Lessons for the Future: Khmer Rouge Survivor Testimonies as Sites of Individual and Social Regeneration

ABSTRACT

Decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian government and international community established a tribunal to prosecute leaders of the regime. The court’s creation was accompanied by numerous outreach efforts, including psychological support for those who had survived the brutal period. Many of these interventions were foreign to Cambodians and drew upon transitional justice tropes that emphasised the importance of ‘bearing witness to atrocity’, while stressing the need to process traumatic events. This paper examines the implementation of ‘testimonial therapy’ among two groups of survivors – ‘new people’, mostly urban dwellers targeted by the regime, and ‘base people’, rural Cambodians who had a prior Khmer Rouge affiliation. It argues that through repeated narrativization, survivors draw upon elements of the globalised figure of the moral witness (Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.), combining this concept with pre-existing beliefs about the performance of Buddhist morality.

KEYWORDS:

• Khmer Rouge
• testimony
• witness
• narrative
• Buddhism

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Grant Number 9418] and the Center for Khmer Studies. First and foremost, I would like to thank my academic mentors for their thoughtful feedback and guidance, including Bruce Knauft, Alex Hinton, Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, and Bradd Shore. Conversations with Kathy Trang and Kaitlin Banfill also offered many helpful insights. In addition, I owe a debt of gratitude to my interlocutors in Cambodia, and to the many friends and colleagues in the country who have supported me over the years, especially Neakkru Seng Sophea. The feedback I received from the three anonymous reviewers was also extremely helpful in revising this article and I thank them for their time and close reading of my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Khmer Rouge tribunal, based on a mixture of both Cambodian and international law, created an unprecedented mechanism for victim participation through the ‘civil party’ system. According to the tribunal’s Internal Rules, civil parties participate in criminal proceedings by supporting the prosecution and are entitled to ‘collective and moral reparations’ (Herman 2014).

2 Despite this fact, the average ratio of women to men was relatively evenly distributed throughout the different comparison groups (along the lines of former ‘base’ and ‘new’ people, and therapy versus non-therapy groups).

3 On a volunteer basis, I sometimes edited English-language documents for staff at the organization and helped with training sessions.

4 It is important to note that TPO staff conducted mental health screenings with all clients before they underwent TT. If a client was not considered to be psychologically stable enough, they would not be invited to participate in the therapy. Thus, TT may not necessarily be appropriate for all patients, especially those who show significant current psychological instability.

5 The ‘Baksbat Inventory’ is a 24-item Likert scale, in which each item is ranked from 0 to 4. Thus, the highest possible score (showing the greatest symptom severity) is 96. While the scores of former ‘new people’ undergoing TT decreased an average of 12 points when measured before treatment, and six months after treatment, those of former ‘base people’ declined an average of 20 points during the same period.

6 Pseudonyms are used to protect the identities of my informants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation [grant number 9418] and a Senior Research Fellowship from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (Center for Khmer Studies).