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The Khmer Rouge forbade the conduct of any funeral rites at the time of the death of the estimated two million people who perished during their rule (1975–79). Since then, however, memorials have been erected and commemorative ceremonies performed, both public and private, especially at former execution sites, known widely as the killing fields. The physical remains themselves, as well as images of skulls and the haunting photographs of prisoners destined for execution, have come to serve as iconic representations of that tragic period in Cambodian history and have been deployed in contested interpretations of the regime and its overthrow.
7 From bones-as-evidence to tutelary spirits: the status of bodies in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide Anne Yvonne Guillou Introduction ‘What is a body?’ The question asked by Stéphane Breton is one that haunts those anthropologists who have to deal with any aspect of the materiality of flesh and of its corruption.1 On the one hand there is its materiality, through which the marks of mass violence such as that of the Khmer Rouge genocide can be read,2 while on the other there is its corruption, the slow process accompanying the change in the religious
and the Congo, or the British and Mau Mau, or the French in Algeria. As the Americans joined the fray post World War II (after Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, and after the US dropped two atomic bombs on civilians without warning), we can fast-forward to the use of nerve agents in Vietnam, the mass bombing of civilians in Cambodia, the giving of a green light to the government in East Pakistan to commit genocide in what is now Bangladesh or the political support the US gave to Pinochet and the Khmer Rouge. We can go back to the
after, a civil war broke out between Lon Nol’s forces and the Khmer Rouge, which the latter eventually won in April 1975. 5 The Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot and named Democratic Kampuchea in early 1976, pursued a determined campaign to eradicate all internal opposition to its Maoist programme in Cambodia. 6 The actual toll of the radical Khmer Rouge attempt to forcefully
. Cambodia is undoubtedly a case with significant gray areas related to the peace that has developed. Cambodia was under Khmer Rouge rule between 1975 and 1979, and around 1.5 to 3 million people died in this period as a result. Cambodia was plagued by both intrastate and interstate war. In 1979 a new communist government was installed following Vietnamese invasion and support, and Pol Pot (of the Khmer Rouge) was ousted. This was followed by a civil war, with Cold War involvement, where the communist regime was challenged by the newly formed Funcinpec (alliance between
1970s. Some key points to be made about archival collections that docu ment violence or repression may extend even to the present day. When the Vietnamese armed forces overthrew the Pol Pot regime in January 1979, they uncovered a secret prison and its previously unknown archive. The latter notably contained a special category of documents, over 4,000 ‘confessions’, also created for a single purpose. But in most ways, the archive of the prison that the Khmer Rouge regime called ‘S-21’ is very different from the 1641 depositions. From 1976 to 1979, the S-21 jailers
. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951). 5 F. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010). 6 B. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996). 7 R. Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No. 21 (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990). 8 J. P. Chrétien
of the violent contestation of post-war politics. In 1970, the Cambodian military ousted ruling Prince Sihanouk in a coup, and in 1975 as the Vietnam war ended, the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian communist guerrillas, took control of the capital Phnom Penh, implementing a regime that over the following four years caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians through forced labour
, shaped a revolutionary operation that preceded the transitional administration operations of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor in the second half of the 1990s. The geographical area known today as Cambodia, inhabited by the Khmer ethnic group (as well as other minority groups), was caught in a civil war from at least the 1960s. The height of the brutal war was between April 1975 and January 1979, during which time the country was ruled by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. In this time period, almost a quarter of the Cambodian
holding of democratic elections. As long as UN personnel and the international community refused to adopt Agenda for peacekeeping 1992–93 101 enforcement methods, the answer to the question depended on the extent of cooperation of the rival parties and mainly of the two strongest factions, the Khmer Rouge and the CPP. This approach – dependence on voluntary cooperation of the warring factions – was based on the traditional principles of peacekeeping operations. In order to ensure a solution to the two security problems, it was decided to launch a multinational force