Tuesday, June 07, 2005

S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

I just watched S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing, a horrific documentary about the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979. The film was shot in the old S21 prison, an interrogation center outside of Phnom Penh, where some 17,000 were interrogated, and only three survived. In all, about 1.7 million were killed by the Khmer Rouge, astounding when you consider that the population of Cambodia was only about 7.7 million in 1975.
I've always thought that the Cambodian genocide was the most chilling of the 20th century. The Khmer Rouge, a Communist regime, simply marched the entire population into the countryside and began working them to death. Anyone with glasses was shot for being an "intellectual". Families were split up and shot. 13 year olds were made interrogators of their own parents. The interrogation centers reversed the normal order of justice. Here people were charged, arrested and tortured who had no charges against them, with the hope that they might create charges during torture to justify the arrest. Children under one year old were killed with the remarkable justification that they were "traitors".
The film follows one of the survivors, Vann Nath, as he interviews his former jailers, none of whom have ever been brought to justice. He gets the chance to interrogate them and asks very pointed questions, but at the end, there's a black hole in these people that cannot be fathomed. They killed because they never really thought about killing.
One interrogator's response:
"If they said this was the enemy, I repeated this is the enemy."
Perhaps it's better for the soul to think. Even if it makes you a traitor.

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