Thus it seems that no one was really interested in establishing or remembering what happened. Along the border the feeding of the Khmer Rouge continued. The new propaganda that Khmer Rouge spokesmen in Thailand or in the West assiduously distributed was distasteful or absurd, boasting of their progressive outlook. But inside Cambodia, under the Vietnamese, former Khmer Rouge cadres were being fed and promoted, with no questions asked. And inside Cambodia, the propaganda of the Vietnamese was often equally absurd and was usually more pervasive.
The Czechoslovak historian Milan Hubl once remarked, after Soviet orthodoxy was forced again onto his country, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” Hubl’s friend Milan Kundera wondered whether this was hyperbole dictated by despair. If one thinks of applying it to Cambodia, one must remember that Vietnamese rule has been much more benign than that of the Khmer Rouge. Nonetheless, in significant ways it seems now that propaganda threatens to bury the real and dreadful history of the recent past so deeply under new lies, new exaggerations, new ideological contraptions, that it is in danger of being obliterated and thus forgotten.
—May 10, 1984
1. Kampuchea Krom is the Cambodian name for the Mekong Delta, which used to be part of Cambodia and is now in Vietnam, and which the Pol Pot leadership coveted. Presumably, anyone accused of having a Kampuchea Krom accent would be declared a Vietnamese spy.
2. In this cold-warring world each side also tends, at least in extremis, to try to associate the other with fascism. Such attempts almost always owe more to rhetoric than to reality and, as such, they almost always devalue that reality. When the Soviets shot down the Korean 747 in 1983 not only did they refuse to apologize (this was perhaps the most terrifying element in the whole disaster), but they also tried to shift the blame to the United States. In alleging that the plane was spying, one Soviet spokesman declared that the White House was “worse than the Nazis. The passengers were sacrificed by the White House just as innocent people had been destroyed by the Nazis.” A few weeks later Mrs. Thatcher, in a burst of anti-Soviet rhetoric, likened the Soviet system to that of Hitler. Such comparisons inhibit understanding.
3. Amnesty International stated in its 1983 annual report that it was “concerned about reports of detention without trial of people suspected of antigovernment activities” in Cambodia. “More than 200 prisoners suspected of supporting the KPNLF [an anticommunist resistance group] were reportedly held in the former Prison centrale in Phnom Penh. Other prisons in Phnom Penh believed to hold political prisoners were those of the municipal police, the Ministry of the Interior and the army. Political prisoners were reportedly also held in provincial and district prisons. People arrested near the border with Thailand and suspected of connections with the anticommunist resistance were said to be sent to a labor camp at Trapeaing Phlong in the eastern part of Kompong Cham province. [By contrast] Khmer Rouge deserters were reportedly sent to separate prisons and most released after three to six months’ reeducation. Most political detainees were held without trial. Amnesty International investigated the arrest in late 1982 in Kompon Thom of two people accused of stealing rice for armed opposition groups; Amnesty International received reports that the reason for their detention may have been their participation in unauthorized Christian gatherings. Amnesty International was also concerned about reports that they were tortured to force them to confess. Amnesty International also received details of several cases of people detained without trial for up to two years on suspicion of antigovernment activities; some were released after admitting the charges and pledging loyalty to the government.”
4. The propaganda declared that the Seventh of January Hospital in Phnom Penh, like almost all other hospitals, had been closed under the Khmer Rouge. But the three Western writers whom the Khmer Rouge had invited at the end of 1978—Elizabeth Becker, Richard Dudman, and Malcolm Caldwell (a British academic who was murdered there)—visited the hospital and found it filled with Cambodian soldiers wounded in fighting along the border with Vietnam. According to the propaganda, there was virtually no industry under the Khmer Rouge. Yet the three foreign journalists were taken to several working factories in 1978; when Becker returned in 1983, she found that they were now closed and it seemed to her that there was even less industrial life than under the Khmer Rouge.
11
‘I Am Prepared for Anything’
Jerzy Popieluszko
When it comes to oppressive governments, the Catholic Church, like most conservative institutions, religious or secular, has a patchy record. But Father Popieluszko was the best kind of priest. His faith, for him, was not just a matter of tradition, ritual, sacred texts, the smells and the bells, and all the other paraphernalia of his calling. To him, it was a matter of standing by people in distress, strikers being beaten by brutal militiamen, dissidents being locked up for speaking their minds, workers who demanded the dignity of forming independent unions.
Jerzy Popieluszko’s Church was not a symbol of stern authority, hierarchy, or dogma; it was the center of moral opposition to a dictatorship that had long ago lost all its moral bearings. His Church was both humble and the grandest place of all, for it was there that people could feel free, even as the most powerful forces of the state were still stacked against them.
—I.B.
Note: Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest at the St. Stanislaw Kostka church in Warsaw, was abducted by the Polish security forces on October 19 on a road outside the city of Torun and killed. He sent this statement abroad last year.
THE STATE OF the Church will always be the same as the state of the people. The Church is not just the Church hierarchy: it is all the people of God, a nation of millions, who constitute the Church in the greater sense, and when they suffer, when they are persecuted, the Church suffers.
The Church’s mission is to be with its people day in and day out, partaking in their joys, pains, and sorrows. The primate and the bishops of course have in their care the well-being of all, and diplomacy is therefore at times necessary in the Church’s higher ranks, to protect people from suffering and mistreatment whenever it is possible to do so. There are those who sometimes misunderstand and criticize this, for they want the Church to take a more decisive stand against the authorities. But such is not the Church’s task.
The Church has repeatedly insisted and continues to insist that the authorities respect human dignity—which is not being respected; that they free the imprisoned. Through the efforts of the Church and of its affiliated Prisoners’ Relief Committee, aid has reached those most severely persecuted. There is no better proof than this that the Church has indeed carried out its mission during martial law.
Has the lifting of martial law changed anything?
I’ve spoken out several times about this from the pulpit—unequivocally. As recently as the end of July, quoting official Church pronouncements in my argument, I concluded that in lifting martial law, something the bishops had called for so often, the authorities failed to take advantage of yet another opportunity for reconciliation with the nation. The amnesty was a subterfuge, calculated for one-sided gain—whereas the country had every right to expect that the amnesty would right the wrongs, especially the moral wrongs, committed during martial law. To this day our democratically elected brothers, behind whom stand millions of their countrymen, languish in prisons. And even those who have benefited from the amnesty must feel at times like hostages, for this is a conditional amnesty. They must sign statements that go against their own conscience.
The Holy Father has spoken on this subject of the freedom of conscience: conscience is something so holy that even God himself does not put limits on it. To do so through such forced statements is to offend against divine law. The lifting of martial law, a move buttressed by so many new regulations, must give each Pol
e the distinct impression that the shackles, partially loosened from around the hands, are tightening around the soul and conscience. There are many more restrictions now than before; freedom is curtailed even further. And that’s why there is bitterness: here was one more chance to join hands, one more chance to try to get out of a difficult situation. This chance, unfortunately, was not seized.
How do I see the future?
I said this at the beginning. The Church’s future will be the same as society’s future. The Church’s mission is to be with the people here through thick and thin, and this mission I believe the Church will never renounce. What is crucial is that people raise their national, religious, and social awareness. We need courses of public education, lectures in ethics, something along the lines of the interwar workers’ universities. It is a fundamental matter, and the Church should participate in it. Its end? So that the next time there is a similar popular rising, a push for freedom, time will not be wasted on the unessential; people must learn to distinguish what is important, on what issues there can be no compromise, and on which, for the time being, there can be.
What is the mood of the country?
It is very difficult to define. One thing is certain: it is not against strong opposition; most people find themselves taking part in it.
It has always been this way: there were leaders who sacrificed themselves for a cause and paid dearly; and then, at the crucial moment, those millions who didn’t seem to be on any side supported the just one.
What am I doing?
On August 30, 1980, a Sunday, Cardinal Wyszynski sent a message through a priest asking me to go to the Warsaw Steel Mill, where a strike was in progress in solidarity with the striking shipyard workers. I said mass. I lived through the disorders with the steel workers. I heard confessions from people who, exhausted beyond the limits of endurance, kneeled on the pavement. These people understood that they were strong in unity with God, with the Church.
I suddenly felt the need to remain with them. Whenever I’m about to undertake something, I either decide not to do so at all, or I take it very seriously, and put my heart into it. I stayed with these people. I was with them at the time of triumph, and for this they are grateful to me. I was with them during the black December night. During the trials, I went with their families to the courtroom. I sat in the front rows, and the accused saw that their families were being taken care of. They wrote me letters saying that they knew about my prayers for them, and that these prayers gave them strength.
Many people have since passed through this house, the church. My monthly mass for the country and for those who suffer for it has become one such meeting place. The masses have become very popular. In my sermons I speak about what people think and what they tell me in private, for often they lack the courage or the means to speak publicly. I speak out whenever I discern in their words a truth I think others should share. This truth-saying in church makes people trust me. I express what they feel and think. The numerous renewals of faith bear witness to how important this is. After many years, decades sometimes, people suddenly have the courage to come to me and ask to be reconciled with God, for confession, for holy communion. It is a wonderful experience for me as a priest, and for those people also. They didn’t dare go to anyone else. Very often the process of conversion, the return to God, to the Church, or simply the discovery of God, begins when someone takes a patriotic stand. Many paths lead to God.
I receive many letters from people saying that these monthly masses for Poland help them live in hope, help them cleanse themselves of the hatred which, despite all, grows in them. This is a great reward for a priest, who really has no life of his own.
The authorities, trying to suppress me, have often attempted to exert pressure on the curia, on the bishops. They have sent letters charging me with various trespasses, often fabricated. I remember a letter in May—signed, incidentally, by a general of the militia—stating that on May 13 I conducted mass in the Church of the Holy Cross and used certain formulations ill becoming the dignity of the temple. But on the evening of May 13 I was sitting in my own church, in the confessional; I have never in my entire life said mass in the Church of the Holy Cross. If the bishop doesn’t yet have the facts, why not burden the priest with more charges, to finally get him?
Recently the prosecutor’s office published an item in its own internal paper saying that it had begun an investigation of me on the grounds that I abuse my freedom of conscience and of belief.
How can one abuse freedom of conscience? One can limit freedom of conscience, but one cannot abuse it. That is why these accusations are nonsense, but of course I realize that for the truth one must suffer. If people who have families, children, responsibilities, were in prisons, and still suffer—why should not I, a priest, add my suffering to theirs? Because of this they bully me. There have been certain attempts, very crude ones, and no doubt they will continue. For example: At two o’clock in the morning of December 14, after I had already gone to bed, dead tired, the doorbell rang. I didn’t get up. Moments later, an explosion. A brick with explosives had been hurled into the apartment, breaking two windows. I’ve had two sham burglaries. I am under constant surveillance. On my way to Gdansk I was stopped and detained eight hours in a police station outside Warsaw. The driver was detained fifty hours. These are all very gross tactics, but there are larger matters at stake, and I am convinced that what I am doing is right. And that is why I am prepared for anything.
Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska
—December 6, 1984
12
Fire on the Road
Ryszard Kapuściński
The “first Nigerian civil war” in 1966 was not yet the main event, which began the following year, when mostly Igbo people founded the breakaway Republic of Biafra. Between 1967 and 1970, when Biafra was reabsorbed into Nigeria, a million civilians died, many of starvation.
The war described by Kapuściński was part of a muddled period of coups and countercoups, whipped up tribal passions, fraudulent elections, and above all of fear; fear of being dominated by other tribes, fear of being marginalized or plotted against, fear of sudden eruptions of extreme violence.
The politics are murky, the rights and wrongs elusive, and the sources of trouble varied: not just differences between the tribes, but also the messy birth of a nation whose boundary lines were sometimes randomly drawn up by British colonial officers.
Kapuściński was not the man to turn to for a precise and dispassionate analysis of the politics in the tropical dystopias he described so well. What he gets is the atmosphere, the taste of fear, the cold sweat, the sickening feeling of total anarchy, when death is ever-present and almost always brutal.
—I.B.
Note: Speaking in April at a rally in Soweto, Winnie Mandela was reported as saying, “Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”* In South Africa “necklaces” is the word used for tires filled with gasoline that are placed around the necks of collaborators and traitors to the cause of liberation, who are then doused with more gasoline and set on fire. Mrs. Mandela later said the press had distorted her speech and she repudiated the statement. But this kind of punishment and this kind of death have been practiced in South Africa for some time, to the horror of some and as a warning to others. Black policemen in flames in South Africa, like witches burning at the stake in Europe, and later, during World War II, Jews set on fire by Nazis in Warsaw and Bialystok, are victims of the same cruel myth, a belief deeply rooted among all fanatics, that fire is not only punishment but the only true purification—that all evil, if one wants to be really rid of it, has to be burned out in an absolutely literal sense.
The vision of fire as the highest agent of punishment and condemnation appears in many faiths and religions. It is one of the most suggestive images of the Apocalypse, a horrible sight, which from childhood admonishes us against temptation and sin—or else we will be hurled into the ete
rnal flames of hell. But there is yet another, “educational,” side of this phenomenon, well known to those who, by putting their opponents to the torch, treat suffering as a spectacle: by passively observing a man being burned alive we indirectly become participants in the crime, take part in it, have implicated ourselves.
What it feels like during the moments before one is set on fire I experienced myself when I was reporting on the first civil war in Nigeria in 1966 (the second war, which erupted soon thereafter, was over Biafra). The conflict I describe here touched off a series of internal clashes, coups, and upheavals in this most heavily populated of the African countries. They continue to this day and in two decades have claimed more than one million victims and caused enormous destruction. During the past twenty years only one Nigerian government came to power through elections (in 1979, the government of Shehu Shagari, now deposed). At all the other times, those who gained power gained it through coups (1966—Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi; 1966—Colonel [later General] Yakubu Gowon; 1975—Brigadier Murtala Muhammad; 1976—Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo; 1983—Major General Muhammadu Buhari; 1985—Major General Ibrahim Babangida).
Most often these takeovers of power are bloody, and those who stage them either perish themselves soon thereafter at the hands of rivals (as did Aguiyi-Ironsi and Murtala Muhammad), or end up in exile (as has General Gowon). Over the last quarter-century the Nigerian officer corps, rent by tribal and political conflicts, obsessed by an implacable struggle for power, has been decimating itself at such a rate that few of those officers who were in the army when Nigeria gained independence in 1960 are alive today. Whoever wants to understand the history of those battles and the tensions and passions behind them should read Shakespeare’s plays, and keep in his mind’s eye the royal throne constantly dripping with blood.
The New York Review Abroad Page 18