by Reif Larsen
The S-21 documentation division, including a young photographer named Nhem En, meticulously recorded every arrival to the camp. Following strict orders, Nhem En would remove the new prisoner’s blindfold and then take a series of photos: facing the camera, in profile, occasionally from the back. After a prominent prisoner died of torture, he would also take postmortem photos, the pools of blood like black ink against the white cement floors. Nhem En faced immediate execution if the photos were not up to Comrade Duch’s exacting standards. He thus took great care with the lighting, the placement of the prisoner in the frame, the shallow depth of field. His art kept him alive, but it also became something alive itself.
Fig. 4.11. Tuol Sleng prisoner #4816
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 658
Of the seventeen thousand prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng, only seven survived. Nhem En’s black-and-white photographs of the prisoners remained in a file cabinet in the school’s old cafeteria after the Khmer Rouge fled the city, though at some point the photographs became separated from their files, so many of the images live on in a liminal, unidentified state. A man resembling Tien is pictured among these photographs, #4816, although, without proper documentation, one cannot be sure if it is actually him or someone else entirely:
Yet even just this act of immortalizing a prisoner in a photo, filled with its soft palette of greys and marked by the subject’s vacant stare of simultaneous comprehension and disbelief, was more attention than the vast majority of the regime’s victims received. Most were never documented by their killers. They slipped into death anonymously, silently, leaving no proof of their existence or of their abrupt demise.
It is here that Røed-Larsen (and by extension we) enter the realm of conjecture. Following the “liberation” of Phnom Penh, Raksmey was able to disguise himself as a peasant and evade execution, presumably because he was mostly unknown to the population. After walking out of the city with the rest of its inhabitants, he was sent to work up north in the rice fields in the Preah Vihear region, near Tbaeng Meanchey district. He survived only by completely abandoning his identity and pretending he was deaf and mute—for more than two years, he did not speak. It must be said, his deafness was a dangerous choice, for those with disabilities were also culled. Raksmey, however, compensated for this with tireless work in the fields, and thus ingratiated himself with the Khmer Rouge district leaders, who were less ruthless than in other sectors. As Røed-Larsen writes, “Cruelty is always local . . . [it] depends not upon the system which creates it but the hand that serves it” (660).
In the evenings, Raksmey would smile and clap as his exhausted comrades chanted songs pledging their allegiance to Angkar. When the Khmer Rouge cadres gave lectures on the triumphs of the Kampuchea state, Raksmey made sure his head was downcast, his eyes dull and empty, so that the chiefs would not detect any hint of life or understanding in them. He thus lived two lives: a life inside the crevices of his mind, where he unwound particles and debated the theories of subatomic quantum mechanics late into the night with an apparition of Dr. Salam, and another that comprised his outward actions during the day, where he was deaf and mute. A simpleton. Eager to please, eager to serve the great and powerful Angkar. Even in the darkest hours of the night, he made sure that his two lives never crossed paths, never greeted each other.
“Angkar!” he would yell with the others in a mangled voice of incomprehension. It was the only word he allowed to pass his lips—two declaratory vowels draped in vague consonants. It was not so much a word as a breath and release: “Ang-kar! Ang-kar!”
During the monsoon season of 1977, he and two others managed to escape their work camp by foot, over the Dângrêk Mountains and into Thailand. One of the men died en route after stepping on a land mine, and the other succumbed to illness as soon as he reached the safety of Thailand.
In Bangkok, Raksmey took up a research assistantship in the physics department of Chulalongkorn University for Dr. Randall Horwich, the friend of a colleague at CERN. Dr. Horwich must have been surprised at who had crawled into his lab from Democratic Kampuchea, which at the time remained an impenetrable mystery to the world. It was a fortuitous arrival that would help to jump-start Dr. Horwich’s career. Together, they co-published an important theoretical paper in 1979 on the mass of up quarks in the Pakistan Journal of Pure and Applied Physics. This paper precipitated Dr. Horwich’s move to CERN in 1980, where he would work on the UA1 experiment, which definitively discovered W and Z bosons and won its research heads a Nobel Prize.
If nothing else, Raksmey’s reentrance into the world of record keeping did yield valuable evidence of his survival: along with the theoretical paper, Per Røed-Larsen managed to track down his letter of hire at Chulalongkorn, several pay stubs, and a university work transcript. There is also one improbable document that stands out from the rest: a handwritten letter, purportedly written by Raksmey to his friend Sebastian Ouellette, a fellow researcher at CERN.
The letter is dated April 18, 1975:
My dear Sebastian,
The Khmer Rouge have finally arrived in Phnom Penh. Yesterday everyone was very glad to see them, people were clapping and cheering in the streets. Many think this is the end of the war though I fear for the worst. . . . I tried to speak with one of the soldiers but he only screamed at me to back away. His eyes were dead. When I saw this, I knew very bad things are ahead. These soldiers have not been trained to run a country. They are trained to kill. Maybe I’m wrong about this. I hope. I hope.
I’m mailing you this letter on the off chance it will get out of Cambodia. Most probably it will never arrive. I miss you and our laboratory in the fields. It feels so incredibly far away right now. What a privilege it is to work there. If anything happens know that I will never forget you.
Fondly,
Raksmey de Broglie
P.S. I had the strangest dream last night. It was very vivid. I was on a river, lying in a boat. I’m not sure what river. It wasn’t the Mekong. But then suddenly I felt as if I was no longer alone. I felt another person was with me—there was no one else on the boat but I felt whole, as if I had found my other half. When I woke up this morning I was still filled with this feeling of completion. I wonder what it means? Maybe I am just suffering from nerves.
Miraculously, this letter survived, according to Røed-Larsen, although it was delayed somewhere along the way and was not delivered to CERN until five years later.
Per Røed-Larsen also includes a telegram sent to Raksmey while he was staying in Bangkok. The telegram was sent from Kirkenes and received on November 10, 1979:
Fig. 4.12. The initial telegram, November 10, 1979. The only surviving piece of communication between Raksmey and Kirkenesferda.
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670
8
After some negotiation, including several telephone calls, Dr. Christian-Holtsmark gradually made clear to Raksmey the extent of his request. Raksmey was to help negotiate their passage to the highly secretive “Camp 808,” just north of Anlong Veng on the Thai border, where the Khmer Rouge had retreated to a jungle base following the Vietnamese invasion. It is unclear how much Raksmey came to understand, over the course of these transmissions, the extent of Kirkenesferda’s ideology or motives, or what they planned to do once they had entered the camp. These telephone calls were not recorded, nor did Raksmey keep any journal or notebook, so Røed-Larsen is left to speculate why, given his horrific experience at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime, he would have agreed to place himself so dramatically in harm’s way on behalf of an unknown group. Røed-Larsen is quick to stress that, once onboard, Raksmey was not merely a hired gun, as Kirkenesferda did not believe in mercenary fixers. Writes Røed-Larsen, “From the minute they landed, [he] was accepted into the group, full stop, as an equal player . . . Kirkenesferda’s eighth official member” (675).
Raksmey met Kirken
esferda at the Bangkok airport the day after Christmas. The team consisted of Dr. Christian-Holtsmark, the de facto leader of the troupe and director of the show; Tor Bjerknes, the primary puppet-maker; Ragnvald Brynildsen, Tor’s mentor and aging Kirk patriarch; Professor Jens Røed-Larsen, who was responsible for the theoretical physics in the show; Siri Hansteen, his wife, who had designed much of the mise-en-scène; and their child, young Lars Røed-Larsen, puppet savant and torchbearer for the next generation.
In Bangkok, they hired two canopy trucks and drove to Sangkha, just north of the Choam border crossing into Cambodia. At the time, the Thai military were collaborating closely with the exiled Khmer Rouge army, providing cross-border supplies and support in exchange for a political allegiance that would act as a buffer to the perceived threat of a growing Vietnamese empire. It was critical for Thailand that Cambodia function as a self-governed country with an actual populace and not just as a cavernous Vietnamese puppet state. Such a calculated realpolitik approach had already led to horrific humanitarian failures, as many Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to the relative safety of Thailand were now forced at gunpoint to return to their homeland. Military trucks dropped them at the border, often in the middle of the minefields, leaving the refugees paralyzed in a state of territorial limbo: they could go neither forward nor backward, and so they remained exactly where they were until starvation eventually gave them the courage to test their fate in the sea of mines.
Raksmey turned out to be a wise choice as both guide and counselor: somehow he managed to coerce and/or bribe the Thai border guards into letting him and the other performers through the blockade and into Cambodian territory. The rough track into the mountains wound through several live minefields, and it was not unusual for them to pass half-exploded cows or carts blown to bits, their onetime owners nowhere to be seen. After crossing into Cambodia, Raksmey again managed to convince the Khmer Rouge soldiers guarding Camp 808 to let them through. Røed-Larsen explains:
[Kirkenesferda’s entrance] seems entirely improbable until you consider that at the time the Khmer Rouge were attempting to boost their image as one of the legitimate government factions that would take part in the anti-Vietnamese Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). . . . Realizing any hope in future political viability lay with disassociating themselves from their failed occupation, [Pol Pot and his loyalists] rebranded the Khmer Rouge as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) and embarked on a (short-lived) PR blitz to counter the reports only just now beginning to emerge of genocidal horrors during their three and a half years in power (681).
One must thus assume that Kirkenesferda caught a murderous regime in a unique window of existential recalibration. Khieu Samphan, the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea—once upon a time one of the most secretive governments in modern history—was now the charming public relations figurehead attempting to resurrect the PDK’s image. Barely a month after Kirkenesferda’s unprecedented visit in December, he would invite a group of prominent Western journalists to dine at 808.
“Reality was suspended,” recalls Henry Kamm of that trip, in his book Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. The New York Times journalist describes his strange January 1980 sojourn to 808’s oasis of indulgence in a region of squalor:
The Khmer Rouge guest camp was the very latest in jungle luxury. That evening the soldier-waiters filled the table with platters of Cambodian, Chinese, and Western dishes of infinite variety and saw to it, following the prime minister’s discreet, silent commands, that the visitors’ plates stayed filled. The best Thai beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, American soft drinks, and Thai bottled water were served; the ice to cool them, which also must have been brought in from Bangkok hundreds of miles away, never ran out. The contrast between the real Cambodia and the holiday resort atmosphere was shocking (178).
Kamm makes no mention of Kirkenesferda’s visit only a few weeks prior, which is no wonder, for Samphan and the rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership would have done their best to eradicate all evidence of the disastrous events that transpired on December 30, 1979.
Like Kamm, the theater troupe encountered moments of surreality during their visit. Each member of the troupe, upon entering the compound, was issued a “Democratic Kampuchea” visa, written in flowery Khmer longhand by an old Khmer Rouge officer with beautiful penmanship. The man lingered over this job of drawing up visas, as if this were the last good deed he might do in the world. No matter that Democratic Kampuchea existed only in the minds of these men.
At some point, an offer was made by the troupe, translated by Raksmey, to provide some evening entertainment in the form of a puppet show. Questions were passed up the chain of command, and some superior, probably Khieu Samphan himself, granted permission. Never mind that such artistic practice had been banned in Democratic Kampuchea while the Khmer Rouge was in power, or that most puppeteers and actors in the country had been murdered. In this time, at this mountain base, such a show apparently was a welcome treat for the weary Khmer Rouge contingent.
Kirkenesferda’s entrance into the jungle compound must have been an odd spectacle. Who knows what these battle-hardened cadres thought as the theater wagon rumbled into camp. The wagon and generator were set up in a little clearing next to the rusty radio tower that the Khmer Rouge was using to communicate with its Chinese allies as well as the remaining far-flung Khmer Rouge factions along the Thai border. Chairs were assembled for the audience, and several rudimentary floodlights were installed as house lighting.
The view from 808 was spectacular. Perched on the edge of a steep precipice, one could see for miles and miles into the heart of Cambodia, a land now enduring mass displacement, famine, and widespread disease due to its hosts’ astonishing negligence of the citizens’ most basic needs. Presumably, such a spot was chosen for security reasons, but the stunning vistas on that evening, particularly as the sun set against a jungled horizon, brought both visitor and host to congregate at the overlook point, lending an air of contemplation to the proceedings as they silently admired nature’s vast depth of field.
At first, the guests were treated well, if not quite up to par with Kamm’s profuse testimony. They were fed a robust meal and given plenty to drink, mingling with Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and several paunchy Khmer Rouge higher-ups. The mood was described as “festive and expectant” (694) about the upcoming show. Raksmey was very much in the middle of it all, dressed now in the simple black outfit of the Kirkenesferda puppeteer, which was reminiscent of the black uniforms formerly worn by their Khmer Rouge hosts, who now sported the dull hunter green of the jungle rebel. Perhaps the Khmer Rouge wardrobe shift was another effort by the rulers to distance themselves from their disastrous years in power, though many still wore the familiar red-checkered krama of the revolution. The puppeteers wore simple black masks around their necks. When the time came, they would disappear behind their puppets.
Raksmey mingled, joking in three languages, steering the conversations, complimenting the officers, saying little about himself or his acquaintances. He negotiated a starting time for the performance, the practicalities of electricity, housing, protocol. As darkness descended and the floodlights went up, Raksmey directed people to their seats. He was the perfect mediator. It was as if he had been training for this evening his entire life. Writes Røed-Larsen, “though [Raksmey] was the group’s newest addition, on that night he was also their most essential member. . . . (For the moment at least), he was Kirkenesferda’s lifeline” (703). It must be noted that the ease with which he took up this ambassadorial role was in marked contrast to the shy reclusion in which he had lived while at CERN, listening to Britten’s Les Illuminations on repeat until the vinyl had begun to erode.
Despite Raksmey’s social high-wire act, there were two circumstances beyond his control that would later lead to catastrophe. The first was that, unbeknownst to him, Tor Bjerknes had wired a telegraph key into the Khmer Rouge radio tower.
This was to beam out the somewhat superfluous and altogether harmless signal “What hath God wrought?” on an obscure frequency. Transmitting this echo of Morse’s first telegram in 1844 was a practice that Kirkenesferda had maintained before each of their bevegelser, or movements, to date. However innocuous the signal, permission was not requested from their hosts, and Raksmey had no knowledge of the wiring or the transmission.
Second, and perhaps more serious, was the coincidental and unannounced visit of Pol Pot himself to the camp, a visit that, due to security concerns, not even Khieu Samphan had been made aware of. Pot normally lived two hundred kilometers to the south, in the Cardamom Mountains, in a top-secret Khmer Rouge compound called Office 131. He presumably had made the risky and arduous trip to 808 in order to discuss political strategy with Samphan and Sary face-to-face. Pol Pot must have been surprised to see that in his absence, a theater troupe had been invited to perform at the camp, but we cannot know his initial response, since prior to the show there was no witnessed confrontation between Pol Pot and Samphan.
The great irony is that Kirkenesferda—as they would do for their bevegelse in Sarajevo sixteen years later—had theatrically “reserved” certain seats in the audience for the major political players in the current conflict. There was a seat set aside for former U.S. president Richard Nixon; for Prince Norodom Sihanouk; for Chairman Mao Zedong and Vietnamese prime minister Ho Chi Minh, both already deceased; for Thailand’s acting prime minister, General Kriangsak Chomanan; for Hun Sen, the Vietnamese-installed head of state in Cambodia; and for Pol Pot. These were meant to be symbolic, a kind of “meta-material extension of the stage” (718), as Røed-Larsen terms it, but just before the curtain went up, the real Pol Pot emerged from a building and took the seat reserved for him, causing a stir in the audience, which also was unaware he was in camp. Raksmey was the only one who saw what had happened. It would only be after the show that the troupe’s other members discovered that Pol Pot was in attendance.