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ABSTRACT
Despite the passage of almost four decades since the end of the so-known “Killing Fields Era,” to date only three Khmer Rouge officials have been successfully tried and convicted for crimes against humanity. This article opens with such “belatedness” as a means of contextualizing the juridical politics of and historical indictments embedded in Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture (2013).
Notes
1. The Khmer Rouge takeover took place during the Cambodian New Year. The term “Killing Fields” is attributed to Cambodian journalist Dith Pran, whose story of survival was the focus of New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg's January 20, 1980 New York Times Magazine article, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” the primary source text for Roland Joffé’s Academy Award-winning film, The Killing Fields (1984).
2. Both the Nixon and Ford administrations supported the anticommunist Lon Nol government. Since 1965, the United States had bombed Cambodia despite its declared neutrality during the Vietnam War. According to Ben Kiernan, by 1973, “half a million tons of U.S. bombs had killed over 100,000 peasants and devastated the countryside” (“Recovering History and Justice in Cambodia,” 78). The amount of munitions tonnage was the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombings.
3. A useful but incomplete analogy involves China's “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976), which sought to remove perceived capitalist and traditionalist elements via forced relocations of individuals to re-education camps and centers.
4. The term “enemies of the people” comes from a speech delivered by Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) that aired on state radio in 1977. This is also the title of Rob Lemkin and Sambath Thet's 2010 documentary, which features Khmer Rouge perpetrators and Nuon Chea.
5. Buddhist monks and nuns were targeted by the Khmer Rouge and religion was prohibited, along with currency, education and private property. Children were proscribed from referring to their parents as “Mak” or “Pa” and were forced to use “comrade.” Siblings were kept apart from one another; parents were separated from their children. Cambodia's National Library was converted into a pigsty and all past governmental affiliations were disavowed. Refer also to Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2004).
6. According to a Khmer Rouge slogan, “The wheel of history is inexorably turning; he who cannot keep pace with it shall be crushed.” See Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book, 269 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004).
7. According to Khatharya Um, “In less than four years, almost two million of the country's estimated seven million people had perished” (2). See From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora (New York: New York UP, 2015).
8. While the Khmer Rouge and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) were former allies, relations between these two entities broke down soon after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh and the concomitant reunification of Vietnam. Between 1975 and 1977, the conflict between the two states was limited to isolated border skirmishes; however, this escalated in April 1977 and would culminate into a full-scale Vietnamese invasion of Democratic Kampuchea in December 1978. January 7, 1979 marks the date that Vietnamese troops overtook Phnom Penh, signaling the end of the Khmer Rouge era.
9. I have previously focused on 1.5-generation Cambodian American artists and their remembrance-oriented activism post-Khmer Rouge in War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012). With regard to Cambodian refugees in other locales, please consult the following report: https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Cambodia-Diaspora-Role-2007-French.pdf. (17 Aug. 2015).
10. Cambodian American authorship has largely taken testimonial form, apparent in recently published works such as Molyda Szymusiak's (Buth Keo's) The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood, 1975-1980 (Indiana UP 1999), Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge (W. W. Norton & Co. 2000), Vatey Seng's The Price We Paid: A Life Experience in the Khmer Rouge Regime (iUniverse, Inc. 2005), Alive in the Killing Fields by Nawut Keat with Martha Kendall (National Geographic Children's Books 2009), and Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey by Ronnie Yimsut (Rutgers UP 2011). Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster 2012) represents the first book-length fictional account of the genocide authored by a Khmer American writer. While the most Cambodian American life writing is concentrated on childhood remembrances, there are instances of first-generation adult refugee authorship such as Haing S. Ngor's self-titled memoir, Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey (Macmillan 1988), co-written with Roger Warner. Films about the Cambodian genocide include John Pilger's Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979), Jocelyn Glatzer's The Flute Player (2003), Socheata Poeuv's New Year Baby (2006), Greg Cahill's The Golden Voice (2007), John Pirozzi's Sleepwalking through the Mekong (2007) and Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (2015). See Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, “Screening the Killing Fields: Cambodian Genocide Film.” The History of Genocide in Cinema: Atrocities on Screen. Edt. by Jonathan Friedman (I.B. Tauris/Palgrave McMillan, forthcoming 2016).
11. As per Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “genocide” refers to “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups, such as: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
12. In August 1979, the Vietnamese-occupied People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) staged a series of Khmer Rouge trials wherein Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were found guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity and genocide. 995 pages of testimony was gathered that recounted abuses and human rights violations during the Khmer Rouge era. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights refused to consider these documents because of their political connection to the Vietnamese government.
13. On April 30, 1994, President William Jefferson Clinton signed into law the “Cambodian Genocide Justice Act” (22 US.C. 2656). “Consistent with international law,” the act established that it was “the policy of the United States to support efforts to bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge for their crimes against humanity committed in Cambodia between April 17, 1975 and January 7, 1979.” This act funded the formation of the Documentation Center of Cambodia which presently provides most of the prosecutorial evidence in the U.N./Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The tribunal is a hybrid formation that pairs international lawyers/judges and Cambodian lawyers/judges; it considers international law concomitant with 1956 Cambodian Penal Code. The first case (001) involved Kaing Guek Eav (a.k.a. “Comrade Duch”), the head warden of the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison; he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes on July 26, 2010. While he originally received a 19-year-sentence, he eventually received a life sentence following a failed appeal.
14. Thirith was the second women to be charged with genocide in the history of international law; the first was Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the former minister for the family and women's empowerment in Rwanda. She passed away on August 22, 2015.
15. As Time reporter Charlie Campbell summarizes in a February 13, 2014 article, “Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Trials are a Shocking Failure,” the tribunal was founded in 2006 and “touted as the largest such reckoning since the Nuremberg trials of prominent Nazis.” Correspondingly, the proceedings were to “target the very top level regime figures and those chiefly responsible for particularly heinous acts…But virtually since the outset, allegations of corruption and politicization have dogged the ECCC's glacial progress, and proceedings were halted for long periods as national staff went on strike after not being paid.” http:/time.com/6997/cambodias-khmer-rouge-trials-are-a-shocking-failure. (4 Sept. 2015).
16. The original French version of The Missing Picture featured Randal Douc as primary narrator. Douc was replaced by Jean-Baptiste Phou in the English-language version. The Missing Picture was produced by Catherine Dussart and showcased Prum Mesa's cinematography.
17. Spanning almost thirty years and sixteen films, Panh's oeuvre consistently revisits the Democratic Kampuchean era. What follows is a brief listing of Panh's major works: Site 2 (1989), Rice People (1994), The Land of Wandering Souls (2000), S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), The Burnt Theatre (2005), Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers (2007), and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2012).
18. The Elimination was co-authored with French novelist Christophe Baitalle and translated into English by John Cullen. Panh's reflections on the Killing Fields era occur alongside more philosophical contemplations about the multivalent politics which brought the Khmer Rouge “into being” and in conjunction with the director's interviews with Kaing Guek Eav (“Comrade Duch”).
19. Such pre-revolutionary cinematic moments are, as The Missing Picture progresses, dramatically juxtaposed with Khmer Rouge propaganda films.
20. From 2014 English-language trailer, The Missing Picture (originally released in 2013).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of two monographs: Modeling Citizenship: Naturalization in Jewish and Asian American Writing (Temple UP, 2011) and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (U of Minnesota P, 2012). In addition to book chapters in multiple collections, Professor Schlund-Vials has published essays in Life Writing, Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS, Modern Language Studies, Amerasia, American Literary History, and Positions. She is the president-elect for the Association for Asian American Studies.