Abstract
In January 1979, Vietnamese Colonel Mai Lam traveled throughout Eastern Europe in search of inspiration. Weeks earlier, troops of the Vietnamese Seventh Division and Khmer Rouge defectors crossed the border into Democratic Kampuchea (DK), routed the Khmer Rouge forces, sending the remnants of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) into hiding along the Thai border. Now, Mai Lam, who served also as the director of the recently built Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City, was to establish a new museum.
The military victory over their former ally and challenging neighbor to the east presented a political problem for the Vietnamese government, in that the military actions of the Vietnamese were perceived by many members of the international community, including the United States, as an invading force. It was imperative for the Vietnamese, and the subsequent People’s Republic of Kampuchea government installed by the Vietnamese, to legitimate their actions. Ideological glitches marked also Vietnam’s global political optics in that, ostensibly, one communist government overthrew another communist government. Potential justifications for the ouster of the CPK could potentially backfire and call to question Vietnam’s own system of government. It was necessary to distance Vietnamese communism from Khmer communism.
A solution appeared as Vietnamese troops occupied Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city and, until recently, the heart of the CPK’s state apparatus. In the days following the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, two Vietnamese photojournalists were walking through Phnom Penh when the smell of decomposing bodies drew them toward a former school. There, the photojournalists discovered the bodies of several recently murdered men, with some bodies still chained to iron beds in rooms that once had been classrooms. Over the next several days, as the Vietnamese and their Cambodian assistants searched the former school, they recovered thousands of documents: mug-shot photographs and undeveloped negatives; thousands of written confessions, hundreds of cadre notebooks; numerous DK publications, and myriad instruments of torture and detainment. The Vietnamese had uncovered S-21, one of approximately 200 security centers established by the Khmer Rouge throughout Democratic Kampuchea. Leadership of the PRK immediately saw a political opportunity at S-21 to build Cambodia’s collective memory of its recent, violent past. Thus, Mai Lam traveled throughout Eastern Europe in search of a model upon which to convert the former security center into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The formal establishment of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in key respects, set the memory work of the Cambodian genocide on a path from which it has hardly strayed. Indeed, from the defeat of the Khmer Rouge through to the present, the institutionalized remembrance of violence in Cambodia has been politicized for reasons beyond any concern for the people of Cambodia. This holds especially true for the widely publicized—and widely criticized—Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), better known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. As Manning writes, the ECCC is not simply “tasked with the challenge of redressing one of the most serious episodes of political violence of the twentieth century” but “has been situated as the key site that today lays claim over memories of past political violence in Cambodia” (p. 1). The primacy of the ECCC is not without its problems, however. For, while the ECCC is routinely cast by its supporters as an apolitical institution, the work of the tribunal conceals as much as it reveals. For Manning, “The ECCC attends to the past selectively, prosecuting some (but not all) perpetrators of political violence, as well as examining some (but not all) episodes of atrocity that could be scrutinized as criminal” (p. 54).
Several scholarly monographs and public accounts of the tribunal have been and continue to be written, for example, Alexander Hinton’s (2016) Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer or Craig Etcheson’s (2020) Extraordinary Justice: Law, Politics, and the Khmer Rouge Tribunals. One wonders where we are to place Manning’s contribution to this ever-widening field. The answer is deceptively simple. The strength of Manning’s monograph comes from his subject matter, which extends beyond the ECCC to consider more broadly the ongoing contestation of transitional justice. Manning’s aim is not only to assess the politics of the ECCC and memory, but also the wider assemblage of techniques through which transitional justice is being delivered in Cambodia and the varied meanings and relationships Cambodian communities have negotiated with memories of political violence, in the context of the ECCC and beyond (p. 9). Indeed, Manning’s monograph is not really about the ECCC, as he is always looking beyond, or through, the tribunal to consider other sites of memory construction. For Manning, “beyond the ECCC, memories of political violence circulate and are reproduced through varied frameworks and within differentiated contexts” (p. 167). These include, for example, non-governmental organizations, such as the “Documentation Center of Cambodia and Youth for Peace” (Chapter 6), “the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide” (Chapter 7), and “the Wat Thmey Genocide Memorial” (Chapter 8). Throughout, Manning presses his argument, namely that transitional justice interventions, such as the ECCC, “do not operate neutrally or void questions of power” (p. 32) but often overpower other attempts to provide counter-claims.
The ECCC, Manning demonstrates in Chapters 4 and 5, is exceptionally limiting in its scope. Manning correctly observes that Focusing only on the 3 years, 8 months and 20 days of Democratic Kampuchea elides important questions concerning how the Khmer Rouge came to power, why they have not until now been held accountable for the crimes perpetrated 1975-1979 and the attendant questions of responsibility arising from these failures. (p. 42)
Manning adroitly documents that “questions about political violence beyond the mandate of the ECCC seem incommensurable to the very language of justice and accountability” (p. 130).
The implications for any pursuit of transitional justice are wide-reaching. Those men, women, and children who endured or participated in the violence before and after the brief Khmer Rouge interregnum of 1975–1979 know and remember. To this end, as Manning writes, “Counter-claims against the ECCC over memories of political violence and suffering, perpetration and victimhood, accountability and recognition, are animated exactly because Cambodian communities recognise the ECCC jurisdictions as politically contingent categories” (p. 130). In other words, both survivors and perpetrators realize fully the parameters circumscribed by the tribunal, and that the public representation of political violence beyond this narrow remit is incomplete.
There is a crucial sub-text to Manning’s work. In key respects, Manning’s book is a critique of the plethora of studies that focus exclusively on the tribunal, to the neglect of other (albeit equally contentious) sites of memory work. Consequently, scholars should acknowledge that “Cambodian communities continue to renegotiate varying relationships to memories of atrocity, often ambivalently or on registers that elide, jar with or are dislocated from the prevailing language of transitional justice and the normative injunction to remember at its heart” (p. 167). To this end, Manning demands that “greater attention needs to be afforded to the different ways that Cambodians have negotiated the meaning of memories of political violence, whether through grief, loss, anger, resilience, ambivalence and even opportunity” (p. 159).
If I have one critique, it is for Manning to expand his argument even further. In Chapter 3, Manning problematizes the history of violence in twentieth-century Cambodia and rightly raises the difficult question of how to write this history. He notes, for example, the possibility of many alternative sketches of the Khmer Rouge. This is a critical observation, for the ECCC has brought to the open thousands of primary source materials that permit a radical reinterpretation of Khmer Rouge history. However, too often, scholar engaged either with memory work or the legal proceedings take as given long-standing narratives of the Khmer Rouge—many of which are uncritically forwarded in the tribunal and other sites of remembrance. Indeed, the purported facts are so established as to be ossified, according to Michael Vickery (1984), as the Standard Total View. Upon ascension to power, for example, the Khmer Rouge evacuated all urban areas and forcibly relocated men, women, and children to work-camps throughout the country. Hospitals were destroyed, temples ransacked, and institutions of learning destroyed. Democratic Kampuchea—as the country was renamed—was to become a self-reliant state bordering on autarky, as the importation of western products, including medicines and technologies, was outlawed. In the process, upward of 2 million people—roughly one-quarter of Cambodia’s population—perished in a little less than 4 years.
The Khmer Rouge, we are told, were fanatically communist in orientation; they were simultaneously anti-urban, anti-intellectual, anti-professional, and anti-technological. The Khmer Rouge, we are told, were dead set on recreating an agrarian utopia—modeled after the famed Angkorian Empire. Indeed, in a foolish attempt to recreate the hydraulic city thesis, the Khmer Rouge initiated a massive “water control” program that was doomed to failure. Such an account is widespread. A recently inaugurated display at the United States Holocaust Museum for example faithfully parrots this account. The problem, however, is that this account is not entirely accurate. The Khmer Rouge were not anti-urban; they were not anti-intellectual; they were not anti-technology; and they did not promote a rabidly isolationist foreign policy. Rather, the CPK initiated a modernist program predicated on the expansion of rice production as a means of securing needed foreign capital. These revenues, in turn, were to be reinvested in a fledgling industrial sector. In the light of these additional facts, we can understand Manning’s warning that “the ECCC jurisdiction offers contours that can contain and conceal specific politically inconvenient histories” (p. 164) that can and must be expanded to reevaluate and reinterpret the broader corpus of writings on political violence in Cambodia.