Photo
Copyright@ Mara Lavitt |
In
the June 23rd New York Times, journalist Seth
Mydans reported that the grave of Pol Pot had become
a place of veneration. Not only veterans of the Khmer
Rouge army whom he led to victory and domination over
their country between 1975 and 1979 come to pray for
a winning lottery number or a cure for malaria at this
patch of dangerous mountain jungle on the Thailand-Cambodian
border. The less implicated also leave their offerings
by the still blackened spot where one of the monsters
of a monster-haunted century was cremated three years
ago, not far from the hut where he died, some say murdered
by his own followers. Aren’t these pilgrims also
among the victims of this murderer of over a million
of his own people? Don’t they also struggle to
survive in the country he so completely ruined that
even now, a quarter century later, it still limps toward
recovery?
The unimaginable horror of the Pol Pot period, which
includes 18 years of guerrilla warfare after his rule
was ended by a Vietnamese invasion, has never received
an adequate accounting in historical records and certainly
never through the clarification and release war crimes
trials might provide. Cambodians have been left in the
midst of their own confusion over how such a powerful,
charismatic leader who proclaimed himself his people’s
savior and liberator could be responsible for such evil.
As Mydans observes, they are "free to reinvent
their past in an attempt to ease the pain." Therefore,
the shrine to the monster in the jungle.
To gain some vantage above the clouds of black irony
that swirl about this circumstance, perhaps one might
view it as indicative of some fundamental process of
healing in order to go forward: a process of myth making.
What link might there be, for example, between the creation
of the legend of Pol Pot and the one, now lost in time,
that comes down to us as the story of the House of Atreus
or the House of David? Such stories encompass crime,
guilt, trauma, death, and ultimately purgation, reconcilement
and a path leading into the future. Is a story such
as Pol Pot’s so overwhelming that it must be told,
regardless of how the forces of circumstance distort
the very act of telling, in order to overcome the spiritual
paralysis it has inflicted? What is the relationship
between history, memory, narrative and the very fact
of survival? And, of course, of all these to art?
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