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Trauma and Its Aftermath: Local Configurations of Reconciliation in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2013

Eve Monique Zucker
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Extract

“I wish for you two boys and two girls,” the elderly man pronounced. He was addressing both myself and my fiancé as he reached out to shake our hands as we were leaving his traditional wooden house. He had told us earlier that he spends his days in this late chapter of his life enjoying his grandchildren and tending his vegetable plot. Now at the door ready to leave I hesitated, not wanting to extend my hand, but then I did so anyway. This grandfather was Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The year was 2002. My fiancé, a cameraman, was working with reporter and author Tom Fawthrop on a documentary about former Khmer Rouge leaders' evasion of justice and I had been invited to come along.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 793 - 800
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2013 

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References

1 “Nuon Chea,” Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, accessed April 23, 2013, http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/indicted-person/nuon-chea.

2 “Khmer Rouge Leader Nuon Chea Expresses ‘Remorse,’” BBC News Asia, accessed July 7, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22726373.

3 Figure taken from “Cambodia,” U.S. Department of State, 2007 Report on International Religious Freedom, accessed April 3, 2013, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90132.htm.

4 Hanks, Lucien M., “Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order,” American Anthropologist 64, no. 6 (December 1962): 1247–61Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 1247.

6 Un, Kheang, “The Khmer Rouge Tribunal: A Politically Compromised Search for Justice,” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 4 (November 2013): pp–ppCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See ibid. and Heder, Stephen and Tittemore, Brian D., Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

8 Pham, Phuong, Vinck, Patrick, Balthazard, Mychelle, Hean, Sokhom, and Stover, Eric, So We Will Never Forget: A Population-Based Survey on Attitudes about Social Reconstruction and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, January 2009)Google Scholar, http://www.law.berkeley.edu/HRCweb/pdfs/So-We-Will-Never-Forget.pdf (accessed July 15, 2012), 4. However, it is also true that most Cambodians see the Tribunal as less of a priority than providing better economic opportunities and improving conditions in other social sectors (ibid., 3).

9 Guillou, Anne Yvonne and Vignato, Silvia, “Introduction,” in “Life after Collective Death in South East Asia: Part 1 – The (Re-)Fabrication of Social Bonds,” eds. Guillou, Anne Yvonne and Vignato, Silvia, special issue, South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 161–74, 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 David Chandler, “Cambodia before the French: Politics in a Tributory Kingdom, 1794–1848” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1973), 1.

11 Chandler, David, A History of Cambodia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2008), 101Google Scholar.

12 Kirmayer, Laurence J., “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Memory and Disassociation,: in Tense Pasts: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Antze, Paul and Lambek, Michael, 173–98 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 189Google Scholar.

13 Not only is the Holocaust discussed in many Passover Seders, but it has also been inscribed into at least one publication of the Passover Haggadah. See Gubkin, Liora, And You Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover Ritual (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, and Robert A. Adelson, “Haggadah HaShoah,” JewishBoston.com, accessed May 8, 2013, http://www.jewishboston.com/279-jewishboston-com/blogs/1930-remembering-on-passover-holocaust-haggadah-supplement.

14 Gow, Peter, An Amazonian Myth and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 279, 303Google Scholar.

15 For an in-depth analysis of landscape, stories, and the past in relation to recovery from the Khmer Rouge period, see chap. 7 in Zucker, Eve, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Ledgerwood, Judy, “Buddhist Ritual and the Reordering of Social Relations in Cambodia,” in “Life after Collective Death in South East Asia: Part 1 – The (Re-)Fabrication of Social Bonds,” eds. Guillou, Anne Yvonne and Vignato, Silvia, special issue, South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 191–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Guillou, Anne Yvonne, “An Alternative Memory of the Khmer Rouge Genocide: The Dead of the Mass Graves and the Land Guardian Spirits [Neak Ta],” in “Life after Collective Death in South East Asia: Part 1 – The (Re-)Fabrication of Social Bonds,” eds. Guillou, Anne Yvonne and Vignato, Silvia, special issue, South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 207–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See Willem Van de Put and Maurice Eisenbruch, “Healing Trauma in Cambodian Communities,” accessed July 25, 2013, http://www.eisenbruch.com/about_us/Eisenbruch%20-%20Healing%20trauma%20in%20Cambodian%20Communities.pdf.