The New York Review Abroad (29 page)
Read The New York Review Abroad Online
Authors: Robert B. Silvers
Few official gatherings are complete without a speaker who details how he or she saw children, parents, and friends murdered by Pol Pot’s henchmen, and other atrocities. It is not unusual for some of the people who carried out such orders to be seated in the audience or even on the podium with the victim recounting the story.
In a sense Vietnamese leniency toward former Khmer Rouge cadres was rendered the more disagreeable by the fact that Hanoi’s propaganda was not content with the actual crimes the Khmer Rouge committed but was determined to exaggerate them sometimes to the point of absurdity. Thus they made the claim that Pol Pot was a madman who, on orders from China, was depopulating Cambodia so that it could be restocked with Chinese. Such extravagant demonology enabled Khmer Rouge spokesmen to claim more plausibly that Vietnamese assertions could not be believed.
4
There is a comparison to be made here with Nuremberg. At that trial defendants attempted, at various stages, to absolve themselves by directing all guilt toward the demonic Hitler. The strategy did not work, if only because of the vast body of evidence that the trial gathered and published. In Cambodia, by contrast, the Vietnamese deliberately fostered the demon theory and allowed no such exhaustive examination of the records of the Khmer Rouge. No documents from
the Central Committee or from the party leadership were released by Hanoi, perhaps because they would not reflect the new version of recent history which the Vietnamese sought to teach. Indeed, the only documents that the Vietnamese allowed to see the light of day were the confessions at Tuol Sleng. While these are a revealing testament to the fanatical brutality of the Khmer Rouge, they hardly constitute an adequate record of its years in power.
Moreover, even access to the Tuol Sleng records was increasingly restricted. While David Hawk found it difficult to arouse much Western interest in a detailed study of the Khmer Rouge, his problems were not just in the West. Last year I was told by rueful officials of the Heng Samrin regime in Phnom Penh that while they had wanted to grant his request to return to Phnom Penh to make microfiches of the records at Tuol Sleng, their Vietnamese “experts” had vetoed the proposal. They thought that now the Vietnamese did not want even that part of the real history to be fully and independently documented—though in previous years some foreign researchers had been allowed to examine the files.
Thus it seems that no one was really interested in establishing or remembering what happened. Along the border the feeding of the Khmer Rouge continued. The new propaganda that Khmer Rouge spokesmen in Thailand or in the West assiduously distributed was distasteful or absurd, boasting of their progressive outlook. But inside Cambodia, under the Vietnamese, former Khmer Rouge cadres were being fed and promoted, with no questions asked. And inside Cambodia, the propaganda of the Vietnamese was often equally absurd and was usually more pervasive.
The Czechoslovak historian Milan Hubl once remarked, after Soviet orthodoxy was forced again onto his country, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture,
its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” Hubl’s friend Milan Kundera wondered whether this was hyperbole dictated by despair. If one thinks of applying it to Cambodia, one must remember that Vietnamese rule has been much more benign than that of the Khmer Rouge. Nonetheless, in significant ways it seems now that propaganda threatens to bury the real and dreadful history of the recent past so deeply under new lies, new exaggerations, new ideological contraptions, that it is in danger of being obliterated and thus forgotten.
—May 10, 1984
1.
Kampuchea Krom is the Cambodian name for the Mekong Delta, which used to be part of Cambodia and is now in Vietnam, and which the Pol Pot leadership coveted. Presumably, anyone accused of having a Kampuchea Krom accent would be declared a Vietnamese spy.
2.
In this cold-warring world each side also tends, at least
in extremis
, to try to associate the other with fascism. Such attempts almost always owe more to rhetoric than to reality and, as such, they almost always devalue that reality. When the Soviets shot down the Korean 747 in 1983 not only did they refuse to apologize (this was perhaps the most terrifying element in the whole disaster), but they also tried to shift the blame to the United States. In alleging that the plane was spying, one Soviet spokesman declared that the White House was “worse than the Nazis. The passengers were sacrificed by the White House just as innocent people had been destroyed by the Nazis.” A few weeks later Mrs. Thatcher, in a burst of anti-Soviet rhetoric, likened the Soviet system to that of Hitler. Such comparisons inhibit understanding.
3.
Amnesty International stated in its 1983 annual report that it was “concerned about reports of detention without trial of people suspected of antigovernment activities” in Cambodia. “More than 200 prisoners suspected of supporting the KPNLF [an anticommunist resistance group] were reportedly held in the former
Prison centrale
in Phnom Penh. Other prisons in Phnom Penh believed to hold political prisoners were those of the municipal police, the Ministry of the Interior and the army. Political prisoners were reportedly also held in provincial and district prisons. People arrested near the border with Thailand and suspected of connections with the anti-communist resistance were said to be sent to a labor camp at Trapeaing Phlong in the eastern part of Kompong Cham province. [By contrast] Khmer Rouge deserters were reportedly sent to separate prisons and most released after three to six months’ re-education. Most political detainees were held without trial. Amnesty International investigated the arrest in late 1982 in Kompon Thom of two people accused of stealing rice for armed opposition groups; Amnesty International received reports that the reason for their detention may have been their participation in unauthorized Christian gatherings. Amnesty International was also concerned about reports that they were tortured to force them to confess. Amnesty International also received details of several cases of people detained without trial for up to two years on suspicion of antigovernment activities; some were released after admitting the charges and pledging loyalty to the government.”
4.
The propaganda declared that the Seventh of January Hospital in Phnom Penh, like almost all other hospitals, had been closed under the Khmer Rouge. But the three Western writers whom the Khmer Rouge had invited at the end of 1978—Elizabeth Becker, Richard Dudman, and Malcolm Caldwell (a British academic who was murdered there)—visited the hospital and found it filled with Cambodian soldiers wounded in fighting along the border with Vietnam. According to the propaganda, there was virtually no industry under the Khmer Rouge. Yet the three foreign journalists were taken to several working factories in 1978; when Becker returned in 1983, she found that they were now closed and it seemed to her that there was even less industrial life than under the Khmer Rouge.
‘I Am Prepared for Anything’
Jerzy Popieluszko
When it comes to oppressive governments, the Catholic Church, like most conservative institutions, religious or secular, has a patchy record. But Father Popieluszko was the best kind of priest. His faith, for him, was not just a matter of tradition, ritual, sacred texts, the smells and the bells, and all the other paraphernalia of his calling. To him, it was a matter of standing by people in distress, strikers being beaten by brutal militiamen, dissidents being locked up for speaking their minds, workers who demanded the dignity of forming independent unions
.
Jerzy Popieluszko’s Church was not a symbol of stern authority, hierarchy, or dogma; it was the center of moral opposition to a dictatorship that had long ago lost all its moral bearings. His Church was both humble and the grandest place of all, for it was there that people could feel free, even as the most powerful forces of the state were still stacked against them
.
—I.B
.
Note:
Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest at the St. Stanislaw Kostka church in Warsaw, was abducted by the Polish security forces on October 19 on a road outside the city of Torun and killed. He sent this statement abroad last year.
THE STATE OF
the Church will always be the same as the state of the people. The Church is not just the Church hierarchy: it is all the people of God, a nation of millions, who constitute the Church in the greater sense, and when they suffer, when they are persecuted, the Church suffers.
The Church’s mission is to be with its people day in and day out, partaking in their joys, pains, and sorrows. The primate and the bishops of course have in their care the well-being of all, and diplomacy is therefore at times necessary in the Church’s higher ranks, to protect people from suffering and mistreatment whenever it is possible to do so. There are those who sometimes misunderstand and criticize this, for they want the Church to take a more decisive stand against the authorities. But such is not the Church’s task.
The Church has repeatedly insisted and continues to insist that the authorities respect human dignity—which is not being respected; that they free the imprisoned. Through the efforts of the Church and of its affiliated Prisoners’ Relief Committee, aid has reached those most severely persecuted. There is no better proof than this that the Church has indeed carried out its mission during martial law.
Has the lifting of martial law changed anything?
I’ve spoken out several times about this from the pulpit—unequivocally. As recently as the end of July, quoting official Church pronouncements in my argument, I concluded that in lifting martial law, something the bishops had called for so often, the authorities failed
to take advantage of yet another opportunity for reconciliation with the nation. The amnesty was a subterfuge, calculated for one-sided gain—whereas the country had every right to expect that the amnesty would right the wrongs, especially the moral wrongs, committed during martial law. To this day our democratically elected brothers, behind whom stand millions of their countrymen, languish in prisons. And even those who have benefited from the amnesty must feel at times like hostages, for this is a conditional amnesty. They must sign statements that go against their own conscience.
The Holy Father has spoken on this subject of the freedom of conscience: conscience is something so holy that even God himself does not put limits on it. To do so through such forced statements is to offend against divine law. The lifting of martial law, a move buttressed by so many new regulations, must give each Pole the distinct impression that the shackles, partially loosened from around the hands, are tightening around the soul and conscience. There are many more restrictions now than before; freedom is curtailed even further. And that’s why there is bitterness: here was one more chance to join hands, one more chance to try to get out of a difficult situation. This chance, unfortunately, was not seized.
How do I see the future?
I said this at the beginning. The Church’s future will be the same as society’s future. The Church’s mission is to be with the people here through thick and thin, and this mission I believe the Church will never renounce. What is crucial is that people raise their national, religious, and social awareness. We need courses of public education, lectures in ethics, something along the lines of the interwar workers’ universities. It is a fundamental matter, and the Church should participate in it. Its end? So that the next time there is a similar popular
rising, a push for freedom, time will not be wasted on the unessential; people must learn to distinguish what is important, on what issues there can be no compromise, and on which, for the time being, there can be.
What is the mood of the country?
It is very difficult to define. One thing is certain: it is not against strong opposition; most people find themselves taking part in it.