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SHOW: Talk of the Nation 3:00 AM EST NPR
March 2, 2005 Wednesday
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HEADLINE: Philip Short discusses Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his legacy on Cambodia ANCHORS: NEAL CONAN
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NEAL CONAN, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
For decades, the small country of Cambodia struggled to stay on the sidelines of the long and brutal war in neighboring Vietnam. Slowly, inexorably, Cambodia was sucked into the maelstrom. Its Communist movement eventually seized power under the leadership of Pol Pot, a man almost universally regarded as a monster, a man whose name evokes horrific images of the killing fields piled with human skulls. No one knows with certainty how many died during the rule of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, but it's thought to be one and a half million or more, one Cambodian in five. In a new biography, veteran correspondent Philip Short questions many of our assumptions about Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia and genocide. The book spares no criticism of the many others who set the stage--the United States, France, Vietnam, China, among others--but it focuses on the Cambodians who played central roles in this atrocity, and on the culture they came from.
Later in the program, building designs that go wrong.
But first, Cambodia. If you have questions about Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, about what happened in the killing fields and why, our number here in Washington is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. And the e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
Philip Short may be best known in this country for his long service with the BBC. He also wrote for the Times of London and for The Economist, and previously published a well-regarded biography of Mao Tse-tung, and he joins us now from a studio on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
Philip Short, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
Mr. PHILIP SHORT ("Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare"): Good morning, Neal.
CONAN: One of the things I found fascinating about your book, Pol Pot was an unlikely tyrant, a man who really wasn't good at anything.
Mr. SHORT: He was good at hiding his views and hiding what he really felt, and that was one of the things, certainly, which helped him to convince others. He had this astonishing, captivating smile, and people would go and see him and think they'd had a wonderful meeting, and then a few hours later they'd be taken off to one of the Khmer Rouge prisons and be killed. I mean, he was secretive, he was reclusive. He covered himself and the movement he led with a kind of almost impenetrable veil. But you're quite right, I mean, he started off as--they all, all these Khmer Rouge leaders, started off as idealistic, altruistic youths who wanted the best for their country, and they did, as you've said, turn into monsters. They created what is, I think, without contest the ghastliest regime of modern times.
CONAN: He--Pol Pot is, of course, a nom de guerre. The man's original name--I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly--Soloth Sar?
Mr. SHORT: Soloth Sar, indeed. And a nom de guerre, but one of many. I mean, he had six or eight different aliases, and he once said the more often you change your alias, the better, because it confuses the enemy.
CONAN: And he was so enigmatic that at one point the Khmer Rouge were already in power in Cambodia, but the world thought somebody else was running the country.
Mr. SHORT: That's right. Many people thought that the real power behind the Khmer Rouge was Khieu Samphan, who eventually became Khmer Rouge head of state, but that was just one more front, one more facade to hide Pol Pot's own personality. And it was only in 1977, two years after the Khmer Rouge had come to power, when he made a journey to Beijing, his one and only official visit abroad, and that was where I first encountered him. But he was--his identity was established as the leader of the Cambodian revolution. Until then, not only did most people abroad not know who he was, but most people inside the country had no idea either.
CONAN: Tell us what that trip was like. You were the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time.
Mr. SHORT: Well, I followed him round. I mean, we were a very small corps of correspondents in Beijing in those days, probably about not more than 20 or 25 of us altogether, including the East Europeans, and so you had, for visits like this, very good access, and I watched him arrive at the airport and followed him round with the diplomats, and then he--there was a welcoming banquet in the Great Hall of the People. There was a news conference. He went and visited places. And I just tagged along. And this--I mention this smile. He radiated an extremely engaging personality. He wasn't charismatic in the sense there was a personality cult around him. There was none of that. But he had a kind of serenity that made him seem very attractive to other Cambodians, to the people who worked with him. You know, one of his students, when he was a teacher in Phnom Penh, said, `The first time I met him, I thought this was someone who could be my friend for life.' And he did have that kind of quality.
CONAN: What was--if you could describe it, where did his philosophy derive from? Was it primarily Marxist? Was it primarily Maoist? Was it Stalinist? Where did his ideas come from?
Mr. SHORT: Well, I think there were two fundamental sources. One certainly was Stalinism, which he absorbed in Paris as a student when Cambodia was fighting for independence, and the only people who would support the independence struggle against the French, the French colonial regime in Cambodia, were the French Communists. So they gravitated--a lot of these students gravitated into the Communist orbit, and there they absorbed Stalinism. They also started reading about the French Revolution, which may seem kind of very far away, 18th century France, 20th century Cambodia, but there were lots of parallels, and Cambodia had a king, 18th century France had a king. Cambodia had no working class in the mid 20th century. Eighteenth century France didn't either. It just had peasants and intellectuals. So that was a kind of model. And what Pol Pot drew from it was the idea that you must never stop a revolution halfway. You have to go to the bitter and final uttermost conclusion.
But then there were indigenous factors. I mean, I quite agree that little quote you had from Nate Thayer talking about Cambodia and political culture influencing the way things were done, that was crucial. And I would argue, though it's very controversial, that Buddhism was--provided, if you like, the grammar, the lattice through which Pol Pot interpreted Marxism, and that that gave his kind of communism the very unique characteristics that it had.
CONAN: Very unique characteristics. For those who...
Mr. SHORT: Tautologist. I shouldn't say very unique. I'm sorry. I take that back.
CONAN: All right.
Mr. SHORT: The unique characteristics.
CONAN: Well, I wasn't quibbling about that so much. I was going to ask you, for those who are too young or don't remember, remind us. When the Khmer Rouge came to power in the last--the American puppet, Lon Nol, his government finally collapsed in Phnom Penh, and the Khmer Rouge came in. This started a bloodbath.
Mr. SHORT: It started a gradual bloodbath. I mean, what you call a bloodbath, when the--at the end of the Second World War in France, people took revenge on those who'd collaborated, and this wasn't, you know, policy. This was mobs killing women who'd slept with German officers. Maybe 100,000 people died in France at that time in this kind of violence. Well, in Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge taking over, perhaps 20,000 people died because the first thing the Khmer Rouge did was to evacuate the cities. They did it brutally, harshly, and in a very disorganized and incompetent way, and around 20,000 people, it's estimated, you know, died along the route.
But then, once the entire population had been set to work in the fields, that was when the larger-scale violence began, and it, too, was--I'm tempted to say unorganized. It was very uneven. Some parts of the country, you know, one village, life would be hell on Earth. A village four miles away, it would be a moderate hell on Earth. It wouldn't be as bad. So a lot depended on the village officials, the village chiefs, how brutal they were, how tough a system they wanted to implement. But it was in the countryside that the million, the million and a half died.
CONAN: We're talking with Philip Short about his new biography of "Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare." Of course, you're invited to join us, (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
And let's talk with Ratana. Ratana's calling from Stockton, California.
Mr. RATANA POF(ph) (Caller): Good morning, Neal. Good afternoon, Neal.
CONAN: Good afternoon.
Mr. POF: My name is Ratana Pof, and I have--enjoy listening to you many times in the past, but I'm so glad that I can get through this time.
CONAN: Yes.
Mr. POF: I am a survivor of the Pol Pot regime. I came here in 1981.
CONAN: You were there in Cambodia when it happened?
Mr. POF: Yes, sir.
CONAN: And what happened to your family?
Mr. POF: I lost three members of my family. I have nine members, and three of them--two are my siblings, and my father.
CONAN: And was this--I'm trying to get--when the Khmer Rouge came to power, how old were you in 197...
Mr. POF: About 12 years old.
CONAN: I was just trying to get an idea of--were you living in Phnom Penh?
Mr. POF: I was living in Battambang.
CONAN: In Battambang.
Mr. POF: Yes.
CONAN: Do you think that the world understands what happened in Cambodia?
Mr. POF: I don't think so. Right now there's not a lot of talking, discussion about what had happened in Cambodia, even though the United Nation has been dragging its feet of trying to set up the tribunal to prosecute leaders of the Khmer Rouge for the past, oh, at least five or six years, and it--there's nothing going on right now.
CONAN: Nothing goes on right now. Ratana, thank you very much for calling. We appreciate it.
Mr. POF: Oh, thank you.
CONAN: Philip Short, your book is a biography of Pol Pot. It's been criticized for having few of the voices of those who suffered so much under his regime.
Mr. SHORT: Well, that's--it's a fair criticism in some ways. My view was that there has been an enormous amount that has been published by the victims. The great question which no one has really tried to unravel has been what was in the minds of the perpetrators. So my--the theme of my book, and I say so very clearly, is to tell the--what happened through the minds of the perpetrators, to try to understand what they were doing. I got a fair amount in about the victims, too, because you can't separate, you know, what they did and the people they did it to, but I have tried not to make this another book, because there've been 30 or 40 of them, which simply recounts the immense, the indescribable suffering that was caused by Pol Pot. I've sketched that in, but I've focused on what these people thought they were doing.
CONAN: We'll have more with Philip Short and his biography of Pol Pot when we come back from a short break. We'll take more of your calls as well. Our number, if you'd like to join us, is (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. You can also send us e-mail. The address: totn@npr.org.
I'm Neal Conan. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
We're talking with biographer Philip Short about his new book about Cambodia's Pol Pot, "Anatomy of a Nightmare." You're invited to join us, (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. E-mail: totn@npr.org.
And let's go now to Eric. Eric's calling from Scappoose in Oregon.
ERIC (Caller): Yes. Thank you. Awhile back I read a book by William Shawcross called a "Sideshow," which described the clandestine American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. They were trying to cut off the insurgents from the north traveling through Cambodia. And it was my understanding from that book that the American carpet bombing, which went on for years and years, had a great deal to do with the fall of Prince Sihanouk and the emergence of these radicalized people with the Khmer Rouge. I was just wondering if Mr. Short had any remarks about that, about the role that American bombing played in, as I say, radicalizing these country people who took over Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge.
CONAN: Philip Short?
Mr. SHORT: Yes. It's an interesting question. I don't agree with William Shawcross on this because even more bombs fell on Vietnam, but the Vietnamese did not introduce a Khmer Rouge-type regime. I think we have to look elsewhere. Certainly the US had a direct role, because it--had there been no war in Vietnam, had the US not intervened in Vietnam, Indochina would not have been destabilized in the way it was, and the conditions wouldn't have been there for Pol Pot to come to power. But I don't think you can say, `Well, we bombed them into the Stone Age, and then they behaved like Stone Age people, they behaved extremely cruelly.'
There are other elements, and one of the key ones, which I don't think people normally take account of, is that Cambodia is a little country, and it's surrounded by Vietnam and Thailand, and there is a kind of national paranoia about whether the Cambodian people will survive as a nation with these two big neighbors, as the Cambodians see them, you know, kind of poised to leap on them and dominate them. And one of the reasons why Pol Pot, when he came to power, tried to develop the country at breakneck speed, making people work inhuman hours, making them work quite literally like slaves in the rice paddies, was this desire to make Cambodia strong quickly so it could resist Vietnam. You know, paranoia is dangerous because it generates irrational policies, and it did that in Cambodia on a huge scale.
CONAN: Eric, thanks very much for the call.
ERIC: Thank you. Is--can I do a fast follow-up question?
CONAN: Go ahead.
ERIC: Now the Khmer Rouge were fighting the Vietnamese, and yet isn't it true that Jimmy Carter sent material aid to the Khmer Rouge late in the--late in that holocaust?
Mr. SHORT: Well, this is--it is true. Not only Carter, but the presidents who succeeded him continued that policy. But we're talking about two different periods. The time when they came--the Khmer Rouge came to power during the Vietnam War, this was the early 1970s, and they actually came to power in 1975, they marched into Phnom Penh. The regime only lasted three years, and then the Vietnamese invaded. I mean, Pol Pot had kind of made his fears a self-fulfilling prophecy. They invaded and they kicked Pol Pot out. At that point, the US, the West generally, and China all supported Pol Pot for another 10 years to fight a guerrilla war in the jungles against Vietnam.
Now why? Because this is the Cold War period. Vietnam's allied with the Soviet Union, so Vietnam must be punished for expansionism, and who better to punish them than Pol Pot? My enemy's enemy is my friend. So for another 10 years, we supported Pol Pot, causing millions of land mines to be laid in Cambodia, which are still killing Cambodian children today, and at least 100,000 more Cambodian deaths. Only when the Cold War ended did we say, `Well, we don't need Pol Pot anymore.' It was not a very glorious episode.
ERIC: Thank you very much.
CONAN: Thank you, Eric.
ERIC: Bye-bye.
CONAN: Appreciate the phone call.
You talked about Pol Pot's paranoia about the Vietnamese. Did it amount to racism?
Mr. SHORT: No, I don't think it did. And here I differ from many of my academic colleagues, and I'm afraid I ruffled a few feathers, but if you're going to write a book like this, you have to tell the truth as you see it, otherwise there's no point in doing it. I don't believe that Pol Pot was racist. I don't believe that Pol Pot--and this will maybe upset people, too--he didn't commit genocide. He committed monstrous crimes against humanity, but genocide is the--an attempt to exterminate a racial group, it--you know a genus. It's biological. The Nazis exterminated the Jews, or tried to, because they were Jews. The Hutu did the same to the Tutsi. Pol Pot did not try to exterminate his own nation, the Cambodian nation. He tried to fit them all into one mold, and if they didn't fit, they got killed. And that is utterly appalling. It is not genocide.
CONAN: And...
Mr. SHORT: It's something else. It's a crime. If words have any meaning, what could be more of a crime against humanity than enslaving quite literally an entire nation? And that's what he did.
CONAN: But the enormity of what he did seems to cry out for a word bigger than simply crime against humanity.
Mr. SHORT: I absolutely agree with you, and I had this argument with a French Khmerologist, a specialist on Cambodia, in Paris, and in the end he turned to me and he said, `But don't you agree what they did was abominable?' I said, `Of course it was abominable, but words have a meaning, and if we call--if we expand the definition of genocide so, you know, it becomes simply a massacre of so many people in so much time, then we are depriving that word of its force and of its unique horror. We won't have a word anymore that fits what is truly genocide, because every series of mass murders by any Tom, Dick and Harry dictator will be labeled genocide, and I think that is wrong, and I think that is dangerous.' And I would cite as my authority to that George Orwell, who wrote at the end of "1984" an essay on the manipulation, the political manipulation of language and its dangers.
CONAN: Let's get another caller on the line. Josen(ph) joins us from Oriental, North Carolina.
JOSEN (Caller): That's right. Hi. My question is, you mentioned earlier that Buddhism affected Pol Pot's thought processes, and I guess those around him. I was wondering if you could expand on that and talk about how that happened. ...(Unintelligible).
Mr. SHORT: I'm glad you asked that because this is a very difficult issue. I'm not in any sense saying, you know, Pol Pot remained in any way Buddhist when he interpreted communism. He emptied the monasteries, he defrocked the monks, he didn't want any signs, any overt signs of Buddhism in his country. But just as an atheist in a Christian country founds their atheism on Judeo-Christian values, so Pol Pot, who had been brought up as a child, as most Cambodian males are, he went through the stage of being a novice in a Buddhist monastery, he'd learned his--much of his thinking was colored by the Buddhism of his youth.
And the way this played out in his interpretation of communism is that Theravada Buddhism, which is the kind that they have in Cambodia, the little vehicle, puts a lot of emphasis on renunciation of material things, renunciation of emotional links, you know--the links between a husband and wife, between parents and children, between a man and his friends. And it teaches that the individual, the individual person's personality, which breeds desires, is the root of all evil and must be crushed.
Well, all that is replicated in Pol Pot's ideology, his form of communism, in a way that you find nowhere else, and I think it's partly because of that that it resonated in Cambodian minds. In the same way as in China, Maoism is colored by Confucianism. He made it resonate in Chinese minds. Well, Pol Pot did that in a Buddhist context.
CONAN: And you point out--Josen, thanks very much for the call. You point out in the book that Cambodia is along a fracture line in Asia between the Confucian world and the Buddhist world.
Mr. SHORT: It is indeed. Not so much Confucian and Buddhist, but Chinese and Indian. I mean, Buddhism--the great vehicle, Buddhism is also very strong in China and in Vietnam, but the fracture line is really between the Indian influences, which were very important in Cambodia's early history, and Confucianism the other side. And one of the things that this did was to make it much more difficult for Marxism in its original sense to penetrate Cambodia. It flowed pretty easily into China, and from China it went into Vietnam. It sat well with indigenous culture, traditional culture in both countries, but it had huge difficulties in penetrating Cambodia, and only managed to do so in this very, very, very special, very different Buddhist-colored form.
CONAN: Hmm. Let's get another caller on the line. And this is Mark. Mark's calling from Oklahoma City.
MARK (Caller): Thank you very much for taking my call.
CONAN: Sure.
MARK: I was in Cambodia in '99 and 2000. My most visual impact of that area was S-21 prison, all the black-and-white photos, the differences whenever you saw the adults and the children in those photos. But my question mainly is on the landmines. Who actually placed all the landmines throughout that country, and who's responsibility is it, really, to remove those landmines today?
Mr. SHORT: Well, the people who placed them were the Khmer Rouge. They laid them--it became almost a weapon of first resort. They laid them in huge numbers, many of them Chinese landmines which have very, very few metal parts and are, therefore, extremely difficult to detect. And, of course, the problem in Cambodia is much of the country is flooded. When the headwaters come down the Mekong, the water level rises and that huge lake in the middle of Cambodia--the waters back up into it and there's widespread flooding. When there's flooding, the mines move. So even if you think you know where the minefield is, they turn out to be somewhere else later.
And it's estimated it's going to take about 50 years. Whose responsibility? Well, it is, in part, because it's their country, Cambodians' resistibility. But I think enormously it is the responsibility of the West, because we--as I've said, we continued to back Pol Pot, cynically, hypocritically, holding our noses when his delegations spoke in the UN, but working away behind the scenes to make sure that he didn't lose his seat because we needed him to oppose Vietnam. So we do have a great moral debt which we are very inadequately fulfilling.
CONAN: Is there a mine extraction program under way in Cambodia?
Mr. SHORT: There is. There is, indeed. A lot of--I don't want to sound chauvinistic, but a lot of Brit groups, British groups, have been working. The HALO Trust has done a lot of work in Cambodia. There are French and Belgian de-miners as well, but not as much American effort as one would wish to see. It's an area where there should be a lot more. And there's been a lot of campaigning in America to push for it, but it hasn't really been happening as much as it should have been, because the task is absolutely enormous.
CONAN: Mark, thanks for the call.
MARK: I agree with you totally. Thank you so much.
CONAN: Bye-bye.
We're talking with Philip Short about his new biography, "Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare."
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And we'll talk now with Bryant. Bryant's with us from St. Louis.
BRYANT (Caller): Yes. Thank you for taking my call.
CONAN: Uh-huh.
BRYANT: I'm only 29. You know, I don't know too much about Cambodia. And all of my interest in it came from actually the Dead Kennedys. Their song "Holiday in Cambodia" spurred some research in me, which you were a playing a classical version of--I've never heard of that--at the break, which I found really interesting.
But the reason I was calling--my question was, I heard you before refer to Pol Pot's teachings about the--or rather his ...(unintelligible) Communist teachings that individual desires are the root of all evil, and the way he played that. Well, I'm wondering were the people under him in the Khmer Rouge--were they motivated a feeling of hope through that, that in the future, if they held fast to his method of government that they would be raised up out of the squalor that they're currently in, or were their actions a little less long-sighted than that and simply just a violent, angry reaction to being so--in such deplorable conditions?
Mr. SHORT: I think anger was a very strong motive force. It depends who you're talking about. I mean, there are descriptions of immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, when the regime came to power, of Khmer Rouge troops in Battambang, when they took the airport, tearing the aircraft, the fighter planes that had been left on the tarmac--I mean, literally tearing them apart with their bare hands because these were the planes that had been dropping bombs on their villages. So there was anger.
But there was also another aspect to Pol Pot's regime which was much more acetic. When you got to the cadres, the officials, the members of the party, the sessions that they had of criticism and self-criticism, the indoctrination sessions can really only be compared to a monastic sect. It had very little to do with any Communist Party anywhere else. This was reforging the mind, stripping the mind bare of everything that didn't coincide with the ideology that Pol Pot had put forward, which was--and it was an ideology which, if taken literally, would have been very unselfish. But of course, it wasn't taken literally; it was overlain with this kind of bedrock of violence that permeated every corner of Cambodian life.
CONAN: And as you point out in the book, some of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge held different standards for those under them and for themselves.
Mr. SHORT: Well, that is true. I mean, nepotism was supposed to be a complete no-no. No one was supposed to advance their own families because that kind of link was not consonant with the ideology. But you look to people like Ieng Sary, the foreign minister, who was Pol Pot's brother-in-law, he promoted his family. Nuon Chea, the number-two in the regime, had a Buddhist monk right through the Khmer Rouge period because his mother was devout and she wanted to hear someone reciting the sutras. This was probably the only Buddhist monk in Cambodia.
The leaders ate well. I mean, you see photographs of them at a time when the country is--millions of--hundreds of thousands of people are dying of starvation, and they look fat and bloated, `sleek as otters' as someone described them who saw them at that time. So, yeah, it was pretty distasteful.
CONAN: Hmm. Bryant, thanks very much for the phone call.
BRYANT: Thank you.
CONAN: We'll continue our discussion with Philip Short about Pol Pot after a short break.
Plus, as the new Walt Disney Concert Hall is about to undergo a face-lift, we'll talk about other buildings with designs that didn't quite work out the way they were intended to.
I'm Neal Conan. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
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Today, we're talking with Philip Short, the author of a new biography, "Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare." If you'd like to join our conversation, the phone number is (800) 989-8255. You can also send us e-mail: totn@npr.org.
And let's get another caller on the line. Brian is with us from Duluth, Minnesota.
BRIAN (Caller): Hi.
CONAN: Hi.
BRIAN: Thanks for taking my call.
CONAN: Mm-hmm.
BRIAN: I just had a couple questions that are related, I guess. I just graduated from the state university here as an anthropology student. And just throughout my high school and college education, I don't recall any mention of Cambodia or any of these, like, wartime atrocities, like "The Rape of Nanking," you know. I had to go read for myself. And I was wondering if your guest thought that that experience is typical of American students, first of all. And if it is, if there are any reasons for that.
And secondly, like, how are children, like, in other parts of the world educated to, you know, this Cambodian, Pol Pot, and his regime?
CONAN: Well, I'll hijack that second part and ask about what children in Cambodia learn about Pol Pot. But, Philip Short, why don't you start?
Mr. SHORT: Yes. That's three good questions in one. I mean, really, I can't comment on the American education system. But I suspect it's like education systems in Europe. And the answer is that there, too, children going through secondary school, through college, don't learn very much about these things. It's not in the curricula. You have to figure it out for yourself if you're interested.
And I think this is actually dangerous, because why are we interested in history? We're interested in it for its own fascination, for trying to figure out why things happen, but also from the lessons we can draw from it. There are enormous lessons to be drawn from what happened in Indochina in the Vietnam War for the present. You know, we did things which had pretty disastrous consequences back in the 1960s and early '70s. Let us learn from that now so we don't repeat those same mistakes.
Now as to what Cambodians learn, I'm going to Long Beach in the next week or so to talk there, and there's a huge Cambodian community. And I've been warned, you know, don't presume too much knowledge. These kids don't really learn very much about their own history in school. In Cambodia itself, it's exactly the same. The Khmer Rouge period is still not really taught.
CONAN: There's a five-year gap in their history.
Mr. SHORT: Well, more than a five-year gap because--I mean, the period preceding it and the causes that led to--you know, that created the Khmer Rouge...
CONAN: Mm-hmm.
Mr. SHORT: ...aren't really taught, either. It's a very kind of superficial view of history. But it means that many young Cambodians really don't have very much idea about this whole period because their parents, who lived through it, understandably are reluctant to talk about it. It's not something which people like to dwell on. They like to look forward. And if it's not in the schools, either, there is a huge knowledge and memory gap.
CONAN: Brian, thanks for the call.
BRIAN: Thank you.
CONAN: You describe a scene in more modern or more recent Cambodia where the wife of a government official throws acid in the face of her husband's concubine.
Mr. SHORT: A very young mistress. Yes.
CONAN: Yes.
Mr. SHORT: A 16-year-old mistress.
CONAN: And use this as a way of describing, in a sense, some lessons about Cambodian society, but also the state of Cambodia today, which you describe as rotten.
Mr. SHORT: I didn't wish to mince words because I think, you know, you have to say it as it is. Cambodia today, the number-one leader, Hun Sen, was a Khmer Rouge regimental commander, deputy regimental commander. The number-two was a Khmer Rouge district chief. Now I'm not suggesting--I'm not trying to say that their regime is as bad as Pol Pot's; it's vastly, vastly better. But it is very, very corrupt. There is total impunity. A minister's wife who not just splashes acid on the face but pours three liters of acid, her bodyguards did, over a girl's body, destroying any hope of happiness, of a reasonable life for her future. And it's not just one case. There've been 50 cases like that Cambodia in the last few years; rich people's wives disfiguring, torturing young women who'd alienated their husbands' affections.
You know, this is--I think this is--does have a certain relevance. The Cambodian regime--I've called it rotten. What distresses me is the West, which gives vast amounts of aid, or relatively large amounts of aid to Cambodia, doesn't really demand that the Cambodian government clean up its act.
CONAN: And in terms--we had a question earlier in the show about, well, you know, trials. Have any of these criminals in the Khmer Rouge been brought to justice?
Mr. SHORT: No, they haven't. But look, I was very interested--you had in your news at the beginning of the program a story about a Nazi camp guard now living in America, in Detroit, who is going to be stripped of his citizenship. You know, this is one of the foot soldiers in Hitler' system who is being punished for what he did, or allegedly did, during that period.
The problem, one of the--there are many problems with a trial, a tribunal, in Cambodia. One is that it will be politically manipulated by Hun Sen's government. It will not be transparent justice. The other is that none of the foot soldiers, the former killers who are now living in the villages next door to the families of their victims, none of that is going to be touched. So I feel that in its present state, although these people, of course, should be tried for the terrible things they did, it's going to be a show, and it's not going to aid reconciliation or even confronting the past and coming to terms with the past in Cambodia. It's a lot of money being spent for something which is going to do very little good.
CONAN: And might make some people elsewhere feel better, but that's about it.
Mr. SHORT: That's right. I mean, it was going to produce any real change in Cambodia, then it would be wonderful. But I have a feeling that in a way, the West--which acted very badly at different times in Cambodia--is trying to take the moral high ground and say, `Well, you see, our hearts really were in the right place. We're putting these monsters before a court.' And they're not actually thinking about what would best serve the interests of Cambodians.
Cambodians would--if you ask them, they say, `Yes, we'd like a trial. There ought to be. These people ought to be tried.' But then you say to them, `Well, would you rather the $50 million it's going to cost was spent on schools, on practical things?' and they say, `Oh, yes. That would be far better. It would actually make our lives better,' which a trial will not do.
CONAN: Let's get one last caller on the line. Gregory is with us. Gregory is calling from Napa in California.
GREGORY (Caller): Thank you for taking my call. Mr. Short, I'm in the middle of your book right now and I've been working in Cambodia since 1998. And one of the problems I see, having what we're addressing now--and you've hit on so many strong points--is that Pol Pot took the children and those were his soldiers. And now the young children that were involved in this are young adults--late 20s, early 30s--and trying to raise families and also dealing with the psychological effects. You hit on so many strong points. What can be done now to try an educate the world and try and get people involved to help these folks and make a difference in Cambodia?
Mr. SHORT: I honestly think that the best thing people could do is to try to put pressure on Western governments to demand higher standards of the government that is now in power in Phnom Penh. Now you may say that's wishful thinking and it's going to be very difficult to do, but if ordinary people--you know, if people want to try and have an effect, it can really only be done, I think, through governments; through NGOs to a degree. But if the system remains the same, progress is going to be very slow.
GREGORY: Well, I agree with the NGOs. They're having so many problems with the government and their hands are tied. And that's why I've taken this project on myself to try and bring it back to our country here and educate. I've traveled many of the provinces that you have in your book--Kampong Thum, Kampong Cham. And you go into these provinces and you will see people that are still living almost the same as they were living during the years of the Khmer Rouge.
Mr. SHORT: Which is almost the same as they were living in the Middle Ages.
GREGORY: That's correct. Thank you again for your book. I'm enjoying it. And I hope you make it up to San Francisco. I'd love to see you speak.
Mr. SHORT: Thank you.
CONAN: Gregory, thanks very much for the call.
GREGORY: Thank you.
CONAN: And, Philip Short, thank you for your time today. We appreciate it.
Mr. SHORT: Thanks, Neal.
CONAN: Philip Short is the author of "Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare," and joined us from a studio on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
LOAD-DATE: March 2, 2005
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