Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

I liked Khieu Seng Kim; I liked his quirky younger-brotherishness. For his sake I wished his mother were still alive — that indomitable old woman who had spread out her mat and started selling vegetables on the street when she realized that her eldest son would have no qualms about sacrificing his entire family on the altar of his idealism. She would have reminded Khieu Seng Kim of a few home truths.

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According to his brother, Khieu Samphan talked very little about his student days upon his return from France. He did, however, tell one story that imprinted itself vividly on the fourteen-year-old boy's mind. It had to do with an old friend, Hou Yuon. Khieu Seng Kim remembers Hou Yuon well; he was always in and out of the house, a part of the family.

Hou Yuon and his brother Hu Nim played pivotal roles in the Communist movement in Cambodia: along with Khieu Samphan, they were the most popular figures on the left through the sixties and early seventies. Then as now, Pol Pot preferred to be a faceless puppeteer, pulling strings behind a screen of organizational anonymity.

The two brothers were initiated into radical politics at about the same time as Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot; they attended the same study groups in Paris; they did party work together in Phnom Penh in the sixties, and all through the desperate years of the early seventies they fought together, shoulder by shoulder, in conditions of the most extreme hardship, with thousands of tons of bombs crashing down around them. So closely linked were the fortunes of Khieu Samphan and the two brothers that they became a collective legend, known together as the Three Ghosts.

Khieu Samphan's acquaintance with Hou Yuon dated back to their schooldays at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Their friendship was sealed in Paris in the fifties and was the subject of the story Khieu Samphan told his brother on his return.

Once, at a Cambodian gathering in Paris, Hou Yuon made a speech in which he criticized the corruption and venality of Prince Sihanouk's regime. He was overheard by an official, and soon afterward his government scholarship was suspended for a year. Since Khieu Samphan was known to be a particular friend of his, his scholarship was suspended too.

To support themselves, the two men began to sell bread. They would study during the day, and at night they would walk around the city hawking long loaves of French bread. With the money they earned, they paid for their upkeep and bought books; the loaves they couldn't sell they ate. It was a hard way to earn money, Khieu Samphan told his brother, but at the same time it was also oddly exhilarating. Walking down those lamp-lit streets late at night, talking to each other, it was as though he and Hou Yuon somehow managed to leave behind the nighttime of the spirit that had befallen them in Paris. They would walk all night long, with the fragrant, crusty loaves over their shoulders, looking into the windows of cafés and restaurants, talking about their lives and about the future…

Hou Yuon was one of the first to die when the revolution began to devour itself: his moderate views were sharply at odds with the ultraradical, collectivist ideology of the ruling group. In August 1975, a few months after the Khmer Rouge took power, he addressed a crowd and vehemently criticized the policy of evacuating the cities. He is said to have been assassinated as he left the meeting, on the orders of the party's leadership. His brother Hu Nim served for a while as minister of information. Then, on April 10, 1977, he and his wife were taken into Interrogation Center S-21—the torture chambers at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. He was executed several months later, after confessing to being everything from a CIA agent to a Vietnamese spy.

Khieu Samphan was then head of state. He is believed to have played an important role in planning the mass purges of that period.

For Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, the deaths of Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, and the thousands of others who were executed in torture chambers and execution grounds were not a contradiction but rather a proof of their own idealism and ideological purity. Terror was essential to their exercise of power. It was an integral part not merely of their coercive machinery but of the moral order on which they built their regime, a part whose best description still lies in the line that Brückner, most prescient of playwrights, gave to Robespierre (a particular hero of Pol Pot's): "Virtue is terror, and terror virtue" — words that might well serve as an epitaph for the twentieth century.

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Those who were there then say there was a moment of epiphany in Phnom Penh in 1981. It occurred at a quiet, relatively obscure event: a festival at which classical Cambodian music and dance were performed for the first time since the revolution.

Dancers and musicians from all over the country traveled to Phnom Penh for the festival. Proeung Chhieng, one of the best-known dancers and choreographers in the country, was among those who made the journey; he came to Phnom Penh from Kompong Thom, where he had helped assemble a small troupe of dancers after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. He himself had trained at the palace since his childhood, specializing in the role of Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana epic, a part that is one of the glories of Khmer dance. This training proved instrumental in Proeung Chhieng's survival: his expertise in clowning and mime helped him persuade the interrogators at his labor camp that he was an illiterate lunatic.

At the festival he met many fellow students and teachers for the first time after the revolution: "We cried and laughed while we looked around to see who were the others who had survived. We would shout with joy: 'You are still alive!' and then we would cry thinking of someone who had died."

The performers were dismayed when they began preparing for the performance: large quantities of musical instruments, costumes, and masks had been destroyed over the past few years. They had to improvise new costumes to perform in; instead of rich silks and brocades, they used thin calico, produced by a government textile factory. The theater they were to perform in, the Bassac, was in relatively good shape, but there was a crisis of electricity at the time, and the lighting was dim and unreliable.

But people flocked to the theater the day the festival began. Onesta Carpene, a Catholic relief worker from Italy, was one of the handful of foreigners then living in Phnom Penh. She was astonished at the response. The city was in a shambles: there was debris everywhere, spilling out of the houses onto the pavements, the streets were jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little food. "I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance," she said. But still they came pouring in, and the theater was filled far beyond its capacity. It was very hot inside.

Eva Mysliwiec, who had arrived recently to set up a Quaker relief mission, was one of the one of the few foreigners present at that first performance. When the musicians came onstage, she heard sobs all around her. Then, when the dancers appeared, in their shabby, hastily made costumes, suddenly everyone was crying, old people, young people, soldiers, children—"You could have sailed out of there in a boat."

The people who were sitting next to her said, "We thought everything was lost, that we would never hear our music again, never see our dance." They could not stop crying; people wept through the entire performance.

It was a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living.

IN EGYPT, the news that the writer Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 was greeted with the kind of jubilation that Egyptians usually reserve for soccer victories. Even though the fundamentalists sounded an ominous note, most people in Cairo were overjoyed. Months later everybody was still full of it. People would tell anecdotes about how the good news had reached Mahfouz. Swedish efficiency has met its match in Cairo's telephones: the news had broken over the wires before the committee (or whatever) could get through to Mahfouz. He was asleep, taking his afternoon siesta (no, it was early in the morning, and he just hadn't woken up yet), when his wife woke him and told him matter-of-factly that somebody wanted to congratulate him for winning the Nobel (no, it was she who wanted to congratulate him, didn't you see the story in…).