Day 17: 16 Jan 2012 – Why the silence about the Khmer Rouge?

Up until now, this blog has said little about one of the most striking and disturbing topics relating to Cambodia, a topic that for many is what springs to mind as soon as you mention the name of the country. In fact, it’s something that has come up very little in conversation in our time here. In a sense, that’s unsurprising – after all, you normally talk about ordinary everyday things, not the lives of your parents and grandparents, especially not when it’s traumatic.

But it really does seem that there’s a silence about this topic. This was confirmed by one of the ex-pats we talked to. Also, the current executive director of PPS told us that he previously worked on a production called Breaking the Silence, in which people who had various roles in the Khmer Rouge era were interviewed. So despite the openness we experienced with Supheap last Saturday, presumably this silence is a real phenomenon.

So why?

Well, we don’t know. But here’s some quotes that might be relevant:

“Hem Heng, the Cambodian ambassador to Washington offered an example. His family, he said, were respected in their village, but in 1978 the Khmer Rouge ordered their family killed. Villagers made a deal with the soldiers: Kill another family instead. And, sure enough, Hem Heng recalled, Khmer Rouge soldiers executed “a Chinese family in our place”. He frowned and looked at the floor, silent” Taken from “Cambodia’s curse: A modern history of a troubled land” by Joel Brinkley.

And according to Youk Chhang, who runs the Documentation Centre of Cambodia which gathers records of the Khmer Rouge regime, “people were hiding their past behaviour [after the war]. To survive during the Khmer Rouge, you had to steal, lie, cheat, point fingers at others, even kill. And now you are ashamed.”

And is there anything we encountered in our time at PPS that might help to explain this? Well, we were told that PPS tried to offer counselling services to people in the area of Battambang, so that they could (further) process their terrible memories from the Khmer Rouge era. This was not easy: if a PPS employee would visit a family and mention talking about this topic, the man would typically not say a word and pretend he found something very interesting on the ground that required his undivided attention. The women typically started crying, not able to have a conversation.