This chapter investigates a mnemonic formation in Cambodia that has an ephemeral and religious nature somewhat different to the other ones discussed in this book: namely, the power of the dead. In analysing how bones and spirits have been treated since the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, the hegemonic memory of the government and its inhibiting effect on the quality of peace becomes visible. The government’s emphasis on preserving the bones of some of those killed by the Khmer Rouge as evidence of the regime’s barbarity serves broader political purposes but ignores survivors’ calls for the bones to be cremated. In Theravada Buddhism as followed in Cambodia, the cremation of a person’s mortal remains in a context of traditional funeral rites is deemed necessary to release the spirit of that individual from the afterlife to be reborn. Consequently, as long as victims’ remains have not been cremated survivors are haunted by the presence of these spirits and worry about their lost loved ones’ cosmic well-being. This situation thus impinges on the dignity of both the dead and the survivors, undermining the quality of peace.

Analytically engaging with the dead as victims of past violence gives us insight into the struggles for political power today and the influence of memory on the prospects for peace in post-genocide Cambodia. This analysis renders visible various dynamics that transcend standard social and political interactions, and it incorporates spiritual dimensions that are important in understanding how many Cambodians perceive and interact with sites of memory. For most Cambodians, the presence of spirits is very real, which renders the spirits of the dead relevant to our investigation of memory and peace in this country. Thus, not only do ‘stories of the dead provide a culturally acceptable mode of narrating history and suffering, [but also] the dead are as constitutive of contemporary social order and stability as the living’ (Bennett, 2018b: 199–200). Spirits can therefore themselves be seen as agents, and studying the dead allows us also to think about forms of non-human agency. Of more central interest to the chapter, though, is an interrogation of how these spirits and the uncremated bones of the deceased are perceived by the living, how different actors talk about them in different ways and how these perceptions are instrumentalised in the politics of memory. We shall therefore analyse the power of the dead as a political issue that is actively negotiated and through which political interests become visible, impacting the prospects for peace.

In studying the dead and their place in Cambodia’s memoryscape we draw on the excellent anthropological literature on the dead in Cambodia (among others, see Arensen, 2017; Bennett, 2015, 2018a, 2018b; Guillou, 2012, 2014, 2017; Tyner et al., 2014), and take these insights regarding the power of spirits, bodies and karma to be understood through the prism of our social scientific approach to understanding the politics of memory.

The genocide by the Khmer Rouge

Cambodia suffered decades of violence. The country also suffered from the war spilling over from neighbouring Vietnam, it fought not one but two civil wars and it experienced genocide. This genocide, carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975–1979, is the main reference point for remembering atrocities, violence and conflict in the country. Heading a state they called Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge exercised full control throughout the country, pursuing their utopian vision of a peasant revolution that would make the country more self-sufficient through rice production, and thus independent from the capitalist and purportedly imperialist West. This peasant revolution saw the Khmer Rouge empty the cities and force the entire population to engage in agricultural labour, working the rice fields and building the necessary irrigation systems. Under this regime that lasted less than four years, between 1.7 million and 2.2 million people died or were killed, out of a pre-genocide population of around eight million (Tabeau/Kheam, 2009, 19). About half the dead fell victim to hunger, overwork and disease within a politically radical and terribly mismanaged Communist state that sought to implement a peasant revolution but failed to prioritise feeding its population. About one million more people were executed for various reasons: ethnic minority groups – the Cham, Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao and Thai – were targeted and some groups were almost entirely wiped out. All those associated with the previous regime’s administration or military, as well as intellectuals and religious figures, became targets for the mass executions, in order to provide a clean political slate for the revolution (Chandler, 1999: 45, 2008a: 265; Tabeau and Kheam, 2009: 19). From late 1976, as the revolution appeared not to be flourishing as the leaders had expected, the regime began to suspect hundreds of thousands of individuals of being internal enemies seeking to sabotage its rule (Chandler, 1999: 45–76). There were massive purges, within the Khmer Rouge itself and among the broader population, of those suspected of being part of elaborate (but non-existent) networks of foreign agents (Chandler, 1999: 123–30, 2008a: 267). Further, the regime killed those deemed to be anti-revolutionary. This attribution could be bestowed upon an individual for the simplest of things: eating outside of collective meals; engaging in sexual intercourse outside of state-sanctioned marriage; or being too slow at one’s assigned duties, to name just a few.

However, despite the prominent position that Democratic Kampuchea obviously occupies in recent Cambodian history, its violence is embedded in a broader longue durée of violence. In the wave of post-Second World War decolonisation across the world, Cambodia’s monarch Norodom Sihanouk had in 1953 negotiated full independence, with Cambodia no longer a French protectorate in association with neighbouring Vietnam (see Chanda, 1986; Kiernan, 1985). Sihanouk remained in power in various political positions, enjoying immense popularity – particularly outside the cities where people were less affected by his mismanagement of the country’s economy – and steering a politically neutral course regarding the escalating war in Vietnam (Chandler, 2008a: 233–54; Kiernan, 1996: 17). Sihanouk was toppled from power in 1970 by his prime minister, General Lon Nol, and subsequently the country became closely allied with the US administration. The new government then allowed massive aerial bombardment of the eastern parts of the country by American fighter planes in their vicious hunt for Viet Cong fighters, even though these incursions into Cambodian territory saw more than 100,000 tonnes of bombs released and at least 150,000 Cambodian civilians killed (Chandler, 2008a, 252; Kiernan, 1996: 24).

Excluded from power, Sihanouk entered into an unlikely alliance with a hitherto relatively small Communist rebel group, later known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge’s restrained socialist propaganda combined with the former monarch’s call to arms – publicised via radio and word of mouth – allowed the rebels to grow rapidly and to engage Lon Nol’s regime in an intense civil war (Bultmann, 2017: 9). Five years of civil war and US war crimes left about half a million people dead by the time the Khmer Rouge entered the capital Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 (Chandler, 2008a: 256). The Khmer Rouge’s initial popularity as the war ended quickly evaporated as all aspects of life became subject to their totalitarian control: Sihanouk was put under house arrest, the cities were evacuated, all property and land was eventually collectivised, and money and religious observance abolished (Chandler, 2008a; Kiernan, 1996).

The next three years, eight months and twenty days – numbers etched into Cambodian collective memory – saw violence and the harshest kind of repression wreak devastation on the country, until defectors from the Khmer Rouge, supported by the Vietnamese military, liberated the country by taking Phnom Penh in January 1979. As the Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border a new, second civil war emerged between the Vietnamese-backed government and complex constellations of rebel groups, including the Khmer Rouge. This violence continued to ravage much of the country until the Paris Peace Agreement of 1991, and more sporadic violence continued until the late 1990s, when peace was finally established (see Chandler, 1999: 157–88, 2008a: 277–95; Etcheson, 2005).

Democratic Kampuchea was clearly only one period in the country’s longer continuum of violence, but the massive scale of killing during this period lends it prominence in transitional justice efforts and broader politics of memory. Hun Sen, who first took office as prime minister in 1984, remained in power until 2023 before handing over his position to his son Hun Manet.¹ Political violence and human rights violations have continued to occur, with repression bolstering the government’s ability to maintain power (Un, 2019: 47, 59). This power is also underwritten by legitimation strategies that emphasise how Hun Sen and his comrades liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge, stoking (unrealistic) fears of their return should he ever lose power (Williams, 2022: 162).

The Cambodian memoryscape

Despite the broad array of violent events in the country’s history, the Cambodian memoryscape is strongly focused on the period of Democratic Kampuchea. This temporal focus does reflect the time period of the worst horrors and the most violent phenomena, but the lesser visibility of other time periods of suffering is predominantly a political decision useful for prime minister Hun Sen and his government. As many in his government, including himself, were Khmer Rouge members in the first civil war before defecting and liberating the country, a focus on atrocities carried out after their defection is politically prudent. Nonetheless, the country has experienced phases of memory in which the government has remembered the violent past of Democratic Kampuchea in different ways at different times. Given the autocratic nature of governance in the country (Un, 2019), it is unsurprising that the Cambodian memoryscape is hegemonically structured according to the political interests of the incumbent government. Nevertheless, these political interests shift over time to highlight various ideas about culpability and victimhood that are politically useful in the moment (Williams, 2022).

Beginning with the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and the outbreak of the second civil war, the government pursued a policy of highlighting the torturous and murderous legacy of the Khmer Rouge. This demonisation of the Khmer Rouge was politically expedient, both in terms of legitimising in the eyes of the world the invasion of the country by Vietnam (particularly given Vietnam’s international status as a pariah state in the aftermath of the Vietnam War) and in mobilising the country’s own population against the Khmer Rouge in the context of the on-going, second civil war (Brown and Millington, 2015: 32; Hinton, 2018: 47; Hughes, 2006: 272; Tyner et al., 2014: 286). The government opened the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in August 1979, just months after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, displaying the horrors of the space in which it was constructed: the museum is housed in a complex that was known as S-21, the central detention centre operated by the regime. Thousands of prisoners were interrogated and tortured there (Brown and Millington, 2015; Williams, 2019). In the early 1980s, the government that had replaced the Khmer Rouge sought to mobilise support in the civil war and instructed that local memorials be constructed across the entire country; skulls and bones were gathered from mass graves and brought into around eighty officially approved memorial spaces (Hughes, 2006). Besides its political function in materialising the horror of the recent past, this centralisation of victims’ bones and skulls was motivated by the fact that the remains were otherwise often being eaten by cows in cases where mass graves had been unearthed by looters.² The government then introduced the Day of Maintaining Anger in 1984 (Sion, 2014: 113), a national commemoration day to remember the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period and rally the population around the flag in the on-going civil war against their remaining forces. In 1988, the Choeung Ek Killing Fields site was opened as a further important national site of memory; many of the people who had been Interrogated at the S-21 detention centre had subsequently been transported to be killed there (Hughes, 2006).

In the 1990s and in the context of peace talks, the local memorials became less important and the state ceased to assume responsibility for their upkeep. Subsequently, religious figures were primarily tasked with maintaining them (Hughes, 2006: 279), although many fell into disrepair due to lack of funding. Government rhetoric towards the Khmer Rouge also became milder in an attempt to bring them into peace talks and successfully negotiate peace. Peace negotiations came to fruition and violent conflict ceased, even prompting Hun Sen, as prime minister in 1998, to call metaphorically for a hole to be dug in which to bury the past (Chandler, 2008a: 356).

The government has not actually buried the past in Cambodia. Since the cessation of the civil war and the advent of peace, it has not dismantled the memorials around the country, nor has it returned to its demonising rhetoric of civil war days, however. Instead, it still uses the past productively for its own ends by reminding people of the horrors of the previous regime, while confining responsibility to the Khmer Rouge’s now-deposed top leadership (Williams, 2022; forthcoming). Although it offered amnesties to defecting Khmer Rouge cadres in the 1990s, the government has since allowed a very narrow transitional justice process to take place against a small number of former Khmer Rouge senior figures, with prosecutions by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (for an introduction, see Gidley, 2019; Hughes, 2015; Manning, 2017). The ECCC is a hybrid institution, with the participation of international staff through the United Nations as well as Cambodian, government-appointed staff. Its operations have been marked by political interference by the Cambodian government (Orentlicher, 2020; Ryan and McGrew, 2016: 72; Un, 2019). For example, the tribunal has witnessed international personnel repeatedly attempting to expand the remit of prosecutions, while Cambodian prosecutors and judges have systematically blocked any attempts to widen it beyond the five people originally indicted in the ECCC’s first two cases, even though a majority of victims support further prosecutions (Williams et al., 2018: 62).

Beyond the ECCC, various civil society organisations contribute to the transitional justice process in judicial and non-judicial ways, although such projects are often thematically tied to the ECCC (Hinton, 2018: 43; Ryan and McGrew, 2016: 92; Sperfeldt, 2012). Most importantly in the context of this chapter, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are key to providing reparations awarded through the ECCC (Sperfeldt, 2020), including, among many other things, the erection of memorials (Williams, 2019), therapy projects and cultural performances (Grey et al., 2019; Shapiro-Phim, 2020). Transitional justice efforts are, however, mostly structured by the government in ways that prioritise their political interests and thus do not necessarily contribute to societal resilience (Williams, 2021).

In this memoryscape the dead are only sometimes present, as for example when there are discussions over whether the remains of the dead should be displayed in memorials or cremated. At other times their presence is more tangential, as when they are discursively rendered as evidence for the ECCC, or when spirits influence whether people visit memorials or how stories are told in cultural projects. But this chapter demonstrates that the dead – through their spirits and bodies – are salient topics in the politics of memory, and that how Cambodian society deals with its dead has manifest consequences for the quality of its peace.

Mnemonic formation: the power of the dead

Within this broader memoryscape, we focus on how the dead are used in the politics of memory and on the power they exert over the living. Here two aspects play overlapping and interconnected roles: first, there are the material remains of the individuals who were killed or died under the Khmer Rouge, that is, their bones; and, second, their more intangible, although equally salient, spirits.

The vast majority of the Cambodian population – as in much of Southeast Asia – subscribes to Theravada Buddhism (Harris, 2015).³ The pagoda is the primary social space in most villages and strong value is ascribed to Buddhist practices, such as merit-making to improve one’s karma and to expedite rebirth for oneself and one’s loved ones (Bennett, 2018a). Buddhist tenets are complemented and expanded by animist concepts that emphasise the importance of spirits and structure social interactions with the dead. In Cambodian culture, therefore, spirits play an important role in everyday life and can exert strong affective power over individuals. To understand the politics surrounding these spirits in the Cambodian memory of the Khmer Rouge, we need to understand the nature of spirits in this country and how these are intimately connected to the bones of the deceased.

Spirits are omnipresent in Cambodian culture and in the country’s social, political and geographic landscapes (see e.g. Beban and Work, 2014; Work, 2017). They also play an important role in how victims engage with transitional justice when more secular, universal perceptions of justice and reconciliation are overlaid with Buddhist readings of these transitional justice processes (Gray, 2012; Williams et al., 2018; Zucker, 2009, 2013) and with understandings that focus more strongly on spirits (Hinton, 2018: 180, 208). Among the broad array of spirits in Cambodia, their emotions and malevolence vary (Bennett, 2018b: 189; Bertrand, 2001). Of particular importance are neak ta (local guardian spirits), which are tied to a certain location and can take on human attributes such as hunger (the preta spirit is known as the hungry ghost) or loneliness, communicating with humans directly or through dreams (see e.g. Guillou, 2012). While these spirits can also possess people (Bertrand, 2001), this has not been reported for the spirits of dead Khmer Rouge (Guillou, 2012: 225, 2017: 225). However, the dead in mass graves are more likely to become neak ta, given their association with the ground and the specific location (Guillou, 2014: 155).

The spirits of one’s ancestors play an important role in many Cambodian traditions, in the context of a fundamental belief in the concept of rebirth after death. Funeral rites are important to release the spirit of the deceased from its connection to the individual’s body so that rebirth can take place; otherwise, the spirit remains present and potentially haunts the space.⁴ Karma, accumulated through merit-making, is influential in how soon someone is reborn. There is an ‘understanding that the improper treatment of human remains prevents the transformation of a body’s spirit, trapping it instead in this world as a ghost’ (Arensen, 2017: 71). Cremation is the standard (although not the only) option for funeral rites, and it is widely believed that the cremation of the body necessitates the participation of family members (Arensen, 2017: 72; Bennett, 2018b: 190; Cougill, 2007).

In cases of unnatural or violent death, one speaks of ‘bad dead’ (khmaoch tai hong) and the spirit of the deceased is less likely to be reborn (Cougill, 2007) and more likely to ‘transform into malevolent entities of various forms staying near the living’ (Guillou, 2012: 216). While the funeral rites are not vastly different for bad dead and focus on dedicating merit to the dead (Guillou, 2012: 217), cremation is seen as more urgent in such cases (Hughes, 2006: 275). As with other cremations, these rites should be performed by families. It follows that when the bodies of Khmer Rouge victims have not been individually identified and the rites performed by their families, there is a higher likelihood that those individuals will not be reborn and will remain in the area of their death as (potentially malevolent) spirits.

During the Khmer Rouge period around two million people died or were killed, so survivors of course became accustomed both to the corpses and to the spirits around them (Bennett, 2018b: 191; Guillou, 2014). Subsequently, hauntings at mass graves were understood more as ‘the result of the kmoac’s [ghost of a recently deceased person] own confused emotional state, and although they frightened some people, and made others sick, they were not malevolent’ (Bennett, 2018b: 191). While many spirits are of people unknown to the local population, due to the many population transfers under the Khmer Rouge, often the dead are broadly identifiable as having belonged to one set of victims or another, for example as Khmer Rouge cadres or as members of other warring factions from the 1980s. People make few distinctions between ghosts of civilians or soldiers, however (Arensen, 2017: 80).

During the 1980s Buddhism remained forbidden under the new socialist regime, meaning that the remains of the dead could not be cremated as religious tradition decreed. Many spirits therefore continued to inhabit the spaces in which they were killed, terrorising (or supporting) the local populations. Thus, spaces of memory are inhabited not only by the living but also by the dead, first in the form of spiritual beings and as a malevolent or benevolent presence, and second through their continued physical materialisation in the form of the uncremated bones.

In the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, the bones of the dead served an important political purpose as evidence of the terror that the former regime had wreaked on the country. In the context of the post-Vietnam War invasion and liberation of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops and Khmer Rouge defectors, bones became the cornerstone of the new government’s legitimation strategy (Guillou, 2014: 151–2). As such, the bones fulfilled a key political role as evidence, even if this at the same time had direct consequences in hindering the liberation of the spirits and their rebirth. While most bones remained untouched in mass graves, some were gathered together to be placed in the local memorials described above. The local population participated in this, in part also to preserve the bones from being stolen or eaten by cattle, as mentioned above; there are also reports that some individuals took fragments of bone as talismans to bring luck and to incorporate into their homes (Bennett, 2018b: 195).

While Buddhist practices were gradually reintroduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Hughes, 2006: 274), the bones of the deceased remained uncremated, mostly because the government still wanted to maintain the bones as evidence of the cruelty of the former regime. They were later also framed as judicial evidence in the context of the hybrid tribunal (see above). Furthermore, given that bones are not individually identified (with the exception of people who were recognised in the immediate aftermath of violence before decomposition set in or who were identifiable by their clothing)⁵ there was and still is a hesitancy to perform funeral rituals, as these should be conducted by family members.

In this context, then, the dead as spirits are co-constitutive of social order and stability in post-genocide Cambodia, and they unfold subtle forms of agency. Spirits in Cambodia can have emotions, feel hunger and take on many characteristics of human beings, as well as interacting with humans who are still alive. It is this interaction that makes them important as subjects in the analysis of the politics of memory. Interactions with spirits are not always negative, but in the case of those who died during the Khmer Rouge regime they tend to be driven by fear on the part of the living. This is because the spirits of those killed in unnatural, violent deaths are more likely to be malevolent. It is this fear of the spirits that precludes interaction with some memorial sites for many people, with parents not wanting their children to visit or work at such places. The area around the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was more or less deserted for many years as people refused to live in the vicinity due to the many malevolent spirits, despite its prime location near the centre of Phnom Penh.

Sites: emplacing the dead

In the politics of remembering the genocidal past in Cambodia, two sites stand out in terms of their national and international significance: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the capital Phnom Penh and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, about 17 kilometres away. Around eighty other memorials are peppered across the entire country, each enshrining the bones of the deceased, which in most cases are on public display, as well as hundreds of unmarked mass graves. Each of these sites is a gateway into understanding how the dead are instrumentalised in negotiating the meaning of the past in the present.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is Cambodia’s most prominent genocide memorial site (for overviews, see Brown and Millington, 2015; Hinton, 2016; Hughes, 2003, 2008). It occupies part of the space previously taken up by S-21, the leading detention centre in an intricate network of security centres across the country (Ea, 2005). Here more than 15,000 people were brought to be interrogated and tortured (Chandler, 2020), although most were not killed in this location but were transported to the nearby killing fields at Choeung Ek. Both sites have been turned into memorials that today are major Phnom Penh tourist destinations that shock and horrify many visitors due to their disturbing histories and the material evidence with which visitors are confronted (Bickford, 2009; Brown and Millington, 2015; Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2022). In both places, these horrific impressions are enhanced by informative but emotional audio guides available to visitors (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2022).

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is housed in a complex that was a secondary school before it was converted into the S-21 detention centre, with four three-storey buildings surrounding a leafy garden area and an administrative block in the centre. On some of the buildings that have walkways facing the garden area one can still see the barbed-wire installed to prevent prisoners from escaping or committing suicide.⁶ On Building A’s ground floor one finds rooms with beds and shackles as they were discovered after the end of Democratic Kampuchea, with photos on the wall showing scenes that include tortured and dead prisoners. The core of the exhibition is in Building B, where photos with relatively short captions are displayed alongside other exhibits, such as a large pile of clothes that belonged to victims of S-21, as well as some costumes and a sample of Khmer Rouge cadre clothing. Building C has been left as it was found in 1979, to give an idea of what some of the prison cells and rooms looked like. In Building D on the ground floor, one can see a measuring stick and the box camera for taking photos of newly arrived prisoners. There are thousands of prints of these photos on display, as well as instruments of torture and graphic paintings by one of the survivors of S-21, the artist Vann Nath. At the end of the exhibition there is a small memorial space where people may place incense (part of religious practice) or write a note.

Physical remnants of victims are also on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. First, there are cases containing skulls in Building D; a member of staff reports some visitors taking selfies in front of them.⁷ And second, there is a photograph of a previous installation that consisted of over 300 exhumed skulls and bones in the shape of a map of Cambodia, with the main rivers and the Tonle Sap lake painted in red to signify the spilled blood. This particularly shocking element of the exhibition was removed and replaced by this photo in 2002, as will be discussed in more depth later in the chapter.

Figure 6.1Building with holding cells at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (photograph by Timothy Williams, June 2018)

Choeung Ek Killing Fields

Almost without exception, people interned at detention centre S-21 (where the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is located today) were subsequently killed, most often after being transported outside of Phnom Penh to a site near the village of Choeung Ek, to the south of the city. The site is now notorious as the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. Visitors today encounter a relatively open space, with many trees and located next to a lake; at first sight it is not clear that 129 mass graves roll out across the space. As visitors follow an audio guide provided at the entrance they are guided through the site, listening to background information on the space itself and the broader history of the genocide. Walking around the site, visitors often see fragments of bones on the ground, particularly during the rainy season when soil gets washed away; staff members only collect up these fragments every few months.⁸ These fragments and the more curated displays of bones and clothes – as in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum – are framed as ‘evidence’ in the audio guide and interviews with staff conducted by the fifth author.

The site contains few buildings, but towering above the green spaces that predominate one finds a strikingly ornate example of a carved stupa (the domelike structure usually containing Buddhist relics). It is reminiscent, for visitors, of Cambodian religious architecture across the country, albeit considerably more monumental in scale. Constructed in 1988, this stupa houses around 9,000 skulls and bones; it was built during a period in the late 1980s when a government policy shift tentatively allowed a revival of Buddhist practices (Hughes, 2006). The memorial is designed to conform with Buddhist tradition. Rachel Hughes evocatively summarises the site’s architectural impact: ‘The memorial does not attempt to symbolically redeem the dead, as in other memorial traditions. It instead preserves the injustice and impropriety of the victims’ deaths in its architectural form’ (Hughes, 2006: 276).

Importantly, an additional layer of disturbance haunts Cambodian visitors to both the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, beyond the already horrific nature of these sites: the spiritual realm. Cambodian visitors speak of being afraid of the spirits of the deceased who – due to the violent nature of their deaths, their bad karma or the lack of cremation – have not been released for rebirth. Staff members have reported that their parents were very uneasy with their working at such a site or even tried to forbid them from taking up their posts.⁹ Furthermore, for many years there was a noticeable absence of school groups visiting these sites, particularly compared with other post-genocide countries. This may be partly due to economic constraints and the government’s lack of interest in integrating the violent past into state-school curricula, but it also appears to be deeply rooted in parents’ fears of having their children visit such haunted spaces – which could bring their offspring bad luck – as well as the children’s own fear of this bad luck.¹⁰

Figure 6.2Stupa at Choeung Ek Killing Fields (photograph by Susanne Buckley-Zistel, June 2013)

Local memorials

As described above, the 1980s saw the government build dozens of smaller memorials around the entire country. There are around eighty such memorials that demonstrate ‘significant uniformity in the age, form and commemorative function’, suggesting that ministerial directives were carefully adhered to (Hughes, 2006: 278) – although other analysts suggest that the processes were more locally driven.¹¹ The structures are built as traditional stupas with ornate carvings, although they are often only a few metres high and thus not much larger than some family graves. As with the two national-level memorials and in stark contrast to other graves in the country, these sites also display human remains, especially skulls and long bones that are laid inside, in the memorial structure, and visible through windows. Where the sites include inscriptions, these are very much in the language of the 1980s, emphasising hatred of the Khmer Rouge and highlighting the horrific nature of Democratic Kampuchea.

These local memorials are often close to religious sites and were often constructed within pagoda complexes, both because of the ‘auspicious nature of temple grounds’ and because they had often previously contained mass graves due to the fact that as the Khmer Rouge often used such sites for incarcerations and executions (Hughes, 2006: 279). Despite their prominent locations, many have fallen into disrepair and do not play an important role for most of the year, with certain festivities, whether religious or more politically oriented, being an exception (see the ‘Events’ section). The sites are not particularly controversial today, having lost the negative political role that made them key to mobilisation against the Khmer Rouge and legitimation of the incumbent government during the civil war of the 1980s.

Unmarked mass graves

The national and local memorials discussed in this chapter were created by, and served the political agenda of, the national government. Their impact on the daily lives of the local population has varied; they received significantly more attention from Cambodians in the 1980s than they do today. Beyond these sites, and out of sight of all tourists and most researchers, there are other unofficial sites of key importance that are locally known but remain unmarked, uncommemorated and often untouched (Guillou, 2012; Tyner et al., 2014). For example, mass graves were regularly discovered in the first years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, particularly by farmers ploughing fields. While these were then sometimes looted for any valuables, or cattle would eat the bones of the deceased at these mass graves, the sites remained otherwise untouched unless the remains were exhumed to be put in the local memorials described in the previous section. Most mass graves remain unnoticeable and unmarked by any building or even signs, although they are nowadays known to the local communities. Often the presence of human remains at such sites only became known about after the end of Democratic Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge regime laid a veil of secrecy and silence over much of what happened during this time. The locations of killings were seldom visible to the broader population (even though it was known that large numbers of people were disappearing and many were being eliminated).

These sites have not become part of any wider political recognition or remembrance of the past violence, but they have been highly significant to the people living around them, particularly as they were haunted by the spirits of the uncremated dead (Bennett, 2015, 2018b). There has been no political will to mark these sites or deal with bodies at most such mass graves, even as these sites have acquired a strong negative significance among the local population. Moreover, there are reports of women becoming pregnant from the mass graves as they looted them in the 1980s, with spirits thus being rebirthed (Bennett, 2018a, 75), and the lives of survivors becoming directly interlocked with the spirits of the deceased, rendering the sites in some cases even more significant to local populations.

In conclusion, various national and local sites are salient in Cambodia’s memoryscape. The increasingly familiar tourist sites of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields are the most prominent, and beyond those high-profile sites there are the dozens of local memorial spaces constructed by the government in the 1980s. These official and recognised sites are complemented by many more informal sites that are spaces of horrific memory due to the killings that occurred there and the bodies that remain buried in mass graves. These sites – recognised or not, official or not – include bones and skulls as human remains on display, and thus have strong implications for the spiritual realm. Here, spirits of those unable to be reborn shape Cambodian people’s perceptions of the sites and their interactions with them.

Agents: the government and its critics

Within the Cambodian memoryscape the government occupies a central position, given its strong hold on power (Un, 2019). But other actors are also important; they may be politically less influential but their understandings are nonetheless co-constitutive of the more diverse memoryscape. Here, we will home in on the late King Sihanouk as a political actor with a provocative role, as well as some of the men and women who are involved in memory work through the positions they hold at memorial sites.

The government as dominant memory agent

Since the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by forces including the Vietnamese, the same party has continued in power albeit renamed and rebranded over time; Hun Sen first became prime minister in December 1984 and remained in power until 2023, albeit sharing the position during some moments of political instability in the 1990s. The government has clearly held a dominant position in the Cambodian political landscape and in the past few years has reneged on many of its democratising moves, dissolving the key opposition party and limiting press and civil society freedoms (Un, 2019). The government has used its dominant political position to pursue its strategic interests in activities that impact collective memory and its meaning for today. The politics of memory in Cambodia is therefore structured in a way that strongly reflects the governing elites’ interests, even as these have changed over the decades since the end of Democratic Kampuchea (Williams, 2022).

The government influences the politics of memory directly. For example, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a national museum that comes under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts; any changes to the museum, its exhibition or the narratives provided at the site need ministerial approval. While the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum has witnessed many additional programmes, temporary exhibitions and changes over the past few years that certainly serve to change the character of the space, these must all adhere to government policy and the fundamental tenets of the space remain unchanged. On the judicial level, meanwhile, the government has attempted to influence decision-making by the ECCC, as mentioned above. Cambodian members of staff at the institution are appointed by the government and are often individuals with close links to government circles. The government can be confident that ECCC staff members will act in accordance with their political interests, for example with Cambodian prosecutors and investigating judges preventing any further cases from proceeding at the tribunal, as the government has little interest in widening the scope of trials.

(Marginalised) memory entrepreneurs

While government policy undoubtedly holds significant sway over the politics of memory in Cambodia, there are, of course, other actors who are key to shaping the memoryscape, both in adherence with, but also in contradiction to, the government’s interests. For example, at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum many of the staff members act in line with government interests when they use the bones of the dead as evidence in educating the next generation; at the same time, however, they share the more broadly felt uneasiness rooted in religious beliefs concerning the non-cremation of the bones and the lingering presence of spirits (see the ‘Narratives’ section). As memory agents, they are obviously important individuals as they shape the memorial site and engage in education programmes and outreach.

A more political agent with a very different role in the Cambodian memoryscape was the late King Sihanouk. Sihanouk was one of the country’s most influential and charismatic, yet ambiguous, figures, from when he negotiated Cambodia’s independence from the French protectorate until his death in 2012. He filled various roles beyond that of king at different times through his long career, including king-father, head of state and prime minister. His role in the country’s history is complex, including an alliance with the Khmer Rouge that began with the campaign to bring down General Lon Nol, whose coup had removed Sihanouk from power. This alliance broke when the Khmer Rouge put the king under house arrest when they seized power. In 1981 Sihanouk founded the armed rebel and political movement Funcinpec, but would be a key figure in the peace negotiations of the early 1990s aimed at ending the country’s second civil war. As a popular statesman, his word carried great weight regardless of what his formal political status was at any particular time. When in 2001 he addressed a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen critiquing the display of skulls at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, on the grounds of lack of respect for the dead, it was an important political event and one that the government felt obliged to react to. The government did not change its policy, as we will discuss, but did remove the skull map in 2002 (Brown and Millington, 2015: 33). The bodily remains were never cremated, however; they remain displayed on glass shelves (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 90–1).

Narratives: how to treat the dead

Given the hegemonic nature of memory politics in Cambodia, we find little physical manifestation of any fragmentation of memory narratives – in contrast to other countries studied in this book. Nonetheless, concerning the role the bones of the dead should play today, and the consequences this has for the spirits, two narratives do compete within the spaces of memory. For some Cambodians, the fundamental question is: should bones be preserved as evidence of past violence or should they be cremated?

The hegemonic narrative advanced by the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen argues that the bones of the dead should be preserved, as they are needed as evidence of the horrific crimes carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime. A counter-narrative quietly adhered to by some memory actors, but which was more vocally advocated by Sihanouk, argues more along religious lines that the bones should be cremated to help set free the spirits of the deceased for rebirth. Interestingly, this debate relates not to all the uncremated bones in Cambodia, including the large numbers still lying in mass graves; it concerns itself primarily with the bones that are on public display in the various memorial sites around the country, including the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

An especially intense debate has concerned a group of bones that were part of a controversial installation at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. As outlined above, the installation showed a map of Cambodia made up of around 300 skulls that had been exhumed from mass graves in Svay Rieng province (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 90); it showed the country’s main rivers and its largest lake, Tonle Sap, highlighted in a blood-red colour (Brown and Millington, 2015: 33). According to an exhibition curated to mark the forty-year anniversary of the opening of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the ‘purpose of creating a Cambodian map with skulls was to symbolize the loss of millions of Cambodian lives from all parts of the country under the reign of the Khmer Rouge’ (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 90). After the intervention by Sihanouk (detailed below), the museum dismantled the installation in 2002. It did not cremate the skulls, however, opting to continue to preserve them as evidence of the atrocities committed. The skulls were moved to be displayed in glass cases behind a small memorial stupa; a photograph of the map made up of skulls now adorns the wall where the installation once hung. The museum suggests that ‘the new arrangement demonstrated the respect and good intentions of the museum towards the souls of the victims who died. It was assumed that Cambodians and foreigners would pay respect to the skulls when they saw them’ (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 91).

Preserving bones as evidence

First we will examine the narrative that construes the bones of Khmer Rouge victims as evidence of past atrocities, and therefore as an enduring symbol and reminder of the peace and stability provided by the current government, in contrast to that era. This is the hegemonic narrative advanced by the government, as it served and continues to serve the political purposes of the ruling elite. When the opponents of the Khmer Rouge liberated the country, the bones were necessary to demonstrate to the outside world (and to any remaining Khmer Rouge supporters in the population) the extreme cruelty of the ousted regime and the genocidal scope of its violence. By highlighting this genocidal violence, the new government in Phnom Penh strove to legitimise its invasion of the country with the help of Vietnamese forces, and also to rally support for its on-going military struggle against the Khmer Rouge in what became a second period of civil war. The bones were tangible and undeniable evidence of the atrocities, which were explicitly framed as the kind of system that would be reverted to if the Khmer Rouge took power again.

Later, when the fighting had ended, the bones took on an enhanced function: they still serve as a reminder of the violent past, but nowadays the emphasis lies especially on the on-going security that the government provides (and implicitly that only the government can provide). Interestingly, it is reported that even Buddhist clergy have declared that it is helpful to preserve the bones (Cougill, 2007: 40); while it is obviously difficult to know whether this support for government policy is wholly sincere when expressed in an authoritarian context, it is at least indicative that the bones-as-evidence debate has gained political currency and is not in diametric opposition to the interests of the Buddhist clergy.

With the advent of peace in the 1990s, the question of whether the bones still needed to be displayed did arise with more intensity. Given the continued political utility of displaying the bones to help bolster the government’s legitimacy, the preservation of bones is now also framed in terms of legal evidence needed for the ECCC. Speaking at a rally in Kampong Chhnang in April 2001 – and in reaction to King Sihanouk’s letter – Hun Sen offered to hold a referendum on whether remains should be cremated or preserved; he stipulated, however, that this could only take place after any trial of former Khmer Rouge had concluded. He thus drew on the original characterisation of bones as visual evidence and transformed this into a matter of legal evidence (Hughes, 2006: 285). Furthermore, forensic analysis of the bones (Fleischman, 2016) plays into these ideas of their evidentiary value – although only limited forensics have been carried out. The narrative that the bones need to be conserved as evidence thus has the political and legal function not only of legitimising the earlier Vietnamese-assisted invasion of the country to oust the Khmer Rouge, with an additional emphasis on on-going security; it has also been framed in terms of providing future justice for the victims of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Obviously, this intersection of security and justice is politically useful to the government and is seen as highly effective in underlining its claims to legitimacy.

Besides these political and legal functions, the hegemonic narrative also argues that it is important to preserve the bones for educational purposes (Sion, 2014: 109), and that they serve as a powerful form of communication with younger generations who have not experienced the violence of the Khmer Rouge themselves (Reinermann, 2020).¹² A connection of the materiality of the bones to postmemory has also been noted as significant in understanding the value of bones for the next generations (Henkin, 2018).

In interviews with various members of staff at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the debate as to whether the bones of the victims should be displayed as evidence, or whether they should be cremated out of respect for the dead, is strong.¹³ One staff member, for example, highlighted how displaying skulls was important as ‘proof of the way that the Khmer Rouge killed the people’ and that the display of skulls corroborated some of the photos of killing and mass graves shown at the memorial.¹⁴ Most staff members acknowledged the value of the bones and skulls as evidence, with potential for educating the next generation. As one museum employee, herself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, expressed it: ‘Keeping the bones is not useless for us, [for] the next generation to know what happened during the Pol Pot regime. So that the young generation will know about it.’ Interestingly, she then went on to highlight on a more personal note that preserving the bones was also good because it helped motivate her to celebrate religious ceremonies for the deceased, gaining merit for herself as well as for the dead.¹⁵

Cremating bones to set the spirits free

The second narrative in circulation regarding the display of victims’ bones stresses that it goes against the cultural practice of cremation and is detrimental to those who have died, as their spirits cannot be released adequately for rebirth. This can be seen as a counter-narrative that seeks to undermine the hegemonic narrative that sees the bones as evidence; it instead highlights how not cremating the bones undermines the dignity of the dead and also negatively impacts the living, who are haunted by these restless spirits. This second narrative thus shifts the focus from a political rationale to a more dignity-focused approach towards the dead.

Given the government’s firm grasp on power in Cambodia, opposition to the display of bones has not been widespread in the population, or at least not within public spaces. An exception is provided by Sihanouk, who sought to throw his political weight as monarch behind this cause in 2001. Sihanouk’s open letter to Hun Sen asked for the skull map at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum to be removed and the 300 skulls to be ‘cremated according to Buddhist practices so that the souls of the victims could be reincarnated’ (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 91). This demand was supported by the artist Vann Nath, who was a prominent survivor of the S-21 detention centre. While this debate did force the government to discuss the role of the victims’ bones openly, in the end it led only to the map being dismantled without the bones being cremated, and more generally to a vague commitment to hold a referendum at some point in the future on how to deal with bones, and this only after the end of a judicial process. Given that this debate occurred in 2001, it is fair to say that the government has been relatively successful in entrenching its own favoured narrative in a solidly hegemonic position.

The intention of cremation suggested in the counter-narrative is two-fold. First, cremation would allow the spirits to be released from the state of limbo they have been in when tied to the bones; they can thus engage in reincarnation. Their cremation would play a part in restoring dignity to the victims who lost their lives under the Khmer Rouge (see Reinermann, 2020). One female staff member at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, for example, said that she would personally prefer the bones to be cremated in order to respect the dead. Interestingly she added: ‘Fortunately, we don’t know who they are. If we were – you can imagine – if we were the family of them and we come here to see our relatives’ … skulls inside here, it will be emotional to them.’¹⁶ This suggests that although the anonymity of the dead (as the lack of DNA analysis means individuals have not been identified) does make it difficult or impossible to perform the required ceremonies for individual victims, it at least has the advantage that family members can hope it is not their own relatives’ bones on display. This uncertainty may lessen the painful impact for grieving family members of a display featuring human skulls, which some perceive as denying the dead their dignity.

In addition, the consequence of this rebirth would be that the spirits would disappear and no longer haunt the living. This ties in, for example, with a strong unease about the presence of bones from a religious perspective among members of staff at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In interviews, some individuals first highlighted their fundamental support for preserving the bones as evidence, and particularly for educating generations to come, thus adhering to the hegemonic narrative; however, they then stressed that they are personally deeply uneasy with the preservation of the bones and the presence of spirits that it entails. Some staff members at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, for example, reported that their parents were deeply opposed to their starting work there due to the spiritual danger they thought them to be in. Beyond the staff, it impacts how other people today interact with the memory of the past, and particularly whether people are prepared to visit sites they see as haunted. At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, staff notice that students and also their parents are reluctant to visit, as they are deeply concerned about the ghosts bringing them bad luck. One senior staff member reported: ‘We try to convince them the … museum is not a museum of ghosts.’¹⁷ Another woman working at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum mentioned that some visitors whom she guided round the museum commented on the fact that showing the skulls was disrespectful to those killed; nonetheless, other visitors would pose in front of the display for selfies, in a way that is easily seen as lacking respect.¹⁸ Thus, the display of skulls is not only problematic in itself, as a decision taken by those curating the display and by those with political oversight; it also enables visitors to engage with the human remains in ways that exacerbate this disrespect, even if such practices are in theory not allowed.

The presence of spirits, as well as the shocking nature of the bones at the memorials, is disturbing to surviving victims of Khmer Rouge rule. In a survey of 439 survivors, when asked what they thought about the fact that the bones and skulls of those who did not survive are sometimes kept in stupas (at memorials), 35.8 per cent of respondents indicated that it made them feel fearful, and 39.9 per cent found it upsetting because the people were not cremated. Only 26.2 per cent suggested that it was good because it reminded people of the past and was evidence of what happened, while 19.4 per cent responded with ‘don’t know’.¹⁹ There are significantly more survivors, then, who are either fearful and/or disturbed by the presentation of bones in memorial sites than survivors who look positively on their being presented as evidence. This sentiment is echoed by a woman from Kampot province who as a victim of the Khmer Rouge participated in an NGO programme that included a visit to the memorial: ‘I felt very shocked because after I visited the Tribunal, I also went to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. After I saw too many bones. … Felt too shocked that when I got home, I became sick. Because there are piles of bones like a mountain, that I could only see the bones of the dead people.’²⁰ Furthermore, even people who did not experience the violence themselves are reported to advocate for cremation of the bones, experiencing their display as disrespectful, as Jan Reinermann (2020) found in his research with young Cambodians.

Events: spiritualism and politics

The final element of our analytical tetrad relates to the events held in the sites discussed above by the various memory agents salient to our analysis. In relation to bodies and spirits, the primary form that this takes are the religious ceremonies where offerings are given with the aim of gaining merit for oneself and for the spirits of the dead, aiding them in the journey to rebirth. Such ceremonies are the focal point of Cambodia’s P’chum Ben festival (usually referred to in English as the ‘Day of Ancestors’), but are sometimes also performed on other occasions. They are held within the religious space of the pagoda, meaning that memorials as spaces are merely incidentally linked to this festival, when the memorial happens to be located at a pagoda. When that is the case, offerings can be made at the memorials, too, but the memorials do not figure in any particular way in understandings of these ceremonies. Meanwhile, spontaneous forms of commemoration are untypical at memorial sites, where the bones and skulls are securely locked away, even when the sites are being used as part of an official religious ceremony.²¹

While spirits are constitutive of this type of event, the materiality of the bones is not, removing such purely religious events from most discussions on the politics of memory. Nonetheless, the ceremonies in which offerings are made to aid the spirits of the departed intersect with two important commemorative national holidays that are highly significant for the politics of remembering and for dealing with the genocide. They are the Day of Maintaining Anger (20 May) and Victory over Genocide Day (7 January).

P’chum Ben: the Day of Ancestors

Spirits can be, and are, appeased through offerings (Bennett, 2018b: 189; Guillou, 2014: 155), and as spirits can gain merit and improve their karma in an attempt to be reborn better or faster they can also engage in actions helpful to the people they interact with – they can bring them luck or offer guidance. Even in the commodification of the Choeung Ek Killing Fields site and its thirty-year lease to Japanese-Khmer business JC Royal Co., the company makes sure to take the well-being of the spirits seriously, reacting to dreams of employees and making offerings to ‘hungry’ spirits (Bennett, 2018b: 199). Furthermore, there is also a spirit house within the site, which is referred to in the audio guide as ‘a dwelling place for spirits that have not found rest’.²² At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum multiple ceremonies are also held every year to aid the spirits.²³

As the most important holiday in the Cambodian calendar, P’chum Ben is a fifteen-day festival during which offerings are made to convey merit to the spirits of one’s ancestors (see Holt, 2012). The offerings are made at the pagoda and feed the spirits in an attempt to appease them and help them on the path to rebirth; the making of offerings thus provides important opportunities for deceased loved ones, and also comes with the possibility of gaining karma for oneself by engaging in these practices.

The festival was outlawed under the Khmer Rouge, as were all other Buddhist practices in an attempt to eliminate religious observance. Despite the change in regime, this major festival remained forbidden through the late 1980s; the government, headed by Hun Sen from 1984, was initially hesitant to embrace Buddhist traditions. When the P’chum Ben festival was re-established in the early 1990s, Anne Guillou (2012: 218) describes a ‘huge relief among the population in the days following the first festival, as if the atmosphere was suddenly lighter and quieter’. The festival is relevant to people because merit can be paid to the dead independent of their actual bodies – which are, in contrast, essential for funeral rites (Guillou, 2012: 218). It therefore allows family members to expedite rebirth for their deceased loved ones even without the knowledge of where they were killed or where their bodies are. In what Judy Ledgerwood (2012) describes as an ‘act of “social resilience”’ the festival can contribute to consolidating connections with individual spirits, in a context in which cremation is not allowed. The re-legalisation of this key spiritual holiday was thus a deeply political move due to its positive reception by ordinary Cambodians.

Political commemoration days: Day of Maintaining Anger and Victory over Genocide Day

Two major events relate more strongly to the politics of memory: the so-called Day of Maintaining Anger (Tivea Chang Kamheng)²⁴ and Victory over Genocide Day. The Day of Maintaining Anger, held on 20 May, was an important political event that the government introduced in the 1980s, in the context of the second civil war. It was aimed particularly against the Khmer Rouge (Sion, 2014, 113). It was celebrated annually across the country with large events, rallies and speeches and was the most important political holiday related to the country’s genocidal past. It did not draw on spiritual references but was a secular, political event, a rallying around the flag. In terms of sites, as well as being held primarily at memorial sites around the country, some of the day’s events would be held in spaces suitable for large political rallies. In the early years of this day being observed, during the civil war, the events were used as an important moment of government propaganda to mobilise support for their fight against the Khmer Rouge by reminding the population of the horrendous past, as well as the danger that this could return should the government not prevail in the civil war. With the coming of peace in the 1990s, the day had served its purpose and was no longer a major event. However, the date of 20 May as an important political event was revived in 2001 as a ‘Day of Remembrance’ (Manning, 2017: 151). The ECCC has designated the Day of Remembrance an officially recognised symbolic ‘reparation’. Reflecting the origin of this national day back in the 1980s, when Buddhist practices were still forbidden, it continues to be a secular event.

Victory over Genocide Day is marked on 7 January every year to commemorate the invasion of Cambodian and Vietnamese troops, who crossed the border to liberate the country in 1979. Given that the government that this invasion brought to power was essentially the origin of the current government, it is one of the most important political days of the year, with national and local-level events. One female victim of the Khmer Rouge who is a civil party seeking redress at the ECCC described this day as ‘the second birthday of Khmer Rouge victims’,²⁵ suggesting it gave them a new lease of life and highlighting the importance the day holds for her personally. For many people though, the day is perceived primarily in political terms. Hun Sen and various other government officials participate in events, give speeches and use the event to celebrate the government’s part in liberating the country from the Khmer Rouge, and to bolster its on-going legitimacy. While there was previously a strong onus on surviving victims to participate in these ceremonies, most report they have not taken part in events organised on this day for several years now, most often explaining that they have not been invited and there is no pressure to participate.²⁶ While these political events are predominantly held at government administrative offices, most surviving victims of the Khmer Rouge use the opportunity to engage in religious ceremonies also at their local pagodas, in practices similar to those performed for P’chum Ben. One woman, a victim of the Khmer Rouge, reported that she likes the 7 January date because survivors like herself are then able to conduct religious ceremonies. She explained: ‘We pray and wish for them [the spirits of the dead] for the next life that no one will hit them and to let them love each other.’²⁷ Furthermore, political leaders will sometimes also participate in religious ceremonies at the pagoda in the context of the broader programmes marking 7 January.

The SANE analysis: memory and the quality of peace

By the time all remaining Khmer Rouge leaders had surrendered or were militarily beaten the country had been wracked by conflict for almost three decades, including two periods of outright civil war and years of violence, repression and genocide in the late 1970s. The peace that prevailed in the late 1990s would prove to be a negative peace; hopes of democratisation and pluralism within the political system have – after positive developments after the turn of the century – been dashed, and human rights violations continued under Hun Sen’s authoritarian rule. But the integration of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders and cadres, after they had been provided with amnesties, has allowed a positive, inclusive peace to develop. As alternative memories of the past are able to co-exist with the hegemonic narrative in those parts of the country that were strongholds of the Khmer Rouge during the second civil war (Manning, 2015), peace has become more entangled. A divisive issue that transcends various ways of remembering the past, and focuses on how it is dealt with today, can be found in the mnemonic formation of the dead. Having discussed the sites, agents, narratives and events that are particularly salient for the dead, both as bodies and spirits, we now interrogate the intersection of these four elements in order to augment our understanding of memory politics in general, and more specifically our appreciation of how this impacts on the quality of peace.

In studying the politics of memory surrounding spirits and bodies in Cambodia, we have seen that it is not sufficient to analyse sites from a material perspective, nor can understandings of social relations and agency be restricted purely to the living, given that the presence of spirits has an important impact on human relations too. This being so, sites and agents can be conceptualised beyond the official national level to incorporate both the living and dead, with their interactions occurring both in the context of official religious ceremonies and also in everyday life, particularly in the direct aftermath of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. By analytically incorporating this dimension, important realities for a large part of the population become visible, and it becomes easier to understand the lived politics of memory in Cambodia. Furthermore, people’s interactions with key sites of memory, such as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum or the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, are pre-structured by these religious understandings, as well as by the fear of the bodily remains and the spiritual entities that may be encountered during visits to these sites.

More important for our understanding of entangled memory and its contribution to the quality of peace, a key question is who has control over the dead in Cambodia’s politics of memory. On the one hand, the government’s refusal to let bodies be cremated allows it to continue to exploit the bones as evidence that ultimately also supports its own legitimacy – which it traces to the toppling of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. The displays underline its claim to be providing security today and thus its continued legitimacy to govern. This appropriation of the physical remains for a political agenda has manifest consequences for family members, who cannot perform traditional funeral rites for their loved ones and fear that without this their family members will not be able to reincarnate. However, this conflict remains latent rather than explicitly voiced, not only because of the authoritarian nature of governance in Cambodia, which precludes too open a criticism of this policy, but above all because the identities of the vast majority of bodies are unclear due to population transfers during Democratic Kampuchea and the absence of any process of forensic identification. Given that the traditional practice is that each family should cremate its own dead, the absence of ties to specific bodies deflects this implicit conflict and facilitates an uneasy peace.

On the other hand, due to the Buddhist belief that without cremation rebirth becomes more difficult, the policy adopted by the government means that there are more spirits active in today’s Cambodia. As the government does not have any control over these dead, the spirits exercise a form of non-human agency and one in which their interactions may run counter to government policy. Particularly in the 1980s, informal sites of memory such as mass graves and former detention centres (which were being brought back into use as schools and pagodas) haunted people due to the belief in the presence of malevolent spirits. The menace of these spaces has since somewhat reduced, however, as some spirits have been reborn or have faded away, particularly after the government allowed the revival of certain Buddhist practices that can placate the spirits.

This politics of memory in the 1980s led to a certain silencing of survivors’ desires to placate spirits and support the deceased, which rendered the peace less inclusive than it could have been. Having said that, however, it was precisely the evidence-based approach and continued demonisation of the Khmer Rouge that supported a rallying around the flag effect during that decade. While this in itself did not lead to the end of the civil war, Hun Sen’s much trumpeted credentials as the bringer of peace and stability have certainly supported his bid to stay in power. With a change in perspectives regarding the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s, from a demonisation rhetoric to universal victimhood for almost all cadres beyond the highest echelons of power, the peace has been structured more inclusively since, facilitating a more just peace for almost all Cambodians. In this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that what started as a hegemonic peace that silenced other memories of the past has gradually come to be accepted. Unlike other cases in this book, the absence of a truly entangled peace cannot be explained as the existence of parallel peace(s), but instead as an increased acceptance by larger parts of the population of the hegemonic understanding of the past and of the peace that this entails.

How victims’ bones are treated after death is unquestionably important in any culture, and this is no different in Buddhist tradition. Framing the bones as evidence has important political or educational consequences, something which is regarded as beneficial by various interest groups. Nevertheless, this means that the bones become objectified as material remnants of Democratic Kampuchea and reduced to an anonymised by-product of violence; the memory of each individual is dehumanised and de-individualised. Further, the difficulty of offering appropriate funeral rites through cremation, due to the anonymity of the dead as discussed above, poses a significant challenge to the dignity of the deceased. Given the consequences that this has in terms of perpetuating the presence of malevolent spirits, this also decreases the dignity within which survivors live. They suffer in the knowledge that their loved ones could be among those unable to be reborn, and they also may have negative interactions with the spirits. As discussed, the presence of spirits was a much more significant issue in the 1980s, but even today the many uncremated remains of the deceased continue to instil fear among some survivors. With the reintroduction of Buddhist practice and the possibility of providing offerings to specific spirits, as well as the more general offerings made during the P’chum Ben festival, these tensions have eased somewhat, allowing the country’s uneasy peace to mature.

Ultimately, the hegemonic structure of the memoryscape in Cambodia means that the treatment of the dead, whether as bones or as spirits, is not an issue of open political contention. It has surfaced in the political space only briefly and sporadically, most prominently in the letter sent by King Sihanouk regarding the skull map at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial. As the dignity of the dead and of survivors is negatively impacted by these memory policies, it is, of course, a topic in private spaces, although even here some parts of the population continue to argue for the value of preserving bones as evidence. As the years go by and the spirits fade, and as younger generations grow up, it appears that the more inclusive peace that Hun Sen laid the groundwork for with the amnesties of the 1990s is bearing fruit. While the peace in Cambodia certainly cannot be seen as a pluralistic one, as the government’s policy strongly dominates the scene, there is a growing acceptance that this way of dealing with the past facilitates peace in the country.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have studied the sites, agents, narratives and events in Cambodia’s memoryscape that relate to the spirits and bodies of the dead. We have discussed how the meaning of the genocide may maintain a strong presence after the event, not only in terms of traumatic memories of the past carried by individuals as their private burdens, but also through the on-going presence of the dead and particularly the various political strategies adopted for dealing with these dead.

Taking the dead seriously in this analysis has been important not only for our understanding of post-genocide Cambodia and the manifestation of memory politics, but also in order to understand what kinds of interventions might be useful to individual survivors in their own recoveries. Classical Western responses to trauma are insufficient (Agger, 2015; Chhim, 2013), while other approaches to calming the mind can be achieved, including for example making ‘merit’ for the deceased and celebrating P’chum Ben (Agger, 2015) – practices that actively engage with the spirits of the deceased as agentive beings. While the gradual fading away of spirits means that the salience of this topic has considerably diminished today, the cremation of bones has still not been carried out, despite the country’s return to Buddhist practices. The debate over what is the most expedient and appropriate handling of human remains therefore continues to be a meaningful one.

While the display of bones and skulls is not a common feature in post-conflict countries, with only Rwanda and Cambodia engaging in this to such a large degree, in this chapter we have demonstrated how the political response to these remains and the spirits seen to accompany them is important for the quality of peace. The hegemonic response supplied by the government precludes any adequate attribution of dignity both to the dead and to the living, even as shifts in memory politics have rendered society and memory more inclusive.

As the trials organised by the ECCC come to an end formally, it will be interesting to see whether the government will revisit the promise made in 2001 to hold a referendum on what to do with the bones of the deceased. It seems likely that in any referendum the government would be able to garner political capital from either outcome: a vote for the continued preservation of bones as evidence would support the government’s on-going legitimation strategy; alternatively, mass cremations might be celebrated as a national act, reminding the nation who it was who saved them from the Khmer Rouge and brought peace to the country. How inclusive this process would be, and whether a plurality of voices would be admitted in the debates, remains an open question. However, a referendum would certainly have manifest consequences, and potentially positive ones, for the quality of peace in the country.