καιρός remembered

Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation

With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror were gradually able to rebuild their lives. As a quarter of the population had perished, almost every family had lost several loved ones. Some people were left completely on their own; their entire family had fallen victim to executions or starvation.

Because everyone had been forced to live and work in the countryside, former city-dwellers tried to find their way back to the deserted towns and villages, in the hope that their old family homes were still standing, and perhaps even to find a few relatives who, like them, had survived the years of horror. However, a considerable number of them must have found themselves in the same situation as the lonely, young survivor, who in the preceding years had lost his entire family – grandparents, mother, brothers and sisters: “I felt I had to return to Phnom Penh to see if any of my cousins or friends had survived Pol Pot. My house was more than one hundred and twenty kilometres from Battambang, and I didn’t know the way. (….) Eventually I arrived in Phnom Penh. As I entered my old neighborhood, my spirit crumbled. My house was burned and my friends’ houses were burned. Everything that had once been so familiar was gone. I knew that my life had changed forever.”

Others were more fortunate and were able to reclaim the homes from which they had been forced to leave in 1975. After liberation, the initial food shortages were gradually overcome and people were once again able to obtain different clothes, so that they could finally cast off their hated black uniforms. Slowly, life began to regain some of its former colour and diversity.

I visited Cambodia – and took the photograph above – twenty years after the collective nightmare of Pol Pot’s regime had come to an end. Yet many survivors still suffered from their own nightmares, which regularly returned at night. As one survivor (who now lives abroad) recounts: “Even today, because of what happened to me, I sometimes feel as if I am again living in the darkness. Still, sometimes when it rains, or when darkness falls, my mind is their prisoner and I struggle to be free.”

“Only one question stays in my mind: Why did Khmer people kill other Khmers in our own motherland, Cambodia?” That is indeed a pressing question to which there is no easy, satisfactory answer. And this is perhaps the main reason why Cambodia’s trauma is so difficult to heal. The lifetime of a single generation will certainly not be enough to achieve this.

Quotations from: Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, compiled by Dith Pran, Yale University Press 1997.

Photo of the week: A street in Battambang, Cambodia, 2000