The Elimination: A survivor of the Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields - Hardcover

Panh, Rithy; Bataille, Christophe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590515587 ISBN 13: 9781590515587

Publisher: Other Press, 2013

Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.

Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil.
 
The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

About this title

About the Author:

Rithy Panh is an internationally and critically acclaimed documentary film director and screenwriter. His films include S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Rice People, the first Cambodian film to be submitted for an Oscar, among others. His newest documentary was inspired by The Elimination.
 
Christophe Bataille is a French novelist. His works include the award-winning Annam, Hourmaster, and Absinthe. He has been an editor at Editions Grasset since 1997.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the interviews we often bring up the works of Karl Marx, which Duch knows and admires.
Me: “Mr. Duch, who are the closest followers of Marxism?” Duch: “The illiterate.”
People who can’t read are the “closest” followers of Marxism. They’re the ones who are in arms. And, I may add, they’re the ones who obey.
Those who read have access to words, to history, and to the history of words. They know that language shapes, flatters, conceals, enthralls. He who reads reads language itself; he perceives its duplicity, its cruelty, its betrayal. He knows that a slogan is just a slogan. And he’s seen others.
'
In 1975, I was thirteen years old and happy. My father had been the chief undersecretary to several ministers of edu­cation in succession; now he was retired, and a member of the senate. My mother cared for their nine children. My parents, both of them descended from peasant families, be­lieved in knowledge. More than that: they had a taste for it. We lived in a house in a suburb close to Phnom Penh. Ours was a life of ease, with books, newspapers, a radio, and eventually a black-and-white television. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were destined to be designated— after the Khmer Rouge entered the capital on April 17 of that year—as “new people,” which meant members of the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, landowners. That is, oppres­sors who were to be reeducated in the countryside—or exterminated.
Overnight I become “new people,” or (according to an even more horrible expression) an “April 17.” Millions of us are so designated. That date becomes my registration number, the date of my birth into the proletarian revolu­tion. The history of my childhood is abolished. Forbidden. From that day on, I, Rithy Panh, thirteen years old, have no more history, no more family, no more emotions, no more thoughts, no more unconscious. Was there a name? Was there an individual? There’s nothing anymore.
What a brilliant idea, to give a hated class a name full of hope: new people. This huge group will be transformed by the revolution. Transmuted. Or wiped out forever. As for the “old people” or “ordinary people” they’re no longer backward and downtrodden, they become the model to follow—men and women working the lands their ances­tors worked or bending over machine tools, revolutionar­ies rooted in practical life. The “old people” are the heirs of the great Khmer Empire. They are ageless. They built Angkor. They threw its stone images into the jungle and into the water. The women stoop in the rice fields. The men build and repair dikes. They fulfill themselves in and by what they do. They’re charged with reeducating us and they have absolute power over us.
The flag of Democratic Kampuchea (the country’s new name) bears not a hammer and sickle but an image of the great temple of Angkor. “For more than two thousand years, the Khmer people have lived in utter destitution and the most complete discouragement. . . . If our people were capable of building Angkor Wat, then they are capable of doing anything.” (Pol Pot, in a speech broadcast on the radio.)
How many people died on the building sites of the twelfth century? Nobody knows. But what they built ex­pressed a spiritual power and elevation utterly absent from the creations of the Khmer Rouge.
'
A few days before April 17, 1975, one of my father’s friends came to our house to warn him, “The Khmer Rouge are getting closer. You and your wife and children should leave. There’s still time. We’ll find a solution for you—a plane to Thailand, for example. You must flee.” My imperturb­able father refused to budge. He wasn’t afraid. A man de­voted to education, he was a servant of the state and had always worked for the general good. Once a month, in his spare time, he’d meet with some friends—professors, school inspectors—and proofread translations of foreign books into the Khmer language. He didn’t want to leave his country.
And he didn’t think he was in any danger, even though he’d worked for every government through the years.
Using the sequence of events in China as an example, he assured us he would no doubt be sent to a reeducation camp for a while; such an outcome seemed to him to be practically in the natural order of things. Then conditions would start to improve. He believed in his usefulness to the country, and in social justice. As for my mother and us, the children, the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t consider us important. That, then, was the analysis of an educated, well-informed man, a man with peasant origins to boot. In retrospect it’s easy to see the naïveté in his assessment. His viewpoint was, first and foremost, that of a humanist, a progressive who envisioned a humanistic revolution.
However, my father knew that some acts of violence had already occurred. Around the end of 1971 a schoolteacher had explained to him that teaching in the zones occupied by the Khmer Rouge insurgents was almost impossible. He spoke of extortion, torture, murder. They were piti­less, he said, and most of all there seemed to be nothing in their organization that was either egalitarian or free.
The popular revolution was cruel, but on the other hand Lon Nol’s regime was no better, with its trail of dis­appearances and arbitrary executions. The peasants would no longer put up with destitution and servitude. Their misery was increased by the American bombardments in the hinterlands. In the towns, too, the ruling power was loathed; in a climate of penury, corruption had reached intolerable levels. It was on this fertile ground of anger that the Khmer Rouge, with their discipline, their ideology, and their dialectics, had prospered.
My father had met Ieng Sary after his return from France in the mid-1950s. Ieng Sary had gone on to be­come an important Khmer Rouge leader, and then in 1963 he’d disappeared into the jungle with Pol Pot. At that time my father had helped his wife. Their children were in the same school as we were. My father couldn’t imagine this former pupil in the Lycée Condorcet, this student of Marx, this professor of history and geography, participating in an inhuman or criminal enterprise. He figured that the new regime would make educating the masses a priority. Basi­cally he had faith in his own program.
The French protectorate of Cambodia had come to an end in 1953, but true independence is not so easily ob­tained. Under Lon Nol’s regime propaganda was every­where. A climate of violence prevailed. Like all boys of my age I was fascinated by the rifles and the uniforms. Whenever a military truck approached our house, I’d sta­tion myself outside with a wooden gun. I drew tanks in my notebooks.
When I reflect on the situation, I feel certain that chil­dren in the countryside must have shared the same fas­cination, but the Khmer Rouge took them in hand very early, at eleven or twelve years old. They were given a uniform—black shirt, black pants, a traditional checkered scarf (a krama), a pair of sandals cut from tire rubber—a rifle, and, above all, an ironclad ideal and an iron disci­pline. What would I have thought if someone had con­signed a weapon to me and promised a people’s revolution that would bring equality, fraternity, justice? I would have been happy, as one is when he believes.
'
The fighting was getting closer to Phnom Penh. We could feel the earth shaking from the American bombard­ments: the famous “carpet bombing” strategy already em­ployed in Vietnam. My country cousins had warned me that when the B-52s approached, I shouldn’t throw my­self flat on the ground; the vibrations in the earth could give you ear- and nosebleeds, even at a distance of sev­eral hundred yards. They also taught me to recognize the whistling of rockets. They couldn’t take being hungry and thirsty and afraid anymore. Because of the air raids, they had to harvest their fields at night. They all died alongside the Khmer Rouge. That’s not hard to explain: the more bombs the American B-52s dropped, the more peasants joined the revolution, and the more territory the Khmer Rouge gained.
The refugees crowded into the capital. They seemed dazed. Rationing became widespread. There were short­ages of water, rice, electricity, gasoline. We took in my aunt and her two children and lodged them on the ground floor of our house. We could hear the rockets whistling as they fell on our neighborhood, and then the mournful wailing of the ambulance sirens. My school was located across from a pagoda, so we witnessed, with increasing frequency, the cremations of officers who had died in combat. A general, impalpable atmosphere of anxiety per­vaded the city. We were waiting, but for what? Freedom? Revolution? I couldn’t recognize anyone anymore—all faces were closed. It was then that I put away my wooden rifle. The party was over, and I had no ideal to aspire to.
'
On April 17 my family, like all the other inhabitants of the capital, converged on the city center. I remember that my sister was driving without a license. They’re coming! They’re coming! We wanted to be there, to see, to under­stand, to participate. There was already a rumor afoot that we were going to be evacuated. People ran behind the columns of armed men, all of them dressed in black. They were young, old, and in between, and like all peasants, they wore their pants rolled up to their knees.
Many books declare that Phnom Penh joyously cele­brated the arrival of the revolutionaries. I recall instead feverishness, disquiet, a sort of anguished fear of the un­known. And I don’t remember any scenes of fraterniza­tion. What surprised us was that the revolutionaries didn’t smile. They kept us at a distance, coldly. I quickly noticed the looks in their eyes, their clenched jaws, their fingers on their triggers. I was frightened by that first encounter, by the entire absence of feeling.
'
Some years ago I met and filmed a former Khmer Rouge soldier, a member of an elite unit, who confirmed to me that they’d received clear instructions on the eve of the great day: “Don’t touch anyone. No one at all. And if you have no choice, never touch a person with your hand; use your rifle barrel.”
'
Annotation in red ink in the register of S-21, across from the names of three young children: “Grind them into dust.” Signature: “Duch.” Duch acknowledges that it’s his handwriting. Yes, he’s the one who wrote that. But he clarifies his statement: he wrote those words at the re­quest of his deputy, Comrade Hor, the head of the security unit, in order to “jolt” Comrade Peng, who seemed to be hesitating.
The pages of that register each contain between twenty and thirty names. Accompanying every name, Duch jot­ted a note in his own hand—“Destroy.” “Keep.” “Can be destroyed.” “Photograph needed.”—as though he had detailed knowledge of each case. The thoroughness of tor­ture. The thoroughness of the work of torture.
'
We went to stay with friends who gave us temporary lodging in the center of the capital. At an intersection jammed with vehicles, soldiers, and a crowd of people, a Khmer Rouge commander riding in a jeep with a pistol at his belt and a cohort of bodyguards around him recog­nized my father, put his hands together in greeting, and slowly bowed. Who was he? A former pupil? A school­teacher? A peasant from my father’s native village? A few yards farther on my father said to my sister, “Let’s try over to the right,” but at once he received a violent blow to the temple from a rifle butt. “No! To the left!” a young Khmer Rouge yelled. We obeyed him.
When my older sister’s husband, who was a surgeon, saw what terrible shape the refugees were in, the pregnant women on the roads, the gravely ill abandoned to their fate, he left us and went back to the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital. For days on end he performed operations and pro­vided medical care, and then he was evacuated, together with all the patients. The chaos was indescribable. And there were no longer any means of communication—or rather communication itself was forbidden. My brother­in-law searched in vain for us and then set out alone for his native province. Fifteen years later I learned that he’d been arrested at Taing Kauk. Somebody recognized him and denounced him as a physician. At that time people would make denunciations for a bowl of rice. Or out of revenge. Or jealousy. Or to ingratiate themselves with the new power. A physician? He was executed on the spot.
About a year later his wife, my elder sister, disappeared. Both of them, she and her husband, had worked for Cam­bodia. What could be better than archaeology and medi­cine? The body of the past and the living body? My father had hesitated too long to send them to France, even though a grant would have made it possible, and even though he’d already succeeded in sending four of his children abroad. He wanted them to specialize, to make further progress, and then to come back and serve their country. But he gave up the idea.
When I go to the archaeological museum—the Na­tional Museum of Cambodia, a complex of red buildings with ornate, soaring roofs, built by the French—I think about my sister, who, despite her young age, was the mu­seum’s deputy director. When I was eight or nine years old, I often went to visit her in her office. I’d climb up on the little brick wall and use a stick to knock down fruit from the big tamarind trees. The ripe tamarinds were deli­cious. Today I wouldn’t dare do that. Because of my age? Or my memories? The royal palace, with its high walls and its traditions, isn’t far. The world we knew will not re­turn. And you, my sister, I never saw you again. I can still picture your colorful skirt when you would appear at the big, carved wooden door, and your bag filled with docu­ments. I remember our walks together. Your words. And my caprices. I see you smile. You take my childish hand.
'
Early on the morning of April 17, a soldier presented himself at our front door: “Take your things! Leave the house! Right away!” We sprang into action. Immediately, without knowing why or how, we obeyed. Did we al­ready feel fear? I don’t think so. It was more like astonish­ment. One of our neighbors, a handyman who’d become a Khmer Rouge commander, tried to reassure us.
The whole city was in the streets. The men in black told us we’d be back in two or three days. The hunt for traitors and enemies had begun. The purge was hideous but classic in those circumstances. The Khmer Rouge were looking for army officers, senior civil servants, supporters of Lon Nol. According to a spreading rumor, the Americans were going to bomb the capital. The Khmer Rouge leaders had frequently alluded to the possibility of an American bomb­ing, and then certain Western intellectuals had echoed the speculation. The Americans did nothing. Who could have seriously entertained the thought that they would bomb a city of two million people just a few days after with­drawing their personnel and ending their support? I still remember the helicopters evacuating their embassy. You needed a lot of hatred and a good deal of blindness, or some unspeakable other reason, to believe in that fable.
Each of us carried a bag prepared by my mother, with her innate practical sense, and we left in the car. We didn’t get very far. Before long we were lost in the human flood.
There were women and children pushing wheelbarrows, men carrying insanely heavy loads, people half-crazed— and everywhere the fifteen-year-old fighters, with their cold eyes, their black uniforms, and the cartridges in their bandoliers.
Historians today think that the revolutionaries drove some 40 percent of Cambodia’s total population into the countryside. In the course of a few days. There was no over­all plan. No organization. No dispositions had been made to guide, feed, care for, or lodge those thousands and thou­sands of people. G...

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1590515587
• ISBN 13: 9781590515587
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288