"Do you see yourself as victims? I want your opinion."

Here's my Cambodia post. For Joey.

During our February wanderings through killing fields and torture prisons and genocide displays, the thing that stuck out is the staggering totality of what happened there. 20 percent of the nation died in just three years, most from either execution or starvation. Just those three years — not to mention the 15 years of protracted insurgency that followed, and not even to mention the four preceding years where hundreds of thousands of largely innocent people were killed by the American carpet bombings (pause on that a minute for the next time Fox News says the U.S. has nothing ever to apologize for) that also paved the Khmer Rouge path to power. And everyone — everyone — was touched, nay, dignity raped by those three years in one way or another.

For us, now 30ish years later, that meant every taxi driver we met over the age of, say, 38, probably remembers it too well. Imagine (if you're my age) knowing that every one of your friends' parents was once either clinging to life in the work camps, or Khmer Rouge cadres themselves.

I really don't know what you do with these kinds of experiences. I end up standing there, staring at faces or skulls or statistics while trying to make it mean something more productive than a further slide into cynicism and dismay. So the question I kept asking was how, on a society-wide scale, does a nation move on from that? Where is it today? Smiling and working and shrugging off guilt — is that the best hope?

Books and books have been written about the Khmer Rouge's victims. The effect seems to be in part a very myopic and PTSD-molded outlook on life that, among other things, has fueled an enormous sex industry. But I was almost more curious about what happened to the Khmer Rouge soldiers and guards, most of whom we're not, in fact, evil people—many only initially guilty of the common human desire for revolution and a good fight, before seeing that innocence destroyed via commanded acts of terror. Are they victims?

Thankfully, I got three chances to explore just those questions:

1. Landmine Museum

Former Khmer Rouge child soldier planted thousands of landmines around the country, now making it his life mission to clear them (and tell tourists about how landmines kill indiscriminately). Con blogged more about it.

2. S-21 Prison/Genocide Museum

In a small room on the second floor of the S-21 Toul Sleng Genocide Museum — a high school-turned-prison where 17,000 mostly innocent people were held, tortured (waterboarded, actually, among other happy "enhanced" techniques), and forced into confessions before being sent to be executed at the Killing Fields — an exhibit gives voice to 13 former Khmer Rouge cadres (soldiers, prison guards, interrogators, etc).

For each, there's a picture and a small bio from back then, plus a snapshot of their life now, with a single quote revealing how they live and wrestle with those memories.

"This is for justice. I'm not trying to defend myself."
"I did not believe what they taught me, but I could do nothing because we were all under their control. To save our lives, we had to do what they said."
"I didn't feel good about watching people die one after another and the prisoners' miserable lives."
"People still brand me as an S-21 worker."
"People call me pro-Pol Pot. I don't mind because it is true I worked for the Khmer Rouge."
"I had to, otherwise I wouldn't live... There was nothing I could do"
"I didn't want to work there.... If I had refused, they would've killed me."
"They must not hide their own crimes and blame the people. This is unfair."
"They must be prosecuted."
"The murderous regime was created by them, and they must be prosecuted."
"You'd be a fool to listen to them."

3. Documentary—S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

The third is this simply extraordinary documentary about a former S-21 prisoner interviewing his former guards 20-something years later, with a single, haunting question:

"Do you see yourself as victims? I want your opinion."

It's incredible. Just incredible. A simple exploration of the pure psychological gymnastics needed to live blithely with such scars.

It all centers around a former prisoner named Vann Nath — a reluctant hero of heroes who basically survived because he was an excellent painter, and therefore proved "useful" to the Khmer Rouge by painting portraits of Pol Pot and other leaders. After the KR fell, Nath led the effort to preserve S-21 and educate future generations of Cambodians about what happened there. His paintings of torture and terror hang all over the prison today.

The film opens with a shot of the parents of a former Khmer Rouge prison guard, encouraging him to admit guilt and seek some sort of Buddhist atonement by making an offering to the dead souls of those he tortured or killed. He's defensive, and vocalizes what I imagine is 25 years of rationalization—basically insisting that if he was ordered to kill under threat of being killed, he should not have to live with such guilt. It wasn't his fault.

From there, in the first 30 minutes alone, it's another former prisoner returning with Nath to S-21 (where he lost his wife and kids) for the first time, staggering around and weeping, and reading the forced confession he gave (he wasted too much fabric in a factory) that might have doomed 60 others. It's Nath welcoming a group of former KR guards and gently leading them to embrace the full horror they helped create. It's the guards—just teenagers in the '70s—attempting to do so by talking openly about their roles in the prison (including one surreal scene where they almost cathartically demonstrate how they went about their jobs, like keeping prisoners from killing themselves before properly confessing to their non-crimes). And it just keeps going from there.

It's beautifully shot with almost no narration. Nath is Asian Morgan Freeman. And a hero.

Anyway.. It's long, but I highly, highly recommend checking out at least the first 30 minutes (the second half is here). I watched this on the bus between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. There were fields after fields after fields, plus life and history and some surviving Khmer Rouge irrigation canals. And these sorts of glimpses into the psyche of then and now help it all... I dunno... exist.