January 7 and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
January 11, 2012
By Theary Seng
Letter to The Phnom Penh Post
 |
| Svay
Rieng Girls - with Srey Meas, the heroine who was imprisoned because
she protested with Sam Rainsy against illegal border posts placed by
Vietnam one hectare into her rice fields in Svay Rieng (Photo: Chak Ang
Re Loeu, Aug. 2013). |
Dear Editor,
January 7 is indeed a
significant day for survivors of the Khmer Rouge. It arrested the
macabre convulsions that would have swallowed all of us into a hellish
hole if the Vietnamese military had not intervened.
It is a bittersweet day of commemoration through invasion.
And now, unfortunately, it is a
day propagandised to be solely the Day of Liberation, neatly sweeping
away the equally important fact of it being simultaneously the
inaugurating day of an occupation that would last for the next decade.
My hairdresser remembers
returning from Battambang to his home in Boeung Keng Kang I on February
3, 1979, only to find that all the wealthy neighbourhoods of villas and
jewellery stores were still barricaded off.
It was an occupation cut short
only by the meltdown of the Cold War – specifically, the break-up of the
Soviet Union, which funded the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.
The rewriting of history in this
manner by the current regime is fraught with danger for the longevity
of Cambodian stability and peace.
Cycles of past grievances that
touch on national identity and humiliation run deep in any society, and
no less in Cambodia. Think of the Khmer Kampuchea Kroms and their
current suffering and struggles. Think of the underpinnings for the
bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia.
It’s not only on January 7 that
the regime is revising history to fit its narrow political agenda. The
political interference in the Khmer Rouge tribunal speaks to the same
dangers.
This regime never wanted the
KRT, but once it was inevitable and the regime was confident of its
control over the mechanisms of the process, it did everything to achieve
and protect its twin goals: to go down in history as the government
that put the Khmer Rouge on trial and, concurrently, to erase its own
Khmer Rouge history and crimes.
With the United Nations’ stamp of approval, the CPP regime is achieving exactly that.
No counterbalancing, competing
narratives are permitted or have the resources and official,
institutional dissemination systems to match it.
Thus, January 7 is paradoxical
for Cambodians who are simultaneously survivors of the Khmer Rouge,
survivors of the K5 plan under the Vietnamese occupation, and continuing
survivors of a regime that desperately needs to whitewash its history
of the Khmer Rouge and has indebted political ties to Vietnam – a
dangerous liaison, in light of the two countries’ historical enmity over
territorial annexation.
Stated differently, January 7 is
a paradoxical and conflicting date for us who are Cambodian victims of
the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian victims of the Vietnamese occupation and
Cambodian victims of a regime with unhealthy political and historical
ties to both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese military.
January 7 initially made us deliriously grateful, then wearily suspicious. That is the tension.
Theary C. Seng
Founding President
CIVICUS: Center for Cambodian Civic Education
