The tribunal should not be about pointing fingers

Posted by: | Posted on: March 31, 2009
Written by Sophan Seng
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Dear Editor,

I was deeply impressed by Noam Chomsky’s perspectives on political dissent [“Tribunal ignoring US role, says Chomsky”, The Phnom Penh Post, March 27, 2009]. In the US, Chomsky is well-known for his radical ideas about US foreign policy. He is a renowned linguist, but what made him  a vital political commentator was his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. Chomsky saw nothing wrong with the North Vietnamese struggle and nothing wrong with the Vietnamese troops invading Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge.

In the interview, Chomsky addresses US support for the Khmer Rouge. I don’t intend to challenge Chomsky on his sharp criticism of the US and the Khmer Rouge tribunal. It is not simply a matter of pointing fingers and assigning blame, as depicted in the amusing “Sacravatoons No 1348 [“Point the finger”, at www.sacrava.blogspot.com]

The Khmer Rouge tribunal has a more fundamental meaning than just pointing fingers at each other. The central goals of this tribunal are the achievement of national healing, national reconciliation, a national collective consciousness, national unity, the strengthening of Cambodia’s judicial system and the elimination of impunity, among others. In addition to these expected outcomes, the tribunal will also help Cambodia become a “full and progressive sovereign state”. Political thinker Charles Tilly has argued that “war makes a state” in the context of European state-making. If this theory is applied to Cambodia, then the agony endured by the Cambodian people in past wars and under the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge can enlighten all Cambodian people and their political leaders. As the Khmer proverb says: “After the dark sky, the bright moon and stars will shine”. Will the Khmer Rouge tribunal yield such fruit?

The answer wholly depends on Cambodian political leaders, Cambodian people and their national collective consciousness. If they see the Khmer Rouge tribunal simply as part of a political game, the “full and progressive sovereign state” of Cambodia might disappear. Moreover, if the Cambodian people and their collective consciousness view the tribunal simply as punishment for a handful of perpetrators, the “full and progressive sovereign state” of Cambodia might also disappear.

It should be noted that the Khmer Rouge tribunal, the independence of the court, and the expansion of the number of defendants – including current political leaders – will enrich the tribunal, not distort the court or cause instability in Cambodia at all. The benefits to be had from a fair court are more important than the thought of social instability. The participation from all political leaders and the people can enhance the achievements of the court. The benefits of thinking outside the box in relation to the tribunal are more beautiful and elegant than just assigning blame and pointing fingers.

Sophan Seng
PhD candidate in political science
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Original Source: The Phnom Penh Post
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CAMBODIA: MEMORY, ATROCITY AND AFFECT

Posted by: | Posted on: March 9, 2009

POLS 703

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).
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Personal Health Pass

Posted by: | Posted on: March 6, 2009

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Anti-Democratic Politics: Book Review

Posted by: | Posted on: February 28, 2009

Book Review

By Sophan Seng

Intervention & Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy? By Sorpong Peou. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, Hardcover: 573pp.

Recent studies of Cambodia have extensively focused on democracy building including its challenges as a post-conflict country. In 23 October 1991 is considered the significant turning point and it is the renaissance for Cambodia to develop democracy. This date is the Paris Peace Agreement collectively signed. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was appointed as the central body to implement all tasks stipulated by the Paris Peace Agreement. Among those key goals is to neutralize Cambodia’s politics that have been divisive among different political factions and ideologies. Building the capacity for democracy in Cambodia after the Paris Peace Agreement is the main focus written by Sorpong. In order to reflect the reality of democracy development in Cambodia, Sorpong has turned 90 degrees arguments to draw attention by contrasting many different approaches of his thesis. His work is engrossed and erudite through the combination of the topical, analytical, chronological and descriptive approaches. He put effort to justify his book as not substantially based on quantitative or statistic research, but his approach is academically prevalent. He used democracy development as the independent variable and he precisely included Cambodia’s political anti-democratic behavior, internal political structures, and external intervention as the based dependent variables to secure his debate[1].

Sorpong Peou presently is the Associate Professor of Political Science at Sophia University in Japan. He received his PhD in York University from Ontario, Canada. His researches interest is International relations in the Pacific Asia, comparative politics of East Asia, collective human security. His written books focusing on Cambodia potentially reflects his academic background in this area and his nationality as a Cambodian-born Canadian accredits his comprehension on Cambodia issues very well. This book is worthy to read for those who seek to read the academic works from Cambodian scholar writing about Cambodia. Sorpong has numerously written many books about Cambodia such as “Cambodia – The 1989 Paris Peace Conference : Background Analysis and Documents” in 1991, “Conflict Neutralization in the Cambodia War: from Battlefield to Ballot-Box” in 1997, “Intervention & Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy?” in 2000, “Cambodia: Change and Continuity in Contemporary Politics” in 2001, “International Democracy Assistance for Peacebuilding: Cambodia and Beyond” in 2007, “Human Security in East Asia: Challenges for Collaborative Action” in 2008 and other numerous published articles relating Cambodia. So we can agree that Sorpong has well illustrated his expertise on Cambodia.

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