Regardless of their accuracy, what makes Delaporte’s drawings so appropriate is their apparently prophetic quality. In 1866 Cambodia’s nightmare – ‘the horror … the horror’ evoked by Conrad and echoed by Coppola – had yet to materialise. It burst upon the country a hundred years later in the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Although the hell lasted less than a decade, it left such a reek of pain that today even the place names – ‘Svey Rieng’, ‘Kompong Chhnang’, ‘Stung Treng’ – sound like agonised utterances hissed through the gritted teeth of the dying. Actual shrieks and screams were strictly forbidden in the interrogation cells. To discourage reactions so reactionary, there was always another tweak in the torturer’s repertoire. Men protested their pain, if at all, with a click of the tongue and guttural retchings. Dying, too, was a hushed affair, rarely worth a bullet; and contrary to received opinion, much of it was not even intentional.
‘Fried frog and chips’? Or ‘virgin pork uterus in sour sweat sauce’?
The menu in today’s Café Kampuchino in Siem Reap reads like a witchdoctor’s shopping list. Cambodia’s culinary ingenuity was legendary long before the Khmer Rouge; it extends to various sorts of rat, bat, toad and snake, some of the larger, scrunchier insects, and assorted innards and extremities from more familiar animals. No great courage is required to order these things. Like heavily advertised promotions the world over, they are never available. ‘No have,’ says the waiter, scrutinising the carte as if he has never seen it before. ‘Bat no now,’ ‘Entrail finish,’ ‘Frog tomorrow.’ The list of fare is in fact a wish-list. Only rice or noodles with vegetables and a few proteinous trace elements can be guaranteed. As for the more delectable sections of, say, a chicken – the bits between its feet, its beak and its parson’s nose – they never appear. What happens to breast, leg, wing and wishbone is one of the inscrutable East’s best-kept secrets.
In the 1970s, participants in the socialist experiment pioneered by the Khmer Rouge were reported as being reduced to scouring the rice stubble for edible bugs and devouring any vertebrate in its entirety. From the killing in the Killing Fields not even butterflies were exempt. Lice were reportedly prized fare in the death camps. Cambodia was starving; and during its ‘holocaust’ far more died from malnutrition – and the reduced resistance to malaria that resulted – than from the better-documented incidence of torture, strangulation or a blow to the back of the head at the edge of a pre-dug grave.
The Khmer Rouge called their collective and depersonalised leadership the Angkar, which is usually translated as ‘the Organisation’. Organisation was precisely what it failed to provide. Allied to a lethal ideology, it was sheer inefficiency that turned the country into an abattoir. Although the numbers are disputed, the human death toll ran into seven figures; so, at the time, did the country’s total population. But a tragedy on such a scale will ever be incomprehensible if reduced to newsworthy trivia about people eating bugs.
For about nine years (1970–79) – five in partial control of the country and four in power – the Khmer Rouge set about the killings in the fields and the torturings in the camps with a ferocious intensity. Society had to be cleansed of those elements tainted with the ‘bourgeois criminality and debauchery’ of previous regimes. Cambodia must start again from ‘year zero’, building a socialist utopia based on the labour of the masses divided into agrarian communes. No wages would be needed; the Angkar would provide food according to need from the collective pool. State centralism was designed to protect the masses from exploitation, not to appropriate the fruits of their labour. And as dictatorial regimes go, that of the Khmer Rouge was indeed a model of incorruptible probity. Its leaders lived simply, extravagant consumption was unknown, and the revolution itself was subjected to relentless and mind-numbing analysis. The scrutiny, like the savagery, was always devastatingly sincere.
But in this excess of method lay utter madness. During a speech delivered in 1977, Pol Pot could congratulate ‘the great mass movement’ on having liquidated ‘the exploiting classes’ while in his next breath calling for a population of ‘fifteen to twenty million’. Having decimated the nation he demanded that it double. Years of civil war had already traumatised the country. US bombing had perforated the paddy fields and destroyed embankments, like those along the Tonle Sap river, by which floodwater was funnelled to crops. The ground fighting had dislocated vital distribution systems, like that of the Tonle Sap’s yield of fishy protein. Hundreds of thousands had flocked from the countryside to Phnom Penh for sanctuary. When the bandana-ed cadres entered the city in April 1975, they found a vast population that had become entirely reliant on US-aided food imports. These now ceased forth-with. Evacuation was the logical response.
The failure was not of logic but of logistics. In the absence of transport, shelter, medical facilities or adequate food, the evacuees were marched into the wilderness and there marooned to die of a combination of overwork, undernourishment and malaria, or to be systematically liquidated as scapegoats for the regime’s rank incompetence. Countryman killed countryman, neighbour neighbour, and cousin cousin not in the cold conviction of a racial holocaust but in a fight for survival born of mutual destitution and paranoia.
It ended when in 1979 the Angkar was ousted from Phnom Penh by a Vietnamese invasion that imposed its own regime under Heng Samrin, a Hanoi puppet. Seeking to legitimise itself, the new regime lit on the idea of publicising the atrocities of its predecessor. Former interrogation centres were reopened as tawdry holocaust museums; mass graves were exhumed and the bones, after being sorted into skulls and limbs, exhibited by the nearest roadside. As journalists began to trickle back into the country, Cambodians were encouraged to recall the horrors they had somehow survived. The blame was laid squarely at the door of the leadership as each witness duly told of siblings, parents, friends who had died at the hands of ‘Pol Pot and his clique’. But in reality the killers too were siblings, parents, friends. Thirty years later the survivors and their tormentors still live side by side in the same villages.
Downriver in Vietnam neither better times nor worse block the historical perspective. There the war with the US retains its immediacy, rumbling on not with bursts of resentment or hostility but in a wave of officially sanctioned nostalgia for a time of simple truths and inconceivable sacrifice. Army and air force museums compete for the nation’s affection with war crimes monuments, ‘War Remnants’ museums, theme-parked bunkers, downed aircraft doubling as climbing frames, and whole bazaars devoted to recycled armaments and US military memorabilia. With a reverence that would not be misplaced in the Uffizi, schoolchildren join veterans to study the photos – torture cages, dead and disfigured American airmen, defoliated villages, raddled call-girls. Thirty years on, and the war is still paramount in the national psyche. As a defining moment in Vietnamese history the fall of Saigon in 1975 ranks with the fall of the Bastille in French history.
But upriver in Cambodia memories of the carpet bombing initiated by Nixon and Kissinger have been swept under mats stiff with fresher bloodstains. Some of the craters left by the B-52s are now fishponds; others, after serving as receptacles for the harvest of the Killing Fields, have been reopened as genocide sites. Pol Pot’s pogrom obstinately blocks the historical perspective. ‘Year zero’ remains the psychological backstop of modern Cambodia’s calendar, and today’s government ministers, some of them tainted with Khmer Rouge associations, others with Vietnamese collaboration (and Prime Minister Hun Sen with both), naturally stall over bringing the killers to justice. They also agonise over the nation-building role to be accorded to the death camps and the mass graves. The exhumed skulls are still stacked by the roadside like bleached watermelons; but the visitors are mostly foreign tour groups and the souvenir potential is limited. Pol Pot is dead, but life does not go on.
The unbearable burden of recall placed on survivors of a conventional holocaust would be a relief to the survivors of a self-inflicted genocide. With no one to blame but themselves, Cambodians seem still to teeter