Myth, nationalism and genocide

Abstract

In the second half of 1978, the Pol Pot regime was in its death throes. A rebellion had spread in the Eastern Zone of Cambodia, and was proving difŽ cult to suppress. One Cambodian man who lived through these events was a former blacksmith whom I met in Phnom Penh in 1991. His cousin was married to a niece of Heng Samrin, one of the rebellion’s leaders and later President of the State of Cambodia (SOC). The blacksmith was working for the SOC Interior Ministry. A technique he claimed the Pol Pot armed forces had used to round up rebels, in those last months of 1978, was to call people to Ž lm showings in the countryside . He said ofŽ cials would Ž rst project the Ž lms, then arrest alleged rebels in the audience. One Ž lm which the blacksmith claimed to have seen was of particular interest, at least for how he remembered it. The Ž lm was of Pol Pot’s 1977 state visit to China. The blacksmith recalled seeing footage of Pol Pot’s trip to an unnamed interior province of China, one which was constantly short of water. In this province, the Ž lm showed “seven million” people assembled to welcome Pol Pot. The massive crowd comprised only young men and women of the Chinese province, all carefully “chosen for their beauty.” The Ž lm also showed how the province was watered by a man-made canal bringing water from the sea, the blacksmith claimed. However, the canal was only able to supply the province with a single bucket of water per person. Here is a fascinating example of Khmer myth-making in progress. The Cambodian script of this “Chinese” Ž lm is striking: the preoccupation with the agricultural water supply that dominated Democratic Kampuchea; the Cambodian’s unfamiliarity with the sea and the unserviceability of salt water for irrigation; the vast crowd of “seven million,” the reputed population of Cambodia at the time; and its division into young men and women, crack troops of the “mobile brigades” into which single adult Cambodian workers were divided by the Khmer Rouge, usually being fed rations of a single can of rice per person per day. The remembered Ž lm was a projection of the Cambodian experience. Of course, in one sense the Pol Pot regime did “show” Cambodians a new country. At the same time the Vietnamese were making their own projections—far into the past—about the Chinese–Cambodian relationship. A cartoon published in an October, 1978 Hanoi magazine for political cadres shows a Khmer Rouge “burning the books” while a Chinese in imperial attire, suggesting Chin Shih Huang, fans the  ames with his breath.