Picking Fruit from the Poison Tree

I wonder if Pol Pot felt satiated as he watched Cambodia devour itself? His appetite for blood was certainly boundless - once he acquired that brackish taste he couldn’t get enough. The Khmer Rouge anthem was already a dreadful omen: a national hymn awash in bloody fixation...

I am now in Cambodia for a month doing research on the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979. Probably about a million and a half people were killed during this period but it’s hard to say. I guess at some point people just stop counting. A few days ago I visited Tuol Sleng – a notorious Khmer Rouge prison facility where 21 000 people were tortured and then sent to their death. They died alone, in the dark, in the nearby Choeung Ek killing field – a single blow to the back of the neck if they were lucky. Can there be a more profound aloneness then being cast apart from all of humankind? Can there be a more woeful death than the death of hope itself?

Tuol Sleng is a Khmer word that can be roughly translated as “poison-tree hill”. It was an abyss of cruelty, penitence without the promise of redemption. Guards wandered the filthy corridors between the tightly-packed cells; beasts in the form of men. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were men in the form of beasts, their humanity sublimated. They toiled with tools born of sadistic inventiveness, their spirits consumed by breathtakingly rootless spite.

Their headmaster was a former teacher known as Duch. He seemed the embodiment of the totalitarian espirit des corps: slavishly devoted to slavish devotion. Of course he was a mathematician: a formula for every human problem; formalism and legalism as the only true forms of perfection and beauty. The utopian ideal could be realised! This was nothing less than the consummation of every anal-retentive impulse. Squeeze a little harder Herr Eichmann and soon you’ll be shitting solid gold bricks - enough wealth to sustain the Reich for a thousand glorious years!

I tried to interview Duch but he’s off-limits (he is currently, finally, on trial at an international tribunal). Duch found Jesus sometime in the 80’s (I wonder if Jesus ever bothered to find him). Within days, I should be interviewing a former senior guard at Tuol Sleng - Him Huy. This should be fascinating and I’m not quite sure what to expect.

Today I’m heading to the far north of the country, into the mountains along the Thai border in search of Khmer Rouge cadres who might be willing to talk to me. Pol Pot lived and died in those mountains and his restless spirit still stalks the people there.

Kjell

Ps. Next time I will write more about the positive (contemporary) things in this beautiful country.