by Amitav Ghosh
Over the brief space of a couple of thousand words the king and his ministers summed up their views on the lessons that France had to offer Cambodia. Most of these had to do with what later came to be called "development": communications had to be improved, new land cleared for agriculture; peasants had to increase their production, raise more animals, exploit their forests and fisheries more systematically, familiarize themselves with modern machinery, and so on. A generation later, Cambodian political luminaries such as Khieu Samphan, writing their theses in Paris, were to arrive at oddly similar conclusions, although by an entirely different route.
But it was on the subject of the ideal relationship between the state and its people that the king and his ministers were at their most prescient. It was here, they thought, that Europe's most important lessons lay. "None should hesitate to sacrifice his life," they wrote, "when it is a matter of the divinity of the king or of the country. The obligation to serve the country should be accepted without a murmur by the inhabitants of the kingdom; it is glorious to defend one's country. Are Europeans not constrained by the same obligation, without distinction either of rank or of family?"
Alas for poor King Sisowath, he was soon to learn that travel writing was an expensive indulgence for those who fell on his side of the colonial divide. In 1910 the Colonial Ministry in Paris wrote asking the king to reimburse the French government for certain expenses incurred during his trip to France. As it happened, Cambodia's budget had paid for the entire trip, including the dancers' performance at the Bois du Boulogne. In addition, the king, who was ruinously generous by nature, had personally handed out tips and gifts worth several thousands of francs. In return he and his entourage had received a few presents from French officials. Among these were a set of uniforms given by the minister of colonies and some rosebushes that had been presented to the king personally at the Elysée Palace by none other than the president of the republic, Armand Fallières. The French government now wanted to reclaim the price of the uniforms and the rosebushes from the Cambodians.
For once the obsequious Minister Thiounn took the king's side. He wrote back indignantly, refusing to pay for gifts that had been accepted in good faith.
The royal voyage to France found its most celebrated memorial in Rodin's sketches. The sketches were received with acclaim when they went on exhibition in 1907. After seeing them, the German poet Rilke wrote to the master to say, "For me, these sketches were among the most profound of revelations."
The revelation Rilke had in mind was of "the mystery of Cambodian dance." But it was probably the sculptor rather than the poet who sensed the real revelation of the encounter: the power of Cambodia's involvement in the culture and politics of modernism, in all its promise and horror.
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As for King Sisowath, the most significant thing he ever did was to authorize the founding of a high school where Cambodians could be educated on the French pattern. Known initially as the Collège du Protectorat, the school was renamed the Lycée Sisowath some years after the king's death.
The Lycée Sisowath was to become the crucible for Cambodia's remaking. A large number of the students who were radicalized in Paris in the fifties were graduates of the lycée. Pol Pot himself was never a student there, but he was closely linked with it, and several of his nearest associates were Sisowath alumni, including his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, and his brother-in-law and longtime deputy, Ieng Sary.
Among the most prominent members of that group was Khieu Samphan, one-time president of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea and now the best known of the Khmer Rouge's spokesmen. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Khieu Samphan was one of the preeminent political figures in Cambodia. He was renowned throughout the country as an incorruptible idealist: stories about his refusal to take bribes, even when begged by his impoverished mother, have passed into popular mythology. He was also an important economic thinker and theorist; his doctoral thesis on Cambodia's economy, written at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, is still highly regarded. He vanished in 1967, and through the next eight years he lived in the jungle, through the long years of the Khmer Rouge's grim struggle, first against Prince Sihanouk, then against the rightist regime of General Lon Nol, when American planes subjected the countryside to saturation bombing.
Khieu Samphan surfaced again after the 1975 revolution, as president of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. When the regime was driven out of power by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, he fled with the rest of the ruling group to a stronghold on the Thai border. As the Khmer Rouge's chief public spokesman and emissary, he played a prominent part in the UN-sponsored peace negotiations. Later, in the months before the elections, it was he who was the Khmer Rouge's mouthpiece as it reneged on the peace agreements while launching ever more vituperative attacks on the UN. The Khmer Rouge's maneuvers did not come as a surprise to anyone who had ever dealt with its leadership; the surprise lay rather in the extent to which UNTAC was willing to go in appeasing them. Effectively, the Khmer Rouge succeeded in taking advantage of the UN's presence to augment its own military position while sabotaging the peace process.
In 1991 and 1992, when Khieu Samphan was traveling around the world making headlines, there was perhaps only a single soul in Phnom Penh who followed his doings with an interest that was not wholly political: his forty-nine-year-old younger brother, Khieu Seng Kim, who lives very close to the school of classical dance.
The school's ability to surprise being what it is, I took it in my stride when I met Khieu Seng Kim one morning, standing by the entrance to the compound. A tall man with a cast in one eye and untidy grizzled hair, he was immediately friendly, eager both to talk about his family and to speak French. Within minutes of our meeting we were sitting in his small apartment, on opposite sides of a desk, surrounded by neat piles of French textbooks and dogeared copies of Paris-Match.
The brick wall behind Khieu Seng Kim was papered over with pictures of relatives and dead ancestors. The largest was a glossy magazine picture of his brother Khieu Samphan, taken soon after the signing of the peace accords, in 1991. The photograph shows the assembled leaders of all the major Cambodian factions: Prince Sihanouk; Son Sann, of the centrist Khmer People's National Liberation Front; Hun Sen, of the "State of Cambodia"; and of course Khieu Samphan himself, representing the Khmer Rouge. In the picture everybody exudes a sense of relief, bonhomie, and optimism; everyone is smiling, but no one more than Khieu Samphan.
Khieu Seng Kim was a child in 1950, when his brother, recently graduated from the Lycée Sisowath, left for Paris on a scholarship. By the time he returned with his doctorate from the Sorbonne, eight years later, Khieu Seng Kim was fourteen, and the memory of going to Pochentong airport to receive his older brother stayed fresh in his mind. "We were very poor then," he said, "and we couldn't afford to greet him with garlands and a crown of flowers, like well-off people do. We just embraced and hugged and all of us had tears flowing down our cheeks."
In those days, in Cambodia, a doctorate from France was a guarantee of a high-level job in the government, a sure means of ensuring entry into the country's privileged classes. Khieu Samphan's mother wanted nothing less for herself and her family. She had struggled against poverty most of her life; her husband, a magistrate, had died early, leaving her with five children to bring up on her own. But when her son refused to accept any of the lucrative offers that came his way despite her entreaties, once again she had to start selling vegetables to keep the family going. Khieu Seng Kim remembers seeing his adored brother, the brilliant economist with his degree from the Sorbonne, sitting beside his mother, helping her with her roadside stall.
In the meanwhile, Khieu Samphan taught in a school, founded an influential left-wing journal, and gradually rose to political prominence. He even served in Sihanouk's cabinet for a while, and with his success the family's situation eased a little.
And then came the day in 1967 when he melted into the jungle.
Khieu Seng Kim remembers the day well: it was Monday, Ap
ril 24, 1967. His mother served dinner at seven-thirty, and the two of them sat at the dining table and waited for Khieu Samphan to arrive; he always came home at about that time. They stayed there till eleven, without eating, listening to every footstep and every sound; then his mother broke down and began to cry. She cried all night, "like a child who has lost its mother."
At first they thought that Khieu Samphan had been arrested. They had good reason to, for Prince Sihanouk had made a speech two days before, denouncing Khieu Samphan and two close friends of his, the brothers Hu Nim and Hou Yuon. But no arrest was announced, and nor was there any other news the next day.
Khieu Seng Kim became a man possessed. He could not believe that the brother he worshipped would abandon his family; at that time he was their only means of support. He traveled all over the country, visiting friends and relatives, asking if they had any news of his brother. Nobody could tell him anything. It was only much later that he learned that Khieu Samphan had been smuggled out of the city in a farmer's cart the evening he failed to show up for dinner.
He never saw him again.
Eight years later, in 1975, when the first Khmer Rouge cadres marched into Phnom Penh, Khieu Seng Kim went rushing out into the streets and threw himself upon them, crying, "My brother is Khieu Samphan, my brother is your leader." They looked at him as though he were insane. "The revolution doesn't recognize families," they said, brushing him off. He was driven out of the city with his wife and children and made to march to a work site just like everybody else.
Like most other evacuees, Khieu Seng Kim drifted back toward Phnom Penh in 1979, after the Pol Pot regime had been overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion. He began working in a factory, but within a few months it came to be known that he knew French and had worked as a journalist before the revolution. The new government contacted him and invited him to take up a job as a journalist. He refused; he didn't want to be compromised or associate himself with the government in any way. Instead, he worked with the Department of Archaeology for a while as a restorer and then took a teaching job at the School of Fine Arts.
"For that they're still suspicious of me," he said with a wry smile. "Even now. That's why I live in a place like this, while everyone in the country is getting rich."
He smiled and lit a cigarette; he seemed obscurely pleased at the thought of being excluded and pushed onto the edges of the wilderness that had claimed his brother decades ago. It never seemed to have occurred to him to reflect that there was probably no other country on earth where the brother of a man who had headed a genocidal regime would actually be invited to accept a job by the government that followed.
I liked Khieu Seng Kim; I liked his quirky younger-brotherishness. For his sake I wished his mother were still alive—that indomitable old woman who had spread out her mat and started selling vegetables on the street when she realized that her eldest son would have no qualms about sacrificing his entire family on the altar of his idealism. She would have reminded Khieu Seng Kim of a few home truths.
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According to his brother, Khieu Samphan talked very little about his student days upon his return from France. He did, however, tell one story that imprinted itself vividly on the fourteen-year-old boy's mind. It had to do with an old friend, Hou Yuon. Khieu Seng Kim remembers Hou Yuon well; he was always in and out of the house, a part of the family.
Hou Yuon and his brother Hu Nim played pivotal roles in the Communist movement in Cambodia: along with Khieu Samphan, they were the most popular figures on the left through the sixties and early seventies. Then as now, Pol Pot preferred to be a faceless puppeteer, pulling strings behind a screen of organizational anonymity.
The two brothers were initiated into radical politics at about the same time as Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot; they attended the same study groups in Paris; they did party work together in Phnom Penh in the sixties, and all through the desperate years of the early seventies they fought together, shoulder by shoulder, in conditions of the most extreme hardship, with thousands of tons of bombs crashing down around them. So closely linked were the fortunes of Khieu Samphan and the two brothers that they became a collective legend, known together as the Three Ghosts.
Khieu Samphan's acquaintance with Hou Yuon dated back to their schooldays at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Their friendship was sealed in Paris in the fifties and was the subject of the story Khieu Samphan told his brother on his return.
Once, at a Cambodian gathering in Paris, Hou Yuon made a speech in which he criticized the corruption and venality of Prince Sihanouk's regime. He was overheard by an official, and soon afterward his government scholarship was suspended for a year. Since Khieu Samphan was known to be a particular friend of his, his scholarship was suspended too.
To support themselves, the two men began to sell bread. They would study during the day, and at night they would walk around the city hawking long loaves of French bread. With the money they earned, they paid for their upkeep and bought books; the loaves they couldn't sell they ate. It was a hard way to earn money, Khieu Samphan told his brother, but at the same time it was also oddly exhilarating. Walking down those lamp-lit streets late at night, talking to each other, it was as though he and Hou Yuon somehow managed to leave behind the nighttime of the spirit that had befallen them in Paris. They would walk all night long, with the fragrant, crusty loaves over their shoulders, looking into the windows of cafés and restaurants, talking about their lives and about the future...
Hou Yuon was one of the first to die when the revolution began to devour itself: his moderate views were sharply at odds with the ultraradical, collectivist ideology of the ruling group. In August 1975, a few months after the Khmer Rouge took power, he addressed a crowd and vehemently criticized the policy of evacuating the cities. He is said to have been assassinated as he left the meeting, on the orders of the party's leadership. His brother Hu Nim served for a while as minister of information. Then, on April 10, 1977, he and his wife were taken into Interrogation Center S-21—the torture chambers at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. He was executed several months later, after confessing to being everything from a CIA agent to a Vietnamese spy.
Khieu Samphan was then head of state. He is believed to have played an important role in planning the mass purges of that period.
For Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, the deaths of Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, and the thousands of others who were executed in torture chambers and execution grounds were not a contradiction but rather a proof of their own idealism and ideological purity. Terror was essential to their exercise of power. It was an integral part not merely of their coercive machinery but of the moral order on which they built their regime, a part whose best description still lies in the line that Brückner, most prescient of playwrights, gave to Robespierre (a particular hero of Pol Pot's): "Virtue is terror, and terror virtue"—words that might well serve as an epitaph for the twentieth century.
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Those who were there then say there was a moment of epiphany in Phnom Penh in 1981. It occurred at a quiet, relatively obscure event: a festival at which classical Cambodian music and dance were performed for the first time since the revolution.
Dancers and musicians from all over the country traveled to Phnom Penh for the festival. Proeung Chhieng, one of the best-known dancers and choreographers in the country, was among those who made the journey; he came to Phnom Penh from Kompong Thom, where he had helped assemble a small troupe of dancers after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. He himself had trained at the palace since his childhood, specializing in the role of Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana epic, a part that is one of the glories of Khmer dance. This training proved instrumental in Proeung Chhieng's survival: his expertise in clowning and mime helped him persuade the interrogators at his labor camp that he was an illiterate lunatic.
At the festival he met many fellow students and teachers for the first time after the revolution: "We cried and laughed while we looked around to see who were the others who had survived
. We would shout with joy: 'You are still alive!' and then we would cry thinking of someone who had died."
The performers were dismayed when they began preparing for the performance: large quantities of musical instruments, costumes, and masks had been destroyed over the past few years. They had to improvise new costumes to perform in; instead of rich silks and brocades, they used thin calico, produced by a government textile factory. The theater they were to perform in, the Bassac, was in relatively good shape, but there was a crisis of electricity at the time, and the lighting was dim and unreliable.
But people flocked to the theater the day the festival began. Onesta Carpene, a Catholic relief worker from Italy, was one of the handful of foreigners then living in Phnom Penh. She was astonished at the response. The city was in a shambles: there was debris everywhere, spilling out of the houses onto the pavements, the streets were jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little food. "I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance," she said. But still they came pouring in, and the theater was filled far beyond its capacity. It was very hot inside.
Eva Mysliwiec, who had arrived recently to set up a Quaker relief mission, was one of the one of the few foreigners present at that first performance. When the musicians came onstage, she heard sobs all around her. Then, when the dancers appeared, in their shabby, hastily made costumes, suddenly everyone was crying, old people, young people, soldiers, children—"You could have sailed out of there in a boat."
The people who were sitting next to her said, "We thought everything was lost, that we would never hear our music again, never see our dance." They could not stop crying; people wept through the entire performance.