Horror has more than one face
By John Esther
Like many of my generation, my very first introduction to the atrocities in Cambodia during the mid-late 1970s was due in thanks to Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia,” an indictment against cruelty in Southeast Asia (not just about Cambodia, the single's cover image depicts violence in Thailand) and a ferocious satire on bourgeois American consumerism and obliviousness.
Released in 1980, the lyrics of “Holiday in Cambodia” specifically addressed the horror of Cambodia’s diabolical leader, Pol Pot, and the soldiers backing his belligerent ways from 1975 to the very bloody end in 1979:
‘Well you’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Til you starve
Then your head’s skewered on a stake’
But those angry words could only attempt to “describe the horror for those who do not know what horror is.” While a few Cambodians tried over the years to shriek back against the country’s historical heart of darkness and the internal nemesis of Cambodian against Cambodian, it is only perhaps now we have an understanding of those times with the release of co-directors/producers Rob Lemkin and Sambath Thet’s Enemies of the People.
“Nobody understands why so many people were killed at that time,” says Thet during the documentary’s introduction.
Winner of Sundance’s 2010 World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize, Thet, a Cambodian journalist, spent a decade tracking and talking to the men and women behind the atrocities, slowly getting them in front of the camera. Fueled by pseudo communistic propaganda and the fear of Vietnam's moderNation, Cambodian peasants killed innocent people (there were no trials) by the hundreds of thousands, until their hands hurt, rather than say no. Those who hesitated in his or her socialist nationalistic duty were told to kill or be killed.
Faced with the camera and eventual death, from elderly uneducated farmers in the Northwest provinces to Nuon Chea, AKA Brother No. 2, the man closest to Pol Pot (who died under suspicious circumstances April 15, 1998), everybody has a horrible justification for what was done in the name of survival and they, he and she know it.
Beyond the amazing access Thet achieves, what furthers the value of Enemies of the People is how he maintains his composure in the presence of dumb, duplicitous and demonic people -- the kind of dumb, duplicitous and demonic people who killed his father before forcing his mother into marital slavery where she died giving childbirth to the collective rapist. Later, Thet lost his older brother to the violent riot of rouge. Thet is not out for revenge, but for the kind of comprehension and reconciliation we have seen in other countries where atrocities took place in recent history (e.g. South Africa, Rwanda). Thet’s supreme quest to seek out and document the truth is a testament a better tomorrow is possible. Occasionally, a few of the best do survive genocide.
Set against this personal-political backdrop, international pressure is mobilizing to have Khmer Rouge officials arrested for various crimes and tried by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a United Nations-backed tribunal. The octogenarian Nuon Chea’s case begins next year.
If Enemies of the People has one great drawback is that it allows Thet to narrate his story in his very poor English. It is so poor there are English subtitles to accompany him and some of the things he says are clearly not exact. The documentary has plenty of people contradicting themselves and Thet does not appear to be one of them, so why let a foreign tongue slip? Since there are already subtitles for the Cambodian dialogue, it was rather pointless for Thet to narrate in English. At any rate, one learns more Cambodian history during the Cambodian dialogue.
A lesson in killing and dying for the wrong reasons, Enemies of the People is a stark reminder that in the end, for most of human un-kind, self-preservation wins the day and while history can be a cold judge, the planet's killing fields continue to grow.
