PBS documentaries already this year, but found this one to give a clear and concise picture of how the Khmer Rouge continued to manifest power even after surrendering in 1998.

Bright green rice fields in Vietnam. Taken by yours truly
in December 2009. 

John Pilger, an Australian journalist who narrates Year Zero, discusses much of the torture and aftermath of the Khmer Rouge--the politics of aid being one of them. (John Pilger is also the same journalist who called Barack Obama a corporate marketing creation.) Still in a polite British demeanor (he is based in London), he reprimands Western countries and international organizations for not sending aid to Cambodia. He finds it horrifying that the U.N., US, and British government alike all still recognize the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's ruling government, because they (the U.N. included) refuse to recognize that Vietnam--the enemy--is helping Cambodia. This was causing, at the time, 3 million people to starve. The USA recognized the Khmer Rouge because China did too, and already China was emerging as a massive trading power that the USA did not want to upset. Vietnam actually supplied 25,000 tons of food to the starving Cambodians even though Vietnam was starving itself. They did this by having the families living in the Southwest provinces of Vietnam donate 6 pounds of rice each to help Cambodia. This is truly an example of neighbors helping each other without any strings attached. Of course, all of this rice did not alleviate hunger by any means--it just meant Cambodians received 4 cups of rice. A month. International governments and organizations would only send aid to Cambodia if they could send it to the "other side" as well, meaning the the Thai border where many of Pol Pot's former army men were camping also. Pilger said that 90% of the Cambodian people were in Cambodia still, not in Thailand. This figure is debatable, but it is certainly true that many of the people in Thailand's refugee camps were Khmer Rouge officials.

An IV drip in Cambodia in 1979.
Screenshot from Year Zero.

Pilger spends much of the film in hospitals talking to the only two western doctors in Cambodia at the time as they explain that simple penicillin and food would cure the vast majority of the disease and sickness in Cambodia. Pilger asks what a certain type of disease is, to which the doctors reply, "it doesn't exist anymore in Europe." In many of hospital scenes, Pilger has a somewhat superior attitude to the children in them. He touches their faces and bones that pop out of their bodies without asking and without letting the child talk. Only their diseased and hungry bodies have a voice in the film. I wonder if Pilger and his crew asked permission to film the children ever, or if Khmer elders at the hospital gave blanket permission in order to expose the world to Cambodia's horrors (the film's effect actually raised a large amount of money). Pilger tells the audience at the end of the film that in Great Britain, penicillin is seen as a right--why is it not here? The United States has a surplus of food--why is it feeding animals and not people (which in and of itself, is still a question that books have been written about and I won't even begin to write about here).

From left to right: Nuon Chea, Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan
Taken from http://observers.france24.com/
category/tags/cambodia

Amanda Pike, narrator and journalist in Cambodia: Pol Pot's Shadow, goes to Cambodia four years after the end of the civil war with the intent to speak with Nuon Chea, or Pol Pot's brother number two. Nuon Chea was largely responsible for the killings and some say he was even more culpable than Pol Pot himself. Pike describes the aftermath of the Civil War in Northwest Cambodia, how soldiers and commanders live side by side with their former subjects. In fact, Pol Pot's personal chef is still cooking away and keeps photos of her children with Pol Pot on the wall. Pike does note that soldiers are often worse off than former commanders, and depicts one former soldier trying to find gems (he finds one sapphire, his first gem in three weeks, that he will sell for $0.50). Pike only found one commander who was somewhat remorseful, but I also must interject and say that I am not surprised that the former commanders they interviewed refused to admit their guilt. "Saving face" is one of the utmost values in Asian culture. When Pike and her crew found Nuon Chea, he said that "it wasn't the Khmer Rouge that killed our people" and finally said "just because you do something wrong does not mean you are a bad person"--the only time in Pike's interview that he briefly insinuated his guilt. Pike's time with Nuon Chea made Comrade Duch's confession to Nic Dunlop seem easy--he did admit his guilt when asked about the past.

First they Killed my Father, one of the
most famous memoirs about the Khmer
Rouge (HarperCollins).

I conclude wondering why I was taught incessantly about the Holocaust and nothing about the Khmer Rouge before I went to Southeast Asia at age 18. I did not even know about the Rwandan Genocide until a movie (I forget now) was sold out so my friend and I walked into the Hotel Rwanda theater instead. I did not realize, until I travelled to Vietnam, that the United States lost the Vietnamese War. I was always taught that we tied the war (did I ever mention that I went to one of the best high schools in the country?). When I was in Cambodia, I had no idea about the U.S. bombings. I read First they Killed my Father on my plane ride home back to the United States in January 2010, and was confused when the narrator was discussing Vietnam and the United States in Cambodia. I remember the novelty of buying that book on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the fact that it was literally copied from the original book and bound together in the typical bootleg fashion. I was always taught about Hiroshima, but never taught about the bombing the U.S. did to Cambodia until recently. The Cambodians were purely innocent people, and I am gravely horrified at the US bombings, and also horrified at myself for not ever learning about it before.

Works Cited:
Cambodia: Pol Pot's Shadow. Dir. Amanda Pike. PBS Frontline, 2002. Film.

de Walque, Damien. "The Socio-Demographic Legacy of the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia." Population Studies. Vol. 60. No. 2 pp. 223-231. (2006). Print.

Year Zero: The Silent Silent Death of Cambodia. Dir. John Pilger. Associated Television, 1979. Film.

A Circle of Torture

In preparation for my time in Cambodia this summer, I am taking not only this independent study course, but also a 0-credit Human Rights seminar in which we just finished the book Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Clapham. I also just finished The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop for my independent study course, and found both books to touch on the aspect of torture, its legitimacy, and fights to accept or reject it. Although my project this summer does not focus on torture or the Khmer Rouge trials, it is vital to learn about in order to better understand the country.

Photos and confessions at Choeung Ek's visitor center (a
killing field about 15km from Phnom Penh). Taken by
your truly in December 2009 (as are all of the photos in
this post).

Clapham's book was a good very short introduction to human rights. He spends one chapter discussing torture. The U.N. has a complete prohibition on torture, stating that in "no exceptional circumstances" is it okay (Clapham 81). Regardless of this, is it okay, at least, in some cases? How do we define "how far can you go?" (87). Clapham gives the scenario of a ticking bomb, and the only way to stop it is to torture somebody for information, questioning "might some incidents of torture or ill-treatment be justified to avert a terrorist attack?" (87). He also mentions, however, that the information given under torture cannot always be trusted as it is often unreliable (87). This is especially true in the "confessions" of those sought out and killed by the Khmer Rouge. Many of them admitted they were part of the CIA to hopefully avert being tortured, although in the end were tortured and killed anyhow (Dunlop 275). Dunlop cites the "confession" of a British man who was caught by the Rouge while sailing off of the coast of Cambodia, accidently drifting from Thailand (275). He writes that he was a member of the CIA, and so was his father (275). This is completely untrue, proving that torture does not actually lead to factual confessions.

Clapham gives an example of a kidnapping case in Germany where the son of a senior bank executive was kidnapped from his family apartment (88). I will be honest: if my kid was missing and this one man knew where he was, I would want him to be tortured to release information. But this is just the problem. Perhaps to Pol Pot: "if this person is against the best ideology of returning Cambodia to Year Zero, I want him to be tortured because he is against it and he can release information about others who might be against the ideology also." Obviously, we can all see the difference, but allowing torture in some cases while prohibiting it in others creates an incredibly, to put it colloquially, "sticky situation." 

Ten rules for the prisoners at Tuol Sleng Museum.

Dunlop is attempting to find Comrade Duch, the head of S-21 Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge. S-21 was a former high-school-turned-prison-torture-house during the Khmer Rouge where only 7 victims survived. Dunlop points out in the first chapter that contrary to popular belief, Tuol Sleng was often not for civilians, but rather was "created for rooting out enemies from within the party" (23). This meant that Duch crossed paths with many of his former teachers, mentors, and supervisors.

Tourists at Tuol Sleng Museum.

Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept immensely detailed records of all of the prisoners including photographs and written accounts of confessions, for example being part of the CIA (the latter on which Duch took notes or commented on the interrogation process). Dunlop throughout his book, which reads in some areas more like a personal narrative, contemplates his role as a professional photographer and when / why / where it is okay to take photos and what they do in the public. The photographs of Tuol Sleng, he says, haunt him because by viewing them and taking photos of the photos, we are exploiting the victim's memories even more without letting them speak (316). 

Dunlop describes his quest for Duch and the people he meets en route to helping authorities capture Duch--the first Khmer Rouge officer to be put on trial and found guilty for torture and murder during the Khmer Rouge. Dunlop describes Duch's time as a prisoner at Prey Sar Prison (S-24) for his communist activities. In this prison, Dunlop concludes, Duch was likely tortured, and used techniques he learned (or rather, were inflicted on him) there and applied them to S-21, suggesting that he certainly had knowledge of the inner workings of Cambodian prisons (76). Duch was able to use the horrors from his own time in prison and apply them to the victims of S-21 (126). He knew that "the threat or anticipation of violence, reinforced by the screams of other prisoners, was often harder to bear than the violence itself" (126). Because Duch was tortured, he knew how to torture and felt okay doing so. This proves Clapham's claim that the use of torture inevitably spreads and becomes a "'slippery slope' where mistreatment is seen as normal, even expected" (87). Duch is also an example how how violence can be internalized and normalized.

Torture creates a domino effect, a positive feedback loop with negative implications. As Clapham says, "No judges today are ready to find arguments to justify torture" (89). Torture can easily expand, and it seems there is not stopping point. Torture can in turn generate further violence in a society--making it not okay under any circumstances. Although many were and still are wary of the trials (and there are problems with the trial, one of many being that they are only concentrating on the Rouge from 1975-1979), it important to recognize the past.

Works Cited
Clapham, Andrew. Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction. New York, New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2007. Print.

Dunlop, Nic. The Lost Executioner. New York, New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Print.