Cambodia Year Zero

"I think Cambodia Year Zero , by Francois Ponchaud is a very valid first view of the situation. He is a person who understands and loves Cambodia a lot. He is also a very talented writer. This book was knocked by the Left at the time, who just didn’t like to hear what was happening. Francois was listening to what was unfolding and he knew the country and knew how this could happen. Cambodia was not a culture that was easy to fathom- the mass of the population were unarmed and uneducated; someone turns up with a gun and tells you what to do, so you get on with it. It may not have been that they agreed, but they had no choice, and on it went. No he couldn’t. He left with the French embassy people in 1975. He listened to the crazy Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts and he talked to the first refugees coming into Thailand in 75-76. It all fitted into something he understood about Cambodia but nobody wanted to listen to him. Absolutely. Although it was still two years after the events began. There was a lot of context, which is what another of my recommended books Sideshow is about. Everyone in the West was fed up with Indochina and wanted to get out of it after 1975 and didn’t want to pay attention to what was happening. It was too much to handle in the late seventies. Ponchaud came as an annoyance to people who wanted everything to be lovely in Indochina, with the “great new dawn” and all that nonsense. He stated that this was not a new dawn, this was a terrible tyranny and this was not anti-communist propaganda but what he knew about. It took awhile. Basically it was 79, when people started pouring out of Cambodia with their own oral accounts, by the ten of thousands. That’s when Chomsky suddenly went quiet. If you were paying attention by 77 most of the people who had been optimistic had changed their mind. They were not doctrinaire. They were told that they were going to be the cutting edge in getting rid of injustice in Cambodia, that they could kill the “haves” and stop being “have-nots” themselves. They were told to stop being Buddhists but frankly young men’s Buddhism is usually pretty fragile anyway. The tattoos and amulets were just protection against what might happen. I don’t see an irony here. Pol Pot and his friends were probably not like that, but they didn’t try to stamp out these traditions. Yes, Voices from S-21 is a detailed study of Khmer Rouge psychology, how this regime thought things through, how they viewed the world. You could call it paranoia but that would be a short cut, and how they copied some procedures from China and how they copied the show trials from Russia, and how in so doing they made the most incredible mess of everything. At S 21 they also documented everything, they produced these extremely neat documents, running to hundreds of thousands of pages, with no typographical errors- it was almost as if anyone made an error they would have their fingers cut off. So they document this horrible situation and reading the documents you get inside their mentality, not who was guilty and who innocent- you never find that out. Some are guilty, some are innocent but you can’t tell which ones because they all claim to be guilty Through the confessions and through the other materials of the prison I thought I penetrated a certain crazy mindset that characterised the Khmer Rouge, and that’s what I wanted to say in the book. I went somewhere that was very sad and depressing, but I needed to express what I encountered. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . A couple of survivors, a few guards who had been there. Nowadays it would quite a different book because so many people have come out of the woodwork, and are ready to talk. They weren’t available 15 years ago when I was writing my book, and they were too scared about what might happen. Actually Rithy Panh has made an extraordinary documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine , about the prison, it is a brilliant study, bringing together people survived with officials at the prison and guards. The prison itself is really a door into the Khmer Rouge world, which is a very strange world. There have been such terrible traumas that there is not much you can deal with. There are a few Cambodian psychotherapists and they are terribly overworked. They hardly know how to handle many of the extreme traumas. Many people over 50 are in pretty poor shape, from what whacked into them during those years, frankly they will be with this until they die. People just didn’t know what hit them, it was a tsunami situation for the victims. Phnom Penh was certainly a paradise for foreigners. Many things were hard though- there was no educational system to speak of and the judicial system was horrible, there was no question of political opposition to the regime. For the elite and the foreigners it was an ideal place to be, it wasn’t as challenging as Vietnam and not as crowded as Bangkok. But everything is always post-dated, you are always looking with hindsight. I certainly didn’t see what was going to occur when I was there in the early sixties and nor did other friends and colleagues who were working there at the time- we couldn’t foresee anything but once it happened, we didn’t say- oh no, that’s the wrong country. There was a ferocity to the place and to its history that anyone who paid attention to it would have picked up. The French managed to put an anaesthetic mask onto the Cambodians to make them behave, calm them down and shut them up. They told them that they were a country of victims living in a paradise, and it suits people to hear that. Sihanouk encouraged this point of view. But it was the last place you would expect to get so terrifying, Shawcross touches on this in his book. These people were not rebellious, or contentious, there were no intellectuals and no nationalist tradition as in Vietnam. Cambodia was not unlike Thailand in the period, also somnolent, and also under a dictator- Sarit. The Thais pretty much just got on with the status quo. They were very laissez faire, you took what was coming and had the view that whatever happens just happens. It may seem like a strange attitude but that’s how it was. The foreigners were crucial but they weren’t responsible for everything, because there could have been other ways of handling things after the foreigners were driven out. Instead the Khmer Rouge chose absolute violence, which had nothing to do with the foreigners. Cambodians don’t like to face up to this any more than the Thais like to face up to the high levels of murder they have there- they say they are peaceful Buddhists but the murder rate in Thailand is as high as in America. It’s a matter of how you perceive yourself."