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BOOK
REVIEW
Exposition of revolutionary
terror
The Gate, by
Francois Bizot
Reviewed by Sreeram
Chaulia
For a long time during the Cold War,
Cambodia remained in the shadow of Vietnam. To the
outside world it was a "sideshow" (journalist William
Shawcross). Yet the monumental devastation and human
loss that ideological hatred foisted on the home of the
Khmers in the 1970s was unparalleled in all of Asia.
Francois Bizot, a French historian of Buddhism, was the
only Westerner to live through the time of Cambodia's
obscurity by surviving and escaping a Khmer Rouge prison
camp. From such a rare species comes a rare testimony of
the proverbial lull before the storm, the prelude to
genocide and the spine-chilling "killing fields". Spy
novelist John le Carre, who fictionalized Bizot's
experiences in The Secret Pilgrim, writes in the
foreword: "He is the authentic version of what the rest
of us can only imagine."
Bizot's earliest
memories of mid-'60s Cambodia are rose-tinted. "The land
was rich and beautiful, enameled with paddy fields,
dotted with temples. This was a country of peace and
simplicity." (p 3) Compared with the later wave of
terror and irreparable damage, the pristine image sits
uncomfortably in Bizot's mind. "This constant split
vision pulled me apart like some schizophrenic illness."
(p 6) From the painful side of the vision, Bizot sees
the gate of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh, a piece of
fragile mesh that resisted so many strong hopes and
opened itself to so many heavy wrongs in 1975. The
harrowing consciousness of this gate forms the theme of
the book.
In 1970, Bizot was in Angkor doing
field research on local Buddhist traditions when the
US-backed military dictatorship of Lon Nol was installed
in Cambodia. Resistance, aided by the North Vietnamese,
was engaging the pro-US government in bloody guerrilla
warfare. To rural Cambodians, "this war was totally
foreign" (p 15). Villagers who wished only to preserve
their centuries-old Buddhist ways of life did not know
what to think of the communists or of the government,
both of whom were harassing them endlessly for
conscripts and grain. Stuck in stereotypes of Vietnam,
European intelligentsia took commando raids on the
government army to be a spontaneous and independent
popular rebellion. The truth, as Bizot witnessed it, was
that ordinary Khmers feared the Vietnamese invaders as
much as Lon Nol.
Around 1971, Bizot detected a
new "hidden organization" that was making life hell for
peasants - the Khmer Rouge. "In contrast to the North
Vietnamese, whose mission was to fight the republican
army, their role was to sow terror, under the cover of
the forests." (p 26) On a trip to a monastery in Oudong,
Bizot and his co-researchers were ambushed by a Khmer
Rouge convoy and dragged on foot to an unknown
destination. Charged with ideological fervor, his
interrogators took him to be an American spy spreading
"imperialism". Bizot heard his captors discuss a
solution to this French-Khmer-speaking Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. "Undress him and shoot
him! What are you waiting for comrades?" (p 37) The
Khmer Rouge's trademark style was to strip victims
before shooting them so that the garments could be
reused.
Miraculously spared through the
intervention of higher-ups, Bizot was chained under a
chhlik tree in a forest glade camp and barely kept
alive. "The first few days last a lifetime ... the voice
of revolt, little by little, dies away." (p 43) Since
there was no spare container for Bizot, he was denied
the morning meal. The miserly rice morsel of the evening
was all Bizot's camp commander Ta Douch
allowed.
Gradually, Bizot developed a strange
attachment and respect for Douch despite the fact that
he was his tormentor (a la the "Stockholm Syndrome",
where the kidnapped undergo affection for their
captors). In conversations with Douch to prove his
innocence, Bizot gleaned a touch of brutality and cold
robotic terror that was to become the hallmark of the
man who would go on to supervise the Tuol Sleng torture
prison in Phnom Penh. References to "cleansing the
sins", "ridding our country of vermin", driving sense
into those "benumbed by Buddhism", and the total disdain
with which Douch and his subordinates treated crops,
gardens, trees, pathways and other sacred symbols were
signs of the apocalypse to come. Douch's superiors
included the who's who of Khmer Rouge butchers - Ta Mok,
Von Veth, Saloth Sar (aka Pol Pot). In the tradition of
the leaders, Douch proclaimed, "the only way is to
terrorize enemies, isolate them and starve them ... it's
better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a
country full of incompetents". (p 116)
Oddly, the
same automaton who carried out beatings and shootings
remorselessly, Douch, was somewhat sympathetic to Bizot
and started believing in his blamelessness. "This
terrible man was not duplicitous: all he had were
principles and convictions." (p 77) He yearned to
project a pure, upright image of the Khmer Rouge and was
known to punish indiscipline, theft or other crimes
among his subalterns. So taken was Bizot by the romantic
image of the upright revolutionary that he played mind
games putting himself in Douch's shoes: "It occurred to
me that in his place, I, too, would have had what it
takes to be a good torturer." (p 98) Douch petitioned
his bosses and overcame obstinate refusals finally to
secure Bizot's release months after his incarceration.
"My freedom had become a sort of personal success for
him." (p 127)
In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge rode
triumphantly into Phnom Penh, Bizot was in the capital
and noticed the same naivete clouded by Vietnam among
French diplomats. They still believed the Khmer Rouge to
be a popular uprising against US intervention in
Cambodia. They would be eating their words in days.
Spreading deliberate lies that "American bombardments"
would start, Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of Phnom
Penh at gunpoint. Displaced persons were allowed no more
than one piece of luggage and herded into long queues
for slave labor in foreordained collective farms and
factories.
Bizot's linguistic abilities and the
crowding of the French Embassy with stranded foreigners
and fleeing Khmers suddenly turned him into the official
interpreter in an extended drama of negotiations between
international citizens and Khmer Rouge soldiers.
Virtually under house arrest, thousands of trapped
inmates used Bizot to express their fears, views and
requests to the new authorities. High figures of the Lon
Nol regime such as Sirik Matak and other
counter-revolutionaries took shelter inside the embassy,
inviting repeated armed raids by Khmer Rouge into the
compound.
Beyond the embassy gate, Bizot
observed "a violence so terrible and so explosive that I
felt totally disheartened". Khmer Rouge forces were
indulging in a spree of looting and mass murder unknown
to Cambodian history. Petrified civilians ran pell-mell
to protect themselves from bullets and commandeering
troops. "They sank the hole of their black pupils into
our eyes, bequeathing us a fragment of their fear." (p
174) Caught in a surreal tragedy of epic proportions,
Bizot found the fragile balance of his sanity often
tipping. In disturbing trances, he would see mangled
bodies of his Khmer colleagues imprisoned by Douch
sticking out of a mass grave. As the embassy compound
wilted from dwindling supplies, space and indefinite
confinement, well-behaved human beings unexpectedly
forked out baser instincts - theft, jealousy,
selfishness and aggression.
The most shocking
aspect of the reign of terror was that there were
Parisian intellectuals who approved of everything that
was occurring. Fraternizing genocidaires as "liberators"
was a most repulsive business that encouraged Pol Pot's
sadistic blueprint for extermination. The Khmer Rouge
grew concerned that news of the death squads was leaking
out through radio broadcasts from the French Embassy and
demanded immediate closure of all telecommunications, an
order Bizot reluctantly conveyed to the journalists and
embassy staff who were relaying commentaries on the
situation in Phnom Penh. Witness accounts of the
atrocities were filtering through, a loophole that had
to be instantly plugged by sealing Cambodia.
At
the end of May 1975, the Khmer Rouge decided to organize
a repatriation of all marooned foreign nationals to
Thailand while "internal stability" was restored in
Cambodia. On the troublesome truck journey out of the
country, Bizot passed through areas of "liberated"
territory that seemed to have grown poorer and more
exhausted since the "people's revolution". Fields were
hoed, villages razed, skulls smashed, pagodas burned and
bridges blown up. Bizot realized then that in the storm
he was leaving behind, dark powers would crush under
their feet "in blood-drenched soil, victim upon victim
... the dangers of war were slight in comparison to the
dangers of revolution". (p 260)
The Gate
suffers from incongruously verbose passages describing
landscapes, animals and characters in the manner of a
literary novel. But as a blow-by-blow narrative of
Cambodia's descent into chaos, it is a valuable primary
source for Cold War history. Years after George Orwell
exposed the dark underbelly of Stalinist
totalitarianism, Bizot has given us another
bare-knuckles exposition of revolutionary terror.
The Gate, by Francois Bizot, Alfred A
Knopf Publishers, New York, 2003. ISBN: 0-375-41293-X.
Price: US$24. 276 pages.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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