Thank you very much Dr. Peang-Met for raising up this very important controversial debate. In Cambodia as people have been embedded by non-independent mass media including the unalienable traumatic past of war and genocide, the group of stability and stomach need, has been conveyed by majority. However, Buddhists who have learned and experienced deep understanding of the teachings see that the highest goal of Buddhism is “liberty”, not “the four necessities”. In practice, Nama (liberty) and Rupa (four necessities) must be equal and in balance.

In Vipassana meditation, practitioners cannot get into the Dhamma stream if one cannot balance Nama and Rupa. Socially and politically observing, Cambodia is not in the stage of any thing identical to these three stages.  Scandals of non-independent judicial system, economic development through poor evictions, non-independent mass media, rampant corruption from tops to bottoms, political autocracy, favoritism and cronyism etc. have been lingering on the murky stage…do we see Cambodia is in the pathway of engineering in development and stability, engineering in creating liberty, or engineering in balancing of both social commodities?

PACIFIC DAILY NEWS
Jan. 25, 2012Cambodia needs to see real change

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

Many readers emailed me following my series of articles on replacing Cambodia’s dictatorship with a democratic form of government. As many emails contained similar concerns, I have grouped those with similar themes and will use this column to deal with two.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

http://www.guampdn.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201201250400/OPINION02/201250318

Real politics focuses on real factors and current changes of a country. It doesn’t give much value to the past or the ideology of politics. Real politics is contradictory  to the politics of memory but it is a base of future politics.

If we talk about real politics in Cambodia, we might concentrate on how we can encapsulate self-reliance on key national fields such as heuristic political domain, economics of sustainable development and development for all, and the independence of judiciary system which can provide trust and just for all Cambodian people. Social security or social wellness needs trusted and just judiciary system.

At the moment, as a younger Cambodian, I can see that Cambodia cannot lift up its dignity as once it proclaimed a great empire in the region if Cambodian leaders and some Cambodians are still using the past trauma, genocide and previous regimes as their tools to measure the current development. It is very impossible to say that Cambodia today and Cambodia last several decades is in the same pace. Last few decades, economists didn’t use GDP to measure growths. Last several decades, we didn’t have iphone or broad band internet to watch online TVs or all visual video clips etc.

Wisely speaking and straight to the beneficial points for Cambodia, we must focus on improvement at the present for a better future. The past is just a lesson. It is incomparable to proclaim dignity for current Cambodians by comparing its present capacity to the past.

Hence, Paris Peace Agreement is a fact that we must remind to maintain our progressive conscience. PPA is the foundation for Cambodia. Cambodia can build other important parts of this nation-house because of this foundation. It is not wise to uproot or renege this foundation. Millions of dollar have flowed into Cambodia because of this PPA. The one who has received benefit most from the PPA is the one who has rejected this important foundation. Do you think they are an “ungrateful person” or Khmer called “Akattanno” or not?

Cambodian people must stay on reality. Real politics focus on real factors and current changes of a country. It doesn’t give much value to the past or the ideology of politics. Real politics are contradictory  to the politics of memory but it is a base of future politics.

If we talk about real politics in Cambodia, we might concentrate on how we can encapsulate self-reliance on key national fields such as heuristic political domain, economics of sustainable development and development for all, and the independence of judiciary system which can provide trust and just for all Cambodian people. Social security or social wellness needs trusted and just judiciary system.

Omnipresent factors of politics, economic and social are imperative for real politics of Cambodia to be developed and endorsed.

Regards,

Sophan S.

CAMBODIA: MEMORY, ATROCITY AND AFFECT

by Alvin Lim

In 2005, just as America was reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, I embarked on a line
of flight from a quotidian life in Singapore, arriving in Phnom Penh to begin a new career as a
philosophy lecturer at Pannasastra University. Several months earlier I had resigned from my
excruciating human resources job at Singapore Airlines. So, it was as a Singaporean suffering
from ennui that I encountered several sites of memory of atrocity in Cambodia, some of which I
shall discuss in this essay. The organization of this paper is not what Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1987) would describe as aborescent, but is instead rhizomatic – its nodes crystallize
encounters I have and have not had with collective memories of atrocity (p. 21). This exploration
transverses time and space, and explores the political significance of sensory affects ranging
from the visual to the gustatory.

A Visit to Tuol Sleng

Under Pol Pot, the Tuol Svay Prey High School was transformed into S-21, the core of
Democratic Kampuchea’s internal surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. The former high
school’s classrooms were crudely transformed and deployed as prison cells and torture
chambers. During the Vietnamese occupation, S-21 was transformed into a genocide museum,
which has since become one of Phnom Penh’s most popular tourist destinations.
Any visit to a memory site of atrocity raises the question of visitor’s ambiguous identity as a
witness to the past or as a voyeur of the other’s pain. Philip Gourevitch (1998) confronted this
dilemma when he visited Rwanda’s Nyarubuye genocide memorial, where the murdered victims
were left unburied as a potent means of commemoration of their atrocious ends:

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The
skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility
of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there
– these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I
couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame,
incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took
photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I
saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely (p. 19).
Sven Lindqvist (1992), another explorer of historical pain, connects memory sites of atrocity to
the European project of colonialism. Noting that the Victorian liberal theorist Herbert Spenser
had applauded the extermination of those troublesome human populations that stood in the way
of the civilizing projects of Western colonialism (pp. 8-9), Lindqvist observes that:
The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald
lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been completely repressed, even by
Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are
actually a common European heritage (p. 9).

What memory sites like Tuol Sleng and Nyarubuye seem to show is that extermination is a
properly human, not just a common European, heritage.
A visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum for Genocidal Crime offers an unpleasant sensory overload.
From the outside, Tuol Sleng looks exactly like the French colonial-era high school that it was
prior to Pol Pot’s ascendance. Its interior, however, is anything but. The first sight that greets a
visitor to Tuol Sleng is of classrooms reconfigured as torture chambers. The sight of beds that
were repurposed into devices of pain creates a visceral shock, as do the old photographs of the
corpses of murdered interrogation subjects. These torture cells are affective machines of terror.
Elaine Scarry (1985) captures the semiological annihilation of ordinary objects that have been
transformed into instruments of torture:
Just as all aspects of the concrete structure are inevitably assimilated into the process of
torture, so too the contents of the room, its furnishings, are converted into weapons…
The room, both in its structure and its content, is converted into a weapon, deconverted,
undone. Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that
everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are
annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no
bed (pp. 40-41).
This pinpoints the shock and nausea of S-21’s torture chambers: the classrooms are no longer
classrooms; the beds are no longer beds – they have been perverted and transformed into places
and instruments of pain and death. When I first saw these blood-stained non-beds, my heart
4
hastened its beating like the percussion of a skor, the traditional Khmer drum, so great was my
horror and disgust.
After these torture cells, one arrives at corridors of individual holding cells. The Khmer Rouge
constructed these by crudely dividing up the original classrooms: a nightmarish
reterritorialization of striated space. The tactile and visual crudeness of these prison cells, and
their claustrophobic and dim interiors, create a sensory bloc dominated by the affects of fear and
horror.
Apart from the tactile and the visual, Tuol Sleng also affects the sonorous and the olfactory.
Silence predominates these walls: even noisy tourists tend to be shocked into silence. While S-
21’s security regulations warn prisoners of the penalties of unregulated sounds, one imagines
silences punctuated by screams when S-21 was in operation.
This sonorous chill is juxtaposed with the lively soundscape just outside Tuol Sleng’s walls.
Boisterous neighborhood children use the former school grounds as their playground, and
predatory tuk tuk and motorcycle taxi drivers patiently wait outside the museum, calling out their
services to hapless tourists. I recall myself having to flee from these smirking drivers when I left
the gates of Tuol Sleng – the cacophony of their commercial appeals jarred uncomfortably with
my fresh memories of the mortuary silences of S-21’s prison and torture cells, making me feel
nauseous.
5
In the past, the museum offered a display the victims’ clothes. This would have added an
olfactory affect to the sensory bloc experienced by the visitors, generating visceral nausea. This
would have mirrored the olfactory affect of similar memory sites in Rwanda:
We made to two stops on the genocide tourism circuit: the Genocide Museum in Kigali
and a former school that had been the site of mass killings and now was a storehouse for
hundreds of preserved bodies and the clothing that used to cover them. The museum did
an excellent job of describing the story of the genocide and at the same time giving it a
personal face. The former school was impacting in how it threw death in your face. You
could smell the stench of the bodies, see the rotting tufts of hair on their heads, and see
the machete wounds deep in the skulls (Miller, 2007).
The display of the clothes of the dead mirrors similar displays of the remnants of lives of victims
in museums commemorating the Shoah. Jeffrey Ochsner (1997) cites the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum’s poignant collections of “ordinary objects that were taken at the
death camps from those about to die – objects like shoes, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, cutlery,
scissors, and the like. These things are ordinary; indeed, they look just like similar objects that
we all own and use every day. (p. 171)” The works of Columbian artist Doris Salcedo similarly
consist of remnants of the lives of victims of atrocity. Jill Bennett (2005) elaborates:
The former series of installations comprises broken domestic furnishings into which are
embedded fragments of bone, clothing, and so on – traces of individuals who have been
6
driven from their homes and killed; the latter piece is constructed from a glass-windowed
chest, packed with items of clothing and concreted over (p. 51).
Ochsner argues that the affective power of the remnants of ordinary lives arises from their very
ordinariness:
There seems to be little time or distance between these things and their owners and the
similar things that we own and ourselves. Thus, these offer the opportunity for us to
realize the similar humanity of those who were killed in the death camps and ourselves.
They can become sites for projection (linking objects), and through them we can
experience (project) a close connection to the feeling of the lives of those who died.
Although we may not have known any of those killed in the death camps, we can “share”
through these linking objects in a connection with these dead. Through the knowledge of
what these represent (objects “harvested” from people about to be killed), we can begin
to experience a partial sense of the fear they must have felt (Ochsner, 1997, p. 171).
Bennett points out that these objects have undergone a radical reterritorialization of their
ordinary meanings:
The shoes, barely discernible behind the thick hewn skins, are less concrete signifiers of
their owners than objects that now cannot be grasped, touched, or brought into focus. The
fragments of clothing encased in furnishings … no longer enliven these objects; instead
7
they haunt them in a way that does not recall their former use, confirming instead that
these items no longer function as they once did (Bennett, 2005, p. 62).
Through their violent resituation in memory sites, these ordinary objects lose their former
functional meanings and are instead transformed into Ochsnerian linking objects: allowing the
living spectators to project onto them a sense of community with the dead.
After one has passed by the corridors of prison cells, one comes to Tuol Sleng’s displays of mugshots
of S-21’s victims. These photographs of the faces of the doomed (only a handful survived
S-21; tens of thousands of others were murdered) have a powerful visual affect, generating
emotions of grief and sorrow. While S-21 can be described as a machine of pain and death, these
interior walls of memorial photographs can be described as machines of grief and sorrow. These
images can also be usefully analyzed through Roland Barthes’ (1981) distinction between the
studium and punctum. The studium consists of the intentional field of the photographic image,
contested and negotiated between the photographer and the viewer. The punctum, on the other
hand, refers to the unintentional elements in the photographic image which “punctuate” or
“break” the studium:
This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign
consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an
arrow, and pierces me… A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but
also bruises me, is poignant to me) (pp. 26-27).
8
The studium of S-21’s mug shots hence consist in Democratic Kampuchea’s bureaucratic need to
document and discipline these alleged counterrevolutionaries. Their punctum, on the other hand,
consist in those unintentional elements – drops of blood, facial grimaces, marks on the walls –
which reveal the human horror (of their impending tortures and murders) these victims faced,
and which generate, almost three decades later, sympathy and the associated affects of sorrow
and grief in the viewers today. These intense emotions stem from the temporally frozen images
of fear and hopelessness that can be discerned on the faces of these victims. In this way the S-21
mug-shots recode the original overcoding generated by what Deleuze and Guattari describe as
the abstract machines of faciality:
The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases
to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal
code – when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by
something we shall call the Face (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 170).
The face hence overcodes the pre-symbolic hermeneutic of the body, allowing the transformation
of the subject into a primal frame of meaning. The S-21 mug-shot, with its studium and punctum,
recodes the face, situating it in the fateful context of eternal murder. Susan Sontag (2003)
succinctly describes the sense of nausea generated by these images:
These Cambodian women and men of all ages, including many children, photographed
from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are – as in Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas,
where Apollo’s knife is eternally about to descend – forever looking at death, forever
9
about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the
lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening (p. 61).
The affect created by these walls of photographs can be juxtaposed with the affect created by the
wall of names at the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor. In contrast to the violence of
intense emotions created by the photographs of S-21’s victims, the stately cadences and elegant
arrangement of names at the USS Arizona memorial generate refined emotions of restrained
sorrow. This arrangement of names echoes the starkness of Maya Lin’s controversial and popular
Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ochsner argues that the memorial’s affective power arises from its
“space of absence”, that is, “a void in which we have the simultaneous experience of both the
absence and the presence of the dead. (p. 156)” The inscription of the names of the dead on the
reflective polished walls of the memorial generates an uncanny sensation of connection between
the living viewer and the memorialized deceased:
The simultaneity of vision of the names of the dead and missing, first with images of
unknown others and then with ourselves, could not be more direct in establishing an
interpersonal connection and making the memorial a linking object. We understand, not
abstractly but rather directly, the common human nature of those who are named and
those who read the names. The directness of proper names connects us; the reflective
surface superimposes our images upon the names. Indeed, we not only see ourselves
superimposed on the names, we also see ourselves gazing out from within the wall
(Ochsner, 1997, p. 164).
10
Adjacent to the displays of mug-shots at Tuol Sleng is its infamous map of skulls. Created from
exhumed human remains from S-21’s mass graves, the visual and tactile affect of this osseous
collage is one of disgust and horror. It is also literally a violent cartography, which Michael
Shapiro (2009) describes as “an articulation of geographic imaginaries and antagonisms, based
on models of identity-difference (p. 18).” Through its biopolitical security apparatuses, the
xenophobic Pol Pot regime sought to purge Democratic Kampuchea of the enemy Vietnamese
and their Cambodian allies. Policing agencies like S-21 were hence created to “identify the
domestic spaces where bodies were judged to be dangerous because they are associated with
foreign antagonists (p. 19).” These spaces eventually evolved – through the extermination of
these dangerous bodies – into killing fields and mass graves. Tuol Sleng’s map of skulls is a
literal representation of this violent cartography.
The genocide memorial art of Vann Nath is also on display here. Imprisoned and tortured at S-
21, Vann Nath was spared execution because of his artistic skills: the Khmer Rouge assigned
him the task of creating portraits of Comrade Pol Pot. Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge to
the Vietnamese on January 7, 1979, Vann Nath was commissioned by the government to
document the horrors of S-21 (Ly, 2003, pp. 71-72). In the resulting series of brutal paintings,
entitled Scenes of Life at S-21, he vividly depicts bodies in pain. Given that these paintings are
displayed right next to the torture instruments they depict, they inspire in the viewer an imagined
reliving of the acts of torture, and hence an intense visceral affect of fear, disgust and horror. In
terms of affect, Scenes of Life at S-21 resembles Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings.
Arthur Danto compares these favorably to the leaked Abu Ghraib photographs, which, he argues,
fail to “bring us closer to the agonies of the victims”:
11
Botero’s images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims,
whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As
Botero once remarked: “A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a
painter can make the invisible visible.” What is invisible is the felt anguish of
humiliation, and of pain. Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag
memorably called the “pain of others” lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in
painting, as Botero’s Abu Ghraib series reminds us, for the limits of photography are not
the limits of art. The mystery of painting, almost forgotten since the Counter-
Reformation, lies in its power to generate a kind of illusion that has less to do with
pictorial perception than it does with feeling (Danto, 2006, p. 24).
Sontag notes that S-21’s photographed victims “remain an aggregate: anonymous victims,” and
that “even if named, unlikely to be known to ‘us’ (Sontag, 2003, p. 61).” While this is still
probably true for the typical foreign visitor to Tuol Sleng, researchers like David Chandler
(1999) have done much to excavate and reveal the identities and histories of these victims. And
what has been revealed has the power to reshape one’s response to the visual records of their
suffering and death. As Nic Dunlop (2006) explains:
“Better to destroy ten innocent people than let one enemy go free” ran a Khmer Rouge
slogan. Because of the lack of information displayed at the museum we often assume that
the prisoners of Tuol Sleng were innocent victims; the terror in the faces elicits a
response of pity from the viewer. The popular image of the Khmer Rouge in the West
12
was of young, fanatical murderers in black pyjamas, wielding guns. What is not
immediately apparent to most visitors to the prison is that Tuol Sleng was created for
rooting out enemies from within the party. The majority of the prisoners were from the
Khmer Rouge’s own ranks. This adds an unwelcome moral complication: among the
photographs I now faced there were interrogators as well as guards from the prison itself,
Khmer Rouge who suddenly found their roles reversed during the many purges. The
upside-down world of Tuol Sleng blurred the distinction between the guilty and the
innocent (p. 23).
It was inevitable that the fear and loathing Tuol Sleng inspired in me would be tempered by my
learning of the circumstances of the genesis of the museum. Early in their occupation of
Cambodia, the Vietnamese transformed S-21 into a genocide museum for the dual purposes of
vilifying the Khmer Rouge and promoting the Vietnamese army as a liberation force. This was
needed given the geo-political background of the Cold War: the U.S. and China were offering
diplomatic and material support to the ousted Khmer Rouge in order to oppose the Soviet-backed
Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.
To create the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, the Vietnamese sent Ung Pech, himself a survivor of
S-21, to Poland to learn from the genocide museum at Auschwitz. Under his subsequent
directorship of Tuol Sleng, the ample evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities was collected and put
on public display. (Dunlop, 2006, pp. 183-185). The political genesis of the Tuol Sleng genocide
museum is illuminated by Pierre Nora’s (1989) account of the dialectic between memory and
history in the creation of les lieux de mémoire (places of memory):
13
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent
evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its
successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to
being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer (p. 8).
With many survivors of Democratic Kampuchea choosing not to share with their children their
traumatic memories, there exists this “dialectic of remembering and forgetting” in Cambodian
society of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. Stéphanie Gée and Im Lim (2008) observe that “many
youngsters in Cambodia still find it hard to presume true the horrors committed under the regime
of Pol Pot and his henchmen… Painful memories of the regime remain kept behind a wall of
silence in many a family.”
Institutionally, the history of Democratic Kampuchea remains excluded from the official school
curriculum, although there are plans to include it in the secondary school curriculum by the end
of 2009. As Burcu Münyas (2008) points out, “in the absence of adequate education on the
history of the Khmer Rouge period, the prevalent exposure to the horrors of the genocide at
homes, schools, museums and memorials has worked to produce fear, anger, disbelief or denial
in many Cambodian youth, sustained their myths, and has left them with several compelling
questions, such as ‘why did Khmer kill Khmer?’” (p. 413).
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While my sorrow for S-21’s victims remains, it is now tinted with a greater horror at the Khmer
Rouge’s creation of a killing machine which devoured its own cadres and their families. This in
turn has shaped my response to Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) approval of the revolutionary authenticity
of the Jacobins:
Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly elsewhere: “That which produces the general good is
always terrible.” These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the
temptation to violently impose the general good on a society, but, on the contrary, as a
bitter truth to be fully endorsed (p. 160).
The violence unleashed by the Khmer Rouge and the Jacobins on their respective societies both
amount to Benjaminian “divine violence” – the cataclysmic event “when those outside the
structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance”
(pp. 161-162). Would Žižek be so flippant if he had actually seen the effects of this “divine
violence” in Cambodia?
Encoding Memories in Sound: A Brief Word
The 1960s and early 1970s were the heyday of Cambodian rock ’n’ roll. Tragically, most of
Cambodia’s musicians were killed by the Khmer Rouge after the revolution (Pirozzi, 2006). This
alters the affective response towards their music, which has been reterritorialized from a mode of
entertainment into a funereal soundscape of the dead.
15
Consider Sinn Sisamouth’s rendition of Quando My Love (2008), for example. As a Khmer
cover version of a classic Italian pop song, the immediate sonorous affect is one of amusing
kitsch. However, when one remembers Sisamouth’s terrible death at the hands of the Khmer
Rouge, the song’s sonorous affect assumes tragic and elegiac undertones: whenever I hear
Sisamouth’s rendition of this song I feel the sorrowful chill of ghostly fingers running up my
spine.
Given the comfortable fit between traditional Khmer music’s love of melody and rock ‘n’ roll’s
jaunty rhythms, it’s not surprising that the music of the murdered generation of Cambodian
musicians remains popular today, and a new generation of musicians has emerged to resurrect
the genre. For example, Dengue Fever (2008) covers a song popularized in the 1960s by Ros
Sereysothea, the female counterpart to Sinn Sisamouth, and who was also murdered by the
Khmer Rouge (Cahill, 2006).
It is useful at this point to compare the impact of viewing photographs of the dead with listening
to songs sung by the dead. In my opinion the latter contains an element of the uncanny that the
former lacks. This uncanny affect stems from the dynamic nature of sound, a living dynamism
missing in the static gaze of a photographic image. The recording of Sisamouth’s performance
preserves for the listener his living voice, making the sonorous impact all the greater.
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Breakfast with the Dictator: The Gustatory and the Political
In August 2007 I accompanied a Czech political scientist to the town of Pailin on the Cambodian
border with Thailand. We were there to meet Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the Khmer
Rouge, for an interview. This interview was to be one of his last before his arrest the following
month on charges of crimes against humanity by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia, popularly known as the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal.
For me this interview generated a unique sensory bloc. Noun Chea had suffered a stroke several
years earlier, and as such suffered bodily impediments. Underneath these, his sternness of speech
and demeanor reflected a fanatical discipline that Žižek would probably acknowledge as that of
an authentic revolutionary. I could not fail to recognize that Nuon Chea, during the period of his
leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, was most certainly not a moderate who sought
“revolution without a revolution,” that is, as Žižek explains, “a revolution deprived of the excess
in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to
preexisting norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the ‘divine’ dimension and thus
reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals. (p. 163)” Despite his
physical frailty, this octogenarian, who was accused of the extermination of almost a third of
Cambodia’s population, terrified me.
As our interview was at 6 AM, Nuon Chea invited us to join him and his family for breakfast.
Mrs. Nuon Chea had prepared a simple but extremely delicious Sino-Khmer breakfast. There
was fried chicken, sour soup with pork and preserved mustard leaves, fatty roast pork, and
17
generous helpings of rice. The rich flavors, and the hearty quality and quantity of the meal all
reflected plenitude, and my sense of fear clashed with, but failed to kill, my gustatory enjoyment.
I ended up having three helpings, to the delight of Mrs. Nuon Chea. Her cooking generated in me
a strong sense of nostalgia, which was interesting because this was the first time I had met her.
“Patrick” (2009), the neuroscientist who runs the Very Evolved blog, explains this sensation of
false nostalgia as “nostalgia by association.” That is, my gustatory enjoyment triggered in my
mind my childhood memories of gustatory enjoyment of family meals. As Lehrer (2007) points
out, “our senses of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental.”
This is because smell and taste are the only sense that connect directly to the
hippocampus, the center of the brain’s long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All
our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed by the thalamus, the source
of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less
efficient at summoning up our past (p. 80).
Benny Widyono (2008), the “shadow governor” of Siem Reap province under the United
Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, describes in his memoirs a similar gustatory
encounter with the Khmer Rouge. In September 1992 Prince Sihanouk and Princess Monique
paid a visit to the Khmer Rouge-held town of Pailin, and Mr. Widyono accompanied them. As he
later recounted:
At lunchtime I was invited to join a banquet of Khmer Rouge top brass in honor of the
royal couple. Khieu Samphan, Son Sann and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Thioun Munn, and I
18
flanked the Prince and Princess; Pol Pot was conspicuously absent. Ieng Sary’s daughter,
who studied in London, prepared a sumptuous lunch: Khmer nouvelle cuisine, including
fine eggshells delicately filled with fluffy dried fish, chicken curry in individual bowls for
each guest with bread, and Cambodian sour soup with dried fish, all washed down with
Mouton Cadet, a Sihanouk favorite (pp. 87-88).
This gustatory enjoyment reflects plenitude, and indeed Pailin at the time was a town of plenty,
thanks to its natural riches of gem mines and lumber:
In the late afternoon I walked along the main road of the town, which was filled with
cafes selling Thai-style roast chicken, Thai beer, and whiskey. The whole atmosphere
was Thai, punctuated by glaring Thai disco music… My visit confirmed that the civilian
population under the Khmer Rouge was more comfortable than civilians in adjacent SOC
territory. Even the Khmer Rouge soldiers, who were given every chance to defect,
refused to go (Widyono, 2008, p. 89).
This plenitude is not representative of life under the Khmer Rouge, however. In September 2005,
shortly after I arrived in Phnom Penh, an entrepreneurial Cambodian opened L’histoire Café
opposite the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, offering authentic Democratic Kampuchea-era
cuisine:
The restaurant serves a $6 fixed-price “Unforgettable Menu” that sacrifices flavor for
historical accuracy: The main course is bland rice gruel, served in a tin bowl.
19
“The Khmer Rouge gave a person a bit of rice or corn mixed with water and leaves. This
kind of food a person could get only a [serving] in the noon and a [serving] in the
evening,” the menu notes. (Melamed & Sambath, 2005)
Hakpry Agnchealy, the owner’s sister, succinctly describes the gustatory affect of this
authentically revolutionary meal:
“When I ate, it made me so sad,” she said. “I do not want to eat this food again.”
(Melamed & Sambath, 2005)
L’histoire Café was shut down by the police a fortnight later (“Cambodian Police”, 2005).
I am uncertain how to properly theorize the gustatory and the olfactory. Of the five senses, the
gustatory and the olfactory offer the least avenue for conceptualization, especially when
compared with the visual or the sonorous. The gustatory and the olfactory are rooted in chemical
interactions between the world and the sense organs, and are less open than the visual, the
sonorous and the tactile to iterations of interpretation and reflection.
However the gustatory and the olfactory cannot be ignored for they offer significant impacts on
the sensory bloc and on judgment. For example, Mrs. Nuon Chea’s delicious breakfast created
for me a gustatory affect of enjoyment, which in turn created a pleasurable sensory frame which
20
juxtaposed directly with the fear produced by my cognizance of Nuon Chea’s deep responsibility
for the Khmer Rouge genocide.
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21
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Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Melamed, S., & Thet, S. (2005, September 30). New Cafe Promises ‘Khmer Rouge Experience’.
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After France granted Cambodia independence in 1953, an impassioned renaissance swept Phnom Penh in the 1960s, a resurgent Angkorian nationalism alongside a potpourri of foreign influences tha included Beatlemania and existentialism. Many saw the city— once called the ”Pearl of Asia”—a neutral safe haven from the havoc that rocked neighboring Vietnam and Thailand. Artists, writers and scholars frequented Phnom Penh’s beautified universities and cafés, discussing the great works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Picasso, while musicians and dancers revived traditional Khmer styles from the country’s Angkor-era height. Even then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the movement’s figurehead, was a filmmaker and singer who led a jazz band.

Fast forward a few years. Bombing campaigns, military coups and civil war rip the country apart. Intellectuals are targeted and wiped out under the Maoist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-79 and their works​​​ destroyed. A former Khmer Rouge cadre named Hun Sen bullies his way into power in 1993 against United Nations-backed election results, and then orchestrates a coup against his co-Prime Minister Norodom Ranarridh in 1997. His ruling Cambodian People’s Party consolidates power in the media, and rampant corruption rankles the universities. Debate and discussion are left dead and a country is in ruins.

Yet today a brimming young movement of intellectuals resembling those of the 1960s is quietly—and sometimes anonymously— creating change in Cambodia. They mostly draw on the same inspirations and discuss the same topics of culture, politics and romance—the latter remains a highly taboo topic. Some even listen to the same music, writing about the classics of Simon and Garfunkel. Yet unlike their predecessors, these intellectuals do not mingle in French-style cafés and art galleries, but in the new wireless Internet cafés springing up in Phnom Penh.

Looking at them, one would think they are just a typical group of youngsters. During lunch breaks and on weekends, they can be seen in popular Monivong Boulevard hangouts wearing ripped jeans and headphones, clicking away on their quirky, stickered laptops, stopping sporadically for a sip of iced coffee. Virtually all are under 30, born during a 1980s baby boom that followed the Khmer Rouge genocide. They represent a small but growing tech-savvy middle class of students, lawyers, technology professionals and journalists, who only recently came of age in a society where little public discussion of issues exists.

Formally banding together in 2006 in a project to teach students about technology, this new generation of intellectuals never actually refers to themselves as “intellectuals.” The word’s archaic connotation foregoes their 21st-century context. Perhaps more appropriate for an environment dominated by mobile phones and cyberspace, they have instead named themselves “Cloggers,” a portmanteau of “Cambodian bloggers.” And, as the name implies, they blog—turning to the unregulated Internet medium because they would have little chance to speak their minds otherwise.

With stilted shacks and slums lined along Phnom Penh’s dirt roads, and a populace of which 33% earn less than $0.50 a day according to optimistic government statistics, Cambodia is remarkably wired. After King Sihanouk, now King-Father, started Cambodia’s first blog in 2002 and the Cloggers began their educational tours of the country, blogging mania swept Phnom Penh; a “blogosphere” once numbering 30 bloggers spawned into a vibrant community of pundits, photographers and diarists now innumerable.

Even though only 2% of Cambodians have regular Internet access on computers, the urban blogging craze can be partly attributed to Cambodia’s widespread mobile-phone culture that also offers mobile Internet access. Only a high rural illiteracy rate of 75% stands in the way to larger change, say Cloggers. “We have a dichotomy. Cambodia has leapfrogged landlines to embrace modern, high-tech mobile phones. Users aren’t afraid of technology. But phones are not reaching their full potential,” said John Weeks, an American blogger who has lived in Phnom Penh since 2003. “If ordinary Cambodians can overcome the language barrier and literacy barriers, phones have incredible gateway potential that would dwarf the current blog boom.”

The trend is only set to grow despite literacy shortfalls. The recent introduction of 3G mobile-phone technology into Cambodia promises high-speed Internet access from anywhere—even the remote northern provinces—for only $35 a month or less. Enthusiasts can also attach their 3G phone to their computer and use it as a makeshift satellite modem, even if they’re traveling in the electricity-starved countryside.

Complementing their taste for global technology culture, that prospect fuels the intellectuals’ desire to continue shaping Cambodia’s public discussions. “Blogs arereally a way of culture-sharing and getting discussions going, something Cambodia really needs now,” reflected Keo Kounila, an inquisitive young Clogger and journalist who voraciously reads John F. Kennedy and Mahatma Gandhi. “It’s that we’re trying to find a unique way to bring more foreign ideas to Cambodia, but put them into a Cambodian context.” Like others, she’s noticed that blogs in Cambodia attract the attention mostly of their American counterparts, who she thinks bring an “open source” culture to Cambodia—referring to the technology movement that strives for free flow of ideas.

Prum Seila, also a journalist and university student, chimed in while humming to his favorite Beatles tune on his mobile phone. ”Foreigners give us a lot of ideas about social issues and the problems of globalization, with the garment factories. Cambodia really needs those new ways of thinking about things,” he added, noting that Cambodia’s current blogging scene resembles the 1960s mostly because of its American cultural influence.

The duo credits foreign attention to the fact that many Cambodians blog in English, as opposed to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam where blogs are largely in local languages. “It’s important to bring more international attention to Cambodia with English, because our issues haven’t been that known for very long,” Mr. Prum added. But as the Open Institute in Phnom Penh spreads its Khmer-language Unicode project, a Cambodian font constantly being tweaked, more Cloggers have embraced Khmer to tap into a local audience.

“We should not give up our own language so we can blog in English,” said Be Chantra, a Unicode developer and Khmer language blogger. “With Khmer, we can make a bigger impact on important decisions in Cambodia, with a more local voice.” But overall, English remains the language of choice for Cloggers who seek global discussion and an escape from government authorities. One Clogger even exclaimed that Mr. Be’s initiatives could get them censored someday.

In a country where the ruling party dominates most newspapers, radio stations and television stations—Mr. Hun’s daughter, Hun Mana, even directs the popular Bayon tv channel—young bloggers like Ms. Keo and Mr. Prum feel that blogs are the only place to foster fresh, nonpartisan discussions. Both said political self-censorship on the part of newspapers, which read more like tabloids, keeps the Cambodian public ill-informed to pressing issues like corruption and land evictions. Unlike nearby Malaysia, Thailand and China, however, the Cambodian government does not actively censor blogs, making it a preferred medium to evade authority. Many say the country’s power elite just haven’t caught up with the times yet, or that they lack the resources to implement rigorous censorship programs. Others say not enough Cambodians read controversial blogs.

Some media outlets have taken advantage of the government’s blind eye to the Internet. Following a spat last May between the government and English-language Cambodia Daily newspaper over a supplement about Burma, the newspaper circumvented government authority by publishing it online. To the surprise of many, Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith’s stance on the Daily’s choice was favorable: “It’s online. It’s OK,” he announced. Wide implications for the Cloggers followed.

Since Cloggers see the cyberspace as an escape, blogs fill a crucial gap against mainstream media that politicize important issues, Cloggers say. Some point to the current border conflict at the Preah Vihear temple. After UNESCO listed Preah Vihear as a World Heritage Site in July, the popular station CTN aired a celebration program showing Mr. Hun’s portrait encircled by stars with the national anthem being performed in the background. Many provincial stations are now reportedly being used to recruit citizen militias in light of the Oct. 15 border skirmish that left three Cambodians and one Thai soldier dead. Cybernationalists have also taken to Internet forums and Wikipedia, vandalizing Web sites with propaganda and bras confrontations that border racism. The Cloggers, however, became the intense focus of a heated but sophisticated discussion on scholarship and history related to the temple, something they say Cambodian tv stations and other Internet sources completely left out.

After she returned from reporting on the Preah Vihear crisis, Ms. Keo reflected in her blog about the writings of the ancient Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan who documented his trips to Cambodia in the 13^th century. In his memoir, he observed Cambodian soldiers carrying their swords everywhere as a testament to their willingness to fight. She concluded with more questions. “Does nationalism mean that you have to die for your country all the time while you leave someone else suffering?” A flurry of comments and discussions ensued, which she said is unheard of in the “real world” of Cambodia.

Teng Somongkol, a former lecturer at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and now doctoral candidate in Minnesota, also took to historical literature and blogged a well-documented record about Thai soldiers pushing 45,000 Cambodian refugees off the cliffs of Preah Vihear in 1980. “In fact, man Cambodians, especially those of my generation who was [sic] born in the 1980s, are not even aware that this horrible event took place,” he wrote. “What they were taught was about the Khmer Rouge period, but not about what happened at Preah Vihear.” He noted that, as a Buddhist, his goal was not revenge but only to point out the “terrible things” that have happened at the temple. His commentary earned him a spot in the Phnom Penh Post newspaper.

Despite the heated debates of nationalism and scholarship, blogs in Cambodia mostly discuss everyday topics like relationships and culture. But more controversial blogs still maintain a firm presence the “Clogosphere,” like the blog of vocal activist Chak Sopheap, who regularly criticizes government leaders over issues of corruption and forced land evictions. She’s already received one death threat, she claims. Her public profile is a gutsy move while most other blogs critical of the government remain anonymous.

“I am often asked by many friends whether I am intimidated for my outspoken statements,” proclaimed the former employee of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, which received international attention in 2005 when two of its activists were arrested after a peaceful demonstration. ”Officials feel insecure when there is resistance. I’m just advocating for a change of attitude by them to listen and tolerate different opinions.”

Now, the youthful and eloquent speaker is pursuing a master’s degree in international relations in Japan, a country from which she draws inspiration for her writings. “I’ve learned from a different cultural context about how crucial good governance is,” she said, referring to Cambodia’s corruption problem that led Transparency International to rank it the 14th most corrupt country in the world this year. “I’m trying to take a comparative perspective about Cambodia in my blog, learning from my professors about the Japanese spirit of success. I don’t mean that other cultures or practices are inferior to Japan, but just that we can integrate these experiences to our benefit.” She hopes to include her favorite blog posts in a book one day.

Of all the great rising Cambodian thinkers, paving the trail is Bun Tharum, widely received as the leader of the Cloggers. A 25- year-old technology professional, Mr. Bun takes inspiration from Western individualism, Ayn Rand and Charles Dickens. He’s a prolific photographer who documents everyday life in his popular blog with haunting and dazzling imagery. Also a writer of short stories, he hopes to publish the next great Cambodian novel in the tradition of the 1960s, an age he longs to revive. “Young people have a lot to learn about this country, about its history, about how it was run. The 1960s were the greatest time for Cambodia,” he said, eyebrows dipped in reflection. “We haven’t completely realized that dream yet. But I remain optimistic.”

Your recent news item titled “Good Karma for Sale” triggered my thoughts on the silent behavior of Cambodian people. Though the majority of the Cambodian population is Buddhist, they have only slightly learned Buddhist principles.

Over decades of social upheaval, Cambodian people seem to have fallen into a numb corner. This is a good chance for the Cambodian elite to take advantage of them. In term of economics, the Cambodian people are just enjoying the emergence of new buildings, roads and bridges. In term of politics, Cambodian people are satisfied with peace and social stability. This materialistic hard infrastructure blinds the Cambodian people to the all-important scene behind, the crucial soft infrastructure.

I don’t want to define current Cambodian politics as Abraham Kaplan said: “Politics is the redistribution of bandits.” But I prefer Gergen’s political thought: “A politician is a person who projects, motivates and rationalises the public for personal gain”.  World academic scholars have observed and concluded that many so-called authoritarian countries have adapted their strategies to receive the ideas of good governance, decentralisation and transparency, as well as to liberalise their national economics, with the intent of extending their power.

It makes sense for post-conflict Cambodian society to appreciate peace, stability, new roads paved, new schools and temples built, and modern cities urbanized. Generally, Cambodian people including Buddhist monks regard political leaders as the well-born persons who can legitimately own the power and wealth they have. Very often, they will not hesitate to beg them for donation. Very intelligent Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has never hesitated to utter his political rhetoric “culture of sharing”. Of course, this is the right time for political leaders to pursue this rhetoric.

Buddha addressed the way to go about donations in three thoughtful stages in order to plant wisdom into his audience. Firstly, concentrate on the right giver, secondly concentrate on the right receiver, and thirdly concentrate on the right material given. Significantly, the right material has not been given, in the same way as the crucial soft infrastructure has always been hidden.

For the long-term future and sustainable development, Cambodia should pursue the principle of every Cambodian citizen being offered the chance to get rid of this silent behavior, and political leaders should share the wisdom of reducing personal gain for the sake of collective national interests. Though the boat can move directly to the destination by a boat-hooker (leader), but without the competent boat-paddlers (peoples), the boat will inevitably be sunk.

Sophan Seng
Ph.D student of political science
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Original Source: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2008082821417/National-news/Silent-behaviour.html ]]> http://www.sophanseng.info/2008/08/silent-behaviour/feed/ 0 http://www.sophanseng.info/2008/08/cambodia-blogging/ http://www.sophanseng.info/2008/08/cambodia-blogging/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:44:06 +0000 P&L http://www.sophanseng.info/?p=24 Last night I slept late. I was inspiring by the new discovery in wordpress blog. It is the easy compact software for all bloggers to enjoy. I was not hesitate to take this chance to be creative though I am really drowsy and busy with study.

During blogging, my mind wandered far and near especially thought about Cambodian peoples at Cambodia: How many of them who can access to internet? How many of them who can blog? How many of them who can use PC or MAC? And how many of them who know about the latest technology development of computer? More than 80% of Cambodian peoples are farmer. They are living in destitute, suburb, rural and remote areas. Significantly, major of them cannot access to electricity, clean water, and health care center.

In developed countries as well as some developing countries, internet has become their daily gadget and it is the magic buttons that their wishes can be unbelievably fulfilled. They buy, sell, communicate, entertain, and study just by clicking the buttons on the computer. And internet is the world wide web connectors for them to personalize as well as to globalize themselves. They can reach far away from their tiny room through video, audio, map, pictures, and online chat. Many peoples have delved themselves to trust and worship computer as well as internet as their new religion. Many internet surfers can accumulate wealth and strong social network. Many of them can seek their partner and become cute couple eventually, incredibly.

Look back to Cambodia, the trend is on the track. But it is really a creeping trend. However, many Cambodian young children are very innovative and creative. Though they don’t have sufficient tools to get into computer and internet, but there are mushrooming users. Many blogs are built and online communicate is so popular among them.

The future will be shed in light by our young generation who will not only the players of internet, but we further hope for their new inventing of modern technology. Cambodian young generation will absolutely not different from their ancestors who were very creative and urbanized such as several huge temples were astonishingly constructed entirely Cambodian Empire, those are rapidly attracting millions of people worldwide.

The pride and hope of future Cambodia doesn’t fall upon the past, the glory of Angkor Wat, but the competent younger generation, well-trained children. They are the responsible future architect and catalysts!

Sincerely,

Sophan P. Seng