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.