POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA SINCE 1945 Case Studies from Six Countries 2020057608, 2020057609, 9780367675462, 9780367675592, 9781003131809

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributor
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Preface
Introduction
PART 1: Dimensions of Mass Violence
1. A time to kill: The anti-communist violence in Indonesia, 1965–66
2. Expulsion/incorporation: Valences of mass violence in Myanmar
PART 2: The Politics of Fear
3. Performative violence and Philippine populism
4. The political organization of genocide: Central orders and regional implementation under the Khmer Rouge
5. Mass violence against the Rohingya: Strategic and ideological drivers of ethnic cleansing
PART 3: Minorities and the State
6. The crucible of Điện Biên Phủ: Making Vietnam in the First Indochina War
7. The Khmer Republic’s mass persecution of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia 1970–75
8. The genocide of Rohingyas in Burma
PART 4: Technologies, Techniques, and Ideologies
9. The air war in Vietnam: Responses to the machinery of mass violence
10. Medical experiments, blood, and gall: Revolutionary utilization of the body in Khmer Rouge prisons
PART 5: Justice, Ethics, and History
11. Assessing genocidal intent in the context of Myanmar’s Rohingya
12. Justice after dictatorship in Thailand
13. Investigating genocide: Rithy Panh’s S-21 (2004)
14. Vietnam, ASEAN, the Great Powers, and the challenges of learning from the Cambodian genocide
PART 6: The Shadow of the Past on the Present
15. The mobilization of state-sponsored mass organizations since the 2006 coup in Thailand
16. Something in the water: Toward a symbolic history of otherness in Chrouy Changvar, Cambodia
17. Mass violence and mob violence in Cambodia: Responses and social repair – Hope for the future?
Index

Citation preview

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA SINCE 1945

This book examines postwar waves of political violence that affected six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam – from the wars of independence in the mid-twentieth century to the recent Rohingya genocide. Featuring cases not previously explored, and offering fresh insights into more familiar cases, the chapters cover a range of topics including the technologies of violence, the politics of fear, inclusion and exclusion, justice and ethics, repetitions of mass violence events, impunity, law, ethnic and racial killings, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The book delves into the violence that has reverberated across the region spurred by local and global politics and ideologies, through the examination of such themes as identity ascription and formation, existential and ontological questions, collective memories of violence, and social and political transformation. In our current era of global social and political transition, the volume’s case studies provide an opportunity to consider potential repercussions and outcomes of various political and ideological positionings and policies. Enhancing our understanding of the technologies, techniques, motives, causes, consequences, and connections between violent episodes in the Southeast Asian cases, the book raises key questions for the study of mass violence worldwide. Eve Monique Zucker is a lecturer in anthropology at Yale University, US. Her research focuses on the social, moral, and digital dimensions of remembrance and recovery after mass atrocities in Southeast Asia and beyond. Her books include Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia; Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age; and Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence. Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and founding Director (1994–2015) of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, US. His books include How Pol Pot Came to Power; The Pol Pot Regime; Blood and Soil; Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia; and Việt Nam.

MASS VIOLENCE IN MODERN HISTORY Edited by Alexander Korb (University of Leicester, United Kingdom) and Uğ ur Ümit Üngor (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)

Despite the horrors of nineteenth century conflicts including the US Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars, it was not until the twentieth century that mass killing was conducted on an industrialized scale. While the trenches of Flanders and the atomic bomb were major manifestations of this, mass violence often occurred outside the context of conventional war or away from the traditional battlefield. Research has understandably tended to focus on major events and often within a binary superpower narrative. In fact, instances of mass violence are often hard to pin down as well as being little known, and involving civilians and citizens of a wider range of territories than is publicized. The books in this series shed light on mass violence in the modern era, from Armenia to Rwanda; from Belarus to Bosnia-Herzegovina and many points in between. 5. The Construction of National Socialist Europe During the Second World War Raimund Bauer 6. Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities: New Theoretical Perspectives Edited by Fiona Greenland and Fatma Müge Göçek 7. Remembering Genocides in Central Africa Rene Lemarchand 8. Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945 Case Studies from Six Countries Edited by Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan 9. Conceptualizing Mass Violence Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations Edited by Navras J. Aafreedi and Priya Singh For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Mass-Violence-in-Modern-History/book-series/ MASSVIOLENCE

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA SINCE 1945 Case Studies from Six Countries

Edited by Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zucker, Eve Monique, editor. | Kiernan, Ben, editor. Title: Political violence in Southeast Asia since 1945 : case studies from six countries / edited by Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020057608 (print) | LCCN 2020057609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367675462 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367675592 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003131809 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence--Southeast Asia--History--20th century. | Southeast Asia--Social conditions--20th century. | Southeast Asia--Politics and government--20th century. Classification: LCC HN670.3.Z9 V569 2021 (print) | LCC HN670.3.Z9 (ebook) | DDC 303.60959--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057608 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057609 ISBN: 978-0-367-67546-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-67559-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13180-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

In memory of Benny Widyono, 1936–2019.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements Editors’ Preface Introduction Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

x xii xv xvi 1

PART 1

Dimensions of Mass Violence

19

1 A time to kill: The anti-communist violence in Indonesia, 1965–66 Geoffrey Robinson

21

2 Expulsion/incorporation: Valences of mass violence in Myanmar Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong

41

PART 2

The Politics of Fear 3 Performative violence and Philippine populism Alfred W. McCoy

57 59

viii Contents

4 The political organization of genocide: Central orders and regional implementation under the Khmer Rouge William Kwok 5 Mass violence against the Rohingya: Strategic and ideological drivers of ethnic cleansing Mayesha Alam

80

101

PART 3

Minorities and the State

115

6 The crucible of Điện Biên Phủ: Making Vietnam in the First Indochina War Christian C. Lentz

117

7 The Khmer Republic’s mass persecution of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia 1970–75 Kosal Path

134

8 The genocide of Rohingyas in Burma Azeem Ibrahim

148

PART 4

Technologies, Techniques, and Ideologies

161

9 The air war in Vietnam: Responses to the machinery of mass violence Sophie Quinn-Judge

163

10 Medical experiments, blood, and gall: Revolutionary utilization of the body in Khmer Rouge prisons Daniel Bultmann

174

PART 5

Justice, Ethics, and History

189

11 Assessing genocidal intent in the context of Myanmar’s Rohingya Katherine E. Munyan

191

12 Justice after dictatorship in Thailand Tyrell Haberkorn

209

13 Investigating genocide: Rithy Panh’s S-21 (2004) Phirum Laurence Gaillard

222

Contents ix

14 Vietnam, ASEAN, the Great Powers, and the challenges of learning from the Cambodian genocide Hoang Minh Vu

234

PART 6

The Shadow of the Past on the Present

251

15 The mobilization of state-sponsored mass organizations since the 2006 coup in Thailand Puangthong R. Pawakapan

253

16 Something in the water: Toward a symbolic history of otherness in Chrouy Changvar, Cambodia Ngoc Tram Luong

268

17 Mass violence and mob violence in Cambodia: Responses and social repair – Hope for the future? Laura McGrew

282

Index

299

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 PKI members and sympathizers detained by the army in Bali, ca. December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia) 1.2 Map of Indonesia and East Timor 1.3 Villagers detained by army and anti-communist militias in Central Java, ca. November 1965. (National Library of Indonesia) 1.4 British Foreign Office note on a report about Indonesia, December 1964. (UK National Archive) 1.5 Member of the anti-communist Pemuda Marhaen militia in Bali, ca. December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia) 1.6 Long-term political prisoners at Sumber-Rejo prison camp in East Kalimantan, 1977. (David Jenkins) 3.1 Body of Moises Padilla, 1951 4.1 Zonal Variation in the Onset of Genocidal Violence in Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) 4.2 Variation in the Implementation of Central “Policy,” by Administrative Zone (1975–79) 7.1 The Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia Situation (May 1971) of the Liberation of Cambodia by the People’s Armed Forces for National Liberation of Kampuchea (Courtesy of the Documentation Center of Cambodia) 16.1 The Chrouy Changvar peninsula and the Sokha Hotel 16.2 The demonstration populaire against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in Phnom Penh in March 1970

22 24

27 30 33 35 63 92 93

139 270 272

List of illustrations xi

16.3 A traditional depiction of Maravijaya 16.4 Anti-Vietcong poster during the Lon Nol period reinterprets the Thorani myth 16.5 A photograph of Vietnamese victims in 1970 captured by a Newsweek reporter

274 275 277

Tables

4.1 The implementation of mass violence, observations 4.2 A continuum of policy escalation and mass killings 4.3 Summary of observations that would support or contradict my theory 4.4 Approximate national death toll in Democratic Kampuchea, by group (1975–79) 4.5 Zonal variation in the level of mass killings (1976–79) 4.6 Zone-level variation in the onset of genocidal violence 4.7 Zonal geographic-spatial factors and genocide onset

85 85 87 89 91 93 94

CONTRIBUTORS

Mayesha Alam is author of Women and Transitional Justice: Progress and Persistent Challenges in Retributive and Restorative Processes (2014) and co-editor of Women and Gender in Military Operations: An International Comparison (2019). Her research intersects comparative politics, international relations, and international law with a focus on armed conflict. She is a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University and a research and advocacy fellow at Yale Law School. Daniel Bultmann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and research fellow of the Department of Social Sciences at Universität Siegen. His work focuses on the political sociology of violence, peace transformations, and social inequality, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Phirum Laurence Gaillard is a PhD student in History at Yale University with research interests in extreme political violence, cultural representations, and traumatic collective memories. Tyrell Haberkorn is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand (2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (2018). Azeem Ibrahim is the Director of the Displacement and Migration Program at the Centre for Global Policy in Washington, DC and the author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (2016). William Kwok is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. His research focuses on mass killings, ethnic conflict, and armed groups. His dissertation

List of contributors xiii

“The Banality of Organization: Mass Killings as a Coordination Problem in the Shadow of War” examines the political organization of mass killings in Southeast Asia. Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on development, agrarian studies, state formation, nationalism, territory, and nature-society relations in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Indonesia. Ngoc Tram Luong is a visual artist and a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University. Alfred W. McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), still in print; Policing America’s Empire (2009), awarded the Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies; and In the Shadows of the American Century (2017). Laura McGrew is an Independent Scholar and Peacebuilding Consultant with a PhD from Coventry University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Johns Hopkins. She has authored articles and book chapters and co-edited a book on transitional justice and peacebuilding. She is a consultant for the UN and NGOs worldwide. Katherine Munyan is a New York-based attorney with a background in international human rights law. As a member of Yale Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, she co-authored the 2015 legal analysis, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State?. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, and clerked on the Second Circuit and Southern District of New York. Andrew Ong is Research Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University where his dissertation fieldwork examined the insurgent autonomy of the United Wa State Army in Myanmar. He has published in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Critique of Anthropology, and currently researches China-Myanmar relations through informal investments and borderland economies. Kosal Path is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. His main research interests are the Cambodian genocide and the Chinese-Cambodian-Vietnamese triangle relations. His most recent publications include Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War (2020). Puangthong R. Pawakapan is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Her recent works include State and Uncivil Society in Thailand at the Temple of Preah Vihear (2013); “The Central Role of

xiv List of contributors

Thailand’s Internal Security Operations Command in the Post-Counter-insurgency Period,” Trends in Southeast Asia (2017); “The Foreign Press’ Changing Perceptions of Thailand’s Monarchy,” After the Coup: 22 May 2014 and the Future of Thailand (2019); and Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military's Internal Security Affairs (2021). Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD from Yale University’s Department of Anthropology based on long-term fieldwork in Myanmar on Burmese subaltern political thought and activism. He is the co-editor of Unraveling Myanmar's Transition: Progress, Retrenchment, and Ambiguity Amidst Liberalization (2020) and is working on book projects on Burmese activism and mass violence against the Rohingya. Sophie Quinn-Judge is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2002) and The Third Force in the Vietnam War (2017). She co-edited The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. II (2017) and worked at the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society. She retired in 2015 from her role as Associate Professor of History at Temple University. Geoffrey Robinson is a Professor of History at UCLA, where he teaches and writes about political violence, genocide, and human rights. His major works include The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (1995); East Timor 1999: Crimes against Humanity (2006); “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (2010); and The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (2018). Hoang Minh Vu is a diplomatic historian of twentieth-century Vietnam and the Asia-Pacific. He is currently Visiting Professor in History at Fulbright University Vietnam. His PhD dissertation at Cornell University argues that the Third Indochina War affirmed the principle of non-interference at the expense of human rights in Southeast Asia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN), the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the Genocide Studies Program (GSP) at Yale University, the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies for supporting the first iteration of this project, the conference on “Mass Violence in Southeast East Asia since 1945,” held at Yale in November 2018. In particular, we are grateful for the encouragement and support from Rahima Chaudhury, Michael Dove, Erik Harms, Hira Jafri, George Joseph, Duncan McCargo, Kristine Mooseker, Ian Shapiro, James Silk, and David Simon. Alfred W. McCoy generously shared his insights in presenting an overview of the conference papers during the November 2018 meeting, and gave us much to think about. We also much appreciate the comments and suggestions of Baskara Wardaya and two anonymous reviewers of a draft of the manuscript. Of course, these projects never get completed solely during working hours and therefore could not be accomplished without the understanding and support of our families, specifically, Karl Malone, Sebastian Zucker-Malone, Saoirse Zucker-Malone, Glenda Gilmore, Mia-lia Kiernan, Derry Kiernan, Polina Adamovich, and Miles Johnson. We are grateful to Robert Langham and the editors at Routledge for bringing this volume through the various stages to production. We would also like to thank the students who have taken our Yale classes over the years, including “Southeast Asia since 1900,” “Genocide in History and Theory,” and “Mass Violence and Its Aftermaths in Southeast Asia.” We found teaching these courses to be very helpful in imagining a conference on “Mass Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945” and bringing genocide studies together with Southeast Asian Studies. We hope that this book will contribute to further study and perhaps new courses along these lines.

EDITORS’ PREFACE

On January 28, 1947, a unit of Dutch soldiers, engaged in what they termed a “cleansing action,” struck the village of Suppa in South Sulawesi. Their action was part of the Netherlands’ attempt to regain colonial control of Indonesia and to repress its independence movement. The Dutch military unit is said to have killed 200 villagers in Suppa that day. Seventy-three years later, in March 2020, after eight years of judicial proceedings brought by lawyers acting for surviving family members of a small number of specific victims, a court in The Hague determined that Dutch soldiers had killed 11 Indonesian men in “cleansing actions,” including summary executions and random shooting, in different parts of South Sulawesi from December 1946 to April 1947. It ordered the Dutch state to pay monetary compensation to eight widows and four children of victims of these massacres.1 The Indonesian war of independence was of course only one of the violent upheavals that roiled postwar Southeast Asia and whose reverberations continued long afterwards. The First Indochina War, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian genocide are just a few of the cases of mass political violence that plagued the region in subsequent decades. In November 2018, 24 scholars of Southeast Asia gathered at Yale University to present papers and hold discussions on the topic of political violence in postwar Southeast Asia. The conference convened at a time when populism and authoritarianism were spreading around the world. With Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping leading the three powers that had been the giants of the Cold War, it was not surprising to see many Southeast Asian nations giving up all but a semblance of democracy, and regional populist leaders – from Rodrigo Duterte to Hun Sen – crushing opposition with impunity. Thailand’s military-dominated regime and Singapore’s one-party democracy were increasing their censorship.2 Even Indonesia’s post-Suharto, newly vibrant democracy was being tested, as conservative Islamist forces pushed the country toward intolerance. In Myanmar, formerly Burma,

Editors’ Preface xvii

electoral democracy had arrived, but its ideals of equality and freedom were corrupted by continuing military power, fear, and a bigotry that had brought the escalating slaughter and expulsion of its Muslim Rohingya population. China’s bullying tactics and its aggressive territorial claims on, and rapid militarization of, the South China Sea had succeeded in dividing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) even as Beijing built close bilateral relations with leaders of individual states, including Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines.3 The Yale conference was held in the context of these developments. In Phnom Penh a week later, the UN-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) issued its ruling that the country’s former Khmer Rouge regime had perpetrated two genocides there in the late 1970s; the former Khmer Rouge head of state, Khieu Samphan, became the world’s first head of state to be convicted of genocide in an international court. The papers that were produced at the Yale conference and are presented as chapters in this volume are in part a response to tectonic shifts in the forms and exercise of postwar power both in regional nations and worldwide. The cases covered here highlight the dangers of a new cold war, rapid political change, impunity and corruption, accelerated modernization, technological warfare, and performative politics. The studies we have brought together represent a snapshot of some of the emergent scholarship in the field, covering a variety of new topics and shedding new light on old ones. The volume also addresses some older topics such as the perils of foreign imperialism and the use of advanced air-war technologies that are as meaningful today as they were decades ago. Some chapters provide an expansive background to their topic, whereas others focus on a particular poignant issue. Some cases receive more coverage here than others, particularly Cambodia and Myanmar. There are reasons for this. First, scholarship on the mass political and ethnic violence in Cambodia has begun to enter a new phase. With the 2018 UN-sponsored tribunal’s findings that genocides occurred under Khmer Rouge rule, some new scholars have moved beyond trying to get an overall understanding of what happened during that Democratic Kampuchea period (1975–79) and into more discrete avenues of inquiry that reach outside the Pol Pot years by examining the ethnic violence of the prior Lon Nol period (1970–75), and the peculiar situation in which Vietnam found itself during the subsequent People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) era (1979–89). Additionally, scholars are delving more deeply into the details of the Khmer Rouge’s torture programs, relations between central and local leadership structures, the reverberations of the genocidal violence in the long aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, and comparing Cambodia’s experience with that of other countries like Indonesia in 1965–66. Moreover, more than any other phenomenon of mass violence in post-war Southeast Asia, Cambodia’s half-century history of civil war, US intervention, the Khmer Rouge regime, Vietnamese intervention, a UN Transitional Authority, and the subsequent genocide tribunal stands as an enormously significant case in Southeast Asian history as well as in genocide studies, not only in Southeast Asia but across the world.

xviii Editors’ Preface

When the Yale conference convened in the fall of 2018, the genocidal killings of the Rohingya in Myanmar – which peaked in 2017 and are still ongoing – was just becoming better understood. Relative to older historical episodes of violence such as those in Indonesia, Vietnam, or Cambodia, scholarship on the violence perpetrated against the Rohingya was and remains relatively scant. For this reason, and the urgent need to better understand the scope of the violence perpetrated against the Rohingya, along with interpretations and responses to that violence, the second largest section of the volume is devoted to this subject. As our Introduction makes clear, the absence of chapters in this volume dealing with East Timor and Malaysia does not signify any absence of postwar political violence in those countries. The same applies to Brunei, Laos, and Singapore. It was our original intention to include more individual chapters in this volume, including more on Southeast Asia’s largest nation, Indonesia. The first and longest chapter, by Geoffrey Robinson, is devoted to that country. However, the other Indonesianists who attended and participated in the conference were for different reasons unable to contribute written chapters. One of these was Benny Widyono.

In memory of Benny Widyono It is with much sadness that we report the loss one of our original conference participants, Benny Widyono, who passed away only a few months later. Benny had opened the proceedings on the morning following Geoffrey Robinson’s keynote address, presenting a paper detailing the Cold War context of the mass killings and genocide in both Indonesia and Cambodia, and highlighting the US’s complicity through its silence during and after the violence in both countries. He warned that China is once again a potential threat to the region as it expands its power and influence, particularly in Cambodia. An Indonesian national, Benny had a long and distinguished career as a United Nations international diplomat from 1963 to 1997, serving in Bangkok, Santiago, New York, and Cambodia. From an ethnic Chinese family, his original name was Oei Hong Lan. He changed it to Benny Widyono – a Javanese name – just after the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in response to the new Suharto government’s extreme discriminatory policies against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority. In 1992, Benny was sent to Cambodia, where he served as the United Nations Governor of Siem Reap Province through 1993, under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). He became the United Nations Secretary-General’s Political Representative in Cambodia from 1994 to 1997, and later served as the Special Adviser to the UN Permanent Representatives in Indonesia and Cambodia from 1997 to 2002. His memoir, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia,4 recounts his experiences during this era and reflects on the role of the UN in Cambodia’s transitional period. Benny’s work in helping Cambodia rebuild and thrive after the Pol Pot years continued until his death through his service on the Board of Trustees of the People Improvement Organization (PIO), an educational non-profit for children

Editors’ Preface xix

in need, and the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), a non-profit dedicated to building scholarship on Cambodia through higher education both within Cambodia and abroad. Benny also took great interest in Indonesia’s past and present politics. As a Chinese Indonesian national whose people were targeted in the massacres of the mid1960s and again in the 1998 riots, he was intimately familiar with the fear and uncertainty of being seen as an “other” in one’s own homeland. As a testament to the profound love Benny had for Cambodia, his ashes were placed in a temple in Siem Reap, the home to CKS, and also the city where he had served as the province governor while working as a peacekeeping officer during the UNTAC administration. Known for his intelligence, wit, humor, and generosity, Benny Widyono will be much missed in Cambodia, Indonesia, the USA, and beyond. –EMZ, BK

Notes 1 Daniel Boffey, “Hague Court Orders Dutch State to Pay Out over Colonial Massacres,” Guardian (London), March 27, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/ha gue-court-orders-dutch-state-to-pay-out-over-colonial-massacres. 2 See, for example, “Thailand Near Bottom of Privacy Protection Table,” Bangkok Post, October 16, 2019, www.bangkokpost.com/business/1773484/thailand-near-bottom-of-p rivacy-protection-table, showing that Thailand ranks among the bottom 5 of 47 countries ranked. On Singapore, see Salil Tripathi “Singapore: Laboratory of Digital Censorship,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1919, www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/19/singap ore-laboratory-of-digital-censorship/, discussing Singapore’s new Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) outlawing what the government considers disinformation. 3 See, for example, Mark J. Valencia, “Who’s Bullying Who in the South China Sea?,” East Asia Forum, November 2, 2019, www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/11/02/whos-bul lying-who-in-the-south-china-sea/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=newsletter2019-11-03. 4 Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

INTRODUCTION Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

On August 6, 1945, a US B-29 aircraft dropped the first ever atomic bomb on Hiroshima, forcing Japan to surrender and ending its aggressive and violent occupation of East and Southeast Asia. For some parts of Southeast Asia, the respite from foreign occupation was short-lived: European colonial forces returned to reclaim what they had lost during the years of World War Two. For others, the war’s end marked a transition to independence. Either way, it was a period of transformation as former colonial subjects wrenched power and influence from the former masters of the region and new nations stood up and took the first shaky steps of independence. With the colonial system in ruins and no longer relevant in a post-World War Two world, nations and their leaders looked elsewhere for inspiration. They did not all look in the same directions. With the rise of the Cold War, American capitalism and Soviet and Chinese communisms were potent models. Neutralism also came into its own. At the same time nation-building prerogatives set out to incorporate many previously on the margins, including upland peoples in Cambodia and Vietnam, and various other minorities living well within the borders of new states. Yet not all minorities were welcomed into a state. In many cases particular groups were excluded, deemed not worthy of membership of the new citizenry. The ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia and the Rohingya in Burma, now Myanmar, were two examples. Other groups, if never targeted for eradication or expulsion, were nonetheless marginalized, refused full representative rights, or forced to give up part of their cultural identity. These included the Muslim communities on Thailand’s southern border, Chinese in Java and Sumatra, and several ethnic groups in Burma. These groups were attacked by the state and sometimes also by their neighbors of other backgrounds. The violence they suffered included rapes, burning of their homes and villages, forced dislocation, and the killing of members of their communities. In addition to experiencing common forms of violence, the different regions of Southeast Asia were also linked historically in other ways.

2 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

Connections The first great wave of violence in postwar Southeast Asia was the anti-colonial wars of independence. These began with the refusal of the French and Dutch governments to recognize the 1945 declarations of independence of the new Republic of Indonesia, proclaimed by Sukarno in Jakarta on August 17, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, proclaimed by Hồ Chí Minh in Hanoi on September 2. Following in the wake of British forces sent to disarm the Japanese after their surrender, Dutch and French armies soon landed in their former colonies determined to reassert their prewar power. Indonesian nationalist and communist forces fought back against the Dutch (and fought each other) until 1949, when the Netherlands agreed to give up all but its easternmost territory, Dutch New Guinea. In French Indochina, the new anti-colonial war began in 1946 and lasted nine years. The communist-led Việt Minh defeated the French at Điện Biên Phủ in May 1954. The Geneva Conference then stipulated a two-year temporary division of Vietnam pending nationwide elections, but owing largely to opposition from the United States and its South Vietnamese ally, these were never held. Meanwhile in 1948, communist insurgencies had broken out in three other Southeast Asian countries, two recently independent, the third still a colony. All three revolts were unsuccessful, but the struggle to defeat them produced veteran counterinsurgency experts who were later to apply their experience in Vietnam. The United States had granted independence to the Philippines in July 1946, but within months the communist-led Huk agrarian movement launched a revolt. A participant in its defeat was the American officer Major Edward G. Lansdale, who was then serving (from March 1946) as chief of US military intelligence in the Philippines. As the Huk revolt expanded, Lansdale later returned to Manila as the liaison between the Joint US Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG) and the new Philippine Department of National Defense, becoming a close adviser to President Ramon Magsaysay.1 In a similar series of events, Burma became independent on January 4, 1948, but the Communist Party of Burma soon launched an armed rebellion against the new government of the former British colony, which held its own against both communist and ethnic insurgents. In still-colonized Malaya, the 1948 Malayan Communist Party (MCP) uprising against British rule led to the declaration of the “Emergency,” a 12-year campaign (1948–60) that led to the defeat of the MCP and the eventual independence of Malaya in 1957. An architect of that British counterinsurgency campaign was Sir Robert G.K. Thompson, who like Lansdale in the Philippines, stayed on after Malaya’s independence and served as the new nation’s Permanent Secretary for Defence under Defence Minister Tun Abdul Razak. Both Lansdale and Thompson were to become involved in the Vietnam War in the 1950s and 1960s. France’s post-1945 attempt to re-conquer Vietnam had received escalating backing from the United States, especially after 1950. The Central Intelligence Agency set up a station in Saigon. In 1951, the station began working with Ngô Đinh Nhu, younger brother of the Vietnamese Catholic politician Ngô Đinh

Introduction 3

Diệm, who was then living in the United States. According to the CIA’s internal history, CIA and the House of Ngo, early in 1954, as the French military position deteriorated, “the Agency started trying to identify Vietnamese leaders with whom it might work directly to resist further Viet Minh expansion.” At a January meeting of the US National Security Council (NSC), “someone suggested that Colonel Edward Lansdale, USAF, renowned for his work as ‘kingmaker’ in the Philippines, be commissioned to find a Vietnamese” to play a role similar to that of Ramon Magsaysay.2 In June 1954, Lansdale arrived in Saigon and set up a second CIA station there, reporting personally to CIA Director Allen Dulles. The CIA’s historian of the Vietnam War wrote in 2001 that since “the southern rump state had to have a leader,” the United States “chose” Diệm for that role.3 Diệm flew to Saigon on June 25, 1954, to become premier of the State of Việt Nam. Edward Lansdale, who had just arrived to establish the city’s second CIA mission, had still “never heard of Diem,”4 though of course Saigon’s other CIA station had. Robert Thompson headed a survey team sent to South Vietnam in 1960 by Malayan Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman after Vietnamese President Diệm made a request for advisory assistance. Diệm, impressed with Thompson’s work, asked the British government to send him on a more permanent basis as an advisor to what had become the Republic of Vietnam. In September 1961, the British prime minister appointed Thompson to head the new British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam. Thus, in Thompson, President Diệm had “acquired a foreign counterinsurgency adviser of his own.” The then chief of the CIA’s Saigon station, William Colby, writing in 1978, recalled that Thompson and Diệm, with Colby in a supporting role, were responsible for introducing the Strategic Hamlet program in South Vietnam.5 The Malayan counterinsurgency model was much appreciated in Washington. On February 14, 1963, President Kennedy called “Malaysia … the best hope for security in that very vital part of the world.”6 There were indeed similarities between the Malayan, Philippine, and Vietnamese communist insurgencies. In all three countries, local communists had played the major role on the side of the Allies in the fight against Japanese aggression and occupation, and had inherited political, organizational, and military strength from their World War Two successes. Landholding inequalities also fueled the communist movement in each case. In both Malaya and the Philippines, these inequalities were addressed in the 1950s, though in different ways. Could not similar counterinsurgency models be applied to the landholding inequalities in South Vietnam in the early 1960s? Two factors, however, distinguished the situation in Vietnam in the early 1960s from the insurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s. The Malayan Communist Party, with few exceptions, had drawn its strength from the minority ethnic Chinese community of Malaya, rather than from the majority Malay peasantry. Most ethnic Chinese, unlike most Malay peasants, rarely owned land, and those who lived in rural areas were concentrated in squatter communities on the fringes of the jungle that made them more accessible to the communist guerrilla bands. However, the rural Chinese were relatively few in number, and the key to the successful British counterinsurgency in the 1950s was a campaign to compulsorily round them up and

4 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

resettle them in more easily patrolled “New Villages” where they could be isolated from contact with the communists who depended on them for recruits, supplies, and information. In South Vietnam, the “Strategic Hamlets” campaign, based on this model, had to encompass a far greater percentage of the majority Vietnamese population. That campaign proved much more difficult and vastly more unpopular. Similarly, in the Philippines, the Huk rebellion was geographically based in Central Luzon, one of the country’s approximately 15 regions, with much greater than average land maldistribution, high concentrations of landlordism, and high rates of peasant landlessness and tenancy. Under President Magsaysay, land reforms were introduced in Central Luzon that to a large extent addressed this problem and undercut the appeal of the Huk political program there. In South Vietnam, with its severe maldistribution of land, which was prevalent in the Mekong delta but also a problem in most lowland provinces including those of the central coast, any similarly effective land reforms would need to be far more wide-ranging, almost national rather than regional in scale. Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, Thailand was never colonized by a European power. But it did not avoid the violence of World War Two, nor its aftermath. Bangkok had allied with Japan in World War Two, seizing territories from all four of its neighbors – Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Malaya – territories that Thailand claimed but had previously lost to Britain and France. Forced to return those territories to its neighbors after 1945, Thailand developed a pattern of military dictatorship, internal instability, and intermittent political violence, sometimes on a mass scale, with outbreaks persisting even in the few short democratic interludes. “Thailand has experienced more coups d’état than any other country in contemporary history.” From 1945 to 2013 alone, ten successful military coups occurred there, and seven abortive coups.7 An unsuccessful coup attempt in June 1951, known as the Manhattan Rebellion, took 1,200 lives, “mostly civilians.” Marshal Sarit’s October 1958 coup brought hundreds of arrests and five executions.8 His successors’ military repression of the October 1973 democratic uprising killed at least 65 people.9 Their sacrifices led to a brief democratic era, but by 1976, “political assassinations, invariably of figures on the left, were commonplace.”10 Democracy ended with the brutal suppression of the student movement at Thammasat University in October 1976, killing 40 students.11 Another 42–52 civilians were shot dead in military repression of demonstrators in May 1992. And in April–May 2010, a Bangkok military crackdown on demonstrators killed 82 civilians.12 Thailand’s postwar pattern of military dictatorship and domestic political violence did not emanate merely from Thai tradition, the wartime alliance with Japan, nor even from its frustrated territorial expansionism. An additional factor was the Thai military’s postwar alliance with the United States and its role in the US wars in Laos and Vietnam. By 1973, the United States had over 44,000 military personnel stationed in Thailand; an additional 15,000 Thais and Americans provided them with base security.13 According to the former Thai foreign minister, Thanat Khoman,

Introduction 5

writing in 1973, “Construction of the air fields and bases at Korat, Takhli, Udorn, Nakhorn Phanom and others, was done secretly and was known only among leading military persons. The cabinet and myself as the Foreign Minister did not know about it until the news was leaked by the Americans themselves. Only then did we know that the Americans had built airfields in Thailand.”14 As Daniel Fineman has written, “American policy aims were incompatible with Thai democracy … the Americans demanded much more from Thailand than simple friendship … Only the military was willing to give such support, and only if civilian influence over foreign-policymaking were curtailed could the generals provide it.” In the 1960s, Bangkok sent 25 Thai battalions to fight in Laos alongside CIA-backed forces there. Three-quarters of all US bombing raids on North Vietnam took off from air bases in Thailand.15 Thailand’s singular avoidance of colonial rule had not prevented its violent entanglement with neighboring countries of Southeast Asia. Cambodia’s neutralist ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, visited Beijing for China’s National Day celebration on October 1, 1965. He praised China as Cambodia’s foremost friend. Sihanouk’s visit coincided with dramatic events in Indonesia: the abortive coup on 30 September and the massacre that immediately began, of, according to the CIA, possibly 800,000 communists and others.16 Sukarno would soon be replaced by the military dictatorship of General Suharto. Unknown to Sihanouk, his communist opponent Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot, was also in Beijing at the time, on a secret visit. Sar was watching the developments in Indonesia as closely as he could. Any lingering doubts in the minds of Sar and the Chinese leaders as to the wisdom of preparing for an armed revolution in Cambodia may have been dispelled by the Indonesian massacres, which demonstrated Sukarno’s powerlessness to defend his communist allies.17 Indeed, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) later looked back at this period as a lesson well learned. A 1977 CPK document dismissed the dissident views of two Khmer communists (both of whom had just been executed in S-21 prison) and others who in the 1960s had “said it was necessary to live together in the world [i.e., with the Vietnamese, and] live together with Sihanouk inside the country.” The CPK document then went on: “If our analysis had failed, we would have been in greater danger than [the communists] in Indonesia. But our analysis was victorious, because our analysis was agreed upon, because most of our cadres were in life-and-death contradiction with the enemy; the enemy sought to exterminate them constantly.”18 If this was not in fact the case for Cambodian communists in the mid-1960s, it certainly was for the communists in Indonesia. Pol Pot determined not only to avoid such a fate, but also to inflict it on his enemies and internal rivals. Another view of the significance of the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–66 was offered in retrospect by McGeorge Bundy, who at the time was special assistant for national security affairs to US Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In a 1978 reflection, Bundy stated that, while winning the war in Vietnam may have seemed “vital” to the United States until 1965, “at least from the time of the anti-Communist revolution in Indonesia, late in 1965, that adjective was excessive, and so also was our effort.”19 The

6 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

view that US goals in Southeast Asia had largely been achieved when “a new antiCommunist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the Communist Party” was shared by US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as early as 1967, when he wrote a memorandum stating: “To the extent that our original intervention and our existing actions in Vietnam were motivated by the perceived need to draw the line against Chinese expansionism in Asia, our objective has already been attained.” On a tour of Asia, MacNamara’s successor, Clark Clifford, found the leaders of the “domino” countries there no longer vitally concerned about Vietnam. Clifford asked, “Was it possible that we were continuing to be guided by judgments that might once have had validity but were now obsolete?”20 Significantly, Bundy did not describe as “excessive” the massacre of possibly 800,000 Indonesian communists and others. But for him the toll was sufficient for the US to wind down the Vietnam War in that region. Foreign Affairs commentators David Fromkin and James Chase conclude: “In this view, then, President Johnson’s major military commitment to the Vietnam conflict was undertaken in the very year that it began to be unnecessary.”21 From late in 1965, it was the US war in Vietnam that was “excessive.” For Bundy, looking back again 30 years later, Vietnam was “a war we should not have fought.” He conceded in 1995 that “on the overall issue – are you for the war or against it, in 1965 and after, the doves were right.”22 Nevertheless, the Vietnam War raged on, escalated, and spread to Cambodia. The year 1965 saw the first US tactical bombings across the border, followed by secret armed Special Forces missions into Cambodia.23 Then in March 1969, Nixon and Kissinger began their strategic B-52 “Menu” bombing campaign against Vietnamese communist sanctuaries in Cambodia. In March 1970 the pro-US General Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk, leading to immediate invasions of Cambodia by the armies of both sides in the Vietnamese civil war and then quickly afterward by US ground troops. Now enjoying the support of Sihanouk and the Vietnamese communists, and benefiting from rural opposition to expanded US bombing that spread over the countryside and helped turn Cambodian villagers into recruits, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces grew from several thousand guerrillas in 1969 to more than 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.24 They took power in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, forcibly evacuated the capital and other cities, and proceeded to transform Cambodian society with genocidal effect, particularly in its impact on ethnic minorities and religious groups. The only foreign chief of state to visit the closed Cambodian state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) was Ne Win, the Burmese military dictator who had seized control in a 1962 coup in Rangoon. Ne Win traveled to Phnom Penh in November 1977. In a speech in the Cambodian capital on November 26, Ne Win stated that “April 17 [1975] was a historic day for the people of Kampuchea. We are very happy that the Kampuchean people on that day won a decisive victory in their struggle for independence.”25 Phnom Penh Radio reported that Ne Win met four times with Pol Pot’s deputy Nuon Chea and DK chief of state Khieu Samphan, who in 2018 were both convicted of genocide against Cambodian ethnic minority groups.26 He likely also met with DK’s secretive leader Pol Pot, who had just returned from his second visit to China.

Introduction 7

Interestingly, while it is not known what the two national leaders may have discussed in private, it is known that in 1977 the Burmese military and immigration authorities were already preparing to launch Operation Naga Min (Dragon King), “a national effort to register citizens and screen out foreigners prior to a national census.”27 That operation formally began on February 6, 1978, just months after Ne Win left Phnom Penh. It provoked the first mass flight of Burma’s Rohingya Muslim minority. By May 1978, over 200,000 Rohingya had fled into Bangladesh. The Rangoon government proclaimed that the exodus signified the Rohingya’s illegal status in Burma. However, “Refugees reported that the Burmese army had forcibly evicted them and alleged widespread army brutality, rape and murder.”28 The comparison with DK’s genocidal treatment of its own Cham Muslim and other minorities is certainly intriguing. In 1991–92, the Burmese armed forces launched a second operation, entitled “Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation,” which again led to the flight of 200,000–250,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh.

Scholarship on political violence in Southeast Asia This volume is not a comprehensive compendium of studies on Southeast Asian political violence but is rather a collection of essays from the disciplines of anthropology, political science, history, peace studies, and law. The aim of the book is not to provide a survey of political violence in Southeast Asia following World War Two, but rather to illuminate particular features of the violence and bring to light events involving political violence not previously studied. There are few volumes on mass atrocities in Southeast Asia that either cover the region as a whole or include cases from multiple countries. Most were published a decade or more ago. They include Abraham, Newman, and Weiss’s 2010 volume Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives29; Croissant et al.’s 2006 collection, The Politics of Death: Political Violence in Southeast Asia30; Paul Smith’s 2005 volume on terrorism in Southeast Asia31; Linell Cady and Sheldon Simon’s from 2007 on religion and violence in Southeast Asia32; Damien Kingsbury’s 2006 edited volume on terrorism and security in maritime Southeast Asia, Violence in Between: Conflict and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia33; and most recently, Cheng Guan Ang’s 2018 book, Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History.34 Our volume, like these regional and multi-sited texts, invites the reader to compare and contrast various cases, noting patterns that recur as well as the differences, and thereby offering a fuller understanding of the causes and forms of, and responses to, mass atrocities in the region beyond the confines of particular countries. However, this book focuses on six countries within Southeast Asia alone (not South Asia), while exploring themes broader than terrorism or religion, and it extends its coverage beyond the Cold War to examine Southeast Asian cases of political violence in the past three decades as well as in the four previous decades. A few broad remarks regarding political violence in Southeast Asia can be noted up front. Obvious, but in need of stating, is the tremendous impact of colonialism

8 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

and later the Cold War, both of which set the stage for later developments. The various colonial regimes in Southeast Asia left an authentically mixed record in the field of infrastructure, from health to education to transportation. But colonialism’s radical reorganization of societies and its often brutal violence, both physical and structural, created fertile ground for some of the most ruthless regimes to come to power in its wake. The categorization of people according to ethnicity and race and concomitant racist policies, the introduction and provocation of nationalism, and other colonial imports, were all part and parcel of the Southeast Asian experience, with only the notable exception of Thailand, which nonetheless adopted many of the same ideas and practices on its own.35 Likewise, the Cold War also impacted many of the new nations in the aftermath of World War Two, with the introduction of rivaling communist and capitalist ideologies, of modern armaments and competing models for the newly independent nations, and the external meddling in local politics up to the outright war that often came with it. However, as Lau suggests, the “cataclysmic upheavals” that World War Two had already brought to the region with Japan’s defeat and expulsion of three colonial powers in a mere five months of 1942 alone amounted to a “systemsmeltdown.”36 This meltdown clearly set the stage for the eventual success of the national independence movements and influenced the newly independent nations’ choices of political ideological models as the global Cold War commenced in World War Two’s aftermath. Geoffrey Robinson (2010) has observed that the ways in which violence is enacted, interpreted, and responded to is to some extent conditioned by prevailing global ideologies.37 In the post-war era these have included the Cold War, humanitarianism, and (following 9/11) international security. At the time of the preparation of this volume, populism and authoritarianism appear to be among the most prevalent ideologies at play.

Some common themes of the volume Apart from historical connections that link multiple cases of political violence in postwar Southeast Asia, a number of common themes that emerged from the discussions at the November 2018 conference take a prominent place in this book. These include the vulnerability of populations to outbreaks of violence during periods of transition; the vulnerability of marginal groups with ambiguous identities or occupying liminal spaces; the propensity of perpetrators to seek to unmask “hidden” intentions on the part of their victims while yet covering up their own atrocities; the key roles of leadership, command, and impunity; the range of mechanisms of killing from technological to visceral; the haunting influence of past violence on contemporary political and cultural climates; and the role of political imagination in a variety of spheres of activity. Achieving independence from colonial powers and transitioning from dictatorship to democracy (or the reverse) are transformational processes. In Southeast Asia, transformations from one state to another can be seen as fruitful but also dangerous and

Introduction 9

uncertain; just as in everyday life, dangers are evident in the transitions of birth, coming of age, and death. Several chapters in this volume cover such transitional periods in the political realm. Some of the worst violence has transpired precisely in these circumstances when new governments with their accompanying ideologies were being established, such as in Cambodia during the Lon Nol period (the chapters by Path and Luong), and during the Khmer Rouge regime (Bultmann and Kwok). In Myanmar the worst violence again emerged during the transition from a military government to democracy (Alam, Ibrahim, Prasse-Freeman and Ong), and in Indonesia more than a decade after independence at the ousting of Sukarno’s regime and the destruction of the PKI (Robinson). On the other hand, in some cases the violence outlasted the ruptures of the transition period and marked the new era itself. The Lon Nol and Khmer Rouge regimes both brought escalating violence not only at their inception, but continuing through the life of the regime itself (in both cases overseeing violence far worse than that of the Sihanouk regime that had preceded them). Taking into account the mass violence in East Timor (which rose to the level of “extermination as a crime against humanity” according to the 2005 UNsponsored Truth Commission report)38 and West Papua that followed the 1965–66 transitional violence in Indonesia, the same applies to the Suharto regime in comparison to that of Sukarno. While violence may occur in the uncertainty that comes with processes of transformation, these same contexts often invoke a concomitant desire to fix or solidify identities. War produces a proclivity for unambiguous identities and absolute loyalty. People whose identity and loyalties may appear dubious owing to their marginality (in their locality, ethnicity, religion, ideology – or a combination thereof) come to be viewed as threatening. War and violence have no room for liminal identities. As Appadurai observes: “The primary literature closest to the most brutal episodes of contemporary ethnic violence is shot through with the language of the impostor, the secret agent, and the counterfeit person. This discourse brings together the uncertainty about categories and intimacy among persons.”39 Marginal groups such as those discussed in Lentz’s chapter – marginal uplanders – become forced into submission to a new state. These once relatively stateless people40 found themselves no longer on the margins but instead, as historic battles were fought in their territories, their identity became central to the state-making process.41 In the case of the Rohingya, their identity is liminal due to the historical fluidity of ethnic identity and of the state’s borders, as was also true for other upland parts of Burma.42 The uncertainty of categories manifests itself also in the idea that truth is masked or hidden from view. In Bultmann’s chapter on Cambodia, we see the guards at S-21 prison looking for hidden truths in the bodies of the prisoners. In Luong’s and Path’s chapters, Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority population were seen by the Lon Nol government and many members of the Cambodian population then and now as having hidden intentions to bring about the annihilation of Cambodia’s people. Luong shows how not only are any such intentions historically invisible but that the truth about Cambodia’s anti-Vietnamese massacres lay hidden below the surface of the

10 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

Mekong River. Ibrahim shows in his chapter, similarly to Path and Luong for Cambodia, that the Myanmar state views its Rohingya population as impostors, merely posing as Burmese nationals. Similarly, in Robinson’s chapter, some Indonesians targeted during the Suharto purges were accused of “secretly” being communists. However, as several of the chapter authors argue here, despite cultural ascriptions and stereotypes that further fueled violence, the killing that did erupt was not caused by cultural differences, but rather, was organized by political leaders, whether through direct orders such as in the Philippine case detailed in McCoy’s chapter, through more deliberately ambiguous directives as Kwok argues in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or in both tacit and active efforts, as in Myanmar. Further, governments may perpetuate violence through ensuring continuing impunity for perpetrators as Haberkorn argues for Thailand, and McGrew for contemporary Cambodia, and finally in cases of outright war such as in the first and second Indochinese wars, described in Lentz’s and Quinn-Judge’s chapters. We also see in several chapters how killing can become a technical procedure whereas in other cases the violence is more visceral in nature. In Quinn-Judge’s and Lentz’s chapters, in aerial bombings primarily perpetrated by the US, people are targeted and killed from a great distance with zero intimacy or physicality. In Bultmann’s chapter the technical is not at all removed from the corporeal, but bodies are used as resources from which useful parts can be extracted in ways that supposedly demonstrate efficiency. These different technical ways of killing contrast with the face-to-face slaughter of ethnic Vietnamese during the Lon Nol period discussed in both Path’s and Luong’s chapters – killings both visceral and intimate. Likewise, the Indonesian and Philippine massacres discussed in Robinson’s and McCoy’s chapters and the attacks on Rohingya villagers in those on Myanmar (by Alam, Ibrahim, Munyan, and Prasse-Freeman and Ong). McGrew’s chapter describes alleged thieves attacked by angry mobs – a probable response to everyday corruption, impunity, and the more abstract structural violence that impinges on trust in the political, judicial, and moral system under which people live. The tangible expression of anger may be a response to their impotence in seeking justice through the law. Impotence against a corrupt state is also found in Haberkorn’s chapter about impunity, which shows how, despite the pattern of Thai state violence and corruption, the ideal of justice persists. Nefarious deeds of the past continue to haunt the present in several of the cases presented in this volume. In Luong’s chapter, we read that today’s Phnom Penh riverfront view of a modern Vietnamese-owned luxury hotel on the opposite bank is haunted by the specter of the thousands of Vietnamese people drowned beneath the water there in 1970. In Pawakapan’s chapter, Thailand’s right-wing nationalist movements such as the Village Scouts from the mid-1970s have returned to inhabit the Thai political landscape. In Ibrahim’s, Alam’s, and Prasse-Freeman and Ong’s chapters, previous episodes of violence against the Rohingya and other minorities are loudly echoed in the genocidal violence directed toward them today. In his chapter, McCoy shows us that Rodrigo Duterte’s spectacular displays of violence

Introduction 11

are designed to haunt the nation as reminders of Duterte’s potency and power. Lentz’s chapter posits that during the First Indochina war the recent memory of the atomic bombing of Japan in World War Two created a specter of annihilation that haunted the inhabitants of Điện Biên Phủ as rumors circulated of the United States using atomic weapons to end the war there. Finally, Quinn-Judge suggests that we should heed the haunting toll of the tremendous wreckage of lives from the US bombing of Vietnam as Washington proceeds to use or threaten bombing as a means to fight other wars. Other recurrent themes include the prominent role of the imagination, which can be positive, such as imagining peace through the Dhammayietra movement described in McGrew’s chapter, but also negative such as imagining a nuclear winter as we might in reading Lentz’s piece. More critically, the idea of imagined enemies permeates several of the chapters where we read of certain populations imagined to be deceitfully plotting and carrying out plans to bring about the existential annihilation of a majority group. In the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol, the government kindles this anxiety among the Khmer population (Luong’s and Path’s chapters); in Myanmar, the Muslim Rohingya are seen as a pernicious threat to the majority Buddhist citizenry (Alam’s, Ibrahim’s, Prasse-Freeman and Ong’s, and Munyan’s chapters); in Suharto’s Indonesia, communists are imagined to be a threat to the nation and morality (Robinson’s chapter); and in Bultmann’s chapter on Cambodia, “enemies” viewed as a virus deadly to the nation, are quarantined, studied, and experimented upon. And imagination also can be applied to gauge intentions as, in Kwok’s analysis, regional commanders have to imagine the goals of national leaders when left to interpret the intent in their vague orders. Munyan’s chapter also deals with intentions but here the goal is to not engage the imagination but rather to prove legal intent.

Overview of the book The volume is divided into six sections: Dimensions of Mass Violence; The Politics of Fear; Minorities and the State; Technologies, Techniques, and Ideologies; Justice, Ethics, and History; and the Shadow of the Past on the Present. These themes and divisions, like the themes discussed in the previous sections are not meant to be absolute but offer a conceptual outline for considering the chapters. The first two chapters of the volume examine in different ways the nature of mass violence, the conditions that allow it to occur, how it underpins state power, and more broadly why some outbreaks are internationally recognized and opposed when others are not. Geoffrey Robinson opens this volume by raising the specter of the massacres committed at the start of the Suharto regime and pointing at the impunity that Indonesian leaders have enjoyed despite their horrific crimes. Regarding the specificity of these crimes, he ventures to investigate more deeply their timing, geography, and the way they were committed. Robinson asks: “Under what conditions are mass killing and genocide most likely to occur?” The first half of his chapter reveals the significant role that the army played in mobilizing and perpetuating the violence, while pointing to the tacit endorsement of foreign powers. In the second

12 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

half of the chapter, Robinson takes his findings from Indonesia to ask broader questions about the causes of mass violence and why some crimes of mass violence are forgotten. Turning to Myanmar in Chapter 2, Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong seek to “rethink mass violence” by studying its modes of operation and also its functions. In a comparative study of the Rohingya and the Wa and other ethnic minorities in Myanmar, they identify and examine the specific forms of violence used in the treatment of the Rohingya. This chapter develops the concepts of incorporation and exclusion and concludes with a discussion of mass violence and its relation to other forms of violence. The next section of the volume, “The Politics of Fear” consists of three chapters. The first of these is Alfred W. McCoy’s, “Performative violence and Philippine populism.” McCoy takes us on a grizzly journey beginning in 1946 that follows the trail of blood left behind by Philippine politicians who have made the murder of their citizens an everyday practice for three-quarters of a century. McCoy pays close attention to two regimes that are notably the most excessive in this regard: those of President Ferdinand Marcos and President Rodrigo Duterte. McCoy asks whether killings by these two leaders can tell us anything about the wider political climate where populism abounds. In Chapter 4, William Kwok examines the motivations of Khmer Rouge subordinates to follow orders from their superiors to kill. Kwok studies the relative clarity or vagueness of the orders and how the interpretation of such orders by Khmer Rouge cadres varied across different regions of the country. Kwok argues that varying levels of clarity of the orders given, and their subsequent interpretation, are salient to understanding the onset and path of genocide in Cambodia and beyond. Mayesha Alam in Chapter 5, on the other hand, examines the strategic and ideational reasoning that is tied to the Rohingya violence as an alternative explanation beyond racism. She posits that the Myanmar state’s security agenda, combined with the exclusion of the Rohingya from the national imagination and from the physical boundaries of the state, propelled the extreme military-led ethnic cleansing that occurred. The next section, “Minorities and the State,” opens with Christian Lentz’s chapter on Điện Biên Phủ in northern Vietnam during the first Indochina war. Lentz chronicles the plight of the diverse peoples of the Black River area as their homeland became a battlefield between competing French and Việt Minh forces. This region, argues Lentz, carried specific and local meanings for its inhabitants, meanings that differed from those imposed on the area by their lowland Kinh/Việt neighbors. Engaging the notion of territoriality, Lentz scrutinizes the state-building processes taking place amid the wartime political violence in the region, particularly its impact on civilian non-combatants. In Chapter 7, Kosal Path focuses on the massacres of Vietnamese civilians in Cambodia and the pernicious racist propaganda disseminated against them by the Lon Nol government in the early 1970s. Path uncovers a series of policies and practices that served to both fuel and ignite distrust and hatred of ethnic Vietnamese living inside Cambodia’s borders. Viewing the situation from a geopolitical perspective, he asks, “Why did the newly formed Khmer Republic

Introduction 13

government under Marshal Lon Nol systematically persecute Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese residents to the point of degrading its important wartime alliance with the Republic of Vietnam during the early 1970s?” In the chapter that follows, Azeem Ibrahim analyzes the genocide committed against the Rohingya in more recent years, demonstrating how over time the politics of identity has driven the Burmese state’s violence against its Rohingya minority. The next section (Technologies, Techniques, and Ideologies) features two chapters that demonstrate in different ways how ideologies combined with technology or techniques can have monstrous consequences. Sophie Quinn-Judge’s chapter shows how the massive bombing campaigns perpetrated by the United States during the Second Indochina War had catastrophic and enduring effects that far outweighed any rational military purpose. Focusing on the short-sighted reasoning behind the US decision to bomb, guided principally by Robert McNamara, Quinn-Judge walks us through the history of the US bombing. Aerial bombardment is notable for an inherent corporeal detachment between pilot and target. Given this detachment, it is seemingly the bomb or the napalm itself that, after an interval, blows up the body or inflicts its wounds on a distant victim’s flesh. Likewise, the objectives themselves are reduced to numbers. The focus on processes and ends in service of an ideological battle is found in a very different setting in Daniel Bultmann’s chapter. Here the violence committed by Khmer Rouge prison guards at S-21 is intimately exercised on the bodies of political prisoners. In a detached pseudo-scientific manner reminiscent of the medical experiments committed in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the bodies of prisoners are not only experimented upon with the results diligently recorded, but the prisoner is a mere resource – whose body parts are to be gathered and processed to serve the revolution. The section “Justice, Ethics, and History” features four chapters, beginning with that of Katherine Munyan, who offers insight into the legal dimensions of the Rohingya violence. Carefully unpacking and analyzing “intent” as a legal concept as well as a mental state, she shows why this is a key issue in determining genocide and, moreover, how historically the law pertaining to genocide has leaned more toward accountability than suppression and prevention. In the next chapter, Tyrell Haberkorn links the ongoing failure of the justice system in Thailand to stop or prevent the corruption or the accountability that would limit the Thai state’s frequent outbreaks of violence against its citizens. The notion of justice also permeates the chapter by Phirum Gaillard, who provides an analysis of the making of Rithy Panh’s film S-21 in the context of the making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the ECCC). Through her in-depth analysis of the various stages of the filmmaking, we see Panh’s role in the process as his subjects, former guards of S-21 prison, re-enact their practices while engaging in an exchange with two former inmates. This section ends with a chapter by Hoang Minh Vu, who highlights the moral failures of Vietnam, the US, China, and ASEAN in preventing war, genocide, and violence. He warns that it is not only imperative that nations remember the results of nonintervention in the past, but also that scholars should also not shirk the truth even when it is uncomfortable.

14 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

In the final chapters in the volume, we see how traces of past large-scale violent events emerge or continue to haunt the present. Puangthong Pawakapan documents the revival of state-supported right-wing groups and organizations in the political upheaval that has plagued the kingdom of Thailand since 2006. One of these movements, the Village Scouts, had played a direct role in the 1976 massacre of students and others at Thammasat University. In the subsequent chapter, Tram Luong pivots between Lon Nol’s Cambodia and present-day Hun Sen’s. Taking us beneath both the sheen of today’s new hotels and the surface of the nearby Tonle Sap river, she shows how memory of the massacres of the Vietnamese population living along the river in 1970 lies barely below that surface. Juxtaposing the massacres during the Lon Nol years with the pernicious undertone of anti-Vietnamese sentiment today, Luong demonstrates how constructions of the Vietnamese as a menacing “other” that buoyed genocidal hatred in the past are fueled by economic tensions today. In the final chapter, Laura McGrew focuses not on the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, but rather on the violence that has shown itself in a variety of forms ever since. This violence includes mob killings, state violence against protesters and political rivals, and extrajudicial killings. Are these violent acts reverberations from the Khmer Rouge cataclysm or are there other factors that lean more toward sustaining Hun Sen’s authoritarian power (and thereby making them more like the situation in Thailand described by Haberkorn)? More hopefully, she also points to efforts toward peace such as the marches led by the Buddhist activist Maha Ghosananda.

Final thoughts We deliver this book on the causes, consequences, connections, and continuities of post-World War Two political violence in Southeast Asia at what may appear to be a pivotal moment in history. As several contributors to this volume suggest, we must be alert to the way shifting tides of political power have proven increasingly resistant to the checks and balances of governmental institutions or to the concerns of citizenry who may support them. Scholars are often positioned not only to recognize troubling historical developments but also to speak out for those who may not, or for those who may lack voices. This volume stands as a warning that what has happened before may happen again, and in some cases already is.

Notes 1 Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion (Quezon City, New Day Publishers, 1986), 147; Eduardo Lachica, Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila, Solidaridad, 1971), 133–4. 2 Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–63 (Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2000), 14–15. 3 Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001), xiii. 4 Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3–4.

Introduction 15

5 Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 78, 79; Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo, 151. 6 Wen-Qing Ngoei, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 114. 7 Max Fisher, “Thailand has had more coups than any other country. This is why,” Washington Post, December 3, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ 2013/12/03/thailand-has-had-more-coups-than-any-other-country-this-is-why/. 8 Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 148, 254–6. 9 “Bangkok: The Revolution that Never Was,” Ronin, no. 15, 1974, 5–9. Puangthong R. Pawakapan provides a later, updated figure of 77 dead. 10 David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 302. 11 For the latest research on this event, see Thongchai Winichakul, Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020). 12 See Puangthong R. Pawakapan’s chapter in this volume; and Asia Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, Bloody May: Excessive Use of Lethal Force in Bangkok, The Events of May 17–20, 1992 (Draft), September 23, 1992, 47pp, www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ reports/THAILAND.PDF, accessed November 2, 2019, 18, 38. 13 “The USA in Thailand,” Ronin, no. 15 (1974), 32–3, citing the Moose-Lowenstein Report, 1973. 14 Social Sciences Review, May 1973, quoted in “The USA in Thailand,” 32. 15 Fineman, A Special Relationship, 261–2. 16 The CIA estimated 800,000 died in Indonesia in 1965–66. Harper’s, September 1984. 17 Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985), 222ff. 18 Communist Party of Kampuchea, Rien saut daoy songkep nu prowatt chollana padewatt Kampuchea kraom kar duk noam rebos Pak Kommyunis Kampuchea (“Abbreviated Lesson on the History of the Kampuchean Revolutioary Movement led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea”), undated (1977?), Phnom Penh, 23pp typescript, 5. Document VII in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, eds. David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua (New Haven, CT: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), 213–26. 19 McGeorge Bundy, “The Americans and the World,” in A New America?, ed. Stephen R. Graubard (New York: Norton, 1978), 292–3; see also Harrison E. Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 52. 20 David Fromkin and James Chase, “What Are the Lessons of Vietnam?,” Foreign Affairs, spring 1985, 742–3; Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line (London: Verso, 2000), 65. 21 Fromkin and Chase, “What Are the Lessons of Vietnam?,” 743. 22 Bundy in 1995, quoted in Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 2008), 227. 23 Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 285; Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia,” The Walrus, October 2006, 67. 24 Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973,” Vietnam Generation 1, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 4–41. 25 Ne Win quoted in Bertil Lintner, “Broadening the Breach,” Irrawaddy 8, no. 7 (July 2000), www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=1896. 26 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/ default/files/documents/courtdoc/2013-12-06%2010%3A24/E295_6_1.4_Redacted_EN. PDF, “Annex 4: Khieu Samphan Chronology,” 58, www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/ court/case-00202-judgement. 27 Human Rights Watch (2000), “II. Historical Background,” www.hrw.org/reports/ 2000/burma/burm005-01.htm, citing K. Maudood Elahi, “The Rohingya Refugees in

16 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Bangladesh: Historical Perspectives and Consequences,” in Refugees: A Third World Dilemma, ed. John Rogge (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 231. Human Rights Watch, citing Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed Books, 1991), 241; Engy Abdelkader, “The History of the Persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” The Conversation, September 20, 2017, http://theconversation. com/the-history-of-the-persecution-of-myanmars-rohingya-84040. Itty Abraham, Edward Newman, and Meredith L. Weiss, Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2010). Aurel Croissant, Beate Martin, and Sascha Kneip, The Politics of Death: Political Violence in Southeast Asia (Berlin: Lit, 2006). Paul J. Smith, ed., Terrorism and Violence in Southeast Asia: Transnational Challenges to States and Regional Stability (New York: Routledge, 2005). Linell E. Cady and Sheldon W. Simon, eds., Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Damien Kingsbury, Violence in Between: Conflict and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2006). Cheng Guan Ang, Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018). Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for Siwilai: Civilizational Thinking in Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (August 2000), 528–49. Albert Lau, ed., Southeast Asia and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2012), 3. Geoffrey Robinson, “Mass Violence in Southeast Asia,” in Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia, eds. Itty Abraham, Edward Newman, and Meredith Weiss (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2010), 69–90. Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008), 135, citing Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste (CAVR), October 2005, Part 8: Responsibility and Accountability, 6. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 155. See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). See also Eve M. Zucker, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). See Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) on fluid identities.

Bibliography Abdelkader, Engy. “The History of the Persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya.” The Conversation, September 20, 2017. http://theconversation.com/the-history-of-the-persecutio n-of-myanmars-rohingya-84040. Abraham, Itty, Edward Newman, and Meredith L. Weiss. Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2010. Ahern, Thomas L., Jr. CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–63. Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2000. Ahern, Thomas L., Jr. CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam. Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001. Ang, Cheng Guan. Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 2018. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Introduction 17

Asia Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. Bloody May: Excessive Use of Lethal Force in Bangkok, The Events of May 17–20, 1992 (Draft), September 23, 1992, 47pp, 18, 38. Accessed November 2, 2019. “Bangkok: The Revolution that Never Was.” Ronin, no. 15 (1974), 5–9. Bundy, McGeorge. “The Americans and the World.” In A New America?, edited by Stephen R. Graubard, 289–303. New York: Norton, 1978. Cady, Linell E., and Sheldon W. Simon, eds. Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Chomsky, Noam. A New Generation Draws the Line. London: Verso, 2000. Communist Party of Kampuchea. “Rien saut daoy songkep nu prowatt chollana padewatt Kampuchea kraom kar duk noam rebos Pak Kommyunis Kampuchea” (“Abbreviated Lesson on the History of the Kampuchean Revolutionary Movement led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea”), undated (1977?), Phnom Penh, 23pp typescript, 5. Document VII in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, eds. David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua, 213–226. New Haven, CT: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1988. Croissant, Aurel, Beate Martin, and Sascha Kneip. The Politics of Death: Political Violence in Southeast Asia. Berlin: Lit, 2006. Elahi, K. Maudood. “The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Historical Perspectives and Consequences.” In Refugees: A Third World Dilemma, edited by John Rogge, 231. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/ default/files/documents/courtdoc/2013-12-06%2010%3A24/E295_6_1.4_Redacted_ EN.PDF. “Annex 4: Khieu Samphan Chronology,” 58. https://www.eccc.gov.kh/ en/document/court/case-00202-judgement. Fineman, Daniel. A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997. Fisher, Max. “Thailand has had more coups than any other country. This is why.” Washington Post, December 3, 2013. www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ 2013/12/03/thailand-has-had-more-coups-than-any-other-country-this-is-why/. Fromkin, David, and James Chase. “What Are the Lessons of Vietnam?” Foreign Affairs (Spring1985): 722–746. Goldstein, Gordon M. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 2008. Human Rights Watch (2000), “II. Historical Background.” www.hrw.org/reports/2000/ burma/burm005-01.htm. Kerkvliet, Benedict J. The Huk Rebellion. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1986. Lachica, Eduardo. Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt. Manila: Solidaridad, 1971. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008. Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975. 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Kiernan, Ben. “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973.” Vietnam Generation 1, no. 1 (Winter1989), 4–41. Kingsbury, Damien. Violence in Between: Conflict and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS, 2006. Lau, Albert, ed. Southeast Asia and the Cold War. London: Routledge, 2012. Leach, Edmund. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.

18 Ben Kiernan and Eve M. Zucker

Lintner, Bertil. “Broadening the Breach,” Irrawaddy 8, no. 7 (July2000). www2.irrawaddy. com/article.php?art_id=1896. Miller, Edward G. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Ngoei, Wen-Qing. Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Owen, Taylor, and Ben Kiernan. “Bombs over Cambodia.” The Walrus, October2006, 62–69. Robinson, Geoffrey. “Mass Violence in Southeast Asia.” In Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Itty Abraham, Edward Newman, and Meredith Weill. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2010. Salisbury, Harrison E., ed. Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Smith, Paul J., ed. Terrorism and Violence in Southeast Asia: Transnational Challenges to States and Regional Stability. New York: Routledge, 2005. “Thailand Near Bottom of Privacy Protection Table.” Bangkok Post, October 16, 2019. www.bangkokpost.com/business/1773484/thailand-near-bottom-of-privacy-protec tion-table. “The USA in Thailand.” Ronin, no. 15 (1974), 32–33. Tripathi, Salil. “Singapore: Laboratory of Digital Censorship.” New York Review of Books, July 19, 2019. www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/19/singapore-laboratory-of-digital-censorship/. Valencia, Mark J. “Who’s Bullying Who in the South China Sea?” East Asia Forum, November 2, 2019. www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/11/02/whos-bullying-who-in-the-south-china-sea/? utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter2019-11-03. Widyono, Benny. Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Winichakul, Thongchai. Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. Winichakul, Thongchai. “The Quest for Siwilai: Civilizational Thinking in Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Siam.” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (August2000), 528–549. www.jstor.org/stable/2658942?origin=JSTOR-pdf. Wyatt, David K. Thailand: A Short History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Zucker, Eve M. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013.

PART 1

Dimensions of Mass Violence

1 A TIME TO KILL The anti-communist violence in Indonesia, 1965–661 Geoffrey Robinson

In a little over six months, from late 1965 to early 1966, roughly half a million members of the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, Indonesian Communist Party) and other leftists were killed. Another million or so were detained without charge, and many were subjected to torture, including rape. The targets of this violence were ordinary people – farmers, teachers, day laborers, artists, writers, civil servants – and they were killed in gruesome ways: decapitated, castrated, their dismembered bodies left in public places. An eyewitness described the scene close to his home in East Java: Usually the corpses were no longer recognizable as human. Headless. Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn’t sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked together on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew.2 This was not a civil war. Those killed and detained were not armed – and all belonged to what were at the time lawful political and social organizations. In fact, at the moment of its annihilation, the PKI was the largest non-governing communist party in the world but had no armed wing. The violence against party members and other leftists stemmed from official allegations that the PKI leadership – under the name of “The September 30th Movement” – had conspired to kill six senior army generals in a failed coup attempt on October 1, 1965. Based on that unproven claim, the army and its allies began a campaign to destroy the PKI – and to overthrow the popular left-nationalist President Sukarno. The campaign was led by Major-General Suharto, who soon became president and remained in power for more than three decades before being forced to step down in 1998.

22 Geoffrey Robinson

FIGURE 1.1

PKI members and sympathizers detained by the army in Bali, ca. December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia)

The consequences of the violence were far reaching. In less than a year, the PKI had been crushed and President Sukarno had been swept aside. In their place, a virulently anti-communist army leadership seized power, signaling the start of more than three decades of military-backed authoritarian rule. The state that emerged from the carnage, known as the New Order, became notorious for its systematic violation of human rights, especially in areas outside the heartland, including East Timor (Timor Leste), Aceh, and West Papua, where hundreds of thousands of people died or were killed by government forces over the next few decades. The violence also altered the country’s political and social landscape in fundamental ways, leaving a legacy of hyper-militarism along with an extreme intolerance of dissent that stymied critical thought and opposition, especially on the Left. Perhaps most important, the events of 1965–66 destroyed the lives of many millions of people who suffered egregious restrictions on their most basic rights, and an enduring social stigma because of their presumed association with leftist organizations and ideas. Even now, half a century later – and more than two decades after the country began its transition to democracy – Indonesian society bears deep scars from those events. In its scale and significance, the violence of 1965–66 was comparable to some of the most notorious campaigns of mass killing of the postwar period, including those in Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda – and it surpassed the iconic cases of authoritarian violence in Latin America, such as those in Argentina and Chile. And

A time to kill 23

yet, this violence remains virtually unknown – and largely unacknowledged – outside Indonesia. Thus, the World History Project’s entry for the year 1965 includes the fact that “Kellogg’s Apple Jacks Cereal First Appears” but fails to mention the killing of half a million people in Indonesia.3 Moreover, in contrast to most of the great mass killings of the twentieth century, these crimes have never been punished or even properly investigated, and there have been no serious calls for any such action by international bodies or states.4 In this extraordinary record of impunity, Indonesia is arguably closer to China, Russia, and the United States than to any other country. Even inside the country, the events of 1965–66 are still poorly understood. The massive production of memoir, truth telling, and forensic investigation that have followed virtually every other genocide in the past century, including those in Southeast Asia, have scarcely begun. More than 50 years after the fact, no national truth commission has been established; no comprehensive effort to exhume the hundreds of mass graves dotted across the country has been made; no official memorials have been constructed to honor the dead; no apologies or reparations have been offered by the state; no proper judicial investigations have been undertaken; and no criminal charges have been brought. The book on which this chapter is based, The Killing Season, aims to interrupt that disturbing pattern of silence and impunity.5 It examines the events of 1965–66 in an effort to understand how and why they happened, why so little has been said or done about them, and what the long-term ramifications have been. This chapter also seeks answers to a number of analytical puzzles about the violence that have remained elusive. What accounts for its distinctive geographical and temporal patterns and variations? That is, why was the violence concentrated in certain regions – Central Java, East Java, and Bali – and why did it begin and end at markedly different times in different parts of the country? Why, despite those variations, did the violence take broadly similar forms across the country? Why, for example, did civilian militia groups everywhere play such a central role; and why were methods like disappearance, mutilation, corpse display, sexual violence, and mass execution, so common? And finally, who was ultimately responsible for the violence, how did they get away with it, and what can be done today to bring them to account? While the answers to these questions lie, in part, in Indonesia’s distinctive history and culture, I have found it fruitful to think about them comparatively, by contemplating the events of 1965–66 in light of the wider literatures on genocide, mass violence, and human rights. And so, while focusing substantively on the case of Indonesia, I also ask more broadly: Under what conditions are mass killing and genocide most likely to occur? And why are some such crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten and left unpunished? I will return to these wider questions at the end of this chapter. But first I want to set out an account of the Indonesian violence that I think explains its distinctive patterns and variations while also making possible its comparison to other cases.

FIGURE 1.2

Map of Indonesia and East Timor.

24 Geoffrey Robinson

A time to kill 25

Explaining Indonesia’s violence Indonesian authorities, and many other commentators, have insisted that the violence of 1965–66 was the inevitable result of popular anger against the PKI, a kind of spontaneous frenzy – a collective “running amok” – fueled by deeply rooted cultural and religious tensions.6 In that account, General Suharto and the army appear not as the perpetrators, and not even as bystanders, but as national saviors, and the six deceased generals are national heroes worthy of endless memorialization. By contrast, the half million leftists who died and the million or more who were detained exist only as unremembered phantoms who, by virtue of their assumed treachery, are deemed responsible for their own annihilation. Powerful foreign states and former officials, where they have said anything at all, have tended to echo official accounts, blaming the PKI for its own demise, praising the army for restoring order, and vehemently denying their own involvement in the violence. My own view, and the view of a growing number of scholars, is that these claims are patently false, and that they deliberately obscure the crucial question of responsibility. Just as important, they do not offer plausible answers to the central analytical questions posed above. The explanation I advance highlights two factors that I believe form the basis for a more satisfactory account of the violence – the role of the Indonesian Army leadership, and the impact of powerful foreign states. This approach takes as its starting point the observation that genocides do not simply happen – they are not the “natural” by-product of socioeconomic or cultural conflicts – but are instead the result of deliberate and conscious acts by political and military leaders. That insight, compellingly argued by Valentino, Straus, Fein, and others, usefully shifts the focus away from purely psychological, cultural, and social dynamics that explain popular participation and acquiescence in mass killing, to the intentional political acts of those in positions of authority who set mass killings in motion, and provide the encouragement and means through which they can be carried out.7 That shift helps to train our attention on the structural conditions that permit mass killings to happen, and the vital question of legal and political responsibility for such acts.

The army’s role My first claim is that the violence of 1965–66 cannot be properly understood without recognizing the role of the army leadership in fomenting and organizing it.8 I do not mean that the army singlehandedly carried out all the killings and detentions, or that it acted alone. That was not the case. It clearly had a good deal of support from political parties like the PNI (Partai Nasional Indonesia, Indonesian Nationalist Party) and the NU (Nahdlatul Ulama, Council of Islamic Scholars), and it faced pressure from religious groups of all stripes (Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu) for “firm action” against the Left. What I am arguing rather is that, contrary to the official Indonesian narrative, the resort to mass killing and detention was not the inevitable result of popular anger against the PKI, nor a spontaneous

26 Geoffrey Robinson

expression of deep-seated religious and cultural tensions, but was instead encouraged and organized by the army leadership itself, and in particular by Major General Suharto. More specifically, I am arguing that a focus on the role of the army leadership helps to explain the geographical and temporal variations in the violence; the fact that it encompassed not only killing but also systematic incarceration; and the long period of silence and inaction that followed. It also explains better than the alternatives certain distinctive features of the violence, notably, the practices of disappearance, mutilation, corpse display, sexual violence, and mass execution, all of which were elements of what I call the army’s “institutional culture” and its “repertoire of violence.” In short, I am arguing that without the army’s leadership, the campaign of mass killing and incarceration would never have reached the extraordinary levels or intensity that it did, and probably would not have happened at all. The army leadership’s decisive role had several dimensions. First, it developed and disseminated a discourse of existential threat to the nation that provoked and valorized acts of violence against real and alleged leftists. Through a carefully crafted propaganda campaign, it demonized and dehumanized the PKI and its affiliates and called for them to be “destroyed down to the very roots,” “annihilated,” and “crushed to bits.” In a radio address on the evening after the alleged coup, for example, General Suharto told the country: It is clear that the actions [of the September 30th Movement] were counterrevolutionary and must be destroyed down to the very roots. We have no doubt that with the full assistance of the progressive and revolutionary population, the counter-revolutionary September 30th Movement will be crushed to bits.9 In one of its more outrageous and effective propaganda offensives, set in motion about one week after the alleged coup, the army and its allies portrayed members of the leftist women’s organization, Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement), as witches and whores who had danced naked while castrating the six generals with razors. As official autopsies later revealed, and as General Suharto undoubtedly knew at the time, that claim was completely false.10 But that did not matter: with complete control over the press and other media, the army was free to use whatever inflammatory language and imagery it deemed useful to its cause. In doing so, the army gave license to the party’s enemies to do the same, and provided an essential ingredient in transforming underlying tensions into widespread violence.11 Crucially, the army leadership also developed a broad plan to detain, transport, categorize, interrogate, and prosecute vast numbers of leftists.12 To implement that plan, it supplied or requisitioned critical logistical assets such as weapons, trucks, detention centers, and hit-lists. Soldiers and civilian militia groups across the country were supplied with weapons of various kinds to be used in detaining and killing suspects. Suspects, bound and tied, were transported to prisons and execution sites in open-backed military-type vehicles. Soldiers and militias used prepared hit-lists to

A time to kill 27

locate victims targeted for arrest or execution. These were signs of a carefully planned military operation, not a spontaneous explosion of popular anger. In the absence of such planning, and without the army’s unique organizational reach, the mass violence could not have extended to so many different areas of the country, could not have been sustained for so long, and would not have entailed both mass incarceration and killing. Yet, while the army alone had the organizational and logistical capacity to implement a nation-wide plan to destroy the Left, its capacity was not unlimited. In some areas, it faced resistance from local authorities, thereby delaying or derailing implementation of the plan. In Bali, for instance, the governor and the regional military commander (both of whom were Sukarno loyalists) balked at central army directives, resulting in a two-month delay in the onset of killings.13 Indeed, widespread killing began there only in early December, after they had been removed, and troops loyal to General Suharto had been deployed to the island. By contrast, in Aceh, where the local civilian and military leadership were united in their support for the army command’s plan, the violence began almost immediately.14 Thus, the army leadership’s uneven capacity to mobilize local allies helps to explain both the geographical and temporal variations in the violence. To multiply its force, and to cover its tracks, the army leadership also mobilized an extensive network of nationalist and religious militia groups to do the essential

FIGURE 1.3

Villagers detained by army and anti-communist militias in Central Java, ca. November 1965. (National Library of Indonesia)

28 Geoffrey Robinson

groundwork of mass killing and incarceration. The most notorious of these groups were NU’s Ansor and Banser in East Java, the PNI’s Pemuda Marhean in Bali, and the Pemuda Pancasila in North Sumatra, but similar groups were mobilized throughout the country. While it is true that some militia groups acted without explicit army sanction, such instances were localized and limited. In the vast majority of cases, militia forces operated with the full knowledge of, and usually under orders from, army commanders. In a report from early November 1965, a senior US Embassy official described the strategy as it had been explained to him by an Indonesian Army contact: “In Central Java Army … is training Moslem youth and supplying them with weapons and will keep them out in front against the PKI. Army will try to avoid as much as it can safely do so direct confrontation with the PKI.”15 It was through these army-backed militia groups that long-standing religious, cultural, and socio-economic tensions were transformed from conflict into mass violence, and that violence was sustained for long periods over wide stretches of the country. Moreover, the army role in mobilizing and training these groups helps to explain the remarkably similar “repertoires of violence” they used across the country, such as disappearance, sexual violence, mutilation, corpse display, and mass execution. Finally, by virtue of seizing power, and holding it for more than three decades, the army was free to popularize a perverse version of history that glorified the perpetrators of the violence and simultaneously demonized and erased all memory of the victims. It did so in various ways, including political show trials, public education, film, and public rituals that portrayed PKI members as barbaric enemies of the nation and relentlessly evoked the so-called “latent threat of communism.” One of the most disturbing examples of that propaganda was the pornographically violent film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Betrayal of the G30S/Indonesia Communist Party) that portrayed the PKI as treacherous and sadistic, and was compulsory viewing for all schoolchildren for some 15 years (1984–1998). The result was a profoundly misleading but remarkably resilient narrative that has penetrated deeply into Indonesian society and has proved crucial in enforcing more than 50 years of silence and inaction.16 The long and continuing dominance of the army and its allies in political life has also allowed them to obstruct any moves toward truth or justice. To this day, in fact, Indonesian officials categorically reject proposals for a truth commission or judicial process, speak dismissively about demands for an apology to victims, and continue to propagate an account of the violence that glorifies its perpetrators as national heroes. Meanwhile, even the most benign efforts to rebury the dead, or to discuss what happened, are routinely disrupted – often with violence – by anti-communist thugs acting with official acquiescence. It is worth stressing that such angry reactions are not solely an expression of state policy or power, but reflect a profound antipathy to the PKI and to the Left generally that has become very deeply rooted in Indonesian society itself.

Foreign states and international context My second claim here is that the actions of powerful foreign states, together with aspects of the wider international environment, were instrumental in encouraging

A time to kill 29

the mass violence of 1965–66, and sustaining the long silence and impunity that has followed.17 I am not suggesting that foreign powers plotted the alleged October coup and the ensuing violence on their own. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Still, I think it can be shown that, in the absence of support from powerful states – most notably the US and the UK – and in a somewhat different international context, the mass killing and incarceration would not have happened. More specifically, I am arguing that the actions and omissions of powerful states and institutions go a long way to explaining why the killing spread so far so fast, how the army got away with it, and why there has been such deafening silence over the five decades since it ended. To state the matter more simply, I am saying that major powers were complicit in the Indonesian genocide and its cover-up. These claims are based on five main observations. First, there is now abundant documentary evidence that, for at least a decade before the 1965 coup, the US and other Western powers worked assiduously to undermine Sukarno and the PKI. They did so, for example, by providing covert assistance to anti-communist parties in the national elections of 1955, and later by supplying military aid, and flying bombing missions, in support of anti-Sukarno rebels.18 Then, in the final year before the alleged coup, the US and the UK undertook a joint covert operation to “create the conditions” for a military take-over. Among other things, they contemplated provoking a premature left-wing coup that would provide an ideal pretext for a military intervention – in other words, more or less exactly what happened in October 1965. As a British Foreign Office document of December 1964 noted: “A premature PKI coup may be the most helpful solution for the West – provided the coup failed.”19 The documentary evidence also shows unequivocally that in the weeks and months after the alleged October coup, the US and its allies actively encouraged the mounting violence. They did so in a number of ways. First, they set in motion a covert propaganda and psychological warfare campaign explicitly designed to “blacken” the name of the PKI.20 Second, they provided covert economic and military assistance to the army leadership, calibrated to increase as the army demonstrated its determination to crush the PKI and remove Sukarno. Finally, they adopted a policy of strategic silence, coupled with secret expressions of support, in the face of mounting army-instigated violence against civilians. As an internal US State Department document from mid-1966 noted: “Until late March [1966], our major policy in Indonesia has been silence … This policy remains sound particularly in light of the wholesale killings that have accompanied the transition.”21 These interventions and silences provided vital assurance – in fact, a bright green light – to General Suharto and his allies that they could move against the PKI without repercussions, and in that way buttressed the army’s violent campaign against the Left at a critical juncture. The violence was further accelerated by the broader international political context, and more specifically by the Cold War.22 That context dominated the domestic political scene, helping to create the highly polarized Left–Right division that was one precondition for mass violence. The Cold War was also essential in shaping Indonesia’s

30 Geoffrey Robinson

FIGURE 1.4

British Foreign Office note on a report about Indonesia, December 1964. (UK National Archive)

pre-1965 international relations, driving it ever closer to Mao’s China after 1963, and alienating it from the US and other Western powers. It was Sukarno’s drift to the left, after all, that led the US and its allies to support the army leadership’s move against him and the PKI, regardless of the cost in human lives. And it was almost certainly because the victims were communists that there was then, and is still today, so little sympathy for them in the West. As Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt joked crudely in July 1966, “With 500,000 to 1 million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”23

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The violence was also facilitated by the prevailing weakness at the time of international human rights norms, institutions, and networks. Perhaps most important was the near absence in 1965–66 of the transnational human rights and civil society networks that, from the late 1970s, began to play an important part in efforts to stop mass violence. In the absence of such networks, the UN took no notice of the violence, most states expressed satisfaction with its effects or said nothing at all, and the mass media largely parroted official views. Thus, in mid1966 – when the extent of the mass killing was already well known – the New York Times referred to the events in Indonesia as “A Gleam of Light in Asia.”24 A telling exception to this silent acquiescence came in the late 1970s when the administration of Jimmy Carter pressured Indonesia to release tens of thousands of leftist political prisoners. Significantly, that move came against the backdrop of a powerful international campaign on behalf of those prisoners led by Amnesty International and other non-governmental organizations, such as Tapol.25 In the absence of that campaign, it is very doubtful that the US would have done anything at all. Finally, for over 50 years, powerful international actors have aided the Indonesian Army’s work of writing a falsified history of the violence, and evading justice for the crimes committed. In 1968, for example, the CIA wrote and published an account of the alleged coup that largely embraced the dubious army version of events.26 Later, a succession of former US government officials, including Ambassador Marshall Green as well as CIA station chief, Hugh Tovar, and his agency colleagues, published memoirs and articles that sought to divert attention from any possible US role, while questioning the integrity and political loyalties of scholars who disagreed with them.27 Likewise, the US and its allies have not supported any process aimed at elucidating the truth or seeking justice for the victims of 1965–66. They have adopted this position, in part, because Indonesia has been seen as a vital ally in the region, and an economic treasure house. Their silence has also stemmed from an obvious lack of sympathy for the victims who were, after all, mere communists. Perhaps more simply, their silence has been driven by the fact of their complicity in the crimes committed – minimally crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide. As such, any serious demand for accountability would place the US and its allies squarely in the judicial dock. These conditions have meant that, unlike the survivors of some genocides – most notably the Holocaust and Rwanda – the survivors of the 1965–66 violence have been unable to generate any serious world attention to those events in the half century since they happened. To sum up, the account presented here and in The Killing Season stresses the critical role of the army leadership, and the influence of international actors and context, in shaping both the mass violence and the long silence that followed. In making these arguments, I do not mean to suggest that personal motives, cultural and religious tensions, and socioeconomic conflicts were not important – clearly they were. Yet their significance was always shaped and circumscribed in decisive ways by the broader historical and political context, and by the decisions and actions of people in positions of political power inside Indonesia and abroad.

32 Geoffrey Robinson

Wider implications While in many ways unique, I think Indonesia’s experience may underscore, and also help us to rethink, some larger arguments about the dynamic of mass killing, incarceration, and impunity. It may also shed new light on some other cases of mass violence in Southeast Asia after 1945. With that in mind, I want to return to the two broader questions I posed at the outset.

Under what conditions? I asked first: Under what conditions are mass killing and genocide most likely to occur? Perhaps the most important insight to be drawn from the Indonesian case is that mass violence and genocide are not in any sense the natural or inevitable consequence of ancient cultural proclivities, deep-seated religious differences, or underlying socioeconomic conditions. Rather, they are inherently political acts, initiated by actors (individuals but also institutions) with political motives and objectives. In other words, as Valentino and others have argued, underlying tensions, conflicts, and hatreds – no matter how deeply rooted they may be – do not lead automatically to mass violence.28 The turn to mass killing and incarceration requires something more – specifically, agents who articulate the idea that conflict should be resolved through violence, and institutions with the inclination and capacity to do so. The obvious candidates for that role, I argue, are armies, police forces, militia groups, and revolutionary movements, whose institutional norms and doctrines portray violence as legitimate and effective in achieving political ends, and who have the logistical and organizational wherewithal to carry it out. It is these institutions, I think, that serve as crucial vectors in translating enmity and conflict into mass violence, including genocide. How they do so depends a great deal on their own histories and internal institutional dynamics. Over time, such institutions develop what I refer to as distinctive “institutional cultures,” which may be more or less violent. Through a variety of processes – such as socialization, indoctrination, command authority, and peer pressure29 – they also develop what I call “repertoires of violence,” which are essentially patterned routines of violence learned by those associated with the institution. These institutional cultures and repertoires, I argue, help to account for certain distinctive patterns of mass violence that are otherwise difficult to explain. At the same time, the Indonesian case underscores the critical significance of regional and local conditions in the dynamic of mass violence. As Straus has observed, even where violence is centrally ordered, its implementation invariably depends on local and mid-level actors.30 If they are enthusiastic allies of the central command, with the will and capacity to carry out its directives, mass violence will be facilitated or accelerated. By contrast, where important local actors are resistant to central directives, or lack the capacity to carry them out, mass violence is likely to be slowed. The point is that even in the most centralized and authoritarian political systems, such local and mid-level actors always have some measure of

A time to kill 33

FIGURE 1.5

Member of the anti-communist Pemuda Marhaen militia in Bali, ca. December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia)

autonomy, and the exercise of that autonomy can help to account for important geographical and temporal variations in the observed patterns of violence. The Indonesian example also confirms a long-standing judgment that genocide and mass killing are provoked and facilitated by language and imagery that dehumanize target groups – portraying them, say, as atheists, traitors, animals, barbarians, whores, or terrorists. As Fein and others have contended, public discourse, historical narratives, and visual representations that exclude the target group from the

34 Geoffrey Robinson

perpetrator’s moral community – or place them outside the perpetrator’s “universe of obligation” – make the move from conflict to violence far more likely.31 They do so in part by removing the moral restraints on violent action, and helping to forge the social consensus, or at least popular acquiescence, that is an essential condition of mass violence. In that process, the mass media play a crucial role, especially where technology, political power, or force of arms allow one side to control or monopolize them. To these largely domestic processes, the Indonesian case suggests a number of ways in which international actors and context can contribute to genocide and mass violence. To put the matter most simply, genocide and mass killing are facilitated by a range of international actions and omissions that strengthen the perpetrators of those crimes vis-à-vis their victims. In addition to direct military intervention, these can include the provision of strategic economic assistance to perpetrators, the use of covert psychological warfare campaigns to provoke and justify violence, the transfer of arms and other military equipment, and, importantly, the calculated decision to remain silent in the face of widespread violence against civilians. These and other activities short of direct military intervention need to be considered as crucial elements in understanding the dynamics of mass violence and genocide and assessing foreign complicity in it. Perhaps less obviously, the Indonesian case shows that genocide and mass violence can be facilitated by prevailing international norms and ideologies that construe violence as legitimate in achieving certain political or moral ends. That category certainly includes utopian and revolutionary ideologies, as well as ethnic nationalism, as noted above. But the Indonesian example suggests that other widely accepted international norms, including “national security,” “law and order,” “national sovereignty,” “non-intervention,” and “development,” can easily be invoked in ways that facilitate or justify extreme violence by the state. Notably, all of these norms have been important in generating, or in rationalizing, widespread mass violence in modern Southeast Asia since 1945. Finally, the Indonesian case suggests that the often noted effects of war in facilitating genocide – for example, through brutalization, discourses of treachery, acute political polarization, and mass mobilization – are not unique to conventional wartime contexts.32 On the contrary, Indonesia’s experience suggests that these effects can also emerge in times of intense but largely nonviolent conflict over political ideas, like the Cold War. In this connection, Üngör has noted crucial similarities between the Indonesian violence and more conventional genocides. He writes, for example, that the way the communist victim category was imagined by Indonesian perpetrators demonstrates “how violent imaginaries in the minds of the perpetrators can create abstract social and political groups that go beyond nominal and visible ethnicity markers.”33 That observation is valuable not only as a way to better understand the Indonesian case, but may also help us in understanding other cases of mass violence, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

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FIGURE 1.6

Long-term political prisoners at Sumber-Rejo prison camp in East Kalimantan, 1977. (David Jenkins)

Why are some crimes forgotten? The second general question I posed was this: Why are some serious crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten and left unpunished? The most important insight from Indonesia is simply that power matters.34 As long as those responsible for the violence retain power – including the power to write history and create social memory – the processes of truth seeking, justice, reconciliation, compensation, and memorialization are not likely to happen. Even after the perpetrator regime has been deposed, those processes will be difficult to set in motion. That is especially so if, through repression, ritual, and repetition, the official version has become so widely accepted in society, so hegemonic, that it requires only minimal enforcement by the state. That dynamic appears to account for the remarkable record of impunity enjoyed by Indonesia with respect to the violence of 1965–66. It may also help to explain the record of impunity for mass violence and genocides committed by other states as well. Indonesia’s experience also suggests that the likelihood of meaningful action in the face of serious crimes is directly related to the particularities of the international context – including the posture adopted by powerful states, prevailing international norms with respect to human rights, and the strength and disposition of transnational civil society networks. On the one hand, Indonesia’s experience gives reason to believe that international human rights norms and robust civil society networks can

36 Geoffrey Robinson

sometimes serve to inhibit and even stop mass violence, including genocide. The successful campaign for the release of Indonesia’s leftist political prisoners in the 1970s was a case in point. On the other hand, the Indonesian example underscores the disappointing fact that where powerful states are complicit in serious crimes and their cover-up, or share economic and political interests with the perpetrators of those crimes, and where international and regional norms are unfavorable to human rights, the prospects for accountability become vanishingly small. That has certainly been the case in Southeast Asia for much of the postwar period. Still, Indonesia’s recent experience makes clear that the power of states to control historical narrative, memory, and justice is never absolute. Especially since the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, a remarkable group of domestic and international civil society actors have sought to challenge the dubious official version of the violence and to demand justice. And they have made progress. One important initiative was the investigation by Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission, whose 2012 report concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed in 1965–66, and recommended both judicial and non-judicial remedies. Although its recommendations were rejected by the government, the report marked an important step toward acknowledgment. More recently, in 2015, human rights activists organized an International People’s Tribunal on 1965 which convened in The Hague. While it had no formal legal standing, and was roundly criticized by Indonesian authorities, it drew new attention to the events of 1965–66, and concluded that the violence then had amounted to genocide. Even more encouraging, in recent years Indonesians from all walks of life have become increasingly bold and innovative in their efforts to raise awareness and to challenge official narratives. Musicians and dancers have begun to perform works once banned for their association with the PKI; school teachers have begun to assign materials to their students that question official history; visual artists and writers have begun to explore the violence in their work; more and more survivors have begun to write their memoirs; and publishers have shown a greater willingness to publish books that would once have been considered taboo.35 While these initiatives have yet to stimulate anything like real judicial or political accountability, they have gone some way toward changing the conversation inside Indonesia and heightening awareness abroad. There is a useful reminder here that – when it comes to truth and memory, to accountability and justice – the path forward will require action outside the purview of the state. That is, in contrast to the classic notion of transitional justice in which a new state takes the initiative in seeking remedies in the aftermath of serious crimes, in cases like Indonesia’s – where the state remains largely in the grip of perpetrators and their defenders – the most promising avenue is likely to be through civil society – and not the state. All of this begs the question of what, if anything, scholars and citizens should do in this case, and others like it. One answer is that we should do nothing – on the familiar grounds that it is better not to open old wounds; that we have no business telling others how to deal with their own histories; and that scholars especially should not be involved in the subjects they seek to study. At the risk of breaching all these norms, I want to suggest that there are things we can and should do. First,

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I think we should insist that our governments – and I mean all governments – help to clarify the historical record by opening their archives from this period immediately and without restriction. More than 50 years after the events, there can be no excuse for keeping those records secret. Second, I think we should demand that our governments and relevant international bodies, including the United Nations Human Rights Council, encourage all credible judicial proceedings against those deemed responsible for the crimes committed. It is unconscionable that they have not yet done so. Finally, whatever our governments and international bodies may or may not do, I believe we should do whatever we can – through our scholarship, our teaching, our creative work, or our direct political action – to disrupt the terrible silence that has allowed these crimes to go unnoticed and unpunished for more than half a century.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of a keynote address given at the Yale University Conference on “Mass Violence in Southeast Asia Since 1945,” November 7, 2018. 2 Pipit Rochijat, “Am I PKI or Non-PKI?,” translated by Benedict Anderson, Indonesia 40 (October 1985): 44. 3 World History Project, “What Happened in 1965,” http://worldhistoryproject.org/1965. 4 The International Peoples Tribunal for 1965 (IPT 1965) held in The Hague in 2015 was a partial exception, but that body’s proceedings and findings had no formal judicial status. See Saskia E. Wieringa, Jess Melvin, and Annie Pohlman, eds. The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2019). 5 Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 6 For an early example of this official version, see Angkatan Bersendjata Republik Indonesia, 40 Hari Kegagalan G-30-S (Jakarta: Staf Pertahanan Keamanan, 1966). A valuable analysis of the shifting official narrative can be found in John Roosa, “The September 30th Movement: The Aporias of the Official Narratives,” in The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68, eds. Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 25–49. 7 See Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 8 This argument and the supporting evidence are fully explored in Robinson, The Killing Season, Chapters 5 and 6. 9 For the text of Suharto’s October 1 radio address, see Boerhan and Soebekti, Gerakan 30 September, (Jakarta: Lembaga Pendidikan Ilmu Pengetahuan dan Kebudajaan Kosgoro, 1966), 77–9. 10 Benedict R.O’G. Anderson, “How Did the Generals Die?” Indonesia 43 (April 1987), 109–34. 11 Saskia E. Wieringa and Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2018). 12 See Amnesty International, Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977); and Douglas Kammen and Faizah Zakaria, “Detention in Mass Violence: Policy and Practice in Indonesia, 1965–1968,” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 441–66.

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13 On Bali, see Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 14 On Aceh, see Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (New York: Routledge, 2018). 15 Embtel 1326, US Embassy Jakarta to Department of State, November 4, 1965, Indonesia, vol. 5, Country file, National Security Files [NSF], box 247, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library [LBJ Library]. 16 A poll conducted by the respected national media outlets Tempo and Kompas in 1999 found that 97 percent of the respondents had seen the film, and 72 percent said it was their main source of information about the events of October 1, 1965. The following year, a Kompas survey found that 77 percent of the respondents agreed with the characterization of communists as “sadistic, atheistic, and immoral,” while more than half agreed that communists were comparable to murderers. All figures cited in Yosef Djakababa, “Narasi Resmi dan Alternatif Mengenai Tragedi ’65,” in Baskara T. Wardaya, ed., Luka Bangsa Luka Kita: Pelanggaran HAM Masa Lalu dan Tawaran Rekonsiliasi (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2014), 366. 17 This argument and the supporting evidence are fully explored in Robinson, The Killing Season, Chapters 4 and 7. 18 The best account of the US role in the rebellions of the late 1950s is George McT. Kahin and Audrey Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995). 19 British Foreign Office note on memorandum from Mr. M.J.C. Templeton, New Zealand High Commission in London, to Mr. Peck, “The Succession to Sukarno,” December 18, 1964, Foreign Office [FO] 371/175251, UK National Archive [UKNA]. 20 The Political Advisor to the Commander in Chief for the Far East wrote to the British Foreign Office in early October, “I recommend that we should have no hesitation in doing what we can surreptitiously to blacken the PKI in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia.” Office of the Political Advisor to C-in-C Far East, Singapore, to Foreign Office, Telegram No. 671, October 5, 1965, FO 371/180313, UKNA. 21 US Department of State Report, “Indonesia,” [May 1966?], US Declassified Documents Catalogue [DDC], 1994, #3183. 22 See Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, eds., 1965: Indonesia and the World, Indonesia dan Dunia, bilingual ed. (Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013). 23 Cited in Richard Tanter, “The Great Killings in Indonesia through the Australian Mass Media,” in 1965: Indonesia and the World, eds. Schaefer and Wardaya, 140. 24 James Reston, “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” New York Times, June 19, 1966. 25 See Amnesty International, Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report; and Greg Fealy, The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic versus Foreign Policy, 1975–1979, Working paper no. 94 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1995). For a full discussion of the fate of the political prisoners both during their detention and after, see Robinson, The Killing Season, Chapters 8 and 9. 26 Central Intelligence Agency, Indonesia – 1965: The Coup that Backfired (Washington, DC: CIA, 1968). 27 See, for example, the memoir of former US ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green, Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation, 1965–1968 (Washington, DC: Compass Press, 1990); and the article by former CIA Jakarta station chief Hugh Tovar, “The Indonesian Crisis of 1965–1966: A Retrospective,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 7, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 313–38. 28 Valentino, Final Solutions. This and other arguments presented here are more fully explored in Robinson, The Killing Season, Chapter 11. 29 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1993). 30 Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

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31 Helen Fein, “Revolutionary and Anti-Revolutionary Genocides: A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979, and in Indonesia, 1965–1966,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (October 1993): 799. 32 On the connections between war and genocide see, for example, Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 33 Ug˘ ur Ümit Üngör, “Indonesia 1965: A ‘Perfect’ Genocide,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 175, no. 2 (August 2019). 34 The arguments presented here are more fully explored in Robinson, The Killing Season, Chapter 11. 35 Among those books was an Indonesian edition of The Killing Season, published with a foreword by a retired Army General. Geoffrey B. Robinson, Musim Menjagal: Sejarah Pembunuhan Massal di Indonesia, 1965–1966 (Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu, 2018).

Bibliography Amnesty International. Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report. London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977. Anderson, Benedict R.O’G. “How Did the Generals Die?” Indonesia 43 (April1987): 109–134. Angkatan Bersendjata Republik Indonesia. 40 Hari Kegagalan G-30-S. Jakarta: Staf Pertahanan Keamanan, 1966. Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Boerhan and Soebekti. Gerakan 30 September, 2nd ed. Jakarta: Lembaga Pendidikan Ilmu Pengetahuan dan Kebudajaan Kosgoro, 1966. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Central Intelligence Agency. Indonesia – 1965: The Coup that Backfired. Washington, DC: CIA, 1968. Collins, J. Foster, and B. Hugh Tovar. “Sukarno’s Apologists Write Again.” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 9, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 337–357. Djakababa, Yosef. “Narasi Resmi dan Alternatif Mengenai Tragedi ’65.” In Luka Bangsa Luka Kita: Pelanggaran HAM Masa Lalu dan Tawaran Rekonsiliasi, edited by Baskara T. Wardaya, 361–369. Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2014. Fealy, Greg. The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic versus Foreign Policy, 1975–1979. Working paper no. 94. Clayton, Victoria: Monash Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1995. Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Fein, Helen. “Revolutionary and Anti-Revolutionary Genocides: A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979, and in Indonesia, 1965–1966.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (October1993): 799. Green, Marshall. Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation, 1965–1968. Washington, DC: Compass Press, 1990. Kahin, George McT., and Audrey Kahin. Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia. New York: New Press, 1995. Kammen, Douglas, and Faizah Zakaria. “Detention in Mass Violence: Policy and Practice in Indonesia, 1965–1968.” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 441–466. McVey, Ruth. The Rise of Indonesian Communism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965. Melvin, Jess. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. New York: Routledge, 2018.

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Reston, James. “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” New York Times, June 19, 1966. Robinson, Geoffrey B. The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Robinson, Geoffrey B. The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Robinson, Geoffrey B. Musim Menjagal: Sejarah Pembunuhan Massal di Indonesia, 1965–1966. Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu, 2018. Rochijat, Pipit. “Am I PKI or Non-PKI?” Translated by Benedict Anderson. Indonesia 40 (October1985): 37–56. Roosa, John. “The September 30th Movement: The Aporias of the Official Narratives.” In The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68, edited by Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, 25–49. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Schaefer, Bernd, and Baskara T. Wardaya, eds. 1965: Indonesia and the World, Indonesia dan Dunia. Bilingual ed. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Straus, Scott. Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tanter, Richard. “The Great Killings in Indonesia through the Australian Mass Media.” In 1965: Indonesia and the World, Indonesia dan Dunia, edited by Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, 129–144. Bilingual ed. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Tovar, Hugh. “The Indonesian Crisis of 1965–1966: A Retrospective.” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 7, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 313–338. Üngör, Ug˘ ur Ümit. “Indonesia 1965: A ‘Perfect’ Genocide.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 175, no. 2 (August2019). Valentino, Benjamin. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Wieringa, Saskia, and Nursyahbani Katjasungkana. Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia. New York: Routledge, 2018. Wieringa, Saskia, Jess Melvin, and Annie Pohlman, eds. The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2019. World History Project. “What Happened in 1965.” http://worldhistoryproject.org/1965, accessed May 23, 2017.

2 EXPULSION/INCORPORATION Valences of mass violence in Myanmar Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong

Introduction The Myanmar military’s 2017 ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmar has captured the world’s attention, as attested in part by the three other Rohingya chapters in this volume on mass violence in Southeast Asia. The sheer immensity of the horror – with thousands killed, hundreds raped, and scores of villages burned – has stunned people across the globe. Yet, while international discourse has tended to analyze this horror in isolation, casting the Rohingya plight as exceptional to standard political analysis of Myanmar, UN Human Rights rapporteur Yanghee Lee highlighted how the Rohingya genocide includes acts “that have been alleged against the military and security forces for generations,” adding that, “for many in Myanmar, they have elicited a tragic feeling of déjà vu” (quoted in Selth 2018, 3). Indeed, the Myanmar state, formally or effectively controlled by its military (the Tatmadaw) for most of the past half-century, has been waging protracted wars against its ethnic minority peoples for generations – Karen, Kachin, Shan, Mon, and others (Sadan 2016; Smith 1999). Critically, this violence has often been directed not only at formal combatants – Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) – but at broader civilian populations as well. Tactics including mass deportations, land grabs, orchestrated famine, and rape as a method of war have turned civilian populations into objects of mass violence – violence directed at masses of people, largely not differentiated from others “like” them. Moreover, the military-state did not direct this kind of violence only against ethnic minorities, but also against members of the dominant Burman majority. Whether during slaughter of peaceful protesters at various moments during its post-independence history (1962, 1974, 1988, 2007), or in the quotidian deprivations immanent to everyday survival, violence defined existence during the military period. One might then,

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as Lee suggests, expect Burmese of all stripes to empathize, and express solidarity, with the Rohingya. This has not happened. Rather, an outpouring of dis-identification with the Rohingya – from expressions of satisfaction with the Rohingya’s fate to bizarre populist rallies in support of the military – has been well documented. The feeling of déjà vu that Lee expected might be better construed as outraged resentment, but not at the military for yet again waging war on its population. Instead, Burmese discourse on the international coverage of the Rohingya genocide observes continuities in the violence, even as its exponents seek to deny political similarity (and hence solidarity) with the Rohingya. For instance, a federation of ethnic leaders rallied together against the Rohingya, declaring that “‘Rohingya’ is not to be recognized as a nationality,”1 while Zaw Aye Maung, a Rakhine politician, has declared that “if genocide was taking place in Rakhine State, then it was against ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.”2 A 2018 Irrawaddy article focusing on the plight of non-Rohingya ethnic peoples under attack was entitled “All But Forgotten” (Lawi Weng 2018). The same newspaper, a long-standing outlet for anti-military commentary, followed up later by publishing a cartoon presenting UN officials walking through a heap of corpses (meant to be ethnic Rakhine slain in the ongoing war with the Tatmadaw) while commenting that genocide could not have occurred because the victims were not Muslim (Than Toe Aung 2019). Further, non-elites likewise identify an ostensible elision of their own plight: as one Karen social media user put it, “Burma wasn’t well known before the Rohinga [sic] outbreak. Thousands of Karen refugees have left their own places by suppressive military regime long before current atrocities in Rakhine state.” Others have explicitly denied any political commonality between the violence against the Rohingya and other ethnic groups (Delle 2017), with many condemning the few statements of solidarity with the Rohingya – such as the one by the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO 2016). What accounts for this dis-identification in the face of similar experiences of suffering? A common explanation is simple racism: that by committing the dual sins of being kala (of South Asian appearance3) and Muslim, both markers of non-belonging, the Rohingya are irredeemably tainted as foreigners. Yet, many others fulfilling the same description, such as Muslims living in Yangon, are not objects of similarly intense scorn. Further still, while members of the Kaman ethnic group are considered both kala and Muslim, the group has nonetheless been recognized as indigenous (taingyingtha). In 2014 even the bigoted Burman Buddhist monk Wirathu went so far as to threaten those who would attack them: “And if the terrorist extremist Bengalis who call themselves Rohingya oppress the Kaman mark my words, Wirathu will never close his eyes to that. I won’t take things lying down. If there are attacks on the Kaman, beware.”4 Rather, and because racism must be explained rather than merely invoked, we analyze this dis-identification through an exploration of state violence in Myanmar, arguing that mass violence against Rohingya and other ethnic groups in Burma has taken two different forms in Myanmar’s broader symbolic and discursive context, with attendant effects. Specifically, the kind leveled against the Rohingya has been

Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 43

expulsive, directed at their belonging and existence itself, while the violence against the other ethnic groups is, somewhat paradoxically, directed at incorporation – under conditions of domination – into the polity. The effect of the violence on other ethnic groups has interpellated them as members of the polity (in a diminished, graduated sense), meaning that they have been targeted as subjects, whereas Rohingya have been killed as objects, as others. Put another way, ethnic groups have been targeted as insiders to be governed (through a form of blunt domination; see Prasse-Freeman 2012) rather than outsiders to be eliminated (with extreme prejudice). The physically and symbolically expulsive violence suffered by the Rohingya both buttresses and secures the standing of the other ethnic groups, even as it justifies itself in the eyes of the broader polity as protective of the entire multi-ethnic nation. As political-cultural anthropologists of Myanmar – Prasse-Freeman studies Burman social movements and Rohingya ethnic identity, Ong the Wa polity and the country’s peace process – we draw here on our extended fieldwork to rethink mass violence in Myanmar. In the following section we advance a provisional theory of mass violence with wider implications. Our third section considers specific aspects of mass violence deployed against Myanmar’s different peoples – including tactical rape, forced relocation, and symbolic assault. The fourth section tackles hard cases – in particular, the use of rape in war – to demonstrate how similarly horrific material practices can have differential symbolic, and hence political, ramifications. Our conclusion considers mass violence in connection with other forms – such as “structural” violence – also occurring in Myanmar.

The massive in mass violence The literature on mass violence is vast (inter alia, Kiernan 2007; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990), but much of it becomes a (non-)theorization of the radically exceptional. Even when some scholars focus on mass violence’s banality (Arendt 2006), it is still the radical horror that cannot be named or even spoken (Scarry 1987; Daniel 1996; for an analysis, Agamben 2002) that becomes the main object of exploration in the literature. Hence, the rendering of that violence as exceptional creates a caesura between it and “normal” state practices – even though such practices inevitably animate the mass violence. While the lack of connections between mass and “normal” state violence has been commented upon (Straus 2012), other scholars articulate different kinds of violence as connected over a “continuum” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004), for instance through a relationship between structural and mass violence (Uvin 2004). While inspired by this research, we resist reducing all violence to a graded continuum. Such flattening of violence into a singular phenomenon is not consistent with the understandings of many relevant social actors who, by marking categorical differences in varying violent phenomena, determine political trajectories. For instance, the type of violence suffered by the Karen and that endured by the “average” unmarked Burman may sit on the same analytical continuum of violence, yet because their

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respective contours (their modes and intensities) are distinct, Burmese people interpret them as fundamentally unrelated phenomena. Hence we instead identify specific operations (what does the violence take as its object? how is it effected?) and functions (what effects does the violence have?), demonstrating how differences have critical ramifications on the political outcomes produced. We reinterpret the idea of “mass,” displacing it from two problems we see with its conventional enumerative assumption, where “massive” draws on implications of scale. First, it hinges on a quantitative calculus of bodies affected rather than considering overall symbolic collective effects. Second, while it refers to “large” in the sense of approaching world historic, this relies on the pronouncements of observing publics of (typically Western) ratifiers. Taking Myanmar’s case, the violence against the Karen for instance, has typically not qualified as a case of “mass violence” (note its absence in this volume) because it was not enumerated and recognized by external observers, a function of the moment and duration of its occurrence and the extant media technologies. Indeed, what is commonly understood as “mass,” by way of historic scale and audiencing, is highly subjective, dependent not just on the social group who finds itself the violence’s object, but on the often divergent perspectives of various members within a group. Consequently, we reframe mass violence provisionally as a form of violence distributed indiscriminately by taking non-combatants as its object (Valentino 2014), as tokens representative of a common (ethnic) type, generating new sociopolitical relationships with that type and with other observing publics. In particular, we highlight the semiotic dimensions of mass violence: diverse interpretations of the event by those both directly and indirectly subject to it mean that its scattered and diffuse objects are symbolically massified into a collective group. Specifically, mass violence (as a sign event) uses attacks on individuals (singular tokens) as symbolic assault on the broader community (the type), which spurs a recursive and interactional process, in which (a) the type becomes constructed or illuminated; (b) membership of that type becomes clarified as subjects assess whether they qualify as tokens of it; (c) the relationship between the source of violence and the new object is articulated; and (d) the broader socio-political field in which the violence operates is transformed, as tangential political actors reassess their own positions and identities based on interpretations of the violence against others. Through this analytic, hate crimes, mob violence directed against particular minority groups, and political “terrorism” all have the seeds of mass violence within them, but can be considered varied scales or reduced forms of mass violence, depending on their repetition and effects. A hate crime, for instance, is mass violence singularized, that is, committed by a single person or group on a single person or group. Of course, any violent event may hail additional observers, potentially impelling them to reconsider their relationship to the violence’s source and the broader political environment. But the mass violence we describe here nearly always contains additional discourse that attempts to control and direct the meaning of the sign (Kockelman 2007). This can be observed in commentary on the acts committed when Burmese soldiers prevented the burial of a raped and murdered Shan woman,

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reportedly saying: “She must be kept like this as an example for your people of Shan State to see” (SHRF 2002). Much is conveyed in these sign events: what a raped Shan body signifies to Shan collectivities may be radically different from what a raped Rohingya body signifies to Rohingyas – meanings are co-constructed by both authors and recipients. This definition will become clarified in the next section, which explores cases of violence in Myanmar.

Cases of mass violence in Myanmar Rohingya The case of the Rohingya demonstrates in contemporary historical time the power of mass violence to construct a broad object out of the specific tokens of enacted physical assault. Internecine and state-led violence have intersected with discursive representations to resubjectivize both Rohingya individuals and other members of Myanmar’s polity. Although the sheer scale of the atrocities against the Rohingya during the 2017 expulsion would alone have warranted significant international media attention, the fallen-hero story of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi took center-stage as she endorsed the military’s conduct, downplayed Rohingya suffering, disclaimed independent reporting as biased, impugned the motives of humanitarian workers, supported the incarceration of journalists who uncovered atrocities, and declared rape allegations to be “fake.” Ensuing morality parables contrasting Suu Kyi’s earlier lionization with her apparent self-betrayal inadvertently encapsulate much of the semiotic content of the mass violence: on display are both the brutal events and the equally brutal interpretation of them. As a long-installed icon of the nation, Suu Kyi stands as a distilled embodiment of “the people” she represents.5 Hence her prevarications and dismissals act not as counterpoints to Tatmadaw generals (who have variously claimed that the “only solution” is to expel Rohingya to “a third country” or that Rohingyas must be treated as “unfinished business”6), but as their ratification. Likewise in the case of the 2012 violence between members of Rakhine and Rohingya communities in Sittwe, which sparked displacement of hundreds of Rakhine and 140,000 Rohingya: the representation of the conflict by Burmese leaders and in the media was of local Buddhist Rakhine fighting against invading Muslims. Suu Kyi endorsed this narrative: “Global Muslim power is very great and certainly, that is a perception in many parts of the world and in our country as well” (Siddique 2013). The military and other state officials’ rhetoric also massifies the Rohingya into a collective vector of invasion, pollution, and threat. As the UN’s recent Fact Finding Mission (FFM) reports, “Myanmar authorities actively associated Rohingya identity with terrorism. Rohingya are typically only referred to as terrorists or suspected terrorists, often in sweeping phrases implying that the entire group is terrorist or violent in nature” (UNHRC 2018, 335). The FFM draws a helpful contrast with

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Myanmar’s treatment of other ethnicities, pointing out the constant reinscription of alterity in the state’s Rohingya treatment, and its implication of the entire group: “It is important to note the systematic inclusion of the word ‘Bengali’, which positions the Rohingya as outsiders from Bangladesh, and erases their claim to a separate ethnicity by subsuming them into an ethnic majority across the border. In relation to other insurgencies or armed conflicts in the country, the military never adds an ethnic affiliation when referring to its opponent or an alleged perpetrator. For example, in relation to the Kachin Independence Army, it refers to ‘KIA insurgents’ or ‘KIA terrorists’ but not to ‘Kachin insurgents’ or ‘extremist Kachin terrorists’” (337), adding that the state mouthpiece The Global New Light of Myanmar included children in its publication of “names and photographs of approximately 1,300 so-called ‘ARSA terrorists’” (337). Even as the military and state massified the Rohingya, it has done the same for the in-group, but for different ends. A week into the expulsion, the army’s commanderin-chief entitled a Facebook post: “Entire government institutions and people must defend the country with strong patriotism” (FFM, 337), later calling for mass mobilization in “security” efforts, encouraging the people to join “hands with the administrative bodies and security forces in oneness” (FFM, 340). Likewise, Wirathu, as well as many in the ultra-nationalist Buddhist organization to which he belongs, Ma Ba Tha, have cast the genocide as a necessary defense of the nation, enjoining the polity not only to physically fight the invaders, but to defend the procreative potential of the population (Prasse-Freeman 2017). And yet, while the words of military men, monks, and matriarchs are obviously important, it is not just elite commentary that excludes the Rohingya. Ordinary Burmese, through the relatively open platform of social media, are reading texts circulated by their peers about the Rohingya: Phandeeyar, a Yangon-based tech firm, reports that social media users feel “that news posted by trusted community members was more reliable than news posted to pages ostensibly dedicated to keeping people in the know” (2019, 29). Elite statements become politically resonant when appropriated and re-entextualized into (digitally) localized discourses. There is a recursivity here worth stressing, in which these virtual publics are both objects of discourse and then participative subjects fueling the reproduction, circulation, and intensification of hate speech about the Rohingya.7 Scholars have begun tracing the effects of the violence and its representation on Rohingya people. Nursyazwani (in review) in her research with stateless Rohingya communities in Malaysia finds “a number who did not know they were Rohingya until they arrived,” identifying simply as Muslims from Rakhine. Nursyazwani presents an informant who conveyed her pride in being Rohingya yet nonetheless acknowledged that while living in Myanmar “she did not know she was Rohingya then.” Nursyazwani ascribes the transformation as “deriving from war, conflict … and forced migration.” Prasse-Freeman (in revision) describes how even those who had not necessarily understood themselves as Rohingya before the events of violence subsequently came to understand themselves as Rohingya, and particularly as Rohingya under (imminent) attack, as the assaults occurred. He records a half-dozen

Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 47

Rohingya who relay “Rohingya realization moments” proximate to moments of violence. One long-term informant described how the occasion of the 2012 violence led not simply to apprehension of himself as a Rohingya, but then to a corresponding pursuit of additional information about Rohingya, particularly on the topic of historical Rohingya origins. Prasse-Freeman describes the somewhat counter-intuitive outcome in which the symbolic violence against the name “Rohingya” cohered an affiliation with it: as information on violence against specific bodies was circulated and organized under the sign “Rohingya,” although many certainly relinquished or rejected the identity, quite understandably passing into other identity categories (such as Kaman) not targeted by the state and polity, others nonetheless felt interpellated by it. Although Rakhine nationalists in particular, and Burmese nationalists in general, rejected the name Rohingya – by insisting on the appellation “so-called Rohingya” (as in Wirathu’s quotation above) – they installed the defaced name as indexing the particular supra-local identity of Muslims of Northern Rakhine state. Moreover, while communities of Rohingya across Rakhine state demonstrate noteworthy ethnolinguistic and cultural differences, being excluded as the same type has helped cohere them, massifying them into Rohingya in a literal lifeand-death way. Having shown how the type first becomes illuminated and then membership in it clarified, we turn to the third element: the relationship between the object and the source of the violence. As the Rohingya became objects of mass violence, they have also been compelled to interpret what it meant to be Rohingya in conjunction with the state expelling them. Prasse-Freeman (in revision) relays how Rohingya convey their belonging to the land, and lament the gradual erosion of their incorporation in the polity (Rohingya elites point to their recognition as Rohingya by the Burmese post-independence pre-military state of the 1950s), yet now, as refugees in Bangladesh, they resist repatriation to the Burmese state because of its express desire to annihilate them. While the desire to return under safe – which is to say totally transformed – conditions is widespread, they interpret the ongoing mass violence as exclusionary and expulsive in a way that differs, as we will see, from other ethnic groups’ experiences with mass violence. Finally, violence against the Rohingya compels other members of the Burmese polity to reassess their socio-political standing. The 2012 statement by the ethnicities federation denying Rohingya’s co-status as indigenous to Myanmar suggests that some ethnic groups either fear any affiliation with the Rohingya,8 or have capitalized on the Rohingya violence to buttress their own claims to belonging. The Rakhine are instructive here, as national statespersons across the ethnic spectrum have celebrated Rakhine defense of the country’s “western gate,” elevating their status. On the other hand, the violence against Rohingya conversely allows violence against other ethnic groups to continue less noticed – as indexed by a recent Irrawaddy headline: “All But Forgotten” (Lawi Weng 2018).

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Karen In contrast with the expulsive violence inflicted on the Rohingya, the Myanmar state’s violence against other ethnic groups might tentatively be called “incorporative.” A case in point is that of the Karen, one of Myanmar’s largest ethnic minority groups, constituting seven percent of the country’s population. Karen identity often appears self-evident, articulated forcefully by Christian missionaries who promoted Karen myths, which Karen elites then transposed into a quasi-history (Rajah 2002). A nascent Karen consciousness was promoted through the development of “a literate tradition” (including a writing system and the mass production of texts). This consciousness diffused to Karen masses through schools, hostels, and churches that allowed the Karen “to organize … translocally” (Rajah 2002, 526), further developing ethnonationalist identification through the circulation of ethnic markers. They “deliberately created national symbols – a national coat-of-arms based on bronze frog drums, Karen dress, a national flag, a national anthem and Liberation Day parades” (ibid, 529). Others note how this narrative has elided the fact that all “peoples known as ‘Karen’ do not share a common language, culture, religion or material characteristics” (Cheesman 2002, 199), subsuming the drastically divergent experiences of “the other Karen” who live in the country’s Ayeyawaddy Delta or in cities, are often Buddhists rather than Christians, practice lowland farming, and – critically – have not experienced the state violence suffered by those Karen in the eastern highlands (Thawnghmung 2011). Cheesman argues that a certain strain of “Karen identity … is manifest in structural opposition to the state,” a stance that has been exacerbated by a “reporting of gross human rights abuses” that “has been co-opted into the ethnic-nationalist framework” (2002, 208).9 As with the Rohingya, mass violence, it appears, has played a critical role in Karen identity formation. However, violence against Karen has largely not been considered as rising to the level of “mass violence,” even though it would seem to qualify: military assaults have included “1) attacking civilians; 2) displacing civilians and forcible transfer; 3) destroying or seizing the adversary’s property; 4) pillage; 5) murder and execution without due process; 6) enslavement; 7) torture and other inhumane acts; 8) rape; and 9) persecution.” The principle of civilian distinction was not adhered to, as Karen villagers were “subject to being shot-on-sight” (MacLean 2018, 16), though “only” if they strayed from the forced relocation villages imposed on them by the state. This violence was slow burning, such that “large-scale combat was not a defining feature of the offensive” (MacLean 2018, 52). Instead, hundreds of thousands were displaced, as the NGO Karen Human Rights Group records (KHRG 2007, 2008, 2009, 2015), a military strategy deployed against other ethnic groups across Myanmar (Bosson 2007; Woods 2011). And while famine was deployed, the “Tatmadaw’s strategic intent was not to kill large numbers of civilians, as some have claimed … [but] to starve villagers out of contested areas” (MacLean 2018, 53). It seems incongruous to suggest that such tactics were implemented as part of a broader strategy of incorporation through reterritorialization, given the horrendous

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offences of weaponizing famine and destroying villages. This is especially true given that hundreds of thousands of Karen were effectively expelled to Thailand. But within the broader politico-semiotic context, the Karen have been recognized as one of the nation’s constituent eight ethnicities (with the Shan, Mon, Burman, Kachin, Chin, Kayah, and Rakhine), in contrast to the Rohingya, who have been symbolically excluded. In many contexts of symbolic representation they even stand in ratified positions of structural equality: at the country’s National Races museum (Girke 2013), at the University for the Development of National Races (Taylor 2005, 281), or on the National Museum’s fourth-floor exhibit of national races, all taingyingtha stand shoulder to shoulder. Critically, however, these moments of equality are perpetually punctured by symbolic subjugations that serve to remind the Karen and ethnic groups of their dominated status, whether in school textbooks (Salem-Gervais and Metro 2012, 29), in public spaces of ethnic states where statues of Burman generals are erected (Lawi Weng 2019), or on the first floor of that same National Museum (monopolized by Burman dynastic regalia).10 This helps explain the strange double consciousness observed when Karen ethnonationalists consider the apparent similarities between their suffering and that of the Rohingya. As one Karen social media user commented, “If the war begins with Myanmar and Bangladesh, these Bangili [sic, “Bengali”] people … [will] they choose to stand and fight for Myanmar? or Bangladesh? … if someone ask me like that same question, I will always stand with not only my Karen people but also my country” (quoted in Delle 2017). Even as they manage the ambiguity, many ratified participants of the nation-state seem beckoned by the moments of symbolic equal standing, and make peace with a domination that is distributed differently to all average people across the country in one way or other.

Wa The case of the Wa offers intriguing comparison. Included in the 135 taingyingtha and numbering approximately 450,000, the ethnic Wa live in two swathes of territory on the Chinese and Thai borders. They have never been pillaged or attacked by the Burmese military, given their protection by the mountainous terrain, their military might, and preoccupations of the Tatmadaw elsewhere. Their United Wa State Army (UWSA), formed in 1989, has historically been the strongest insurgent armed group, with 30,000 troops controlling their de facto autonomous territories (partially recognized as a “Self-Administered Division”), never once engaging in open conflict with the Burmese state since its formation (see Ong 2018). On the contrary, the UWSA fought alongside the Tatmadaw against Shan armed groups in the 1990s and against Thai military forces in the early 2000s. Despite this, it now maintains an uneasy truce with the Tatmadaw, following its refusal to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire. Military might and its ambivalent stance in negotiations have given it a front seat in any future peace talks. It now builds alliances with other armed groups against the Tatmadaw and has been rumored to provide them with weapons.

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Yet, even while defending its population, the UWSA has meted out mass violence, in the form of a forced relocation of peoples from the Wa highlands on the Chinese border to “South Wa” on the Thailand border, over a span of seven years from 1999 to 2006. “South Wa” was a territory given to the UWSA in 1996 by the Tatmadaw, for its assistance in fighting the Shan “druglord” Khun Sa during a period of better relations. The relocation of villagers from North to South Wa was a steady process meant to ease population pressure in the highlands in order to wean rural inhabitants off opium growing. The UWSA declared plans for its area to be poppy- and “drugfree” by 2005, and relocations began in 1999, with hundreds of Wa villagers dying of exhaustion and disease in the weeks-long journey south. The official figure relocated was put at 50,000 by the UWSA, but other accounts gave numbers as high as 126,000 (Sai Lone 2008; LNDO 2002). Uprooted from their homes, with no warning in some cases, they were allowed to bring only minimal possessions, leaving behind their houses, livestock, and grain. After arrival, the struggles did not cease. “Malaria and other diseases” caused 4,000 deaths in 1999 and “a Thai military source reported that 10,000 Wa died in 2000” (Fiskesjo 2017, 17). Local Shan in South Wa areas also bore the brunt of the relocation, with 48,000 affected, losing houses, land, and possessions, with many jailed for complaining to UWSA authorities. Scores fled to Thailand in response (LNDO 2002), while others were reportedly extorted or conscripted. The land in South Wa, widely rumored to have been “sold” by Tatmadaw General Khin Nyunt to the UWSA, fueled local grievance against the Tatmadaw. Shans reported: “[T]hey take everything they want, pigs, chickens, ducks and so on, saying, ‘Gen. Khin Nyunt has given us this country. If you want it back, go and ask him’” (ALTSEAN 2001, 15). UWSA officials justified this movement through blood they had shed in fighting Khun Sa, and the promises of Khin Nyunt. Even as various masses suffered, the dynamics of the mass relocation interpellated the UWSA as a potential Tatmadaw ally and a ratified participant in the Myanmar state’s program of violence – co-opted, dominated, or targeted according to the particularities of the “security situation.” Wa villagers in South Wa, protected by the UWSA, yet themselves the victims of forced relocation, allegedly acted with impunity among the Shan locals, stealing and extorting, fomenting historical stereotypes of the “bogeyman in the hills,” a reference to their headhunting past. The Wa people were produced as the invading Other, with the Shan as triply subject to the Myanmar state, an armed Wa group, and other Wa non-combatants. Despite taingyingtha status, without armed protection their claims to their land and property were insecure. A tripartite relation of mass violence emerged, with Wa and Shan villagers’ ethnic affiliations re-entrenched amidst coercion and contestations between the armies. Wa villagers were reportedly forced to stay by the UWSA as part of the resettlement; those who tried to flee were arrested and beaten, some allegedly killed, marking a semi-coercive and ambivalent membership in the Wa polity. Few media outlets and activist groups were present to bear witness, so the Wa resettlement did not reach a wider audience. Since 2010, the Burmese government has demanded that the South Wa territory be vacated and returned to the state,

Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 51

with military blockades and counterblockades in and around South Wa. The lowburning but constant threat of armed skirmishes has remained ever-present, embedding Wa villagers in a dependent relationship with the UWSA. During the violence against the Rohingya, however, many Wa people changed their Facebook profile pictures to that of Aung San Suu Kyi, in a show of support against the aspersions of the international community. An interlocutor justified it in this way: “she is the hope for reconciliation in the nation, only she has the authority to bring all the nationalities together.” Naturally, the Rohingya were excluded from this aspirational community, though perhaps not with the same fervor as the Karen interlocutor quoted above, given the greater socio-political distance between Wa and the Myanmar state, and Wa affinities and connections with China. The Wa interlocutor’s vision of the Myanmar Union was an aspiration toward peace and stability (“hope for reconciliation”), yet ambivalent toward political inclusion into the nation-state. Ultimately, the Wa remain potential objects of Myanmar state violence themselves, despite the protection afforded them by the UWSA.

Comparing through hard cases Rape as a method of war remains the most confounding phenomenon for our argument. The Shan Human Rights Federation perhaps does not go far enough when it writes, “sexual violence serves the multiple purpose of not only terrorizing local communities into submission, but also flaunting the power of the dominant troops over the enemy’s women, and thereby humiliating and demoralizing resistance forces” (SHRF 2002). If rape is an extreme bodily violation of a specific victim, it is also an indexical threat to others like her (typically a her), and a symbolic assault on the entire collective that cares for her. That symbolic violation is further inflected by the context of a chauvinist Myanmar state project of domination, making it difficult to imagine its object interpellated into the nation. And yet, we observe different metapragmatic commentary on the rape – both by the rapists and by other politicians – as well as different interpretations of it, that marks a distinction between the signification of mass rape in different Myanmar contexts. There is extensive documentation of rape as a weapon of war. Info Birmanie and the Swedish Burma Committee (2012) summarized incidents from the 1990s; KWO (2016) relays that “from 2005 to 2016, eleven women’s organizations from Burma, published at least 33 separate reports on the violence against women perpetrated by the soldiers of the Burma Army”; and Davies and True (2017) make a compelling case that rape is underreported in Myanmar. Yet there is not to our knowledge research on how people make sense of their relationship to the Myanmar nation after these kinds of assaults. For the Karen, at least, what we have encountered anecdotally are rumors of “secret” Tatmadaw orders for soldiers to use rape as a way to dilute their ethnic stock.11 This Karen interpretation sees rape conducted not to terrorize and expel the group from the polity, but rather to incorporate it under even more intensified conditions of domination. This is in contrast to the Rohingya, where systematic rape (Patten quoted in Selth 2018, 30)

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has been interpreted as conducted to punish, annihilate, and destroy the capacity of Rohingya women to reproduce (Kaladan News, quoted in ibid). The systematic sexual assault of Rohingya women is accompanied by not only denial but degradation. Generals and even monks have proclaimed Rohingyas are not attractive enough to rape. Even Suu Kyi singles out Rohingya rape victims as innately untrustworthy. When describing rape of ethnic women, Suu Kyi once declared forcefully that, “rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights, especially in the areas of the ethnic nationalities. Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by the armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities to divide our country.” Here Suu Kyi simultaneously reiterated their belonging in the country, and separated the Myanmar nation (indexed by the phrase “our country”) from the specific narrow source of the violence (the armed forces). When those same armed forces were accused of mass rape of Rohingya women, however, Suu Kyi’s responses proved different. Journalist Jonah Fisher reported that “for weeks Myanmar’s human rights icon turned leader … denied the allegations, insisting soldiers were adhering to the law, while at the same time refusing to allow independent journalists or observers to access the area” (Fisher 2017). When she finally acceded, Fisher describes how Myanmar state investigators threatened and verbally abused victims before declaring their claims of rape “fake,” a declaration that Suu Kyi splashed across her State Counselor Facebook page. While it is impossible to conclude that rape “means” (in an ultimate sense) different things to different groups and actors, the differences in commentary and interpretation shed light on different “logics of rape,” twisted as they are. While mass rape of other ethnic nationalities is implemented so as to dominate and dilute, mass rape of the Rohingya is perpetrated and denied so as to expel and annihilate.

Conclusion Discussing these cases together has allowed for an introductory exploration of violence in Myanmar in its various forms. By comparing the spectacular nature of the expulsions of thousands with the slow-burning and longstanding nature of violence against communities (daily exclusion, rape as a method of occupation), a more complete picture of the Burmese state’s violent practices emerges. But while this chapter has discussed the differential logics of mass violence on and between other ethnic groups, it did not address the Burmans, or other ethnic groups, who have not endured mass violence in the manner we have laid out. Indeed, although Myanmar’s military regime has turned on Burman protesters, their killing and abuse cannot fulfill our definition of mass violence, as they were targeted not as undifferentiated icons of the Burmese populace as a whole, but as exceptional political figures choosing to resist directly by entering the streets. These other subjects nonetheless exist in an environment of diffuse and perduring structural violence – what Uvin (2004) calls the agonizing if dull humiliation of inequality and exclusion. If mass violence produces mass objects, then structural violence, conversely, splits its object into ever-ramifying subgroups, down to the atomized individual struggling to

Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 53

survive.12 What happens when they are combined in the same ecosystem? We suspect that a common structural violence experienced by all in Myanmar (under a state simultaneously rapacious and indifferent; see Prasse-Freeman 2012) is the bedrock on which the other forms of violence rest. A society saturated in structural violence then stands as the condition of possibility for Rohingya exclusion. This is because structural violence produces a fragmentation or foreclosure of solidarity among the polity, to differing degrees, such that poor ethnic groups and poor Burmans alike are treated like degraded members of the in-group, while Rohingya are the constitutive outsiders who are not treated as belonging at all.

Notes 1 In 2012, an alliance of Myanmar’s ethnicities rejected any affiliation or solidarity with the Rohingya (RFA 2012). 2 Quoted in Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2015, 1. 3 While Western media often presents kala as a slur and equivalent to terms (such as the nword) that are always slurs, kala’s meanings in Burma are context dependent. 4 A transcript of the talk (Wirathu 2014) is in the authors’ possession. 5 While Prasse-Freeman (2014) describes both the process through which Aung San Suu Kyi became an icon of Burma and threats to that status, her populist stance toward the Rohingya has played well to Burma’s masses, reinstalling her into the iconic role. 6 Quoted in Selth 2018, 16. 7 For a development of this argument, see Prasse-Freeman (2021). 8 See Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2018) for a description of how the Kaman, Burma’s recognized Muslim group, have feared association with the Rohingya. 9 Thawnghmung (2011, xi), reflecting on her own family’s experiences of assimilation in Burmese life, illuminates how Karen have been “constantly re-interpreting and rearticulating their identities” (Campbell 2014, 241). 10 Scholars more sympathetic to the regime, such as Robert Taylor, also acknowledge the possibility of such interpretation given the context of domination: even if the Myanmar state enacted “a series of policies that were intended to play down ethnicity and religion in politics and society, thus having an integrating effect over time … as these policies were implemented by a Bamar majority army government, they were interpreted as an attempt at Bamar-ization, thus providing an argument for fighting for greater autonomy, if not independence” (2005, 280). 11 We thank Stephen Campbell and Shae Frydenlund for discussion on these issues. We also thank John Buchanan and Ken Maclean for their important contributions. 12 We thank Sayres Rudy for encouraging this theorization of the different forms of violence.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. ALTSEAN. 2001. Burma: Tentative Steps. Report Card Sept ’00–Jan ’01. March2001. Bangkok. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem. London: Penguin. Bosson, Andrew. 2007. “Forced Migration/Internal Displacement in Burma with an Emphasis on Government Controlled Areas.” Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, May. Campbell, Stephen. 2014. “Articulating Grievance in Southeast Myanmar.” In Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development, edited by Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar, 240–263. New Delhi: Sage.

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Chalk, Frank, and Kurt Jonassohn. 1990. The History and Sociology of Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cheesman, Nick. 2002. “Seeing ‘Karen’ in the Union of Myanmar.” Asian Ethnicity 3, no. 2: 199–220. Daniel, Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davies, Sara, and Jacqui True. 2017. “The Politics of Counting and Reporting Conflict-related Sexual and Gender-based Violence: The Case of Myanmar.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 1: 4–21. Delle, Jean-Luc. 2017. “Same Fight? Definitely Not!” Facebook post, 25 September. Fiskesjo, Magnus. 2017. “People First: The Wa World of Spirits and Other Enemies.” Anthropological Forum 27, no. 4: 1–25. Girke, Felix. “More To It than Meets the Eye: Visiting the National Races Village.” Pansodan Arts and Culture Friday Journal, 2013. Info Birmanie and Swedish Burma Committee. 2012. “The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma’s Ethnic Areas.” Burma Briefing Paper. KWO (Karen Women’s Organization). 2016. “KWO Message: On-Going Use of Rape by Burma Army,” 5 December. https://karenwomen.org/2016/12/05/kwo-message-ongoing-use-of-rape-by-burma-army/. KHRG (Karen Human Rights Group). 2007. “Development by Decree: The Politics of Poverty and Control in Karen State,” 24 April. KHRG (Karen Human Rights Group). 2008. “Village Agency: Rural Rights and Resistance in a Militarized Karen State.” KHRG (Karen Human Rights Group). 2009. “Cycles of Displacement: Forced Relocation and Civilian Responses in Nyaunglebin District.” KHRG (Karen Human Rights Group). 2015. “Forced Relocation and Destruction of Villagers’ Shelters by Burma/Myanmar Government Officials and Police in Hpa-an Township, Thaton District, June 2015,” 26 August. Kiernan, Ben. 2007. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kockelman, Paul. 2007. “Agency: The Relation between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge.” Current Anthropology 48, no. 3: 375–401. Lawi Weng. 2018. “All But Forgotten.” Irrawaddy, 4 May. Lawi Weng. 2019. “Union Govt Rehashes Kayah State Playbook in Mon State Dispute.” Irrawaddy. LNDO (Lahu National Development Organisation). 2002. “Unsettling Moves: The Wa Forced Resettlement Program in Eastern Shan State (1999–2001).” MacLean, Ken. 2018. “Famine Crimes: Military Operations, Forced Migration, and Chronic Hunger in Eastern Burma/Myanmar (2006–2008).” IDCE Occasional Research Paper Series. Nursyazwani. In review. “Legibility by Invitation: Rohingya Refugees and The Value of Political Ambivalence.” Nyi Nyi Kyaw. 2018. “Myanmar’s Other Muslims: The Case of the Kaman.” In Citizenship in Myanmar: Ways of Being in and from Burma, edited by Ashley South and Marie Lall. Singapore: ISEAS. Ong, Andrew. 2018. “Producing Intransigence: (Mis) Understanding the United Wa State Army in Myanmar.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 40, no. 3: 449–474. Phandeeyar. 2019. Exploring Digital & Mobile Cultures in Myanmar 2019, May. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. 2014. “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her Discontents.” Kyoto Review 14. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. 2020. “Hate-Bait, Micro-publics, and National(ist) Conversations on Burmese Facebook.” Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship 2, no. 1.

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Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. 2012. “Power, Civil Society, and an Inchoate Politics of the Daily in Burma/Myanmar.” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 2: 371–397. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. In revision. “Refusing Rohingya: Reformulating Ethnicity Amidst Blunt Biopolitics.” Current Anthropology. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. 2017. “The Rohingya Crisis.” Anthropology Today 33, no. 6: 1–2. Rajah, Ananda. 2002. “A ‘Nation of Intent’ in Burma: Karen Ethno-nationalism, Nationalism and Narrations of Nation.” Pacific Review 15, no. 4: 517–537. RFA. 2012. “Ethnic Alliance Rejects Rohingya.” Radio Free Asia, 26 June. Sadan, Mandy, ed. 2016. War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: the Kachin Ceasefire, 1994–2011. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Sai Lone. 2008. “The Political Economy of Opium Reduction in Burma: Local Perspectives From the Wa Region.” Unpublished Master’s Dissertation, Chulalongkorn University. Salem-Gervais, Nicholas, and Rose Metro. 2012. “A Textbook Case of Nation Building: The Evolution of History Curricula in Myanmar.” Journal of Burma Studies 16, no. 1: 27–78. Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois. 2004. “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence.” In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Schissler, Matthew, Matthew J. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. 2015. “Threat and Virtuous Defence: Listening to Narratives of Religious Conflict in Six Myanmar Cities,” report by Myanmar Media and Society Project, University of Oxford. Selth, Andrew. 2018. Myanmar’s Armed Forces and the Rohingya Crisis. United States Institute for Peace, Peaceworks series, No 140, August. SHRF (Shan Human Rights Foundation). 2002. “Myanmar/Burma: License to Rape,” May.http://burmacampaign.org.uk/media/License_to_rape.pdf. Siddique, Haroon. 2013. “Burma Sectarian Violence Motivated by Fear, says Aung San Suu Kyi.” Guardian, 24 October. Smith, Martin. 1999. Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnic Conflict, 2nd ed. London and New York: Zed Books. Straus, Scott. 2012. “Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Violence and the Dynamics of Restraint.” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2: 343–362. Taylor, Robert. 2005. “Do States make Nations? The Politics of Identity in Myanmar.” Southeast Asia Research 13, no. 3 (November): 261–286. Than Toe Aung. 2019. “‘Genocide’, ‘Human Rights’ and What’s Lost in Translation.” Frontier Myanmar, 8 May. Thawnghmung, Ardeth Maung. 2011. The ‘Other’ Karen in Myanmar: Ethnic Minorities and the Struggle without Arms. New York: Lexington Books. UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council). 2018. Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. September 10–28. www.ohchr.org/Documents/ HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/A_HRC_39_64.pdf. Uvin, Peter. 2004. “Global Dreams and Local Anger: From Structural to Acute Violence in a Globalizing World.” In Rethinking Global Political Economy, edited by Kurt Burchet al. London: Routledge, 147–162. Valentino, Benjamin. 2014. “Why we Kill: The Political Science of Political Violence against Civilians.” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1: 89–103. Wirathu. 2014. “Clarifications so that Those who Oppose the Protection of the Race Law can be Known.” Speech given at Ahthawaddy playfield North Okkala Township, 11 May. Woods, Kevin. 2011. “Ceasefire Capitalism: Military–Private Partnerships, Resource Concessions and Military–State Building in the Burma–China Borderlands.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 4: 747–770.

PART 2

The Politics of Fear

3 PERFORMATIVE VIOLENCE AND PHILIPPINE POPULISM Alfred W. McCoy

From the first elections after Philippine independence in 1946, political violence emerged as a recurring problem that seemed to threaten the integrity of the country’s democratic process. But only twice during the Republic’s 75-year history has this endemic violence peaked in ways that made it seem symptomatic of broader global trends. In the last years of his martial law dictatorship, President Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned some 2,500 extrajudicial killings, and during his first months in power President Rodrigo Duterte presided over 7,000 such killings as part of his drug war. Are these simply senseless murders, or can they somehow help us understand the recent proliferation of populist leaders in nominally democratic nations around the globe? Across Europe hyper-nationalist parties like the French National Front, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the Alternative for Germany, the UK Independence Party, and others have won voters by espousing a nativist reaction to economic globalization. In the most visible rejection of global integration, the British public voted, in June 2016, to quit the European Union. Simultaneously, a generation of populist demagogues gained popularity or power in nominally democratic nations around the world.1 “Demagogues are still emerging, in the West and outside it,” observed Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, “as the promise of prosperity collides with massive disparities of wealth, power, education, and status.”2 Giving weight to those words, the Philippine economy grew by a solid 6 percent per annum from 2010 to 2016, but the number of poor remained largely unchanged. Just 40 elite Filipino families on the Forbes wealth ranking controlled 76 percent of this growth, while a staggering 26 million poor struggled to survive on a dollar a day as development projects, accelerated by this economic expansion, were evicting many from their squatter shacks and subsistence farms.3

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To explore the ideology that underlies the appeal of these demagogues, rhetoric scholar Michael J. Lee analyzes populism as a movement that, above all, defines the national community by both “shared characteristics” and a common “enemy,” much like the Nazis excluded certain groups by race. Populist movements often exhibit a desire, says Lee, for “apocalyptic confrontation … as the vehicle to revolutionary change” through “a mythic battle.”4 With a similar emphasis on inclusion and exclusion, political scientist Jan-Werner Müller argues that “the telltale sign of populism” is leaders who “claim that they, and only they, represent the people.”5 Somewhat more broadly, Cas Mudde defines current populism as “an ideology that separates society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite,’ and that holds that politics should be an expression of ‘the general will’ of the people.”6 Although seemingly universal in depicting the way populist demagogues rely on divisive or violent rhetoric, these models omit the actual violence and its potent political symbolism that can propel populist leaders to power. Indeed, over the past ten years, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his bare-chested power by assassinating a dozen opponents.7 Turkey’s populist Recep Erdogan has recently expressed his aura of mailed-fist authority by staging a bloody repression of the Kurds and jailing thousands of opponents who have been raped and tortured.8 In 2014 and again in 2019, retired general Prabowo Subianto came close to capturing Indonesia’s presidency with a law-and-order campaign that resonated with his 1998 terror that torched over 5,000 buildings in downtown Jakarta and left a thousand dead.9 In the closest parallel to Duterte’s drug war, the Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra launched his “red shirt” populism in 2003 with a campaign against methamphetamine abuse that prompted the police to carry out 2,275 extrajudicial killings in just three months.10 Even a cursory review of these cases indicates that we cannot understand populism solely by looking skyward into the ether of ideology, but should also look down to ponder the meaning of all this blood on the pavement. Offering a revealing instance of this global phenomenon, violence has long been a defining attribute of Philippine populism – particularly the way that Filipino leaders combine the high politics of great-power diplomacy and the low politics of performative violence, with corpses written upon and read as texts.

Provincial warlords Only three years after independence, the 1949 presidential elections marked the first appearance of armed violence as a defining feature of Philippine politics. Before World War II, the national police, called the Philippines Constabulary (PC), had enforced strict controls that restricted gun ownership to registered handguns. During World War II, however, both conventional combat and antiJapanese guerrilla operations littered the archipelago with loose firearms that provincial politicians amassed after the war to form private armies.

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To check the Constabulary and thereby allow their provincial paramilitaries free rein during elections, nascent warlords pressured Malacañang Palace to restrain its Constabulary commanders. Since local leaders could deliver blocs of votes whose sum was often the margin of victory in national contests, presidential candidates had to court these provincial warlords and incur compromising political debts.11 In the early years of this new regime, Governor Rafael Lacson of Negros Occidental was one of the first provincial politicians to discern the Republic’s structural flaw and play upon it to win a de facto political autonomy from the central government. The resulting political violence soon became a national scandal that discredited the government of President Elpidio Quirino and created a political crisis for this young democracy. On the pretext of checking communist infiltration, Lacson had, by 1948, formed one of the first private armies, which soon expanded into a force of 130 Special Police (SP) and 59 Provincial Guards. To fund this ad hoc force, Lacson drew upon diverse sources – municipal taxes, formal provincial appropriations, and national pork barrel from the Presidential Action Commission on Social Amelioration (PACSA).12 Significantly, all the soldiers in Lacson’s private army were, in some way, agents of the state. Such a small force of 190 men could not have been effective had it faced serious opposition from any of three possible rivals – municipal police, the security forces attached to the province’s many sugar mills, and, of course, the Constabulary. With a mix of deft maneuver and brute force, the governor subjugated each in succession. In the 1947 local elections, Lacson had won de facto control of municipal police by manipulating the mayoral elections. Two years later, after terrorizing the rival political faction that owned the province’s sugar mills, Lacson raided several factory compounds and confiscated their arms, effectively neutralizing this industrial security force.13 So armed, Lacson became a prime progenitor of the systematic violence that made the 1949 presidential elections, in the words of foreign and Filipino observers, “a national disgrace” and “the most fraudulent and violent in democratic history.”14 From the outset, the campaign was a tight contest between the wartime president Jose P. Laurel, who still commanded a strong following, and the incumbent Elpidio Quirino, whose unpopularity and unlikely election was the subject of much media commentary.15 In eight key provinces across the country, armed goons harassed the opposition’s political rallies. So intense was the intimidation in two provinces, Lanao and Lacson’s Negros Occidental, that the Commission on Elections recommended, in the weeks before election day, suspension of voting and imposition of Constabulary control – suggestions the president ignored. Among the 3.7 million votes cast nationwide, 41 percent of Quirino’s 485,000 majority came from Negros Occidental (200,000) and another 28 percent from Lanao (140,000). Though Quirino won only 51 percent of the ballots cast nationwide, Lacson delivered an incredible 92 percent of his province’s vote for the president, thus producing the winning margin. In its subsequent investigation, the House Electoral Tribunal found evidence of systematic terrorism in Negros Occidental and voided the results in two of its congressional districts.16

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After single-handedly assuring Quirino’s election, the governor demanded that the president give him a veto over Constabulary assignments to his province, retaining those officers who supported him and transferring any who did not. With the state’s monopoly on violence thus neutralized by this seemingly modest concession, Governor Lacson unleashed a reign of terror against his local rivals.17 At the start of the 1951 local and legislative elections, Defense Secretary Ramon Magsaysay dispatched over a thousand troops, 200 Marines and 900 ROTC cadets, to prevent another round of violence in Negros Occidental.18 Despite their presence, investigators later found 51 instances of intimidation by Special Police – including beatings, random gunfire, and, most disturbingly, the murder of Moises Padilla, candidate for mayor in the town of Magallon.19 Taking Padilla’s candidacy as a personal affront, Governor Lacson insisted the Constabulary absent itself from Magallon during the elections, and the provincial commander, Captain Marcial Enriquez, complied. Two days before the voting, Lacson denounced Padilla as a communist at a public rally in Magallon and on election day, November 13, ordered his arrest. For the next three days, the SP tortured him publicly on the plazas of four nearby municipalities. On November 16, the Special Police shot him 14 times before dumping his body in a shed near the town of La Castellana, making no attempt to conceal the crime.20 But this time the governor had gone too far. The next day, Defense Secretary Magsaysay flew to Negros accompanied by the publisher of the Manila Times, Joaquin Roces, and his star reporter, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. Arriving at Magallon after dark, Magsaysay climbed the stairs to a wake where Padilla’s body lay face down to expose the congealed blood, bullet holes, and wounds of torture. One photo of the clothed body showed the left hand upturned toward the camera to reveal a raised wound in the palm, akin to Christ’s stigmata from the nails that held him to the cross. When local doctors refused to do an autopsy, Magsaysay flew the body back to Manila for a military funeral with full honors. At each step in this political Calvary, publisher Roces clicked his camera and reporter Aquino jotted down quotes – producing a sensational story for the front page of the Manila Times that stirred public condemnation. Despite the outpouring of anger, President Quirino seemed reluctant to suspend Governor Lacson. “Mr. President,” Secretary Magsaysay advised, “the people are so outraged by the death of Moises Padilla that they are ready to stone Malacañang Palace.” After an embarrassing delay, government prosecutors filed murder charges against Lacson and the president finally suspended him.21 Realization that the president had compromised the Constabulary, a force synonymous with the state’s integrity, dismayed the Filipino public. Two years later in the 1953 presidential elections, Magsaysay, now running as the opposition candidate, brought campaign rallies in towns across the Philippines to an emotional peak by stretching out his arms as if bearing an invisible corpse and saying: “I held in my arms the bleeding symbol of democracy: the body of Moises Padilla.”22 After Magsaysay’s triumph in the November balloting, the courts suddenly accelerated the Lacson case. In August 1954, the governor was sentenced to death for

Performative violence and Philippine populism 63

FIGURE 3.1

Body of Moises Padilla, 1951.

the murder of Moises Padilla, a penalty later reduced to life imprisonment.23 For an unpopular president, the tacit tolerance of warlord violence had created a political martyr whose death hastened the loss of power. Despite some significant reforms under Magsaysay, the politicization of the Constabulary that had fostered these provincial warlords continued and the potential for political violence thus remained. Indeed, during the 1960s, many provinces would again witness the fusion of public office with private militia, indicating that the tension between central authority and provincial violence had persisted as a defining attribute of Philippine politics.

The Marcos regime After a 20-year career as a conventional party politician, President Ferdinand Marcos combined national resources and provincial violence to accomplish something unprecedented in the history of the Philippine Republic: his re-election. During the 1969 campaign, Marcos stumped vigorously and flooded the country with cash, reaching even remote villages to personally place a check for P2,000.00 in the hands of each barrio captain and thereby pushing the country’s finances to the breaking point.24 The 1969 campaign also produced incidents of political terror of the sort not seen since the 1951 elections. With the Constabulary now under the command of

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Marcos loyalist Vicente Raval, the PC Special Forces orchestrated violence in four swing provinces that left 46 dead.25 Bolstered by force and fraud, Marcos scored a crushing victory, winning 74 percent of the presidential vote, 86 of 100 House seats, and 11 of 12 Senate seats being contested.26 In the aftermath of these elections, a family dynasty in Ilocos Sur pursued a political vendetta against local enemies, producing an incident iconic for both its brutality and its executive complicity. Since this troubled province was adjacent to Marcos’s own Ilocos Norte, and its local warlord, Representative Floro Crisologo, was his political ally, the president’s victory may have encouraged these events.27 In mid-September 1969, the Crisologo goons gunned down a former Bantay municipal mayor, and a month later prosecutors indicted the congressman’s son, Vincent Crisologo, chief of the family’s private militia, for ordering the crime.28 In the election’s aftermath, political reprisals continued in the town of Bantay as the Crisologos retaliated against two villages, Ora Este and Ora Centro, for supporting the opposition’s candidates. In May 1970, Vincent Crisologo led a hundred armed men into these villages and burned both to the ground, killing an elderly woman who was caught in the flames. During the attack residents pleaded with the provincial PC commander, but he “ignored … appeals to stop the arson.” In its front-page coverage, the Manila press carried moving photos of survivors sorting through the ashes of their devastated homes.29 Outraged by such a blatant display of warlord power, 42 civic, religious, and youth organizations formed Operation Bantay to demand an impartial investigation.30 Despite his alliance with Congressman Crisologo, President Marcos ordered charges filed against his son Vincent for arson.31 Such unrestrained brutality by a private militia, apparently operating with the president’s tacit approval, challenged the Republic’s legitimacy among both student activists and Manila’s middle class. Once again, warlord electoral violence had created an iconic incident and a political martyr that compromised the legitimacy of a president and the regime he represented. In September 1972, as this hard-won second term came to an end, Marcos used a mix of US support, central power, and provincial controls to suspend Congress and declare martial law. The military quickly disbanded 145 private armies, two for each of the country’s 67 provinces, and confiscated 523,616 firearms, one for every 15 adult males, leaving the president with a momentary monopoly on violence.32 Three months later, on January 15, 1973, a Constabulary firing squad executed Chinese drug dealer Lim Seng, with photos splashed across front pages and footage shown on television and in movie theaters.33 By his simultaneous appeal to the moral crisis over drug abuse and his use of the Manila Chinese as a unifying populist enemy, Marcos gained an aura of potency that arguably strengthened his public support right at the outset of martial law. Significantly, Lim Seng was the first and last person publicly executed during the 14 years of martial rule. On the external side of the political equation, Marcos used the issue of military bases to win support for his authoritarian regime and tacit tolerance of his human rights violations from three successive US administrations. When President Jimmy

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Carter took office in 1977, however, his emphasis on human rights roiled an already fraught bilateral relationship. Complicating matters further, Marcos pressed so hard for increased US payments for its bases that George Kennan, a senior Washington strategist, advised “immediate, complete, resolute and wordless withdrawal.”34 While his daughter Imee publicly denounced the bases as “clear evidence of our being American stooges” and his wife Imelda visited the Soviet Union to seek an alternative to US aid, Marcos played the statesman and broke the impasse, after three years of negotiations, by agreeing to annual US compensation of $500 million.35 “We had to choose between using our bilateral relationship for human rights objectives,” US negotiator Richard Holbrooke told Congress, “and using it first for putting our military facilities on a stable basis.”36 President Reagan’s administration embraced the dictator, inviting him to Washington for a formal state visit in September 1982. Even as the regime plunged into crisis after it was implicated in the 1983 assassination of ex-Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., Washington refused to contemplate alternatives. US military aid to the Philippines doubled to $70 million in 1985, a signal seen in Manila as support for the regime’s limitless lien on power. Most importantly, through the World Bank and private banks, the US led the First World in granting Marcos loans that eventually totaled US$26 billion. The largesse extended the life of the regime by providing it with a steady inflow of cash to offset the funds wasted by its plunder of the nation’s economy. With Washington generally silent about his regime’s excesses, Marcos could pursue two mutually reinforcing strategies to transform his dictatorship into a dynasty – the destruction of any potential opposition and the construction of a ruling coalition. He damned the provincial politicians as “warlords” and used his martial law powers to strip them of their arms and offices. He denounced Manila’s wealthy families as “old society oligarchs” and transferred their confiscated assets to a new economic elite of his relations and retainers. After a decade of dictatorship, Fortune magazine would describe the new Philippine economy as “crony capitalism.”37 The former ambassador to Japan, Roberto S. Benedicto, is an apt example of a crony capitalist. A close Marcos friend from their law school days at the University of the Philippines in the late 1930s, Benedicto became the regime’s de facto administrator for sugar, then the country’s leading export industry. By the late 1970s, Benedicto had enormous power over the industry through a combination of private and public agencies.38 Using that wealth, Benedicto became the palace’s plenipotentiary for the sugar region, Negros and Panay islands, where he appointed local officials and backed resurgent warlords by investing them with command of anti-communist militia. Shaken by major political and economic crises between 1981 and 1984, the Marcos coalition weakened, as once powerful cronies, who had generally mismanaged their assets, began losing the fortunes they needed to finance electoral mobilization. By the time of the 1984 legislative elections, his popular support had largely eroded, leaving a mass base comprising his native Ilocos region, a demoralized ruling party machine, and rearmed regional warlords – including, Armando Gustilo (Negros Occidental), Ramon Durano (Cebu), and Ali Dimaporo (Lanao).39

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Shaken by major political and economic crises of the early 1980s, a Marcos regime once proud of its “constitutional authoritarianism” staged a spectacle of extralegal violence to preserve his power. In the last years of martial law, Marcos unleashed his internal security forces to subdue the population with a sudden burst of terror, producing about 77 percent, or 2,520 of the 3,257 extrajudicial killings under Martial Law. These “salvagings” dumped the victim’s remains, scarred by stigmata of torture, in public places so passers-by could read a transcript of terror in the wounds. In the capital, with only 4,000 police for six million residents, the metro government deputized hundreds of “secret marshals” to shoot petty criminals on sight, producing over 30 fatalities during the program’s first month, May 1985. In the countryside, the Constabulary tried to check communist insurgency by arming 110,000 local militia as of 1982, flooding Mindanao with Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF) that soon degenerated into what their chief later called “private armies … for the personal aggrandizement of the local warlord.”40 To control the five provinces of the Western Visayas region, Marcos allowed regional warlord Armando Gustilo to revive his private army as an official CHDF unit. When demonstrators mounted a protest against regime policies at Escalante, Negros Occidental in September 1985, Gustilo’s 300 militia, many of them CHDF, opened fire without provocation, killing 28. As the February 1986 elections approached, Gustilo used this armed force to support the president, thereby escaping any legal consequences for the massacre. Thus, Marcos had come full circle, beginning as a centralizer and ending dependent upon resurgent provincial warlords quite similar to those he had destroyed at the outset of martial law. Yet such performative violence was capricious and highly contextualized, proving effective at the start of martial law when people had yearned for order and ineffective at its close when Filipinos wanted to recover their freedom. By the time presidential elections arrived in February 1986, Marcos lacked sufficient provincial support to win by a convincing majority. Moreover, the Cold War was waning and Washington’s interests were quietly shifting to support emerging democracies worldwide, creating an opening for anti-authoritarian movements around the globe. Reversing the dynamic that had driven his political ascent, a combination of Marcos’s attenuated local controls and Washington’s fading support would prove a fatal combination for the regime, which famously collapsed in February 1986.

Davao City and Duterte’s violence Like his predecessor Ferdinand Marcos, President Rodrigo Duterte gained his extraordinary power through the juxtaposition of international patronage and local power. Yet unlike any of his predecessors, Duterte pursued his entire political career in local government, in his case Davao City, which was a site of exceptional violence that left a lasting imprint on his political persona. Davao’s descent into extreme violence began in the early 1980s when the communist New People’s Army (NPA), which was expanding rapidly during the

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Marcos dictatorship, made it the site of a new urban guerilla warfare strategy.41 As the NPA’s “sparrow units,” or liquidation squads, moved into this city of one million, the number of homicides doubled to 800 in 1984, including 150 police. The rebel control over the city’s sprawling Agdao district was so complete it was known as “Nicaragdao.”42 While the NPA was spreading into the suburbs of Davao City in 1983–84, military intelligence units seeded the area with Deep Penetration Agents, or “zombies.” In its search for these spies, the NPA over-reacted and slaughtered hundreds of its own members. By the time the Communist Party tried to restrain the cycle of accusations and executions that had spun out of control, the Davao front had collapsed. Many genuine cadres sought refuge from the slaughter with local military units.43 “By April 1986,” reported one group of foreign observers, “Davao was a counter-revolution waiting to happen.”44 Once the Marcos regime fell in February of that year, the AFP, encouraged by both US advisors and Filipino elites, announced a re-emphasis on counterinsurgency. Starting in July 1986, Davao’s Metrodiscom chief, PC Colonel Francisco Calida, recruited NPA returnees and local criminals to transform a small group called Alsa Masa into a mass vigilante organization. Lending a lurid quality to this violence, their spokesman Juan “Jun” Pala, Jr. broadcast anti-communist rants almost daily on local radio, saying: “Just one order to our anti-Communist forces, your head will be cut off. Damn you, your brains will be scattered in the streets.”45 When I visited Davao in 1987 to interview Jun Pala and investigate his death squad, this remote southern city had an air of utter hopelessness. It was in this fraught conjuncture of national regime change and localized violence that Rodrigo Duterte, the son a local elite family, launched his political career, first as an appointive vice-mayor of Davao City in 1986 and then in 1988 as the elected mayor – the first of seven terms that would keep him in office, on and off, for another 21 years until 2016. His first campaign in 1988 was hotly contested and Duterte won with only 25.7 percent of the vote, barely beating his rivals, including President Corazon Aquino’s anointed favorite Zafiro Respicio with 24 percent and the vigilante radio host Jun Pala who captured 18.3 percent. The city that Duterte inherited was then in remarkably poor shape – a million poor squeezed into squatter slums, capital flight, rampant kidnapping, and endemic violence between the NPA sparrow units and the Alsa Masa death squad. With rival assassins roaming the streets doing one-bullet kills in broad daylight, the city had an aura of utter desolation.46 As the nation’s economy slowly recovered from the drag of Marcos’s mismanagement, Mayor Duterte proved an apt local booster whose tax breaks and probusiness policy produced growth for Davao City that reached 9.4 percent in 2014, the highest for any Philippine region. Violence also played a central role in his campaign to restore order to this sprawling city whose population was growing toward two million. After he announced a crackdown on petty crime in the mid1990s, there were 1,424 documented killings in the city from 1998 to 2015, most attributed to the Davao Death Squad (DDS), which reportedly operated under his

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patronage. Taking a leaf from Jun Pala’s playbook, Mayor Duterte used his weekly television show to read off the names of reputed malefactors, some of whom became victims of the DDS.47 According to Philippine Senate testimony by a former death squad member, the group numbered 500 and, apart from liquidating drug dealers, also eliminated the mayor’s political rivals, notably the broadcaster Jun Pala who had parlayed his notoriety into a city council seat. For years leading up to his assassination in 2003, Pala began his daily radio broadcast by saying: “This is Jun Porras Pala, who remains the voice of democracy in [Mayor Rodrigo] Duterte’s reign of terror. Maayong buntag [good morning].”48 Campaigning for president in 2016 on a law-and-order theme, Duterte sparked a surge of populist support that, as the analyst and activist Walden Bello put it, was “bubbling up from below” and won by a wide margin of six million votes. “If by chance that God will place me there,” he promised at the start of his presidential campaign, “watch out because the 1,000 [people killed while Duterte was Davao mayor] will become 100,000. You will see the fish in Manila Bay getting fat. That is where I will dump you.” But there was also historical resonance to this violent rhetoric. By praising Marcos, promising to bury his body in the National Heroes Cemetery, and supporting the candidacy of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. as vice president, Duterte identified himself with a lineage of populist strongmen epitomized by the old dictator. Accordingly, on his first day in office Duterte’s handpicked police director, Roland dela Rosa, ordered his force to unleash an aggressive attack on drug trafficking. In the hundred days that followed, the National Police and allied vigilantes killed over 1,400 alleged drug users, frequently leaving the bodies on city streets.49 During his first six months, before the police murder of a South Korean prompted a brief suspension, the tally for Duterte’s drug war reached 7,000 bodies dumped on the streets – sometimes with a crude cardboard sign reading “Pusher Ako” (I am a pusher). Frequently, the victims’ faces were wrapped in distinct brown packing tape that had been the signature of the Davao Death Squad, much as Marcos’s salvaging victims showed the stigmata of torture. After ordering a resumption of the anti-drug campaign in March 2017, Duterte brushed aside complaints about human rights abuse, telling police that if they killed their accusers “I will pardon you.”50 By July 2019, the Philippine Human Rights Commission estimated the number of drug killings at 27,000 and the UN Human Rights Council voted, over vehement Philippine opposition, to investigate the potential violation.51 Human Rights Watch declared this drug war a “calamity,” but even after six months and thousands of killings a resounding 85 percent of Filipinos surveyed were still “satisfied” with the policy.52 After three years of controversy and 27,000 extrajudicial killings, Duterte’s approval rating remained at 79 percent in April 2019 – providing the popular support that allowed him to capture control of the Philippine Senate in the May midterm elections.53 Urban sociologist Nicole Curato finds an explanation for his continuing popularity amidst controversy in the elusive duality of Duterte’s rhetoric. By demonizing the drug menace, both users and pushers, he employed what Curato called a

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“populist logic of painting a ‘dangerous other’” who are “considered enemies that should be eradicated.”54 For citizens troubled by petty criminals and addicts, Duterte’s tough talk, Curato argues, offers a “promise of justice” and “stability in an otherwise fragile context.”55 If we move beyond the rational realm of policy to the emotions of performative politics, each bullet-ridden body left sprawled on a city street seemed a fulfillment of the president’s promises of order and progress. Just as he has used the spectacle of violence to consolidate his domestic base, so Duterte has proven equally skilled in playing upon great power rivalries to strengthen his international position. In the midst of rising tensions over the South China Sea between Beijing and Washington, Duterte improved his country’s bargaining position by moving away from the close strategic alliance with America toward a more neutral position. At the ASEAN conference in Laos in September 2016, Duterte reacted profanely to President Barack Obama’s oblique criticism of the thousands of extrajudicial killings under his ongoing drug war, saying: “Who does he think he is? I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign country and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people. ‘Putang ina mo’ [Your mother’s a whore], I will swear at you.” That outburst led Obama to cancel their bilateral meeting, opening a breach between the leaders that resisted repair.56 That October, during a state visit to Beijing, Duterte quietly capitulated to Beijing’s relentless pressure for bilateral talks to settle their dispute over the South China Sea, virtually abrogating Manila’s recent slam-dunk win on that issue before an international court.57 China reciprocated, signing deals that gave Manila $22.5 billion in trade and low-interest loans.58 After US elections in November 2016, Duterte tilted back a bit toward Washington, quickly congratulating president-elect Donald Trump on his victory. Struggling to contain North Korea’s nuclear threat, President Trump reciprocated, telephoning Duterte in April 2017 to praise his “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”59 Despite his love-song serenade of Trump during a November 2017 state visit to Manila, Duterte did not change his apparent decision that China’s economic power, not America’s military might, was the key to his country’s security.60 By his unprecedented affront to one US president and his sedulous courtship of another, Duterte gained freedom of maneuver to maximize concessions from rival superpowers. His deft juxtaposition of international maneuvering and local bloodletting has made him a latter-day Philippine strongman, with no apparent check on his power.61

Conclusion This study of Filipino strongmen past and present reveals two overlooked aspects of the ill-defined phenomenon of global populism: i.e., the role of performative violence in projecting domestic strength and a complementary need for diplomatic success to demonstrate international influence. By seeing how skillfully they balance these critical poles of power, we can speculate about the political fate of populist strongmen in disparate corners of the globe.

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In Russia’s case, Putin’s projection of strength by the murder of his domestic opponents is matched by unchecked aggression in Georgia and Ukraine – a successful balancing act likely to extend his hold on power for the foreseeable future.62 In Turkey, Erdogan’s wholesale repression of ethnic and political enemies has complicated his bid for entry into the European Union and his alliance with the United States against Islamic fundamentalism – diplomatic barriers that could ultimately slow his bid for unchecked domestic power.63 In the Philippines, President Duterte’s great power diplomacy has the potential to weaken his domestic authority. Just six months after his dramatic tilt toward Beijing, Duterte made a sharp correction in an apparent bid to placate a restive military not shy about intervening in the political arena. In March 2017, his defense minister Delfin Lorenzana, a career officer who had played a key role in developing the current military alliance with America, sounded the alarm about Chinese naval explorations on Benham Rise, a resource-rich area inside Philippine waters.64 When Duterte insisted he had granted Beijing permission, both his defense and foreign secretaries objected openly, prompting one legislator to file an impeachment petition.65 Seeking to still the damaging controversy, Duterte soon surprised critics by ordering his military to strengthen their forces on islands in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines.66 But should Manila’s balancing act fail to rebuild working relations with Washington in ways that will defend its maritime zone, then a six-year hiatus in the alliance would allow China to make its de facto claim to the Philippines’ exclusive zone in the South China Sea an undeniable reality. If public opinion tires of his spectacle of violence and its pervasive sense of threat, as it once did of Marcos, then Duterte’s de facto abrogation of his country’s claims to rich fishing grounds and undersea oil reserves could risk a popular backlash, a military coup, or both.67 By studying a single manifestation of this worldwide trend toward populist leadership, we can gain a sharper sense of both the global diplomacy and local violence that have made contemporary populism such a formidable political force. And by tracing the potent symbolism of mangled bodies – Moises Padilla’s battered corpse, Lim Seng’s carefully staged execution, Marcos’s display of salvaged remains, and Duterte’s many dead – we can grasp both the political importance of raw physical violence and its shifting significance within the complex, ever-changing currents of Philippine politics.

Notes 1 Jeremy Ashkenas and Gregor Aisch, “European Populism in the Age of Donald Trump,” New York Times, December 5, 2016; Rick Lyman, “Like Trump, Europe’s Populists Win Big with Rural Voters,” New York Times, December 6, 2016, www.nytim es.com/interactive/2016/12/05/world/europe/populism-in-age-of-trump.html. 2 Pankaj Mishra, “The Globalization of Rage,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (November/ December 2016): 46–54. 3 Agence France-Presse, “Philippines’ Elite Swallow New Wealth,” Inquirer.net, March 3, 2013, http://business.inquirer.net/110413/philippines-elite-swallow-countrys-new-weal th; Gerardo P. Sicat, “The Philippine Economy and Benigno Aquino III’s Presidency, 2010–2016,” Philippine Star, January 6, 2016, www.philstar.com/business/2016/01/06/

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4 5

6 7

8

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1539645/philippine-economy-and-benigno-aquino-iiis-presidency-2010-2016; D.J. Yap, “12 Million Filipinos Living in Extreme Poverty,” Inquirer.net, March 18, 2016, http:// newsinfo.inquirer.net/775062/12m-filipinos-living-in-extreme-poverty; all accessed Feb ruary 12, 2016. Michael J. Lee, “The Populist Chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 357–64. Jan-Werner Müller, “Trump, Erdogan, Farage: The Attractions of Populism for Politicians, the Dangers for Democracy,” Guardian, September 2, 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/sep/02/trump-erdogan-farage-the-attractions-of-populism-for-politicians-the-dangersfor-democracy. Cas Mudde, “Europe’s Populist Surge: A Long Time in the Making,” Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2016-10-17/ europe-s-populist-surge. Andrew E. Kramer, “More of Kremlin’s Opponents Are Ending Up Dead,” New York Times, August 20, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/world/europe/moscow-krem lin-silence-critics-poison.html; Andrew E. Kramer, “Russian Critic of Putin Assassinated in Ukraine,” New York Times, March 23, 2017. Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Accuses Turkey of Hundreds of Killings in Campaign Against Kurds,” New York Times, March 11, 2017; Mark MacKinnon, “Erdogan’s Purge,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), January 5, 2017, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ erdogans-purge-50000-ousted-arrested-or-suspended-inturkey/article30987001/. Angus McIntyre, The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal Toward Constitutional Rule (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 187; Randy Fabi and Kanupriya Kapoor, “Behind Prabowo’s Campaign to Become Indonesia’s President, a Questionable Crew,” Reuters, July 5, 2014, www.reuters.com/article/uk-indonesia-election-pra bowo-idUSKBN0FB03F20140706; Keith B. Richburg, “Indonesia Sliding Toward Economic, Social Chaos,” Washington Post, July 22, 1998, www.washingtonpost.com/ archive/politics/1998/07/22/indonesia-sliding-toward-economic-social-chaos/d94b22344616-4b50-ba65-d6e982155b9c/?utm_term=.7b73a3630acf; Per Liljas, “Here’s Why Some Indonesians are Spooked by this Presidential Contender,” Time, June 12, 2014, http://time.com/2836510/prabowo-subianto-human-rights-indonesia-elections/; Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono, “Joko Wins Re-election in Indonesia, Defeating HardLine Former General, New York Times, May 20, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/ world/asia/joko-widodo-indonesia-election.html. Human Rights Watch, Not Enough Graves: The War on Drugs, HIV/AIDS, and Violations of Human Rights in Thailand (July 2004), 9–12, www.hrw.org/reports/2004/thaila nd0704/thailand0704.pdf; Seth Mydans, “A Wave of Drug Killings is Linked to Thai Police,” New York Times, April 8, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/world/a-waveof-drug-killings-is-linked-to-thai-police.html. For a fuller discussion of this period, see, Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 379–85. Negros Occidental, Provincial Board, Minutes, General Fund-Chief Executive, October 6, 1950; Jose V. Abueva, Ramon Magsaysay: A Political Biography (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing, 1971), 140–1. El Civismo (Bacolod), May 23, 1948; Liberator (Iloilo City), October 29, 1949. Dapen Liang, Philippine Parties and Politics: A Historical Study of National Experience in Democracy (San Francisco: Gladstone, 1971), 311. Philippines Free Press, September 17, 1949, 1. Philippines Free Press, January 27, 1951; Abueva, Ramon Magsaysay, 140–42; Remegio E. Agpalo, Jose Laurel: National Leader and Political Philosopher (Quezon City: Jose P. Laurel Memorial, 1992), 245–7; Carl H. Landé, Leaders, Factions and Parties: The Structure of Philippine Politics (New Haven, CT: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University, 1965), 66;

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17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

John T. Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109. Landé, Leaders, Factions and Parties, 66. Letters from Rafael Lacson to President Elpidio Quirino, July 31, 1950, August 28, 1950, September 28, 1950, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Syquia Mansion, Vigan, Ilocos Sur. El Civismo (Bacolod City), October 7, 1951, November 11, 1951. Rafael Lacson v. Hon. Luis R. Torres, Philippine Supreme Court, G.R. L-5543, Annex A. People v. Lacson, Criminal Case 3220. Philippines Free Press, August 28, 1954; Abueva, Ramon Magsaysay, 201–3; Carlos Quirino, Magsaysay of the Philippines (Manila: Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Society, 1958), 79–80; Jesus V. Merritt, Magsaysay: Man of the People (Manila: Far Eastern Publishing, 1953), 33–4; Nick Joaquin, The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as Three Generations (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1986), 221–3. Abueva, Ramon Magsaysay, 202–3, 254–5; Quirino, Magsaysay of the Philippines, 116; Merritt, Magsaysay, 34; Joaquin, The Aquinos of Tarlac, 224. Philippines Free Press, August 28, 1954. Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (New York: Times Books, 1987), 76–7; Mark Thompson, The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 34–5; Lela Garner Noble, “Politics in the Marcos Era,” in Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond, ed. John Bresnan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 79–80. Thompson, The Anti-Marcos Struggle, 35–7, 192–3; Willem Wolters, Politics, Patronage, and Class Conflict in Central Luzon (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1983), 166–7; Conrado de Quiros, Dead Aim: How Marcos Ambushed Philippine Democracy (Pasig City: Foundation for Worldwide People’s Power, 1997), 46, 66–7; Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 218–19. Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, 218. Primitivo Mijares, The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos I (San Francisco: Union Square Publications, 1976), 151; Luis “Chavit” Singson, interviews with the author, Vigan, June 1974. Daily Mirror, October 15, 1969. Manila Times, June 3, 1970; Daily Mirror, June 7, 1972; Alan Robson, “Patrimonial Politics in the Philippine Ilocos,” Pilipinas 38 (2002), 8–12. Manila Times, June 13, 1970. Manila Times, June 3, 1970. Ferdinand E. Marcos, The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines (Manila: Ferdinand E. Marcos, 1977), 222. de Quiros, Dead Aim, 437–8; Ambeth Ocampo, “Lim Seng Remembered,” Inquirer.net, July 13, 2016, accessed February 5, 2016, http://opinion.inquirer.net/95625/lim-sengremembered. Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator, 205–11. William E. Berry, Jr., U.S. Bases in the Philippines: The Evolution of a Special Relationship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 163–217, 236–7; Patricia Ann Paez, The Bases Factor: Realpolitik of RP-US Relations (Manila: CSIS-Dispatch, 1985), 71–3. Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator, 23. Louis Kraar, “The Philippines Veers Towards Crisis,” Fortune, July 27, 1981. Sugarland (Bacolod City), 1977 (no. 1), 26–27, 1977 (no. 3), 15; Sugar News (Manila), August 1974, 271, April 1976, 124, July 1977, 163, September 1977, 248. Alfred W. McCoy, “After the Yellow Revolution: Filipino Elite Factions and the Struggle for Power,” in The Philippines After Marcos, eds. P. Krinks and J. Connell (Canberra: Australian Development Studies Network, 1987), 9–33. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 397–416, quote on 405. US House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 1st Session, Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Foreign Assistance Legislation for Fiscal Years

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1986–87 (Part 5) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1985), testimony by Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, March 12, 1985, 557–77, 593–637. Asia Week (Hong Kong), September 13, 1985, 6–18; Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Vigilantes in the Philippines: A Threat to Democratic Rule (New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1988), 23–5. Interview with Western military attaché, Manila, January 9, 1988; interview with Luis Jalandoni, foreign representative of the National Democratic Front, telephone interview from Sydney to Utrecht, May 30, 1987. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Vigilantes in the Philippines, 25. Ibid., 23–38. Eric U. Gutierrez, et al., All in the Family: A Study of Elites and Power Relations in the Philippines (Quezon City: Institute for Popular Democracy, 1992), 146; Seth Mydans, “Right-Wing Vigilantes Spreading in Philippines,” New York Times, April 4, 1987, www.nytimes.com/1987/04/04/world/right-wing-vigilantes-spreading-in-philippines. html?pagewanted=2; Nicole Curato, “We Need to Talk About Rody,” in A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Duterte’s Early Presidency, ed. Nicole Curato (Quezon City: Bughaw, 2017), 9–10. Adrian Chen, “When a Populist Demagogue Takes Power,” New Yorker, November 21, 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/when-a-populist-demagogue-takespower; Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, “Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’: The Securitization of Illegal Drugs and the Return of National Boss Rule,” in A Duterte Reader, ed. Nicole Curato, 152– 6; Danilo Andres Reyes, “The Spectacle of Violence in Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs,’” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 35, no. 3 (2016): 114–15, 124. Felipe Villamor, “Ex-Officer in Philippines Says He Led Death Squad,” New York Times, February 21, 2017; Julliane Love de Jesus, “Duterte Ordered Killing of Journalist Pala, says DDS Member,” Inquirer.net, September 15, 2016, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/ 815498/duterte-ordered-killing-of-journalist-jun-pala-says-dds-member; Ma. Diosa Labiste, “The Jun Pala Dilemma,” News Break, June 20, 2005, http://archives.newsbrea k-knowledge.ph/2005/06/20/the-jun-pala-dilemma/; Veronica Pulumbarit, “Called an SOB by Duterte, who was Davao City Journalist, Jun Pala?” GMA News Online, June 2, 2016, www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/568566/news/nation/called-an-sob-by-dutertewho-was-davao-city-journalist-jun-pala. Chen, “When a Populist Demagogue Takes Power”; Curato, “We Need to Talk About Rody,” 6–8; Yuji Vincent Gonzales, “Duterte: Bongbong Marcos could be our New VP,” Inquirer.net, October 20, 2016, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/828171/duterte-bongbong-ma rcos-could-be-our-new-vp; Sheila S. Coronel, “Murder as Enterprise: Police Profiteering in Duterte’s War on Drugs,” in A Duterte Reader, ed. Nicole Curato, 170–3. Daniel Berehulak, “They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/rodrigoduterte-philippines-drugs-killings.html?_r=0; Felipe Villamor, “Philippine Police Are Accused of Killing South Korean Businessman,” New York Times, January 19, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/world/asia/philippines-police-south-korean-killing. html; Human Rights Watch, License to Kill: Philippine Police Killings in Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ (New York: Human Rights Watch, March 2017), 3, 4, 15, 17, 55, 61, 90, www. hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/philippines0317_web_1.pdf; Manuel Mogato, “Philippine Hitman says he Heard Duterte Order Killings,” Reuters, September 15, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-drugs-duterte-idUSKCN11L16K; Felipe Villamor, “Defiant Duterte Says Deadly Crackdown Continues,” New York Times, March 15, 2017; Chen, “When a Populist Demagogue Takes Power”; Reyes, “The Spectacle of Violence in Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs,’” 121. Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Rights Council to Investigate Killings in Philippine Drug War,” New York Times, July 11, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/asia/ philippines-duterte-killings-un.html. Therese Reyes, “Making Sense of Why Filipinos Fear Duterte’s War on Drugs but Approve of him so Highly,” Quartz Media, December 20, 2016, https://qz.com/

74 Alfred W. McCoy

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54 55 56 57

58 59

60 61 62 63

64

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66 67

867742/social-weather-stations-survey-shows-filipinos-approve-of-duterte-but-worry-afamily-member-will-be-victim-of-his-war-on-drugs. Pia Randa, “Duterte’s Satisfaction Rating Bounces Back to Personal Height – SWS,” Rappler, April 10, 2019, www.rappler.com/nation/227887-duterte-satisfaction-ratingssws-survey-march-2019; Adam Withnall, “Philippines Election: Duterte Wins Backing for Authoritarian Regime with Midterms Victory,” The Independent (London), May 22, 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-election-results-duterte-senatemidterms-latest-a8924661.html. Nicole Curato, “Politics of Anxiety, Politics of Hope: Penal Populism and Duterte’s Rise to Power,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 35, no. 3 (2016), 100–7. Ibid., 101–2. Sheena McKenzie and Kevin Liptak, “After Cursing Obama, Duterte Expresses Regret,” CNN Politics, September 6, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/09/05/politics/philippines-presidentrodrigo-duterte-barack-obama/. Barbara Demick and Tracy Wilkinson, “Philippine President Duterte: ‘I Announce my Separation from the United States,’” Los Angeles Times, 20 October 2016, www.latimes. com/world/asia/la-fg-philippines-us-20161020-snap-story.html; “President Duterte Speech at Philippine China Trade & Investment Forum, Beijing, China, October 20, 2016,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUHjTWnqaA. Demick and Wilkinson, “Philippine President Duterte: ‘I Announce my Separation from the United States.’” Richard C. Paddock, “Trump Partner is Philippines’ New Trade Envoy to U.S.,” New York Times, November 10, 2016; Republic of the Philippines, Department of Foreign Affairs, Subject: Phone Call of the President with the POTUS, Date: 02 May 2017, The Intercept, May 23, 2017, theintercept.com/2017/05/23/read-the-full-transcript-of-trumpscall-with-philippine-president-rodrigo-duterte/. Jane C. Timm, “Duterte Serenades Trump,” NBC News, November 13, 2017, www. nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/duterte-serenades-trump-you-are-light-m y-world-n820201. Walden Bello, “Rodrigo Duterte: A Fascist Original,” in A Duterte Reader, ed. Nicole Curato, 81–7. “The Threat from Russia,” The Economist, October 22, 2016, www.economist.com/news/ leaders/21709028-how-contain-vladimir-putins-deadly-dysfunctional-empire-threat-russia. Asli Aydintasbas, “Turkey’s Unwinnable War,” Politico, January 5, 2016, www.politico. eu/article/turkey-unwinnable-war-pkk-protests-media-erdogan-kurds-nato/; Patrick Kingsley, “Turkey, Facing Disunity Under Erdogan, Finds an Enemy in Europe,” New York Times, March 13, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/world/europe/turkeyerdogan-disunity-europe.html. Department of National Defense, Republic of the Philippines, “The Secretary,” www. dnd.gov.ph/the-secretary-2.html; Frances Magosing, “Lorenzana: Chinese Survey Ship Spotted in Benham Rise,” Inquirer.net, March 9, 2017, http://globalnation.inquirer.net/ 153204/lorenzana-chinese-survey-ship-spotted-benham-rise. Patricia Lourdes Viray, “DFA Chief: Duterte Misquoted on Benham Rise Issue,” Philstar Global, March 30, 2017, www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/03/30/1686047/dfa-chiefduterte-misquoted-benham-rise-issue; Mara Cepeda, “Alejano wants Duterte Impeached over Benham Rise, West PH Sea Row,” Rappler, March 30, 2017, www.rappler.com/ nation/165588-supplementary-impeachment-complaint-duterte-benham-rise-south-chinasea; Richard Javad Heydarian, “Duterte’s Dance with China: Why the Philippines Won’t Abandon Washington,” Foreign Affairs, April 26, 2017, www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/philippines/2017-04-26/dutertes-dance-china. Felipe Villamor, “Duterte Orders Philippines’ Military to the South China Sea,” New York Times, April 7, 2017. Heydarian, “Duterte’s Dance with China.”

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Elpidio Quirino Papers, Syquia Mansion, Vigan, Ilocos Sur. Fabi, Randy, and Kanupriya Kapoor. “Behind Prabowo’s Campaign to become Indonesia’s President, a Questionable Crew.” Reuters, July 5, 2014. www.reuters.com/article/uk-in donesia-election-prabowo-idUSKBN0FB03F20140706. Garner Noble, Lela. “Politics in the Marcos Era.” In Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond, edited by John Bresnan, 70–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Gonzales, Yuji Vincent. “Duterte: Bongbong Marcos could be our New VP.” Inquirer.net, October 20, 2016. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/828171/duterte-bongbong-marcoscould-be-our-new-vp. Gutierrez, Eric U. All in the Family: A Study of Elites and Power Relations in the Philippines. Quezon City: Institute for Popular Democracy, 1992. Heydarian, Richard Javad. “Duterte’s Dance with China: Why the Philippines Won’t Abandon Washington.” Foreign Affairs, April 26, 2017. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ philippines/2017-04-26/dutertes-dance-china. Human Rights Watch. License to Kill: Philippine Police Killings in Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’. New York: Human Rights Watch, March2017. Human Rights Watch. Not Enough Graves: The War on Drugs, HIV/AIDS, and Violations of Human Rights in Thailand. New York: Human Rights Watch, July2004. Joaquin, Nick. The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as Three Generations. Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1986. Kingsley, Patrick. “Turkey, Facing Disunity Under Erdogan, Finds an Enemy in Europe.” New York Times, March 13, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/world/europe/turkeyerdogan-disunity-europe.html. Kraar, Louis. “The Philippines Veers Towards Crisis.” Fortune, July 27, 1981. Kramer, Andrew E. “More of Kremlin’s Opponents Are Ending Up Dead.” New York Times, August 20, 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/world/europe/moscow-krem lin-silence-critics-poison.html. Kramer, Andrew E. “Russian Critic of Putin Assassinated in Ukraine.” New York Times, March 23, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/world/europe/a-russian-critic-of-puti n-is-assassinated-in-ukraine.html. Labiste, Ma. Diosa. “The Jun Pala Dilemma.” News Break, June 20, 2005. http://archives. newsbreak-knowledge.ph/2005/06/20/the-jun-pala-dilemma/. Landé, Carl H. Leaders, Factions and Parties: The Structure of Philippine Politics. New Haven, CT: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University, 1965. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Vigilantes in the Philippines: A Threat to Democratic Rule. New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1988. Lee, Michael J. “The Populist Chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006). Liang, Dapen. Philippine Parties and Politics: A Historical Study of National Experience in Democracy. San Francisco: Gladstone, 1971. Liljas, Per. “Here’s Why Some Indonesians are Spooked by this Presidential Contender.” Time, June 12, 2014. http://time.com/2836510/prabowo-subianto-human-rights-indonesiaelections/. Lyman, Rick. “Like Trump, Europe’s Populists Win Big with Rural Voters.” New York Times. December 6, 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/world/europe/europe-polandpopulism-rural-voters.html. McIntyre, Angus. The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal Toward Constitutional Rule. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

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McCoy, Alfred W. “After the Yellow Revolution: Filipino Elite Factions and the Struggle for Power.” In The Philippines After Marcos, edited by P. Krinks and J. Connell, 9–33. Canberra: Australian Development Studies Network, 1987. McCoy, Alfred W. Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. McKenzie, Sheena, and Kevin Liptak. “After Cursing Obama, Duterte Expresses Regret.” CNN Politics, September 6, 2016. www.cnn.com/2016/09/05/politics/philippines-presidentrodrigo-duterte-barack-obama/. MacKinnon, Mark. “Erdogan’s Purge.” The Globe and Mail, January 5, 2017. www.theglo beandmail.com/news/world/erdogans-purge-50000-ousted-arrested-or-suspende d-inturkey/article30987001/. Magosing, Frances. “Lorenzana: Chinese Survey Ship Spotted in Benham Rise.” Inquirer.net, March 9, 2017. http://globalnation.inquirer.net/153204/lorenzana-chinese-survey-shipspotted-benham-rise. Marcos, Ferdinand E. The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines. Manila: Ferdinand E. Marcos, 1977. Merritt, Jesus V. Magsaysay: Man of the People. Manila: Far Eastern Publishing, 1953. Mijares, Primitivo. The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos I. San Francisco: Union Square Publications, 1976. Mishra, Pankaj. “The Globalization of Rage.” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (November/ December2016). www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2016-10-17/globalization-rage. Mogato, Manuel. “Philippine Hitman says he Heard Duterte Order Killings.” Reuters, September 15, 2016. www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-drugs-duterte-idUSKCN11L16K. Mudde, Cas. “Europe’s Populist Surge: A Long Time in the Making.” Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2016. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2016-10-17/europes-populist-surge. Müller, Jan-Werner. “Trump, Erdogan, Farage: The Attractions of Populism for Politicians, the Dangers for Democracy.” Guardian, September 2, 2016. www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/sep/02/trump-erdogan-farage-the-attractions-of-populism-for-politicia ns-the-dangers-for-democracy. Mydans, Seth. “Right-Wing Vigilantes Spreading in Philippines.” New York Times, April 4, 1987. www.nytimes.com/1987/04/04/world/right-wing-vigilantes-spreading-in-philippines.html? pagewanted=2. Mydans, Seth. “A Wave of Drug Killings is Linked to Thai Police.” New York Times, April 8, 2003. www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/world/a-wave-of-drug-killings-is-linked-to-thaipolice.html. Negros Occidental, Provincial Board, Minutes, General Fund-Chief Executive. October 6, 1950. Ocampo, Ambeth. “Lim Seng Remembered.” Inquirer.net, July 13, 2016. http://opinion. inquirer.net/95625/lim-seng-remembered. Paddock, Richard C. “Trump Partner is Philippines’ New Trade Envoy to U.S.” New York Times, November 10, 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/world/asia/donald-trumpphilippines-jose-antonio.html. Paez, Patricia Ann. The Bases Factor: Realpolitik of RP-US Relations. Manila: CSIS-Dispatch, 1985. “President Duterte Speech at Philippine China Trade & Investment Forum Beijing China October 20, 2016.” YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUHjTWnqaA. Pulumbarit, Veronica. “Called an SOB by Duterte, who was Davao City Journalist, Jun Pala?” GMA News Online, June 2, 2016. www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/568566/ news/nation/called-an-sob-by-duterte-who-was-davao-city-journalist-jun-pala.

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Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. “Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’: The Securitization of Illegal Drugs and the Return of National Boss Rule.” In A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Duterte’s Early Presidency, edited by Nicole Curato, 145–166. Quezon City: Bughaw, 2017. Quirino, Carlos. Magsaysay of the Philippines. Manila: Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Society, 1958. Rafael Lacson v. Hon. Luis R. Torres. Philippine Supreme Court, G.R. L-5543, Annex A. Randa, Pia. “Duterte’s Satisfaction Rating Bounces Back to Personal Height – SWS.” Rappler, April 10, 2019. www.rappler.com/nation/227887-duterte-satisfaction-ratings-sws-surveymarch-2019. Republic of the Philippines, Department of Foreign Affairs. “Subject: Phone Call of the President with the POTUS. Date: 02 May 2017.” The Intercept, May 23, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/23/read-the-full-transcript-of-trumps-call-with-philippinepresident-rodrigo-duterte/. Reyes, Danilo Andres. “The Spectacle of Violence in Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs.’” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 35, no. 3 (2016): 111–137. Reyes, Therese. “Making Sense of Why Filipinos Fear Duterte’s War on Drugs but Approve of him so Highly.” Quartz Media, December 20, 2016. https://qz.com/867742/socialweather-stations-survey-shows-filipinos-approve-of-duterte-but-worry-a-family-memberwill-be-victim-of-his-war-on-drugs. Richburg, Keith B. “Indonesia Sliding Toward Economic, Social Chaos.” Washington Post, July 22, 1998. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/07/22/indonesia-slidingtoward-economic-social-chaos/d94b2234-4616-4b50-ba65-d6e982155b9c/?utm_term=. 7b73a3630acf. Robson, Alan. “Patrimonial Politics in the Philippine Ilocos.” Pilipinas 38 (2002), 8–12. Seagrave, Sterling. The Marcos Dynasty. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Sicat, Gerardo P. “The Philippine Economy and Benigno Aquino III’s Presidency, 2010– 2016.” Philippine Star, January 6, 2016. www.philstar.com/business/2016/01/06/1539645/ philippine-economy-and-benigno-aquino-iiis-presidency-2010-2016. Sidel, John T. Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Thompson, Mark. The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. “The Threat from Russia.” The Economist, October 22, 2016. www.economist.com/news/ leaders/21709028-how-contain-vladimir-putins-deadly-dysfunctional-empire-threat-russia. Timm, Jane C. “Duterte Serenades Trump.” NBC News, November 13, 2017. www. nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/duterte-serenades-trump-you-are-light-my-worldn820201. U.S. House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 1st Session, Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs. Foreign Assistance Legislation for Fiscal Years 1986–87 (Part 5). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1985. Villamor, Felipe. “Defiant Duterte Says Deadly Crackdown Continues.” New York Times, March 15, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/world/asia/duterte-philippines-drugcrackdown.html. Villamor, Felipe. “Duterte Orders Philippines’ Military to the South China Sea.” New York Times, April 7, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/world/asia/rodrigo-duterte-southchina-sea.html. Villamor, Felipe. “Ex-Officer in Philippines Says He Led Death Squad.” New York Times, February 21, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/asia/rodrigo-duterte-philippinesdeath-squad.html.

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Villamor, Felipe. “Philippine Police are Accused of Killing South Korean Businessman.” New York Times, January 19, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/world/asia/philippinespolice-south-korean-killing.html. Viray, Patricia Lourdes. “DFA Chief: Duterte Misquoted on Benham Rise Issue.” Philstar Global, March 30, 2017. www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/03/30/1686047/dfa-chiefduterte-misquoted-benham-rise-issue. Withnall, Adam. “Philippines Election: Duterte Wins Backing for Authoritarian Regime with Midterms Victory.” The Independent, May 22, 2019. www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/asia/philippines-election-results-duterte-senate-midterms-latest-a8924661.html. Wolters, Willem. Politics, Patronage, and Class Conflict in Central Luzon. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1983. Yap, D.J. “12 Million Filipinos Living in Extreme Poverty.” Inquirer.net, March 18, 2016. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/775062/12m-filipinos-living-in-extreme-poverty.

4 THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF GENOCIDE Central orders and regional implementation under the Khmer Rouge William Kwok

Introduction Why do local subordinates obey leaders’ orders for mass killings, and when and where do they do so? What accounts for the onset of and participation in mass killings? In Cambodia, the Communist Party of Kampuchea Central Committee (CC) ordered subordinates to raise rice production to an overwhelming “three tons per hectare” on March 30, 1976, without providing any guidelines beyond granting “the authority to smash inside and outside the ranks.”1 I call this an “incomplete” order. While cadres in the distant Northeast and Northwest Zones both strove to fulfill the CC’s “incomplete” order, the former initially did so with nonviolence and the latter by initiating mass killings against civilians – a violent interpretation of the orders that spread across the country from 1976–79, culminating in 1,671,000 deaths. This formulation of orders without clear guidelines departs from standard military practice in which subordinates have little freedom of interpretation (“complete” orders). In this case, the order contained an “ambiguous” dimension – the CC formulated the order in a way that promoted killings but obscured that stance. This article addresses these questions through a study of the political organization of mass killings with an empirical focus on Cambodia that uses process tracing and archival work.2 These issues are increasingly salient as scholars and policymakers puzzle over the reoccurrence of mass killings – recently, those by the Myanmar Army and ISIS. Similar patterns of violence feature across genocides (defined here as group-selective mass killings). In Indonesia, regional commanders in the provinces of Bali and Aceh responded with divergent measures to General Suharto’s order on October 1, 1965 to “annihilate the counterrevolution” with no questions asked about the means.3 While commanders in Bali and Aceh both worked to fulfill Suharto’s “incomplete” order, the former initially used relatively peaceful measures, while the latter carried out mass

The political organization of genocide 81

killings that quickly spread to victimize civilian groups such as ethnic Chinese and religious minorities – an interpretation of orders that then became common across Indonesia from 1965 into 1966, resulting in possibly one million deaths, including possibly 80,000 in Bali.4 These recurring puzzling features raise the question, what accounts for the onset of and participation in group-selective mass killings, where and when it occurs? In this chapter, I make the case that across genocides, initial orders issued to local units by central leaders are ambiguous.5 These orders vary from implicit to more explicit calls for violence – from “fragmented” orders, which are disclosed over time; “vague” orders, which are too general; “coded” orders, which use misleading language; “incomplete” orders, which set goals without any guidelines; “optional” orders, which present a “choice” to participate; to “exemplary” orders, which the order-giver initiates to serve as an example of permissible behavior.6 Yet local commanders in certain areas tend to interpret this ambiguity toward mass violence, whereas those in other localities participate only once the killings have started elsewhere and have spread. I argue that this ambiguity reflects a coordination “problem” common across genocides. This coordination problem is driven by organizational dynamics that are determined by the strength of information flows between local actors and central command. The immense scale of plans in genocide creates a coordination problem in which central command’s ability to implement objectives is constrained by their ability to coordinate local subordinates. My theory predicts that when central leaders’ orders are ambiguous and where center–local coordination is low, ambitious local commanders initiate what I call “entrepreneurial” forms of violence to implement what they see as the goals of higher-ups and thereby advance their own individual interests, generating a cascade of mass killings. As scholars and policymakers look for instruments to reward, challenge, or constrain the behavior of armed group members, they will require a deeper understanding of how these groups operate and coordinate members’ activities and why certain actors comply with orders, and under what conditions. This chapter serves as an important step in this avenue of research. My study makes several useful contributions to scholarship and policy on mass killings and mitigating or preventing future mass violence against civilians: (1) an original dataset and collection of commands and violent (and nonviolent) responses in several key cases; (2) a new framework for disaggregating wartime “policy” into distinct types of commands for violence – in the absence of “smoking gun” evidence (which courts and existing studies lack), unpacking leadership in mass killings requires new tools that break down “policies” for violence and identify the component loci of agency; and (3) identification of the unit hierarchies that generate participation in violence, which can inform policy development to mitigate or prevent mass atrocities. The remainder of this chapter provides a discussion of the current literature, an elaboration on my theoretical model, an overview of my empirical approach, and a case study of the Cambodian genocide to illustrate my theory. This work is part of my broader comparative study that advances a general organizational theory of

82 William Kwok

mass killings.7 While the aim of this chapter is conceptual, I lay the groundwork for further empirical testing of my theory.

The current discussion The existing literature on mass killings mostly focuses on the top.8 Much less is known about the middle and bottom, i.e., the organization and local actors. “Idealist” theories point to broad factors such as ideology.9 “Strategic” theories point to national leaders’ “rational” decision-making.10 Much of the existing scholarship does not problematize the implementation of genocide as processes.11 The machinery of violence is often assumed to operate as a unitary actor under a national leadership’s direct and complete control. Analyzing implementation requires a theoretical and empirical account of mass killings as dynamic processes.12 I focus on a neglected factor: organizational dynamics and its impact on mass killings. I extend the political science literature linking strategy to illicit forms of violence by armed groups in war.13 In doing so, I advance the debate from the macrolevel to include the subnational, introducing a novel multilevel focus on the political organization of mass killings. While interest in the microdynamics of genocide is growing, such studies mostly focus on Rwanda or other violent events specific to sub-Saharan Africa.14 In order to address what drives the killings and why so many participate, attention needs to be paid to how violence starts and spreads across different contexts. Further, unlike the existing literature’s empirically intractable theories, my model generates testable predictions linking certain types of orders to specific patterns of violence.

Concepts and theory My theoretical approach centers on the central–local coordination problem in war. I theorize that a principal–agent problem between central command and its local agents, and a collective action problem among these agents, also shape the political organization of genocide. In this section, I make the case that a coordination problem between central command and local leaders, the principal and its agents, underlies genocide. Orders from central command to local-level subordinates often feature built-in ambiguity. This ambiguity reflects an information insufficiency for both central and local leaders. Central leaders do not have the precise information necessary to implement policy on the ground in locations outside the center’s direct control, given the uncertainty and staggering number of contingencies that may arise in translating broad, ambitious policies into concrete practice. Local leaders do have the necessary information “on the ground” that central command lacks. Faced with this information asymmetry, central command devolves a degree of authority to local leaders. Local leaders, on the other hand, do not know for certain what behavior would be considered acceptable in implementing policy, as the ambiguity of the policy presents a range of interpretations. The preferences and interests of

The political organization of genocide 83

central command generally do not overlap perfectly with those of local-level subordinates in war, creating a potential conflict of interest over when to engage in violence and how much of it to use – the “commander’s dilemma.”15 This coordination problem creates an opportunity for reward-seeking entrepreneurs at the local level who are willing to take risks with interpreting policy to attempt to implement central orders in line with the assumed preferences and interests of the organization. This ambiguity, for example, can be empirically observed in the timing of orders. Local armed subunits in the outlying areas of the German wartime empire, the Eastern Front in particular, did not selectively target only Jews at first.16 Even prior to the second Eastern invasion of 1941, German military and police units (the Gestapo and SD) following the 1939 invasion of Poland selectively targeted Jews, communists, Polish resistance members, Roma, homosexuals, and the disabled and elderly, as opposed to exclusively targeting Jews. To elaborate on the principal–agent problem, there is a conflict of interest between central command and its local agents over when to engage in violence and how much of it to use. Even central leaders who are willing to engage in violence if it is deemed necessary for achieving goals – especially victory in war – want to avoid any unnecessary violence that would generate negative consequences for central command. Central leaders can delegate the risks of uncertain outcomes to local leaders by granting the latter greater autonomy in interpreting and implementing policy, as this permits central leaders to advance organizational objectives without the risk of being held responsible for negative outcomes. In addition to the ambiguity inherent in broad central policies in war, this delegation of authority presents an additional dimension of ambiguity that is strategic – central leaders exploit uncertainty over whose responsibility the use of violence belongs to in the organization. This provides central leaders with deniability and the option to shift blame downward over undesirable outcomes – especially central leaders anticipating losing the war and possibly facing prosecution. Most local agents, on the other hand, would prefer to use violence when the least risks are involved, e.g., when victory in war is assured and central commanders secure, which raises the likelihood of obtaining rewards desired from political authorities. Local agents are least willing to engage in excess violence when victory in war is doubtful and central commanders insecure, which lowers the likelihood of obtaining rewards desired from political authorities. It follows that the majority of local agents will be most reluctant to use gratuitous violence when and where central command deems it the most needed. This central–local conflict of interest is exacerbated by a collective action problem that arises when neither victory nor defeat in war seems certain. If local agents all engaged in violence to eliminate the designated threat, victory would become more likely and defeat kept at bay. However, each individual local agent discounts the willingness of other local agents to engage in violence in the shadow of possible defeat, which leads individual local agents to interrogate their own willingness to engage in violence.

84 William Kwok

The principal–agent problem and collective action problem together presents a context in which both central command and its regional agents have imperfect information on the likelihood of victory or defeat in war, while the information held by regional agents is more precise than the center’s but limited to their own region. This context is characterized by individual “inaction” on the part of most region agents, e.g., implementing policy in such a way that bears modest costs and risks. Such a scenario presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are willing to take on greater risks to secure rewards by engaging in violence where and when most other regional agents would hesitate. If all parties had access to perfect information, all actors would seize opportunities for rewards. By acting in a context of uncertainty, entrepreneurs at the regional level take action to secure rewards. In short, this situation presents the opportunity for some regional leaders to distinguish themselves from other regional agents and signal to central commanders their own special “compliance” with the organization’s preferences and interests. This need to gain recognition and legitimation from central command and implement policy in line with organizational preferences is a form of compliance that results in an abundance of killings on the part of entrepreneurs at the regional level that eventually aggregates into genocide. In Germany, for example, Kershaw’s historical study of Nazi dictatorship dubs this phenomenon of compliance with a case-specific term: “working towards the Führer.”17 Through this process, the coordination problem is “solved.” In a certain respect, the goal underlying strategic ambiguity is to bring subordinates to the same understanding of the given situation as their leaders would have – having both commander and lieutenant come closer to the same, shared understanding of the preferred plan(s) implicit in the order.18 Actions by regional lieutenants that interpret the given situation most closely in line with the preferences and goals suggested by central leaders’ “ideological” framework or political “identity” helps solve the coordination problem, as the center can read these “signals” to screen out less committed or less compliant subordinates in insecure areas and also identify a concrete course of action put into practice with observable effects. The local subordinate, in turn, attains recognition and legitimation from political authority and increases his/her odds of receiving promised rewards. My theoretical framework suggests certain observable empirical patterns. As suggested in Table 4.1, there are six theoretical possibilities generated by the interaction between local combatants’ interpretation of policy and the central commander’s orders, ranging from relatively peaceful types of implementation – not mass violence as policy; not mass violence as “implied” policy; unauthorized non-violence – to increasingly violent ones – unauthorized mass violence; mass violence as implied policy; and mass violence as policy. The table specifies the forms that these possibilities assume along with the scale (in terms of frequency, size, and duration) characteristic of each. Table 4.1 provides a static depiction of types of activity generated by the combination of central leaders’ orders and regional lieutenants’ implementation. My theory focuses on the process of escalation from the central cells (under the “implied policy” column) to the upper left cell, “mass violence as policy – genocide.”

The political organization of genocide 85

TABLE 4.1 The implementation of mass violence, observations

Central Commander’s Orders Explicit Policy

Not Policy Implied Policy: Partial Orders, Rhetoric, Tolerated

Not Authorized

Mass violence as implied policy Entrepreneurial violence Not mass violence as implied policy “Inaction”

Unauthorized mass violence Opportunistic violence19 Unauthorized non-violence Opportunistic non-violence

Moderate

Small

Local Combatants’ Actions: Mass Violence

Mass violence as policy Genocide

Not Mass Violence

Not mass violence as policy Limited violence; relatively peaceful means

Scale

Large

Specifically, the escalation to genocide occurs as the combination of orders and violence moves from the upper central cell, “mass violence as implied policy – entrepreneurial violence,” to the upper left cell, “mass violence as policy – genocide,” as Table 4.2, below, illustrates. At the starting extreme, there is “not mass killing as policy,” followed by “not mass killings as implied policy” and “mass killings as implied policy” (both of which fall under “no explicit policy for or against mass killings”), and at the final extreme there is “mass killings as policy.” The perspective that I adopt allows for a greater focus on empirical patterns of deviation (and compliance) that fall under the “no explicit policy for or against” category and how responses to this policy ambiguity relate to the extreme outcome of mass killings as policy. I focus on central orders that are the same for the entire country, i.e., general “policies.” I can then observe how certain regional leaders deviate or comply with central command. If my theoretical expectations in regard to positive cases of genocide are correct, we should expect to see localities respond to ambiguous central policy in two different directions: (1) relative “inaction” in which local agents produce no mass killings (at first) and continue with their existing behavior TABLE 4.2 A continuum of policy escalation and mass killings

Policy Against Not mass killings as policy Limited violence; relatively peaceful means

→

No (Explicit) Policy For or Against Not mass killings as implied policy “Inaction”

Mass killings as implied policy Entrepreneurial violence

→

Policy For Mass killings as policy Genocide

86 William Kwok

and (2) entrepreneurial violence in which risk-taking local agents take the initiative to implement killings. We should expect to see the center, in turn, reward regional leaders that implemented killings where and when there was no explicit policy (in the form of promotions, integration higher up in the command chain, having their actions promoted as positive examples, etc.).20 We should expect to see central command adopt as policy the killings in the form introduced by entrepreneurial regional actors and order them carried out nationally. Converging behavior should emerge after higher-ups’ endorsement of the regional innovation. Assuming that genocide has not been adopted as an explicit policy, the previous theoretical discussion suggests that there are (at least) four main conditions under which group-selective mass killings are likely to occur with significant frequency: (1) fragmented coordination within the chain of command (between central leaders and regional agents of violence, for which distance from central command is a proxy); (2) implicit authorization for group-selective mass killings (embedded in strategically ambiguous orders issued by central leaders); (3) a preference for group-selective mass killings held by at least some of the regional lieutenants (i.e., the “entrepreneurs”); and (4) “vertical” unit dynamics that generate participation through (positive) incentives for superlative “compliance” with central political authority. Whether these conditions are met for the outcome of group-selective mass killings depends in turn on the preferences and attitudes concerning violence and national groups in war held by central leaders and the organization’s regional units. My empirical application of this theoretical model focuses on certain key observables that would support or contradict my argument. Table 4.3 summarizes specific key observable implications of my theory for four major issues: fragmented coordination, central “policies,” regional lieutenants’ actions, and “vertical” unit dynamics. If my theoretical claims are true, we should expect to observe the following sequence emerge: orders falling on the more ambiguous side of the spectrum issued at first, followed by different patterns of actions by various regional units across the country, and then a shift toward more explicit orders followed by an escalation of incidences of group-selective killings by local actors across the country as the outcome of genocide onset approaches.21

Empirics This section uses a case study of the Cambodian genocide to explore the logic of my theoretical model and its observable implications. I examine Cambodia at the national and subnational levels to provide an illustration of my theory. Any general theory of genocide should be expected to apply to Cambodia. Existing accounts of the Cambodian case have proposed essentially identity- or ideology-based explanations for violence. Area scholars have more or less either identified ideas of Khmer nationalist ideology22 or utopian peasant communism23 as the explanatory variable for the genocide. I argue that the coordination problem associated with distance from central command applies to the Cambodian case.24 I

The political organization of genocide 87

TABLE 4.3 Summary of observations that would support or contradict my theory

1. Fragmented coordination

2. Central “policies”

3. Local combatants’ actions

Support

Contradict

The armed organization is divided into separate chains of command. Local subunits each cooperate with central leaders and not with one another. “Policy” outcomes vary along lines of local administrative subunits. When prompted with implicit orders for violence, the outcome of central orders gravitates to the extremes in peripheral localities – either toward mass killings or (relatively) peaceful measures. Certain regional subunits engage in and sustain specific patterns of violence within their localities. Central leaders enact policies that aim to minimize or neutralize national outgroups using less costly, relatively peaceful measures at first, e.g., removal of citizenship rights. Central leaders shift from relatively peaceful policies to implicit orders for violence after losses in territorial control in war. The ambiguity of orders proceeds from implicit calls for violence to more explicit ones over time: from fragmented orders, vague orders, coded orders, incomplete orders, “optional” orders, to exemplary orders. We should expect to observe the following sequence: orders falling on the more ambiguous side of the spectrum issued at first, followed by different patterns of actions by various local units across the country (e.g., removal of citizenship rights, deportations, and pogroms), and then a shift toward more explicit orders followed by an escalation of incidences of group-selective killings by local actors across the country over time. Regional lieutenants are at first divided on the appropriate means to implement central orders. Variation in measures should vary according to locality, with mass killing first emerging in the periphery. Regional lieutenants’ actions converge on group-selective mass killings across localities following central leaders’ recognition of the use of mass killings by regional entrepreneurs.

The armed organization is not divided into separate chains of command and is unified into one chain of command. Local subunits cooperate with each other and central leaders. “Policy” outcome is either uniform or does not proceed along lines of local administrative divisions.

Central leaders use clear substitutes for genocide (e.g., ethnic cleansing) in the absence of security concerns (e.g., loss of territorial control in war).

Local combatants uniformly introduce group-selective mass killings even prior to the confirmation of this type of violence by central leaders.

(Continued)

88 William Kwok TABLE 4.3

(Cont.)

4. “Vertical” unit dynamics

Support

Contradict

The organizational hierarchy presents (positive) structured incentives for superlative “compliance” with higherup political authorities. Central leaders recognize regional subordinates who innovate means in a way that advances organizational interests. Central leaders play a prominent role in the diffusion of group-selective mass killings once entrepreneurs have implemented the killings. Central leaders recognize and reward regional lieutenants who have killed where and when there was no explicit policy (in the form of promotions, integration further up in the command chain, having their actions promoted as positive examples, etc.). We should expect to see central leaders adopt the killings in the form introduced by entrepreneurial regional actors as policy. Regional lieutenants across the country should be expected to increasingly participate in group-selective mass killings. In short, the following “upand-down” sequence should unfold: (1) innovation at the regional level, (2) confirmation at the central level, followed by (3) diffusion in regions across the country.

The organizational hierarchy does not present structured incentives for compliance with higher-up political authorities. Group-selective mass killing is introduced by regional lieutenants and spreads “horizontally” from unit to unit across the country without confirmation by central leaders. In other words, the unit dynamics are observed to be “side-to-side,” as opposed to “up-and-down.” The sequence that we should expect to observe in the “side-toside” case would proceed as: (1) the practice of mass killings by certain units at the local level, (2) no clear response at the central level that would punish mass killings that do not serve a strategic purpose, (3) diffusion from neighboring unit to unit occurs locally without central leaders’ delegation. Imitation occurs between units, whereby a unit interacting (via joint training, shared members, etc.) with a neighboring unit that practices mass killings mimics the latter’s behavior.

outline how my theory applies to the Cambodian case in that rivalry among the CPK, once joined by the 1975 introduction of a fragmented Maoist party-state structure and competitive quota reporting system, provided opportunities and structured incentives for killings of certain civilian populations among regional-level cadres in areas distant from central command (headquartered in Phnom Penh). My study of Cambodia contains two stages aiming to establish the causal process: (1) a focus on descriptive details of the violence that occurred and the process behind it, and (2) a subnational analysis with a focus on zonal variation in the timing and level of violence. I view subnational differences in timing as indicators of willingness to (or resistance against) engaging in violence.

Violence at the national level Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 1,671,000 people died under the rule of the CPK.25 The policies issued by central leadership to subordinate local cadres resulted

The political organization of genocide 89

in the forced displacement of the civilian population from all urban areas, slave labor, deportation of members of ethnic minorities, famine, and mass killings, which all together contributed to the deaths of 21 percent of the total 1975 national population (see Table 4.4).26 Table 4.4 shows Kiernan’s estimates of the approximate death tolls in Democratic Kampuchea (DK), by group from 1975 to 1979, with my calculations in column 2 of the percentage comprised by each group of the total 1975 population. Existing theories that point to “ethnic hatred” have difficulty explaining these patterns of violence, in which significant proportions of members of Khmer and non-Khmer ethnic groups alike were exterminated. The only victim group that appears to be exceptional in this regard is the ethnic Vietnamese, which experienced 100 percent of its members exterminated from 1975 to 1979. Nonetheless,

TABLE 4.4 Approximate national death toll in Democratic Kampuchea, by group (1975–79)

New People (“Target” Group) Khmer (urban) Khmer (rural) Chinese (urban) Vietnamese (urban) Lao (rural) Total New People

1975 population

Percentage of total 1975 population

2,000,000 600,000 430,000 10,000 10,000 3,050,000

25 8 5 0.13 0.13 38

4,500,000 5,000 250,000 10,000 20,000 60,000 4,840,000 7,890,000

57.03 0.06 3 0.13 0.30 0.80 61.32 99.53†

Number of deaths

Percentage of group killed

500,000 150,000 215,000 10,000 4,000 879,000

25 25 50 100 40 29

675,000 2,000 90,000 10,000 8,000 9,000 792,000 1,671,000

15 40 36 100 40 15 16 21

Old People Khmer (rural) Khmer Krom Cham (rural) Vietnamese (rural) Thai (rural) Upland minorities Total Base People Total Overall

Sources: Columns 1, 3, and 4 of this table reflect Table 4 in Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 458. I checked his descriptive statistics against original sources and multiple “expert” sources, including Osborne, “Pol Pot’s Terrifying Legacy,” Rummel, “Power, Genocide and Mass Murder,” and Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982. Ewa Tabeau et al., United Nations Demographic Expert Report, Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, April 1975–January 1979: A Critical Assessment of Major Estimates, 30 September 2009 (Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2009), also concurs with Kiernan’s estimates. †

The 99.53% reflects the fact that a remaining 0.47% of the total 1975 population consisted of members of groups other than those that fell under new or old people (e.g., Westerners, foreigners, central officials, etc.).

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theories that point to ethnic hatred struggle to explain the seemingly indiscriminate extermination of other ethnic groups alongside the Khmer, such as the Chinese, Cham, Thai, Lao, and so on. Similarly, existing theories that point to Pol Pot’s “peasant revolution” do not provide clear reasons for the comparable proportions of members of urban and rural groups killed. With some exceptions (see note 8, above), most analyses of the Cambodian genocide stop at the national level and do not examine the subnational level(s). I expect that a full subnational analysis will confirm the implications of my theoretical model and disconfirm existing explanations centered on extremist nationalism and utopian socialism. I expect the findings of my empirical analyses to indicate that such broad factors are not sufficient to explain the emergence of and engagement in the killings and that the mechanism(s) responsible operate at the organizational level.

Subnational variation in violence I exploit variation between subnational administrative zones, since Cambodia features subnational variations in the timing of its genocidal violence (and especially in its onset), the levels of the violence (intensity), the responses to central orders by unit leaderships, and on other key proposed variables. The level of analysis is the subnational administrative zone, phumipeak, each headed by a zonal leader who reported to national leaders in the CC and also oversaw subordinate cadres operating in localities within their respective zone. The pattern that can be observed is that following ambiguous policy issued by central command, the onset of killings proceeded differently across the subnational zones, with mass killings isolated to certain zones and very few at all in most other zones. Yet all zones eventually converged and experienced a “spike” in killings – that is, “killings as not explicit policy” eventually becomes “killings as policy.” Using the so-called micro-comparative method, I hold numerous variables constant while focusing on variation. Specifically, I examine differences across zones in terms of level and timing of violence. Examining why violent onset occurred sooner or later, greater or faster, in some areas rather than in others offers insight into the mechanisms underlying engagement in the violence. To measure levels of engagement in mass killings, I look at how many people were executed as a percentage of how many lived in that area before the killings started. For the latter, I use the estimated total population of each zone documented just prior to July 1976 – only months after March 30, 1976, when the CC had formally devolved authority over how to implement policy to subnational-level cadres – in the party’s “Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields.”27 Unlike most other studies of Cambodia that take the total death toll as is, I disaggregate deaths by cause of death (e.g., execution, starvation, disease, and so on).28 Specifically, I focus on the number of people “executed” (used loosely here to refer to death via homicidal violence) to arrive at the level of violence in each administrative zone across the country. This approach has the advantage of

The political organization of genocide 91

being able to infer intent, whereas including all other non-violent causes of death risks including observations resulting from negligence, indirect causes, incompetence, natural causes, “acts of God,” and so on. Table 4.5 shows that the level of violence varied across zonal administrative divisions, but no zone effectively resisted involvement in the killings, with as much as 48.3% of the pre-genocide population exterminated in the Western Zone and 9% in the relatively “peaceful” Northeast. With some differences, all zones, as well as the headquarters for central command (in Phnom Penh), contributed to the nationwide trend of killings. As for the key issue of timing, I ask whether violence started at different times in different areas. To examine this question, I adapt Straus’s approach and classify each zone as having early, middle, or late onset (1–3) in response to central “policy.”29Figure 4.1 provides a visualization of the variation in the onset of genocidal violence by DK administrative zone from 1975 to 1979 along with the location of mass graves that have been substantiated as composed of casualties from mass killings. In addition to recorded onset dates, I add another variable to give a more nuanced dimension to the issue of timing. To examine different patterns of mobilization in response to central command (see Table 4.2), I operationalize local policy response as a four-fold variable. The variable is measured on a 1–4 scale, with 1 indicating not following any orders to kill (we should observe relatively TABLE 4.5 Zonal variation in the level of mass killings (1976–79)

Administrative zone where target populations lived in 1976 and zone where victims were killed 1976–79:

Population (March 1976)

Number executed (1976–79)

Percentage of pregenocide population executed (1976–79)

Ranked level of violence by percentage of population executed

West Capital (Phnom Penh) East Southwest Northwest Northeast North (including North-Center) Zone Armed Forces Total

600,000 100,810 1,700,000 1,500,000 1,790,000 200,000 1,483,000

289,566 19,650 228,584 180,263 164,513 18,010 74,148

48.3 19.5 13.4 12.0 9.2 9.0 5.0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

20,000 7,333,810

–* 882,576

– 12.0

– –

Sources: I crosschecked the original estimates reported in official CPK documents against multiple secondary sources including Kiernan, Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; and Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982. For the original official estimates, see CPK, Party Center [July– August 1976] in Pol Pot Plans the Future. * Zone Armed Forces are not included in the estimates of numbers executed in mass killings.

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FIGURE 4.1

Zonal variation in the onset of genocidal violence in Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). † This map modified an image sourced from the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program

peaceful measures being used); 2 indicating “no killings” (we should observe limited violence, but below the designated threshold for “extermination”)30; 3 indicating “killings” (we should observe violence that is above the threshold for “extermination”); and 4 indicating group-selective mass killings (i.e., genocide). This variable captures the level of coordination that is reflected in the variation (or uniformity) in responses to central commands. Table 4.6 reports the results on zonal variation in the onset of violence. I provide an accompanying visualization of zonal variation in the implementation of central “policy” over time from 1975 to 1979 in Figure 4.2. Altogether, the results shown in Table 4.6 and Figure 4.2 indicate that there were clear differences in timing – when genocidal violence started varied across administrative zones. In certain areas such as the Northwest, local leaders implemented mass killings only a few months following the CC’s granting of local agents on March 30, 1976 the “authority to smash (people) inside and outside the ranks”31 in pursuit of the goal to increase rice production to “three tons per hectare” as instructed by the center’s ambitious “Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism.”32 In other areas such as the East and Northeast, local leaders held off from mass killings for a relatively long period of time (approximately over two years) despite being granted by central “policy” the same “authority to smash (people)” at the

The political organization of genocide 93

Variation in the implementation of central “policy,” by administrative zone (1975–79). Sources: I collected all available central orders from 1975–79 in order to trace the evolution of policy as well as death counts of each zone, so that I could match central policies to killings in each area. The evidence is from a combination of original archival research and secondary historical sources. FIGURE 4.2

TABLE 4.6 Zone-level variation in the onset of genocidal violence

Onset date

(Relative) Timing

Onset rank

May 1, 1976 February 26–March 6, 1977 April 1–5, 1977 September 1–7, 1977 May 1, 1978 May 23, 1978 January 5–8, 1978

Early Early Mid Mid Late Late Late

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Administrative zone: Northwest North West Southwest Northeast East Capital, Phnom Penh

Sources: These estimates of genocide onset were established using a triangulation of primary and secondary sources – archival documents collected by the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program and DCCam, court evidence from the ECCC, and Kiernan, Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; and Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982.

same time as other zones.33 Eventually, even the least compliant administrative zones gravitated toward massive violence – in the case of the East, due to a brutal conventional military suppression of that zone by Center, Southwest, and North armed forces beginning in late May 1978. While variations in onset range from a

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matter of months to years, these “delays” point to significant differences in the local interpretation and implementation of the same, central “policies.” As implied by my theoretical model, distance from central command (as a proxy measure in the Cambodian case) headquartered in Phnom Penh should be expected to have a significant relationship with the onset of violence. My theoretical model also implies other different plausible explanatory variables, but given the constraints of this chapter I will focus the following analysis on correlations between proximity to central command and the onset of violence. Table 4.7 reports these details. The results in Table 4.7 show a correlation between being located farther from central command and experiencing the onset of violence earlier than those zones closer to the center.34 With the exception of the Northeast, the administrative zones farthest away from central command (e.g., the Northwest and North) implemented “new,” more radical types of violence the earliest.35 The main finding from my examination of variation in the level of timing of violence is that while onset occurred at different times in different administrative zones, the levels of violence wind up converging toward the more extreme implementation of “policy.”

Conclusion This chapter extends the literature linking strategy in conflict to violence by focusing on a new issue: how and why organizational dynamics impact the onset of and participation in group-selective mass killings. I explore how the problem of coordinating (illicit) activity between commanders at the center and their regional agents – a problem that the ambiguity of orders exacerbates – creates the TABLE 4.7 Zonal geographic-spatial factors and genocide onset

Administrative zone: Northwest North West Southwest Northeast East Capital, Phnom Penh

Distance from central command (miles)

Distance from front/ Vietnam-Cambodia border

Timing of genocide onset

Onset rank

195 175.7 70 52.7 160 63.3 0

328 233.9 88.1 23 132.2 56.6 42.2

Early Early Mid Mid Late Late Late

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sources: Distances for each zone were calculated using archived maps featuring major and minor roads, railroads, and waterways specific to the 1975–79 period (see Yale Cambodian Genocide Program “CGEO2” ArcGIS database).

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opportunity for entrepreneurial behavior among regional lieutenants that leads violence to turn into a landslide of killings. In doing so, this chapter advances the debate from the macrolevel to include the subnational, introducing a focus on both the “top” and “bottom” of the political organization of genocide. I offer a new theoretical framework that integrates a specific mechanism critical to making sense of patterns of violence generated by members of armed organizations who perpetrate mass killings – “compliance” – and its aggregate effect – “convergence” – which also helps to explain why and how others join in once the killings have started. The model explains why individual local agents implement “entrepreneurial” violence to signal allegiance to the organization’s preferences but wind up generating an aggregate outcome that seems like “overkill.” The model generates a set of testable predictions linking the ambiguity of central commanders’ orders and the level of central–local coordination with patterns of violence that aggregate into genocide. Specifically, the theory predicts that when central leaders’ orders are ambiguous and where center–local coordination is low, reward-seeking actors at the local level initiate entrepreneurial forms of violence to implement the goals of higher-ups and to advance their own individual interests within the organization. An empirical analysis of the Cambodian genocide illustrates how the CPK central command’s ambiguous formulation of orders and low central–local coordination gave rise to patterns of violence that aggregated into genocide. My focus on how organizational dynamics impacts the onset of and participation in mass violence illustrates the importance of moving beyond analysis of the “top” to explore the workings of mass killings at the “middle” and “bottom” – the organization and the multitude of local actors involved. Recognition of the causal mechanisms that link the recurring feature of ambiguous orders to the onset of genocide and participation once the killings start is only a first step. Studies that explore how and why different organizational dynamics and constraints on central– local coordination shape the choices and behavior of central leaders and their local agents at the group and local levels are a first step in the direction of this promising avenue of research.

Notes 1 CPKCC [30 March 1976], Article 1 of “Decisions of the Central Committee on a Variety of Questions” in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, ed. David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988). 2 This chapter was presented at the Mass Violence in Southeast Asia Since 1945 Conference at Yale University, New Haven, CT (November 9, 2018) and the Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes (WISLI) Joint Student Conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (June 30, 2018). 3 Indonesian Army ([1965] 1966), Laporan tahunan lengkap Kodam-Iin Mokoginta in Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (New York: Routledge, 2018).

96 William Kwok

4 For death estimates, see Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). 5 There may be exceptions to this empirical pattern, but I have not found them in my research to date. 6 For a psychological study of order formulation, see Sophie Richardot, “‘You Know What to Do with Them’: The Formulation of Orders and Engagement in War Crimes,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 19, no. 2 (2014): 83–90. 7 William Kwok, “The Banality of Organization: Mass Killings as a Coordination Problem in the Shadow of War,” PhD diss. prospectus (Yale University, 2015). 8 Exceptions in the literature on Cambodia include Eve Zucker’s study of Kompong Speu province, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), and Ben Kiernan’s studies of the Eastern Zone, Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres: A Report on Social Conditions and Human Rights Violations in the Eastern Zone of Democratic Kampuchea under the Rule of Pol Pot’s (Khmer Rouge) Communist Party of Kampuchea (New York: Columbia University, 1986); Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008). On Rwanda, see Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). On Nazi Germany, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 9 See Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005); Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 10 See Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 375– 407; Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 11 While the implementation of genocide has been a puzzle that scholars have been trying to disentangle, certain studies now recognize that “ordinary” people make genocide possible as much as the leadership directives (on Cambodia, see Michael Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982 (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1999); on Rwanda, see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Straus’s (2006) analysis of implementation as a dynamic process has received less attention. 12 For a discussion of wartime violence as processes, see Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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13 See Scott Gates, “Recruitment and Allegiance. The Microfoundations of Rebellion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 1 (2002): 111–30; A. Hoover Green, “The Commanders Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 5 (2016): 619–32; Devorah Manekin, “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure on Opportunistic Violence,” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 10 (2013): 1273–1300; James Ron, “Savage Restraint: Israel, Palestine and the Dialectics of Legal Repression,” Social Problems 47, no. 4 (2000): 445–72; J.M. Weinstein, “Resources and the Information Problem in Rebel Recruitment,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (2005): 598–624; Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape as a Practice of War: Toward a Typology of Political Violence,” Politics and Society 46, no. 4 (2018): 513–37. 14 See Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”; Fujii, Killing Neighbors; Straus, The Order of Genocide; Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations. 15 Hoover Green, “The Commander’s Dilemma” and Wood, “Rape as a Practice of War” describe a “commander’s dilemma” in general terms. 16 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 17 Prussian civil servant Willikens ([1934] in Ian Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (1993): 103–18) declared: “Everyone knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer … it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish.” 18 See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Richardot, “‘You Know What to Do with Them.’” 19 Whereas strategic violence is violence purposefully adopted in pursuit of armed group objectives, opportunistic violence is carried out for the sake of private interests – that is, the fulfillment of private and group interests are unaligned (see Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape During War is Not Inevitable: Variation in Wartime Sexual Violence,” in Understanding and Proving International Sex Crimes, eds. Morten Bergsmo, Alf Butenschøn Skre, and Elisabeth J. Wood (Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2012, 389–419). 20 In this model, fear of punishment is not a necessary condition to generate mass killings. The presence of a “benefits stream” provides the incentive for local agents. While not necessary, it is possible for central command to also punish local actors that did not kill where and when there was no explicit policy. See Gates, “Recruitment and Allegiance” for a formalized example in rebel recruitment and allegiance; see also Ashlea Rundlett and Milan W. Svolik, “Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 1 (2016): 1–66; Gabriel Carroll, “Robustness and Linear Contracts,” American Economic Review 105, no. 2 (2015): 536– 63; Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom, “Aggregation and Linearity in the Provision of Intertemporal Incentives,” Econometrica 55, no. 2 (1987): 303–28. 21 In my empirical analysis, I code orders on a scale of 1–6 according to one of six categories outlined in my discussion of ambiguous orders. The assumption underlying this approach is that each category reflects a specific level of strategic ambiguity. Coding orders in this way enables us to observe the level of coordination between leaders and subordinates in terms of how closely local-level actions correspond with leaders’ preferences (in terms of the form of violence, targeting, and frequency). 22 Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime. 23 Francois Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978); Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982. 24 The assumption underlying the transmission of orders is that central leaders can and do communicate with regional leaders over the course of the genocide.

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25 I crosschecked this estimate against multiple sources, including Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia; Milton Osborne, “Pol Pot’s Terrifying Legacy,” Far Eastern Economic Review 6 (1980): 20–2; Rudolph J. Rummel, “Power, Genocide and Mass Murder,” Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 1 (1994): 1–10; Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982. 26 David P Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Kiernan, Blood and Soil; Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982. 27 Original population estimates in 1976 are reported by the CPK Party Center (July–August 1976), Table 1 “Population and Riceland in Kampuchea” in Pol Pot Plans the Future. 28 Execution data sourced from the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program and DC-Cam. 29 Onset at the zonal level serves as the dependent variable. I created a dataset of estimated onset dates using multiple principal and secondary sources, including Kiernan, Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; and Vickery, Cambodia, 1975– 1982. See Straus, The Order of Genocide for the onset of genocidal violence in Rwanda. 30 The threshold for extermination is defined as sustained killings of at least 5% of a victim group (see Table 4.4) over the course of a year spatially distributed across a zone. 31 CPKCC [30 March 1976] in Pol Pot Plans the Future. 32 CPKCC, Party Center [July–August 1976] in Pol Pot Plans the Future. 33 CPKCC [30 March 1976]. 34 A question that remains is whether the dates of “liberation” correspond to the onset of violence, which due to the constraints of this edited volume format is addressed in my other studies. 35 Distance as a variable (or a proxy measure) refers to geographical distance. Granted, “distance” can take forms other than geographical space, as the concepts of ethnic and ideological “space” demonstrate. Geography is fundamental to the command and control of an armed organization. Under certain conditions, distance from central command is a limiting factor that affects the ability of an organization to effectively coordinate and project force. In the cases of genocide under examination, information in the chain of command relied on a particular technology such that geographical distance was the limiting factor in the absence of variation in terrain, other natural features, and so on. In Cambodia, that technology was limited to traditional face-to-face mediums (see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime). The CPK conveyed orders via couriers. While present in Cambodia, analog mediums appeared in low densities – networks of radio towers and beacons, continuous telephone lines, cables, and so on were not readily available (especially not in peripheral localities). While central leaders’ ability to observe events on the ground relied on local agents to act as the eyes and ears of the organization in their localities, distance – given the technologies available – was the main constraining factor in central–local coordination.

Bibliography Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Carroll, Gabriel. “Robustness and Linear Contracts.” American Economic Review 105, no. 2 (2015): 536–563. Chandler, David P. The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. CPKCC (Communist Party of Kampuchea Central Committee). Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea 1976–1977. Edited by D.P. Chandler, B. Kiernan, and C. Boua. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988.

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Des Forges, Alison Liebhafsky. “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999. Fujii, Lee Ann. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Gates, Scott. “Recruitment and Allegiance: The Microfoundations of Rebellion.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 1 (2002): 111–130. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996. Hinton, Alexander Laban. Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Holmstrom, Bengt, and Paul Milgrom. “Aggregation and Linearity in the Provision of Intertemporal Incentives.” Econometrica 55, no. 2 (1987): 303–328. Hoover Green, Amelia. “The Commander’s Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 5 (2016): 619–632. Indonesian Army. ([1965] 1966). Laporan tahunan lengkap Kodam-Iin Mokoginta. In Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. New York: Routledge, 2018. Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kershaw, Ian. “‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship.” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (1993): 103–118. Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Kiernan, Ben. Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres: A Report on Social Conditions and Human Rights Violations in the Eastern Zone of Democratic Kampuchea under the Rule of Pol Pot’s (Khmer Rouge) Communist Party of Kampuchea. New York: Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, 1986. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kwok, William. “The Banality of Organization: Mass Killings as a Coordination Problem in the Shadow of War.” PhD diss. prospectus. Yale University, 2015. Levene, Mark. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Manekin, Devorah. “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure on Opportunistic Violence.” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 10 (2013): 1273–1300. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Melvin, Jess. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2018. Midlarsky, Manus I. The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Ponchaud, Francois. Cambodia: Year Zero. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. Osborne, Milton. “Pol Pot’s Terrifying Legacy.” Far Eastern Economic Review 6 (1980): 20–22.

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Richardot, Sophie. “‘You Know What to Do with Them’: The Formulation of Orders and Engagement in War Crimes.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 19, no. 2 (2014): 83–90. Robinson, Geoffrey. The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Ron, James. “Savage Restraint: Israel, Palestine and the Dialectics of Legal Repression.” Social Problems 47, no. 4 (2000): 445–472. Roosa, John. Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Rummel, Rudolph J. “Power, Genocide and Mass Murder.” Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 1 (1994): 1–10. Rundlett, Ashlea, and Milan W. Svolik. “Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud.” American Political Science Review 110, no. 1 (2016): 1–66. Sémelin, Jacques. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Shaw, Martin. War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Straus, Scott. Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tabeau, Ewa, and Trey Kheam. United Nations Demographic Expert Report, Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, April 1975– January 1979: A Critical Assessment of Major Estimates, 30 September 2009. Phnom Penh, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, 2009. Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Valentino, Benjamin, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay. “‘Draining the Sea’: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare.” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 375–407. Vickery, Michael. Cambodia, 1975–1982. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1999. Weinstein, J.M. “Resources and the Information Problem in Rebel Recruitment.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (2005): 598–624. Weitz, Eric D. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Wood, Elisabeth Jean. “Rape as a Practice of War: Toward a Typology of Political Violence.” Politics and Society 46, no. 4 (2018): 513–537. Wood, Elisabeth Jean. “Rape During War Is Not Inevitable: Variation in Wartime Sexual Violence.” In Understanding and Proving International Sex Crimes, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Alf Butenschøn Skre, and Elisabeth J. Wood, 389–419. Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2012. Yale Cambodian Genocide Program. https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/cambodian-genocideprogram. Zucker, Eve M. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013.

5 MASS VIOLENCE AGAINST THE ROHINGYA Strategic and ideological drivers of ethnic cleansing Mayesha Alam1

Introduction In August 2017, the Myanmar military began a “clearance operation” in Rakhine State that led to almost three-quarters of a million Rohingya men, women, and children fleeing across the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh over the course of several weeks. The Myanmar military justified the “clearance operation” as a necessary response to the emergence of an insurgency known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which had attacked local security posts just before the “clearance operation.” However, the Myanmar military’s actions were internationally condemned and characterized by human rights experts as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”2 How can we explain this campaign of mass militarized violence? This is the fundamental puzzle that motivates the analysis that follows. I argue that the campaign of mass militarized violence was both strategically and ideologically motivated. On the one hand, the “clearance operation” was the product of proximate security concerns: the Myanmar military sought to eliminate the threat ARSA posed and thereby fortify a porous border region. This is crucial to explaining the timing of the “clearance operation.” On the other hand, the Rohingya have long been reviled as outsiders who neither rightfully belong within the bounds of the imagined nation nor the boundaries of the physical state. This exclusionary ideology of ethnoreligious nationalism is crucial to explaining why the Rohingya became the target of state-led ethnic cleansing. My findings are based on a combination of research methods. I undertook fieldwork in Rohingya refugee camps and conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, the United States, and Europe. In addition, I conducted extensive archival research based on a range of historical documents from the colonial and post-colonial era. This data was collected between November 2017 and May 2019.3 I also rely heavily on journalistic

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coverage of the Rohingya crisis and reports by human rights and humanitarian aid organizations, including from before and since the August 2017 “clearance operation.” These sources offer useful descriptive statistics, detailed accounts, and spatial illustrations of the dramatic population movements and the physical destruction caused by the military-led “clearance operation.”

Explanations for ethnic cleansing Ethnic cleansing is differentiated from other types of mass violence by two crucial features. First, the target population comprises an ethnic group distinct from the population carrying out the violence. Second, the perpetrators seek to eliminate the targeted ethnic group from a given territory.4 Myron Weiner and Michael Teitelbaum define the strategy of ethnic cleansing as “a politics of terror sufficiently powerful to convince people to abandon their homes and land to others.”5 Explanations for ethnic cleansing fall within three broad categories, those based on identity-based prejudice, others based on instrumentalist value, and others still based on exclusionary ideologies. Explanations in the first category emphasize factors such as ancient hatreds, cultural differences, and mistrust of out-group members.6 While the causal mechanisms may vary, such theories generally emphasize widespread participation of members of one ethnic group in the production of violence against members of the targeted ethnic group. Theories based on inherent prejudice suffer from noteworthy flaws: they assume that ethnic identities are fixed and that the hate that fuels ethnic cleansing is immutable. Yet, there is much evidence to show that ethnic identities – like prejudices – can and do evolve. Moreover, ethnic violence – let alone ethnic cleansing – is far from inevitable in heterogenous societies.7 Instrumentalist theories, in contrast, generally contend that ethnic violence – and in its most extreme form, ethnic cleansing – is actually the result of rational choices on the part of armed actors who frame competition over political power, territorial control, and limited economic resources as being identity-driven in order the maximize their own interests.8 A broad swathe of such rational-choice-based studies emphasizes the context of armed conflict – whether inter- or intra-state – in motivating ethnic cleansing and creating enabling conditions.9 Explaining the relationship between armed conflict and ethnic cleansing has inspired extensive research, much of it relevant to a broader body of scholarship on civilian targeting. But purely utilitarian arguments are all too often ahistorical, meaning they ignore the deep-set discrimination against the targeted group that may precede periods of armed conflict, and they leave gaps in understanding about why civilians are targeted en masse often through extremely brutal, performative violence. Recent scholarship has emphasized the ideational foundations of mass political violence by scrutinizing the political ideology of ruling elites. Ideology-based explanations are helpful to understanding not only why civilians are targeted on a mass scale but also why some but not all regimes that face insurgent threats commit mass political violence against co-ethnics of insurgent groups. For the purposes of

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the analysis that follows, ideology should be understood in the terms defined by Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín and Elisabeth Wood to explain civilian targeting “as a set of more or less systematic ideas that identify a constituency, the challenges the group confronts, the objectives to pursue on behalf of that group, and a (perhaps vague) program of action.”10 This conceptualization of ideology in explaining political violence treats instrumental reasoning and normative commitments as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Scott Straus also argues in favor of the “theoretical compatibility” of a strategic perspective, namely how armed conflicts legitimize violence, with an ideological perspective.11 He explains, “[T]he political imaginary establishes social categories and political goals, which in turn helps to explain why certain civilian groups are targeted … the ideological vision of a political leadership will shape how leaders respond strategically to perceived threats.”12 He further underscores “the way in which leaders imagine the purpose of their polity and the legitimate community of citizens that belong to the polity” as crucial to explaining mass violence against civilians selective on group identity.13 Building on these insights from existing literature and based on case-specific evidence, I argue that the Rohingya became targets of military-led ethnic cleansing due to ideological and strategic reasoning. From an ideological perspective, a state-imposed classification system of “national races,” which was first introduced in the 1960s in the early years of military dictatorship and solidified a ruling ideology based on ethnoreligious nationalism over the course of the next few decades, delineates political inclusion and representation in Myanmar. The idea of “national races,” locally articulated as “taingyintha,” is the primary marker of belonging and, as a political idea, is both revisionist toward history and utopian in its future aspiration. The key mechanism underpinning the ethnoreligious nationalist ideology encapsulated in “taingyintha” is exclusion: any groups that do not fall within the designated 135 “national races” do not belong in the political entity that is modern-day Myanmar. Ethnic groups that fall within the designated “national races” may be engaged in contentious politics – even armed conflict – with the state, but their belonging in Myanmar is not disputed as is the case for populations excluded from “taingyintha.” Indeed, although the Myanmar military has been engaged in a series of armed conflicts with rebels from various ethnic minority groups, and known to commit vast human rights abuses therein, the treatment of the Rohingya is unique. The Rohingya, excluded from the “national races” and therefore not considered “taingyintha,” are seen as illegal infiltrators whose demands for inclusion and representation, whether mounted non-violently or through armed resistance as in the case of ARSA, are met with government ire as well as broader public disdain. Not only are they seen as not belonging, confirmed by their exclusion from “taingyintha,” but the security threat posed by ARSA provides justification for the “clearance operation” and accounts for its timing. In short, the military-led ethnic cleansing effort is the product of both strategic and ideological reasoning. To substantiate this argument, in the following sections I examine who the Rohingya are, how they came to be vilified as demographic and national security threats in the political imagination of ruling elites as well as by the greater public, and how the Myanmar military sought to repress and remove them.

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“Othering” of the Rohingya in historical perspective The Rohingya are an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority group who for generations lived in the northern part of Rakhine State in western Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh. The river Naf divides the two countries and although the border region is heavily militarized today, historically it has been porous. Like many other regions of Myanmar, Rakhine State is a multi-ethnic territory with Rakhine Buddhists comprising the most populous ethnic group followed by Rohingya Muslims who, until 2017, lived predominantly in the northwestern townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung, where they comprised a localized majority.14 The Myanmar government brands the Rohingya as illegal migrants, refuses to use the term Rohingya in reference to the population, and instead insists on calling them Bengalis to suggest they are intruders from Bangladesh.15 This is despite extensive historical evidence that suggests the Rohingya have lived inside Myanmar (formerly Burma) near the Mayu range for several generations. The Rohingya population emerged from what was once the predominantly Muslim kingdom of Arakan. The Arakan civilization was incorporated into the Buddhist-majority kingdom of Burma in 1785, which was followed shortly thereafter by British colonization in 1824. British rule disrupted the pre-existing centuries-old social, political, and economic order.16 Through inter-marriage and settlements, the Muslim community in what is today Rakhine began to expand and the British often delegated administrative governance tasks to Muslims. For Buddhist monks, intermarriage – though far from ubiquitous – became a troubling development as fears grew about the potential Islamization of the population. A 1938 British colonial investigation into anti-Muslim riots in Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships found that “one of the major sources of anxiety in the minds of a great number of Burmese [Buddhists] was the question of the marriage of their womenfolk with foreigners in general and with Indians in particular.”17 Deep-set disdain toward the Rohingya also stems from a legacy of divided loyalties during World War II. When Japan invaded Burma, many ethnically Indian Muslims in the Arakan region sided with the British in hopes of achieving political and territorial autonomy in the future. One British commander who was stationed in the area recounts in his personal diary, “We can work in the full knowledge that nine out of the ten [Mussulmen] men in our sector are for us, and that if we ever see a Maugh [Buddhist], he is against us.”18 After the war, however, British support for the political and territorial ambitions of Muslims in Arakan who had hoped for their own homeland never materialized. Burma declared independence from the British in January 1948 but failed to emerge as a unified country. Instead, territorial conflicts involving ethnic minorities became a fixture of Burmese politics across various regions. In Arakan, some 1,000 “mujahids” (“soldiers of holy war”) mounted a rebellion on behalf of Arakanese Muslims in Maungdaw and Buthidaung, but were quashed by the Burmese army.19 Even though declassified British Foreign Office records suggest that not all Muslims in Arakan supported the rebels, an enduring perception solidified

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among the Burmese political leadership of the Rohingya as “a minority that prefers separatism.”20 This perception evolved in the post-independence era and intensified for decades thereafter. After General Ne Win staged a military coup in 1962 and established a socialist dictatorship, the Rohingya were systematically marginalized through a series of repressive policies and military operations. The cornerstone of Ne Win’s vision for the state he sought to build was the concept of “taingyintha,” akin to “sons of the soil,” based on a classification of “national races” to bring together Myanmar’s various ethnic groups under one umbrella. The principle underpinning “taingyintha” was not so much the idea of “unity in diversity” as “unity through hegemony.”21 On the one hand, the architects of the “national races” classification system sought to return the demographic composition of the land to the precolonial era while, on the other hand, build a state based on assimilation and homogenization but not equality or democracy among the various ethnic groups.22 This classification coincided with the “Naga Min” (“Dragon King”) military campaign against Rohingyas in 1978, leading to tens of thousands of civilians fleeing to Bangladesh.23 A new citizenship law promulgated in 1982 created a four-tier hierarchy distinguishing between full citizens, associate citizens, naturalized citizens, and resident foreigners.24 Members of ethnic groups that had continuously and permanently existed within the geographic territory of Myanmar prior to British colonization (i.e., before 1823) were deemed citizens, as were children born of two parents who were members of the designated national races. In other words, membership in a national race, equivalent to being “taingyintha,” became “the primary basis of citizenship” under the new law.25 The Rohingya were deemed to fall outside those considered “taingyintha.” In this sense, they were not so much stripped of their citizenship but rather disqualified from being able to make any claims to citizenship. Rohingya who remained in Myanmar were effectively barred from holding public office, using public services, and exercising freedom of movement within the country. They were also thus left physically and culturally disconnected from the rest of the country’s fragmented and dispersed Muslim population. A series of Rohingya resistance groups emerged making a variety of claims for self-determination. Groups such as the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), and the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) used violent and non-violent means to advance their objectives, while groups such as the Democracy and Human Rights Party sought to advance civil and political rights for the Rohingya by contesting local elections.26 Irrespective of their claim and the approach, such groups were consistently met with state-led repression. Although insurgent groups never managed to mobilize broad popular support or pose serious threats to the military, they were met with excessive and indiscriminate force. Pro-democracy parties, meanwhile, were banned and obstructed from gaining access to local political institutions. As Elliott Prasse-Freeman explains, “[The Rohingya] committed the dual sin of having

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perceived characteristics of ‘foreignness’ while demanding taingyintha status.”27 Weiner’s notion of territorial ethnicity is relevant here. He writes, “whether a people see themselves as having an exclusive proprietary right over what takes place within that space, or whether they envisage sharing that space with others is a critical element in the patterns of integration within a political system.”28 The Myanmar military not only denied basic rights to the overwhelming majority of Rohingya people but also rejected the notion that they belonged in Myanmar.

Contemporary vilification and exclusion of the Rohingya After five decades of direct military rule and international isolation, Myanmar began a slow process of opening up and transitioning toward civilian rule in 2011. The hallmarks of this transition included competitive elections, long-time pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s ascent to power, the growing prominence of her party (National League for Democracy) in parliament, and the opening up of the country to foreign investment. The international community was quick to applaud these developments as signs of liberalization. Yet Myanmar, since 2011, more closely resembles an anocracy than a democracy. The division of power enshrined in the current constitution is conducive neither to democracy nor pluralism but rather institutionalizes a struggle for power skewed in favor of the military. Myanmar has what one expert described as a “quasi-military, not quasi-civilian, government.”29 While Aung San Suu Kyi is the State Counselor and heads the foreign ministry, she has no authority over the military, which maintains control over the ministries of defense, home affairs, and border affairs. The military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) also heads the ministries of labor, immigration, and population as well as religious and cultural affairs. The state ideology remains hierarchical and exclusionary, based on the ethnoreligious supremacy of the Buddhist Bamar (Burman) majority. The transition away from direct military rule coincided with the consolidation of the 969 Movement led by extremist monks such as Ashin Wirathu who seek to preserve the central place of Theravada Buddhism in Burmese politics and thwart what they see as impending Islamic expansionism in Myanmar. The ethnoreligious nationalist movement has been particularly potent in mobilizing people based on the Islamophobia accompanying the global “War on Terror,” as well as fear of the large populations of Muslims in South and Southeast Asian countries.30 969 leveraged the easing of restrictions to speech, assembly, and access to information, and spread propaganda about Muslims generally and the Rohingya in particular both in Rakhine State and throughout Myanmar. The propaganda campaign is “tech savvy,” capitalizing on the saturation of Facebook throughout Burmese society to deploy messengers, amplify its message, and spread misinformation, myths, lies, tropes, and fear.31 Reviving anxieties from the colonial era and reinforcing what Nyi Nyi Kyaw calls a “deeply held siege mentality,” one particularly potent rumor relates to Muslim men “taking” Buddhist women, whether through marriage or rape, and thereby threatening the very existence of the Burman race and Buddhist

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religion.32 This perception, combined with the recent emergence of ARSA, underscores the need to fortify the country’s “Western Gate” (i.e., the western border) from foreign intruders, namely the Rohingya, or “illegal Bengalis” as they are locally known.33 Ethnoreligious nationalism became a powerful governing ideology with the leaders of 969 increasingly in lock-step with the quasi-military regime. As one interviewee explained, “969 went from stickers to pamphlets to DVDs to shaping policies.”34 Senior officials in the central government, for their part, did little to thwart growing Islamophobia and anti-Rohingya sentiments. After a Rakhine Buddhist woman was gang-raped and murdered by Rohingya Muslims in 2012, 969 called for revenge, which helped foment deadly communal riots and led to further government restrictions against the Rohingya. One high-ranking individual in President Thein Sein’s office proclaimed, “Rohingyas from other countries are coming into our country. Since our military has got the news in advance, we will eradicate them until the end … We don’t want to hear any humanitarian issues or human rights from others.”35 Similarly, in 2013, another senior government official warned that the “Bengali” population in Rakhine State would “precipitate the end of Myanmar itself” and called for measures to safeguard the “taingyintha.”36 In the lead-up to the 2014 national census, 969 and its affiliated Committee on the Protection of Race and Religion (known locally as “Ma Ba Tha”) took a vocal stand against counting the Rohingya in the national population.37 The government also revoked the white registration cards that Rohingya were previously entitled to hold as non-citizens, thus stripping them of any legal identity. Ahead of the 2015 general elections, certain leaders of Ma Ba Tha encouraged voters to support candidates of parties, namely the military-aligned USDP, while explicitly discouraging votes for the NLD.38 Aung San Suu Kyi’s landslide victory, however, far from rendered Ma Ba Tha irrelevant. Rather, the group focused its post-election efforts on shaping legislation designed to protect the Buddhist Bamar majority from the purported threat of invading Muslims. It is against this backdrop that ARSA mounted an armed rebellion claiming to fight for a homeland for Rohingya Muslims in the border region.

“Clearance operation” as ethnic cleansing ARSA mobilized around the general elections in 2015, a time when the Rohingya population faced further infringements on their rights and freedoms, but it is virtually impossible to accurately gauge the level of civilian support for ARSA. Although ARSA represents a legitimate security threat that is capable of causing limited harm to the state through low-level, ambush-style attacks, it can hardly be described as an organized rebel movement. As one interviewee familiar with ARSA fighters explained to me, “The members I know were malnourished men and boys in flip flops with knives and sticks, many of whom reported being paid a meager $20 for joining.”39 Led by an ethnic Rohingya, Pakistan-born, and Saudi-raised militant called Ata Ullah, ARSA claims to be fighting for an independent homeland for the

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Rohingya people and denies connections to foreign or transnational terrorist organizations.40 Nevertheless, ARSA is perceived to be affiliated with and similar to Al Qaeda. ARSA first carried out ambush attacks against three Myanmar Border Guard Police posts in October 2016 that resulted in the deaths of several police officers and allowed insurgents to seize some low-grade weapons. The Myanmar military responded with indiscriminate attacks against Rohingya villagers while claiming to be targeting militants. The military also sought to fortify the border region. By early August 2017, the Myanmar military had deployed troops from the 33rd and 99th Light Infantry Divisions into Rakhine State. Military forces were thus ready in anticipation for the next ARSA attack, which came on August 25, 2017.41 This time, ARSA perpetrated a series of 30 ambush attacks against Burmese security posts that killed 9 border guards and 4 soldiers.42 ARSA was declared a terrorist organization and these attacks, while limited in their level of destruction, triggered the “clearance operation,” which appears to be a final solution to rid the country of not only the insurgent threat but also the unwanted Rohingya population. The Myanmar Army weaponized social media to reiterate the exclusionary ideology and amplify the grave threat posed to the Burmese by the Rohingya, thus galvanizing public support for a swift and heavy-handed approach.43 A week into 2017, the head of the Myanmar military declared in a Facebook post, “The Bengali problem was a long-standing one which has become an unfinished job despite the efforts of the previous governments to solve it. The government in office is taking great care in solving the problem.”44 While it is difficult to confirm the exact numbers of civilian casualties, reports suggest at least several thousand Rohingya persons were killed, while approximately three-quarters of a million were driven out.45 In this respect, ethnic cleansing appears to be mainly achieved through strategic mass displacement. More specifically, the Myanmar military’s use of extreme violence that was selective on ethnic identity and committed on a mass scale terrorized the majority of the Rohingya population into leaving Rakhine State and fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh – thus pushing them across an international border. In addition to massacres, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh report an array of other abuses that they experienced or witnessed such as torture, intimidation, destruction of property, and sexual violence (including gang rapes and various forms of sexualized torture). These abuses, generally perpetrated by uniformed military personnel, appear to have been pervasive, deliberate, and perpetrated with virtual impunity.46 The army deployed scorched-earth tactics, reminiscent of other military dictatorships’ attempts to quash rebellions such as during the Guatemalan civil war, razing more than 350 Rohingya villages in an area that stretches some 70 miles from the northern tip of Rakhine State down to the State’s capital in Sittwe.47 The Myanmar military justified its actions to a domestic audience by framing it as not only a short-term imperative to securing territorial control in the border region but also in the long-term political and economic interest of those citizens who properly belong to the nation. For decades, the government has sought to build both “model” villages for non-Muslims and incentivized relocation to

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Rakhine State by non-Muslims from other parts of the country.48 Now that the majority of villages previously occupied by the Rohingya are empty, and they are unlikely to return, Rakhine authorities and local groups like the Ancillary Committee for Reconstruction of Rakhine National Territory have been encouraging Buddhist settlers to move to the border region and help defend the Western Gate from future infiltration.49

Conclusion Although tensions between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists have flared from time to time, the mass expulsion of the Rohingya was not merely the product of grassroots mobilization by one geographically concentrated group against another. Rather, ethnic cleansing was engineered and operationalized by the Myanmar military as a top-down process shaped by a confluence of local and global conditions alongside historical and contemporary factors. The “clearance operation,” while triggered by the actions of ARSA, was ideologically driven by the army and historically rooted. ARSA was not the sole target of the “clearance operation.” The pace, brutality, and scale of violence perpetrated by the Myanmar military against Rohingya civilians in northern Rakhine State in 2017, combined with decades of institutionalized repression and discrimination, suggests that rather than seeking submission or loyalty, the state was primarily interested in getting rid of the population altogether. The Myanmar military did not perpetrate mass collective violence against the Rohingya people in the border region simply because it lacked territorial control or the capacity to distinguish Rohingya civilians from ARSA insurgents. In other words, ethnic cleansing was not merely the result of strategic imperative or operational necessity. The objective was to eliminate any future prospects of the Rohingya existing and flourishing in the territory from which they were to be expelled. The Myanmar military chose to systematically attack civilians on a massive scale in order to terrorize them into leaving their homes and fleeing across an international border. Through a campaign of mass militarized violence, the Myanmar militarily effectively translated exclusion of the Rohingya from the imagined national community into their exclusion from the real state boundaries. When the August 2017 “clearance operation” began, there were already an estimated quarter of a million Rohingya people living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, as well as significant diaspora communities in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, and Thailand. More than two years since the August 2017 “clearance operation” began, the Myanmar military has consistently blocked the return of those Rohingya most recently expelled, by failing to provide guarantees of security and obstructing their return through bureaucratic delays despite international pressure. Instead, the military has further securitized the border region and the government has sought to repurpose the land previously inhabited by the Rohingya. Academics and policymakers who are interested in ameliorating the current Rohingya crisis must not ignore the sociopolitical conditions that gave rise to the current

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catastrophe. While many observers insist that the Myanmar government ought to give the Rohingya citizenship, such a move will be insufficient to ensure their political participation and integration into the social fabric of the nation. For that, safe repatriation must be accompanied by comprehensive measures to counter the perception and policies that have left the Rohingya outside the bounds of those who belong in Myanmar.

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Steven Wilkinson, Elisabeth Wood, James Scott, David Simon, and Ian Shapiro for their advice. 2 United Nations, “UN Human Rights Chief Points to ‘Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing’ in Myanmar,” UN News, September 11, 2017, https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/09/ 564622-un-human-rights-chief-points-textbook-example-ethnic-cleansing-myanmar. 3 This research protocol involving human subjects was reviewed and approved by the Yale University Institutional Review Board (No. 2000022085). 4 H. Zeynep Bulutgil, The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 5 Myron Weiner and Michael S. Teitelbaum, Political Demography, Demographic Engineering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 66. 6 Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: Macmillan, 2005); Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7 Kanchan Chandra, “What is Ethnic Identity and Does it Matter?” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 397–424; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 75–90; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 8 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–95; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 9 H. Zeynep Bulutgil, “Ethnic Cleansing and its Alternatives in Wartime: A Comparison of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires,” International Security 41, no. 4 (2017): 169–201; Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Benjamin A. Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 375–407. 10 Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín and Elisabeth J. Wood, “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (2014): 213–26. 11 Scott Straus, “‘Destroy Them to Save Us’: Theories of Genocide and the Logics of Political Violence,” Terrorism and Political Violence 24, no. 4 (2012): 549. 12 Ibid., 550. 13 Ibid., 548. 14 Syed S. Mahmood et al., “The Rohingya People of Myanmar: Health, Human Rights, and Identity,” The Lancet 389, no. 10081 (2017): 1841–50. 15 Sanjoy Hazarika, “A Question of Outsiders: Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan,” in Demography and National Security, eds. Myron Weiner and Shron S. Russell (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001). 16 James Baxter, Report on Indian Immigration. Rangoon: Superintendent (Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1941), www.networkmyanmar.org/ESW/Files/Baxter-Report. pdf.

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17 Burma Riot Inquiry Committee, Interim Report of the Riot Inquiry Committee (Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1939), http://web.archive.org/web/20160428193247/ http://www.networkmyanmar.org/images/stories/PDF22/1938-Riot-Inquiry.pdf. 18 Anthony Irwin, Rex Wood, and Patricia Carfrae, Burmese Outpost (London: Collins, 1945), 23. 19 B.R. Pearn, “The Mujahid Revolt in Arakan,” FO 371/101002-FB 1015/63 (Kew: The National Archives, 1952). 20 Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma (Wiesbaden: O. Harrasowitz, 1972), 112. 21 Matthew Walton, “The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics,” Journal of Burma Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 889–910; Nick Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 3 (2017): 464. 22 For more information, see Cheesman, “How in Myanmar.” 23 Eileen Pittaway, “The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: A Failure of the International Protection Regime,” in Protracted Displacement in Asia: No Place to Call Home, ed. Howard Adelman (London: Routledge, 2008), 83–105. 24 For more information, see Human Rights Watch, “III. Discrimination in Arakan,” www. hrw.org/reports/2000/burma/burm005-02.htm; Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, Burma Citizenship Law, October 15, 1982, www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4f71b.html. 25 Cheesman, “How in Myanmar”, 471–2. 26 Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front, “A Treacherous Burmese Design,” Arakan no. 2, November 1990, 1–8 (Project Maje Records MS 2039, Series V, Box 49, Folder 2); Rohingya Solidarity Organisation, “RSO Intensifies Guerilla Operation,” The Newsletter Fortnightly, May 15, 1994 (Project Maje Records MS 2039, Box 49, Folder 1). 27 Elliott Prasse‐Freeman, “The Rohingya Crisis,” Anthropology Today 33, no. 6 (2017): 1–2. 28 Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4. 29 Interview 47. 30 Paul Mozur, “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, with Posts from Myanmar’s Military,” New York Times, October 15, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmarfacebook-genocide.html. 31 Min Zhin, “Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: Why Now?,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2015): 375–97. 32 Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 186. 33 Interview 1; Interview 2; Interview 4; Interview 5; Interview 45; Interview 46. 34 Interview 47. 35 Joseph Allchin, “The Rohingya, Myths and Misinformation,” Democratic Voice of Burma, June 22, 2012, http://english.dvb.no/analysis/the-rohingya-myths-and-misinformation/ 22597. 36 Cheesman, “How in Myanmar”, 473. 37 Ministry of Immigration and Population, “2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census,” Myanmar Information Management Unit, https://themimu.info/census-data. 38 “MaBaTha, USDP: Election Bedfellows?,” Myanmar Times, September 30, 2015, www. mmtimes.com/opinion/16738-ma-ba-tha-usdp-election-bedfellows.html. 39 Interview 50. 40 International Crisis Group, Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State: Asia Report no. 283 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, December 15, 2016), www.crisisgroup.org/ asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/283-myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state. 41 Fortify Rights, “They Gave Them Long Swords”: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 2018, www. fortifyrights.org/downloads/Fortify_Rights_Long_Swords_July_2018.pdf. 42 “‘They Tried to Kill Us All’: Atrocity Crimes Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State,” Bearing Witness Report (Washington, DC: Simon-Skjodt Center for the

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43 44 45

46 47 48 49

Prevention of Genocide and Fortify Rights, November 2017), www.fortifyrights.org/ downloads/THEY_TRIED_TO_KILL_US_ALL_Atrocity_Crimes_against_Rohingya_ Muslims_Nov_2017.pdf. Mozur, “A Genocide.” Aung Hlaing Min, “Entire Government Institutions and People must Defend the Country with Strong Patriotism,” Facebook, September 2, 2017, www.facebook.com/ seniorgeneralminaunghlaing/posts/1698274643540350. Doctors Without Borders, “Myanmar/Bangladesh: MSF Survey Estimates that at Least 6,700 Rohingya were Killed during the Attacks in Myanmar”, December 12, 2017, www.msf.org/en/article/myanmarbangladesh-msfsurveys-estimate-least-6700-rohingyawere-killed-during-attacks. Skye Wheeler, “All of my Body was Pain”: Sexual Violence against Rohingya Women and Girls (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2017), www.hrw.org/report/2017/11/16/ all-my-body-was-pain/sexual-violence-against-rohingya-women-and-girlsburma. Thomson Reuters, “Burned to the Ground”, Reuters Graphics, December 31, 2017. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/MYANMAR-ROHINGYA/010060630DW/ index.html. Hazarika, “A Question of Outsiders,” 245. Moe Myint, “Settling Scores in Northern Rakhine,” Irrawaddy, December 14, 2017, www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/settling-scores-northern-rakhine.html.

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Downes, Alexander B. Targeting Civilians in War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 75–90. Fortify Rights. “They Gave Them Long Swords”: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar. 2018. www.fortifyrights. org/downloads/Fortify_Rights_Long_Swords_July_2018.pdf. Gutiérrez Sanín, Francisco, and Elisabeth J. Wood, “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond.” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (2014): 213–226. Hazarika, Sanjoy. “A Question of Outsiders: Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Bhutan.” In Demography and National Security, edited by Myron Weiner and Sharon S. Russell. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Horowitz, Donald L. Ethnic Groups in Conflict, updated edition with a new preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. International Crisis Group. Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State: Asia Report no. 283. Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2016. www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-eastasia/myanmar/283-myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state. Irwin, Anthony, Rex Wood, and Patricia Carfrae. Burmese Outpost. London: Collins, 1945. Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Kyaw, Nyi Nyi. “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar.” In Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, edited by Melissa Crouch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. “MaBaTha, USDP: Election Bedfellows?” Myanmar Times, September 30, 2015. Accessed November 11, 2017. www.mmtimes.com/opinion/16738-ma-ba-tha-usdp-electionbedfellows.html. Mahmood, Syed S., Emily Wroe, Arlan Fuller, and Jennifer Leaning. “The Rohingya People of Myanmar: Health, Human Rights, and Identity.” The Lancet 389, no. 10081 (2017): 1841–1850. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Min, Aung Hlaing. “Entire Government Institutions and People must Defend the Country with Strong Patriotism.” Facebook, September 2, 2017. Accessed September 11, 2017. www.facebook.com/seniorgeneralminaunghlaing/posts/1698274643540350. Ministry of Immigration and Population. “2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census.” Myanmar Information Management Unit. Accessed September 19, 2019. https://themimu. info/census-data. Mozur, Paul. “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, with Posts from Myanmar’s Military.” New York Times, October 15, 2018. Accessed October 16, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/10/ 15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html. Myint, Moe. “Settling Scores in Northern Rakhine.” Irrawaddy, December 14, 2017. Accessed September 15, 2019. www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/settling-scores-northern-rakhine. html. Pearn, B.R. “The Mujahid Revolt in Arakan.” FO 371/101002-FB 1015/63. Kew: The National Archives, 1952. Petersen, Roger D. Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentiethcentury Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pittaway, Eileen. “The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: A Failure of the International Protection Regime.” In Protracted Displacement in Asia: No Place to Call Home, edited by Howard Adelman. London: Routledge, 2008. Prasse‐Freeman, Elliott. “The Rohingya Crisis.” Anthropology Today 33, no. 6 (2017): 1–2.

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Rohingya Solidarity Organisation. “RSO Intensifies Guerilla Operation.” The Newsletter Fortnightly, May 15, 1994. Project Maje Records MS 2039, Box 49, Folder 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Library. Shaw, Martin. War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Straus, Scott. “‘Destroy Them to Save Us’: Theories of Genocide and the Logics of Political Violence.” Terrorism and Political Violence 24, no. 4 (2012): 544–560. “‘They Tried to Kill Us All’: Atrocity Crimes Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.” Bearing Witness Report. Washington, DC: Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide and Fortify Rights, November2017. Accessed September 18, 2019. www.fortifyrights. org/downloads/THEY_TRIED_TO_KILL_US_ALL_Atrocity_Crimes_against_Rohingya_ Muslims_Nov_2017.pdf. Thomson Reuters. “Burned to the Ground.” Reuters Graphics, December 31, 2017. Accessed September 25, 2019. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/MYANMARROHINGYA/010060630DW/index.html. United Nations. “UN Human Rights Chief Points to ‘Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing’ in Myanmar.” UN News, September 11, 2017. Accessed September 30, 2017. https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/09/564622-un-human-rights-chief-point s-textbook-example-ethnic-cleansing-myanmar. Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the 20th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Valentino, Benjamin A., Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay. “‘Draining the Sea’: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare.” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 375–407. Walton, Matthew. “The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics.” Journal of Burma Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 889–910. Weiner, Myron. Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Weiner, Myron, and Michael S. Teitelbaum. Political Demography, Demographic Engineering. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Wheeler, Skye. “All of my Body was Pain”: Sexual Violence against Rohingya Women and Girls. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2017. Accessed October 1, 2019. www.hrw.org/report/2017/ 11/16/all-my-body-was-pain/sexual-violence-against-rohingya-women-and-girlsburma. Yegar, Moshe. The Muslims of Burma. Wiesbaden: O. Harrasowitz, 1972. Zhin, Min. “Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: Why Now?” Social Research: An International Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2015): 375–397.

PART 3

Minorities and the State

6 THE CRUCIBLE OF D ̵ IÊN ̣ BIÊN PHỦ Making Vietnam in the First Indochina War Christian C. Lentz

A decade before President Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext for bombing Vietnam’s north and deploying troops in its south, the US government was already deeply involved in the first of what would become three Indochina Wars. As the People’s Army of Vietnam laid siege to the French Expeditionary Corps’ entrenched camp at Điện Biên Phủ in spring 1954, French pilots were flying American bombers and dropping American bombs on and around the mountain town.1 By that point in the First Indochina War (1946–54), the US was funding 80% of the French war effort, sending in total as much aid as it had to France itself in the Marshall Plan.2 In April, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered French foreign minister Georges Bidault two atomic bombs to aid the beleaguered French garrison, an offer wisely refused.3 Long denied by Dulles and obfuscated by his apologists, the offer raised the specter of another American nuclear attack on Asia only nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The very real possibility of atomic bombardment both heightened the terror of aerial violence at Điện Biên Phủ and intensified political organizing there by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). While a rich literature analyzes decisionmaking by the French, American, and Vietnamese governments in the First Indochina War, comparatively little has been written about ground-level experiences and political maneuvers at its most consequential site.4 Drawing on newly available records from Vietnam’s National Archives, this paper returns to Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 to analyze how civilians experienced war in a crucible of decolonization and Cold War violence.5 As diverse peoples hunkered down or fled in fear, the DRV mobilized them to fight foreign forces, making them into political subjects along the way. In ways that foreshadowed America’s role in the Second Indochina War (1960–75), aerial bombardment generated unintended effects on the ground. Neither the French nor the Americans monopolized violence in emerging Vietnamese territory. On and off the battlefield, cadres pressed local civilians into supporting the People’s Army, a

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widespread form of labor service known in Vietnamese as dân công. Through processes marked by both coercion and consent, these same diverse peoples became citizens (công dân) of a new nation-state. If war makes states and states make war, as sociologist Charles Tilly memorably argued, then the First Indochina War also made terrified people into a nation.6 Then, in the wake of war, their persistent fears of mass death and their bold aspirations for self-rule crystalized into a social movement, pointing to political tensions built into postcolonial Vietnam.

A place, not just a battle One of the most important battles of the twentieth century, the battle of Điện Biên Phủ began on 20 November 1953 when French paratroopers landed in an isolated mountain valley, built a fortified airbase out of rice fields, and challenged their opponent to a set-piece battle. In turn, the DRV deployed its army over rugged terrain, surrounded the colonial force, and mobilized a massive logistics operation – all largely on foot. Geopolitically, the clash figured in Asia’s heating Cold War. Months after a July 1953 armistice had ended combat on the Korean peninsula, the prospect of France’s defeat in Indochina led the United States to contemplate “massive retaliation,” including the above-mentioned atomic bombs.7 After grinding artillery duels and siege warfare, the battle ended on 7 May 1954 in a stunning victory for the DRV.8 The outcome compelled negotiators in Geneva to conclude the First Indochina War, earning independence for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A liberatory symbol and fait accompli of armed decolonization, the battle catalyzed a global transformation from European empire to national self-determination. But Điện Biên Phủ’s significance as pivot and symbol can overshadow the many other things it was and remains. Just as scholars must note that Vietnam is a country, not just a war, so too is Điện Biên Phủ a place, not just a battle. Situated in a broad plain near the Black River, it was home to ethnically diverse peoples who had turned the plain into a rice basket, covered the mountains in food and cash crops, and plied trade routes to China, Laos, and Thailand.9 They called their home Mường Thanh, or heavenly muang, using a Tai language term (muang) for governed space to signify the place’s centrality, not isolation.10 The Vietnamese term “Điện Biên Phủ,” by contrast, means “border post prefecture,” positioning it on the inside edge of territory claimed by downstream Kinh/Việt peoples, now the country’s national ethnic majority. That one place has two names from different languages indicates divergent ideas about space and, moreover, competing claims on it. Therefore, although the battle has come to symbolize Vietnam’s national liberation, never was it certain that the place would become Vietnamese. Embattled by France and its international and local allies, Vietnam was violently in the making at Điện Biên Phủ. Since World War II, the Black River region had been the site of a fierce rivalry between revolutionary Vietnam and resurgent neocolonial France, both of which sought territorial control by recruiting local

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power brokers, especially Tai muang leaders. The French backed the Tai Federation, established in 1948 at Lai Châu, headed by Đèo Va˘ n Long, and the latest iteration of indirect rule that had begun in 1886. Meanwhile, the DRV appealed to Tai leaders alienated by the Đèo clan, Hmong cultivators chafing at the federation’s opium tax, and others seeking an alternative to old relations of muang domination.11 After years of guerilla warfare and brutal counterinsurgency, in autumn 1952 the People’s Army rolled the Tai Federation back into a corner of its prior domain, liberating Điện Biên Phủ along the way. But a year later the French Expeditionary Corps reoccupied the town. Then, in December, the People’s Army crushed federation hold-outs at Lai Châu, encircled the Corps at Điện Biên Phủ, and launched a massive logistics operation.12 What unfolded over late 1953 into mid-1954 was as much a battle between armies as a war of logistics in which France commanded the skies and Vietnam held the ground.13 The latter – centered at Điện Biên Phủ and extending across northern Vietnam – became the territorial rear of the People’s Army where diverse local residents faced increasingly heavy claims on their scarce household resources and multiple political identifications. The resulting contests over food, labor, and citizenship indicate tense processes of territorialization in a crucible of anti-colonial warfare. By territorialization, I mean making territory and the processes through which relations of rule are spatialized. I argue against territory either as given spatial container – common in military and diplomatic histories based on French sources – or an expanse always already there – as in nationalist histories of Vietnam.14 I engage geographic theories of territory as a calculative political technology encompassing strategic and political-economic values.15 Yet thinking about territory as a mode of rule sets up an intellectual problem in Vietnam’s revolutionary context, Điện Biên Phủ especially. In a war of liberation, how did the liberators legitimate spatial domination? At what point did an emancipatory movement actually coerce the people it sought to free? Why? To what effect? Linking logistics to territory, my approach reads Vietnamese archival records to analyze territorial processes taking place amidst politically organized violence. Whereas studies of war tend to valorize soldiers and statesmen, I study civilian non-combatants. Over 261,000 dân công or “people’s laborers” participated in the epic, eight-month-long military campaign.16 They outnumbered total combatants by a ratio of 5:1. Here, I focus on the 30,000 local and ethnically non-Kinh peoples around Điện Biên Phủ – mostly Tai, Khmu, Dao, and Hmong – who worked as a duty of Vietnamese citizenship on terms not always of their choosing. Because the battlefield was far from secure base areas, the People’s Army pursued a policy to “mobilize logistics in place,” relying on local peasants for rations and transport.17 The strategy linked the Vietnamese geobody to diverse peoples and gendered bodies in everyday ways.18 Not simply commandeering resources, cadres socialized the imaginary of national territory through supply work, encouraging consent backed by force. As a result, from late 1953, state resource claims increased with vocal concerns about their social costs, indicating how the home front had

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emerged as a contested site within the territorial rear. On sites along Road 13 linking Yên Bài to Sơn La, for example, thousands of local dân công and hundreds of supervising cadres expressed “anxiety” over back-to-back mobilizations, first to complete the road in October and then guarantee traffic flows beginning in December. Working far from home for weeks and months at a time under dangerous conditions led workers to “worry” about the rice harvest, cadres to clamor for “rest,” and “increasing tensions” among them all.19 As General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s policy of political-military struggle (đấu tranh) approached a turning point at Điện Biên Phủ, everyday struggles were surfacing in the Black River region over the rightful disposition of people and things, bodies and belongings. Just as dân công duty leveraged transport labor from the local population, the agricultural tax pried away a portion of their rice harvest for military rations. Along the way, both policies generated anxiety and worry and tension. When armed struggle ended triumphantly in May 1954, these myriad struggles over agrarian resources and subject relations continued – and questioned armed struggle’s outcome. Moreover, popular fear of nuclear bombardment rose in the wake of combat, continuing to terrorize civilians in a time of ostensible peace.

Điện Biên district at war The French assault in November 1953 split Điện Biên District and its resident population of 22,640 into two parts.20 French forces reoccupied five of its communes on the broad plain. Tai residents there were “confused and worried,” according to native son and Tai power broker Lò Va˘ n Hặc. Faced with heavy weapons and crack troops, “most of the upper strata,” he continued, “slid towards the enemy and no longer believed in us.”21 The DRV’s popular legitimacy was shaken, in other words, and local elites saved their skins. Common folk then had to decide whether to go or stay, a decision faced acutely by Tai women, children, and elderly. Those who fled for free zones in the hills wound up shuttling supplies to People’s Army soldiers. Having abandoned home and farm, they subsisted on forest tubers and lived in fear of starvation. Any who remained, however, saw their houses dismantled, rice snatched, gardens burned, and livestock shot and eaten by the French Expeditionary Corps. They experienced what historian Christopher Goscha calls the “bloodstained asymmetrical encounters” characteristic of the conflict, including rape and torture, intended to strike fear into any who supported DRV sovereignty.22 Forced into internment camps (bản tập trung (V); gros villages (Fr)), remaining Tai residents faced depredation and corvée labor as well as heightened vulnerability to untimely death, corporeal violence, and sexual assault.23 Only kilometers away, but a world apart from the combat below, five Tai communes in the foothills and five Hmong communes in the mountains remained subject to DRV state power and intensifying claims on its behalf. One year young, the institutions of Điện Biên District were evolving rapidly through militarized social mobilization of these and other residents. “Through the processes of serving the front,” stated an early 1954 report by Lai Châu Province, “the infrastructure of

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local government has been consolidated; armed militia and police forces have also been selected.”24 Mobilizing local civilians to serve the front strengthened state institutions by vetting and training personnel. Old and new officials then integrated food and labor collection into established programs called “improving the countryside,” such as boosting production, serving soldiers, and taxing grains. The broad appeal of development was backed by increasing government surveillance. Police work secured local sources of manpower and meat. “Watching over” (theo dõi) civilians prevented people, and their livestock, from fleeing Vietnam for Laos.25 The wartime atmosphere was terrifying. Hastily reflagged as French, Americansupplied aircraft dropped bombs and napalm, killing upstream residents and downstream laborers. The aerial violence lit entire villages afire. For much of 1954, DRV state shops ceased to operate, and already scarce supplies of salt, farm tools, and tobacco largely dried up.26 Water buffalo were butchered for meat or killed by bombs and mines, leaving farmers short of draft labor. People displaced from the plain wandered the hills, begging for food. Beset with “anxiety” and “worry,” people “all over” feared starvation, particularly if the People’s Army did not win its “certain victory.”27 On 25 April, seven weeks into the bitter siege, an explosion in French-occupied Noong Nhai village killed 444 Tai residents, mostly women and children.28 Whether the massive explosion and the terror it caused really proves that people at Điện Biên Phủ feared atomic weapons during the battle, as Vietnamese secondary sources claim, remains inconclusive in light of primary sources reviewed in more detail below.29 In any event, as for soldiers, so too for civilians: mass violence was a lived experience. DRV leaders responded to these deadly conditions – and the existential threat facing their political project – by intensifying institutional development and legitimation at the grassroots. The Military Central Party Committee of the Vietnam Workers Party (VWP) identified the commune as a foundational institution, stressing its role as mediator between districts, which set targets, and villages, which met them. To build support for its logistics agenda, the command ordered cadres to recruit local villagers into commune leadership. Meanwhile, the Politburo ordered recruitment to reflect a locality’s ethnic composition.30 Following these instructions on local participation and ethnic diversity, the Điện Biên District Party Leadership Council created Village Head and Stalwart Committees in each commune to coordinate logistics work.31 Chosen “stalwarts,” according to the council, were “good people” from poor families who counterbalanced suspect village leaders from rich families. To avoid the appearance of ethnic domination and because Kinh cadres knew little of local languages and customs, Tai and Hmong stalwarts served as interpreters in village meetings. Working in teams, they stressed local participation in military supply and national unity against a foreign enemy.32 Led by cadres and guided by these stalwarts, the meetings illustrate how logistics mobilization and state formation worked reciprocally and iteratively to secure territory. First, households yielded rice, corn, vegetables, and livestock as payment of the 1953 agricultural tax, sold them outright to procurement officers, or loaned grains against the projected 1954 tax.33 Laborers ferried supplies from depot to

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trench, built artillery roads, maintained bridges, and milled rice. Second, assessments provided quantitative, household-level data on production capacity and manpower availability, knowledge used to plan and conduct more taxation and labor recruitment. Third, cadres selected candidates for the bureaucracy. Of the district’s 49 stalwarts, 39 “vigilant” ones became commune officials and 10 were dismissed. Aiming to embed state in society, the militarist measures also collapsed calculative spaces of logistics and territory.34 In addition to gathering resources, gleaning data, and building institutions, the myriad meetings socialized the Vietnamese geobody. Cadres educated illiterate audiences by reading aloud Hồ Chí Minh’s “Letter to Compatriots and Cadres of Lai Châu.”35 Stressing loyalty to the DRV, the president called for unity and mutual assistance in the Vietnamese homeland (tổ quốc), invoking an idiom that mixed nation, ancestry, and geobody. “For over 80 years now,” he wrote of Điện Biên’s encompassing province, “the compatriots of Lai Châu have been exploited, oppressed, and tricked by French colonialists and reactionary Vietnamese traitors.”36 This is history in service to the present. Hồ’s letter flattened complex local history when, in fact, the Black River region’s place in France or Vietnam and what form it would take in either was still very unsettled. For example, in January 1953, Hồ himself had proposed “regional ethnic autonomy,” announcing a form of self-rule that would take years to realize there.37 Nonetheless, projecting Vietnam’s geobody back in time served the politico-military struggle. In order to liberate Lai Châu and relegate exploitation to the past, he implied, the rising postcolonial state required food, labor, and loyalty – now and in the future. Differentiating between the two armies’ provisioning strategies was itself an important ideological tactic. Cadres pointed to French combatants who “took pigs, chicken, water buffalo … but offered no money in return.” By contrast, “the Government did not allow the People’s Army to take anything from the people.” In one lesson, residents were encouraged to think of the army as akin to a water buffalo: “it protects the country, protects the house, so one must care for it so that it has energy.” But equating a complex, coercive institution with a tame animal avoided mention of politically organized violence. The metaphor also advanced the territorial agenda by linking civilian safety in the rear to the army’s frontal attack. “We in the rear who are able to eat well and sleep peacefully,” continued the lesson, “must thank the sibling soldiers out on the front.”38 If a farmer appreciates a draft animal, then so too must “we” – that is, a national we in the making – thank the army. Whether or not local people actually ate well or accepted these terms of citizenship are other questions, discussed below. The meetings allowed villagers to discuss state claims, offering scholars rare insight into contests over state legitimacy and the genesis of its coercive powers. In sessions called “airing grievances” (tố khổ), peasants criticized themselves or denounced others as class enemies in line with Maoist models of class struggle and land reform.39 Although the DRV withheld actual land redistribution from the Black River region, class-based rhetoric and denunciation nonetheless conditioned public discussion of the state’s agenda.40 Significantly, the sessions gave peasants a

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chance to vent feelings about household assessments, even challenge their suitability. Written up in reports and stored in the archives, their reactions indicate how cadres monitored public morale. Classifying reactions as either “good” or “bad” equipped officials with disciplinary capacities to reward or punish participants as they saw fit.41 On the good side, peasants spoke to desired legitimation effects by accepting claims and welcoming service. “Selling pigs and chickens and paying the agricultural tax,” stated a Hmong resident, “enables the army to eat and gain energy to fight the enemy and protect the order of our bản muang.” Referring to mountain villages and governing units in Tai terms, the Hmong respondent harbored no illusions about how the new government incorporated old relations of spatial domination. She added, “Caring for the military is like caring for a sibling who leans on me.” Associating army with family, she recognized the duties that both bonds imply. Other reactions demonstrate how Hồ Chí Minh’s charisma animated emancipatory ideas and emotive responses, encouraging recognition of DRV authority. “Before we were as though deaf and mute,” stated one poor peasant, “now, enabled by the Government, great-grandfather Hồ sends cadres back here to announce all kinds of differences, as though my deaf ears and blind eyes are clear again.” The president’s extraordinary qualities personified complex institutions and extended legitimacy to the ordinary cadres working in his name.42 A Hmong villager likened the military to a guest for whom residents played host: “This year while the bandits are in Điện Biên, we all celebrated Tết by going on dân công to deliver rice to the army to eat.” Appealing to the Lunar New Year ritualized logistics duty and recognized the army as a legitimate force necessary to secure Vietnam’s territorial claim. By contrast, invoking the ancient word “bandit” or “enemy” (giặc) to characterize French forces rejected a rival claim, dehumanized the enemy, and normalized their violent treatment.43 Exchanging sentiments between prospective leaders and followers opened a longer statemaking process. In concrete terms, cadres expected citizens to fulfill assessments levied on household resources through the provision of materials, such as food, and labor. Those who complied enthusiastically then became peasant champions. In elaborate ceremonies, dozens of such “outstanding individuals” received from the district a medal, 1 kilogram of salt, and a shovel.44 More than alleviating scarcity, the awards emphasized agriculture and trade for the shared benefit of state and society. The exchange underscored the reciprocal relationship between territorial security and rural livelihood that drove the People’s War and ultimately sealed Vietnam’s victory. Also an ideological performance, the ceremonies constructed an idea of “the state” that represented, cared for, and watched over national society. Not everyone consented, indicating how territory on and off the battlefield was always negotiated, often partial, and sometimes openly contested. Recorded “bad” reactions feature people of suspect class backgrounds who rejected DRV overtures and challenged egalitarian ideals. “Why all these meetings?” asked a Tai lord. “Just

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take the rice and meat already.” His sharp question recognized legitimation work as such and expressed impatience with its recital. To relinquish food and still earn a bad grade underlines the political significance of imbuing resource flows with meaning. In another instance, a Tai noble questioned prevailing DRV Ethnic Policy, opining that French military superiority had prompted Kinh people to move upstream in search of favorable conditions. He further declared: “The Kinh come up here and eat the rice of Tai people. So, no way am I doing any dân công work at all.” Not everyone in Điện Biên shared the policy’s prescribed unity between peoples conceived first as nationally Vietnamese and second as ethnically Tai, Hmong, Kinh, or otherwise. On the contrary, the same Tai noble asserted that Kinh people were taking advantage of him and other Tai people. Viewing soldiers and cadres not as fellow Vietnamese but as unwelcome visitors, he refused to play host. Finally, a number of critical responses astutely warned of mass mobilization’s escalating social costs. A rich peasant linked the visitors’ consumption to the effects on their host. “The army eats up all the rice and goes back downstream,” he reasoned, asking pointedly, “How can we save anything?” Indeed, state resource claims depleted local household stores. Likewise, a Hmong man observed, “This year requires going on dân công a lot such that many people fall ill.” On top of unhealthy and dangerous conditions, putting Hmong people to work reversed the colonial precedent exempting them from corvée labor.45 Classifying his response to recruitment as “bad” confirmed what the region’s commissar called its “not good political influence,” that is, it damaged DRV legitimacy.46 In short, procurement was exacting a human toll – and unraveling the idea of a caring state. When peasants aired grievances that questioned ideological and material claims, the stalwarts assumed another role: enforcing state power inside villages. Stalwarts “watched over” disgruntled elites to compel compliance with their assessed duties. At first, they staged unannounced home visits. Yet early monitoring inflamed classstatus relations and caused stalwarts “pain.” So the district appointed senior cadres to accompany the local stalwarts. Acting as mentors in the arts of surveillance, seasoned cadres taught the fresh recruits how to “observe discreetly.”47 Just as good reactions and fulfillment of assessed duties merited reward, so too bad reactions and failure to fulfill duties deserved punishment. If peasant champions demonstrated the former, then Hmong leader Vàng Sông exemplified the latter. Allied with French forces and operating from Laos, Vàng tried to organize resistance to labor service but was foiled by Hmong residents of Độc Lập Commune who reported the “traitorous commando” and invited district officials to “capture” him.48 Soon killed by artillery fire, he nonetheless struck a chord that grew louder after the battle.49 Through it all, the DRV enlisted peasants to police their neighbors, kin, and clan. Raised even in the face of pervasive violence and growing coercion, discontent signaled awareness of a contradiction between hungry people and a state empowered to protect them. Since the 1945 famine under Japanese occupation and

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throughout the war with France, the DRV had blamed food scarcity on foreign enemies, often with good reason, while advancing rural development to remediate conditions. Development had certainly bolstered regime legitimacy among the peasantry. Now, however, it was grain requisitions for the People’s Army that caused food insecurity in its rear area. By spring 1954, the effects of hunger and incipient starvation on regime legitimacy had shifted. After a year and more of DRV hegemony, it was harder to cast blame on foreign enemies. Valid warnings of bare cupboards and sick workers, then, foretold unexpected consequences riding in the wake of violence. In light of the high expectations for change generated by revolution, the deferral of progress undermined DRV legitimacy and amplified territorial tensions amidst a post-war millenarian movement. Never foreordained, the outcome of combat at Mường Thanh rested heavily on the shoulders of local civilians who experienced multiple forms of violence firsthand. The dramatic result at Điện Biên Phủ was a contingent product of embattled, interlocking processes that endured long beyond the end of fighting there: securing territory through force; mobilizing a differentiated peasantry; legitimating resource appropriation; acculturating diverse peoples to Kinh social norms, especially the Vietnamese language; and institutionalizing DRV rule in a semi-autonomous region. Constructing a national community isomorphic with territory enrolled civilians in everyday struggles and generated cumulative effects lasting long after combat, as hunger and persistent fear illustrate. Making territory through logistics work, then, did more than help win the battle that won the war: it also built cracks into a newly emerging Vietnam that would destabilize postcolonial rule for years to come.

Atom bombs and apocalyptic renewal Though the epic battle ended on 7 May 1954, its violent effects lasted long afterwards, rattling a region in transition. About 700 residents of Điện Biên Phủ died in French-occupied zones from aerial bombardment and the explosion at Noong Nhai. DRV officials counted 283 people wounded, 157 women raped, 1,255 houses destroyed, and 671 water buffalo killed, all at the hands of French Expeditionary Corps soldiers. As of 15 May, another 300 residents had died from dysentery stemming from unsanitary conditions around the former French base.50 Food was scarce because of the provisioning of both armies and a devastated agricultural landscape: much of the once-verdant plain of Mường Thanh was left mined, cratered, and trenched; loss of water buffalo reduced the supply of meat and draft power. No wonder that, “at the moment of liberation,” according to a DRV assessment, even the regime’s enthusiastic local supporters “worried a lot about how to earn a living [because] returning to old villages and getting food met many difficulties and shortages.”51 Such vocal concerns about life itself would grow still louder in the months and years to come. After the battle, moreover, violence and the terror it wrought around the battlefield assumed new forms that rippled through the Black River region and across

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Vietnam’s northern mountains. First, among the many defeated combatants captured at Điện Biên Phủ was Đèo Va˘ n Ún, son of the vanquished Tai Federation president Đèo Va˘ n Long. Considered a “Vietnamese traitor,” Ún was executed by firing squad at Co Mị Village on 10 June 1954.52 Through 1954, the triumphant regime captured 1,133 “enemies” across the region, the vast majority of whom were tried and sentenced to some combination of re-education and jail.53 Second, the work of detaining traitors and enemies overlapped with a program waged across the northern uplands to “eliminate bandits” (tiểu phỉ). Lasting until 1978 and disarming or killing, by one count, a total of 8,178 “bandits,” the program’s vaguely defined target shifted over time from French spies, partisans, and other local collaborators to Hmong people suspected of ethnic revolt.54 Rather than risk death or capture, many French allies and fearful residents fled across the border to Laos. Alongside the violence used to secure Vietnamese territory, state claims on local labor and grain continued to burden an already hungry and exhausted people, eroding popular legitimacy and amplifying concerns over life itself. From August 1954, the purpose of the agricultural tax and dân công service shifted from logistical support of the People’s Army to rebuilding a shattered economy and building a new nation’s infrastructure.55 Staking claims on scarce household resources contributed to widespread hunger and scattered starvation across northern Vietnam, peaking in spring 1955.56 Destitution also threatened the legitimacy of a regime that had long promised postcolonial development in exchange for sacrifice during the anti-colonial struggle. At Điện Biên Phủ, postwar poverty and worsening hunger inflamed fears lingering since liberation. “We must run for Laos in order to live,” a former Tai Federation official told his subjects in Điện Biên Phủ in May 1954, “because Americans are sure to drop a deadly bomb here.”57 Though he made no mention of an “atomic” bomb, the Tai man recognized the threat of mass death from US-supported aerial bombardment. Moreover, based on the growing fears that followed, his statement marks an early recognition at the grassroots over the possibility of nuclear holocaust at Điện Biên Phủ. As late as February 1956, agricultural specialists working in the district encountered a popular “fear of French [Tây] return, fear of atomic bombs, fear of high tax contributions.”58 In a Black River context of postwar devastation, material deprivation, and shaken state legitimacy, popular fears of atomic bombs arose with uncertainty over the region’s future. Amidst discussions over regional autonomy in early 1955, swidden cultivators began to call for a “just king” who would eliminate taxes and labor service, deliver bounty, turn the old young again, and vanquish the Tai and Kinh hegemony now entrenched in the DRV state. Resonant with political traditions associated with Hmong prophets but appealing to Khmu and Dao peoples too, the “calling for a king” (xưng đón vua) movement featured supernatural visions of apocalyptic renewal.59 Beginning peacefully with demonstrations, fasting, and work stoppages, the movement largely ended after a violent confrontation in April 1957 prompted a DRV crackdown.

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Fears of nuclear Armageddon converged conspicuously with popular prophecies of apocalypse and renewal. In February 1955, the police detained a local cadre in Lục Yên District, Yên Bài Province who was a war veteran working for the Lào Cai granary. While circulating from village to village collecting receipts of dân công labor, he had also shared “fabulous” visions. He foretold that the Dragon King (Long vương) would come to life and hold court at a field nestled in the mountains of Xuân Giang, east of the Red River. Revered in Vietnam and China as Dragon King of the Four Seas, the king would then call forth a deadly flood to drown enemies, leaving people alive but in desperate straits. Note that this king harks back to Sino-Viet traditions and, therefore, was not necessarily the same monarch invoked by Hmong, Khmu, and Dao people “calling for a king.” Nonetheless, both imagined a supernatural sovereign who would call forth destruction but deliver salvation. Meanwhile, other people in Lục Yên “buzzed” that the sound of distant explosions were from atomic bombs. “The new year began in hailstorm,” they prophesized of Hanoi, before yielding to “mid-year in peace, and year’s end with sky’s bend.” In short, the police concluded, they predicted nuclear explosion and mass death in late 1955.60 The frequency and specificity with which Black River residents spoke of nuclear holocaust grew during this tumultuous postwar period of still-contested sovereignty and emerging regional autonomy. All along the porous Lao-Viet border, according to a February 1955 report, the old regime’s officials and soldiers encouraged residents to pick up sticks and move to Laos where abundant land, cheap goods, and no taxes or labor service awaited. Better move now, they said, “because in 1955 the Americans will drop an atom bomb.”61 In archived reports, fear of an atom bomb always occurred alongside grievances about domestic resources and sometimes alongside ongoing violence from abroad. In January 1955, armed bands crossed into a village in Mường Pôn Commune near Điện Biên Phủ where they murdered the village head, torched houses, and forced villagers to return with them to Laos. Among the scared, intimidated, and confused residents of Mường Pôn who remained in Vietnam, more strange and disturbing rumors circulated in March, including stories that the US was helping France to salvage victory from defeat by dropping atomic bombs soon: “a plane flying like a silent peacock carries atomic weapons; it will drop only three bombs and destroy the entire Northwest.”62 Intriguingly, the mention of exactly three atomic bombs matches an item in Operation Vulture, an American military plan for massive retaliation discussed by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff with their French counterparts during the battle in March 1954.63 Allegedly spread by the regime’s same enemies a year later, such threats of American nuclear bombardment echoed across the montane borderlands through the DRV’s establishment of the Thái-Mèo [Tai-Hmong] Autonomous Zone in May 1955. Regional unrest complicates questions about who bore responsibility for the widespread stories of feared atomic bombardment. DRV reports consistently blame a rogues’ gallery of enemies, bandits, and smugglers based in Laos, including former Tai Federation officials and soldiers, French spies and provocateurs, as well as

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nationalist party remnants displaced from China (KMT) or Vietnam (QDĐ). They quote propaganda that tellingly refers to the “Việt Minh,” as in, “America helps France fight the Việt Minh,” evidence supporting this attribution.64 Used by French and American historical actors and still misused by contemporary analysts, the label collapses distinctions between a mass organization, the People’s Army, anti-colonial activists, and a new nation-state, working to obfuscate and even deny the DRV’s sovereign territorial claim. Counterinsurgency tactics were an acknowledged weapon in the Cold War arsenal of French and American militaries, lending support to the DRV claim that such propaganda aimed to destabilize its new regime through psychological warfare.65 But popular fears of nuclear attack and their official attribution to enemy psychological operations ultimately outlasted the “calling for a king” movement, as documented in local DRV reports from late 1958 and late 1959, even persisting into the Second Indochina War.66 Yet the long convergence of apocalyptic visions – one indigenous and another allegedly foreign – renders difficult if not inconclusive the task of identifying the original producers of political messages. Moreover, doing so explains neither those messages’ popular consumption nor their rapid and sustained circulation. Regardless of their origins, nuclear stories and their widespread acceptance in and around Điện Biên Phủ speak to the aerial violence already suffered there by civilians, and they also register the enduring aftershocks of war. Among a local population terrorized by aerial bombardment and worried about a rapid political transition, a willingness to believe in the possibility of imminent Armageddon indicates both dire conditions during, and an uncertain future after, the First Indochina War. More broadly, political messages found a receptive audience among the diverse peoples of the Black River region as they recovered from a decade of war, faced hunger and deprivation, endured anxiously the renewal of state resource claims, and fretted about their future as ethnicized citizens in a new Vietnamese nation. Rarely, if ever, recorded as a stand-alone horror, fears of nuclear holocaust appear in the historical record alongside fears of the agricultural tax, labor service, and the return of colonial rule. As much as enemy propaganda, then, fears of nuclear war in the crucible of Điện Biên Phủ gained purchase among a new citizenry as they levied valid critiques of DRV policies and voiced legitimate aspirations for postcolonial autonomy. Recorded in a regional vernacular, visions of apocalypse – both fabulously supernatural and realistic assessments of the nuclear age – indicate the lasting effects of mass violence as well as the tensions embedded in new Vietnamese territory.

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter are based on the Introduction and Chapter 5 in Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 2 Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 277, 285.

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3 Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 498–501. 4 Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Indochina War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 5 Documents from Hanoi’s National Archives of Vietnam Center 3, hereafter abbreviated NAVC 3. 6 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 7 John Prados, The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954 (New York: The Dial Press, 1983), 152, 199–200; Logevall, Embers of War, 508. 8 Of the voluminous literature on the battle itself, Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966) remains the classic account. 9 Philippe Le Failler, La rivière Noire: L’intégration d’une marche frontière au Vietnam (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014). 10 Cầm Trọng, Người Thái ở Tây Bắc Việt Nam (Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1978). 11 John McAlister, “Mountain Minorities and the Viet Minh: A Key to the Indochina War,” in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, Nations, ed. Peter Kunstadter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 771–884; Christian C. Lentz, “Cultivating Subjects: Opium and Rule in Postcolonial Vietnam,” Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 17 (2017): 879–918. 12 Raymond Muelle, Combats en pays Thaï de Lai Chau à Diên Biên Phu, 1953–1954 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1999). 13 Charles Shrader, A War of Logistics: Parachutes and Porters in Indochina, 1945–1954 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). 14 Cf., Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004); Jules Roy, La bataille de Dienbienphu (Paris: René Julliard, 1963); Đặng Nghiệm Vạn and Đinh Xuân Lâm, Điện Biên trong lịch sử (Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1979). 15 Stuart Elden. “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” Territory, Politics, Governance 1, no. 1 (2013): 5–20. 16 Hoi dong Cung cap Mat tran, “Bao cao Cong tac phuc vu chien dich Dien Bien Phu,” 10 July 1954, 1692/PTTg (1945–54)/NAVC 3. 17 Võ Nguyên Giáp, Đường tới Điện Biên Phủ (Hanoi: Quân đội nhân dân, 1999), 403. 18 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geobody of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994). 19 Lê Va˘ n Kim, “Báo cáo tình hình cán bộ và dân công (công tác chính trị tháng 12–53),” 15 Jan 1954, 647/BLĐ/NAVC 3. 20 Ty Cong an Lai Chau, “Bao cao Cong tac nam 1954 cua Ty CA LC,” 25 Dec 1954, 90/Sơn-Lai/NAVC 3. 21 Lò Va˘ n Hạc, “Bao-cao Tong ket Cong tac nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 542/PTTg (1945– 54)/NAVC 3. 22 Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 226–7. 23 Lò Va˘ n Hạc, “Bao-cao Tong ket Cong tac nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 542/PTTg (1945– 54)/NAVC 3; Duc Binh, “BAO CAO Thang 2 Nam 1954,” 28 Feb 1954, 2194/ KTTTB/NAVC 3. 24 Tinh Lai Chau, “Ke hoach Cong tac Huyen Dien Bien,” 1954, 10/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 25 Duc Binh, “BAO CAO Thang 2 Nam 1954,” 28 Feb 1954, 2194/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 26 Lò Va˘ n Hạc, “Bao-cao Tong ket Cong tac nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 542/PTTg (1945– 54)/NAVC 3. 27 Duc Binh, “BAO CAO Thang 2 Nam 1954,” 28 Feb 1954, 2194/KTTTB/NAVC 3; Tinh Lai Chau, “Ke hoach Cong tac Huyen Dien Bien,” 1954, 10/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 28 The explosion killed 444 people, “almost all of whom were women and children.” Cited from a memorial in Thanh Xương Commune, photographed by the author in January 2007. Cf., Công an tỉnh Lai Châu, Lịch sử Công an Nhân dân Huyện Điện Biên

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29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

(Hanoi: NXB Công an Nhân dân, 1994), 30–1; Ty Cong-An Lai-Chau, “BAO-CAO ‘Tinh hinh giai fong Dien-Bien fu’ Ngay 15–5-1954,” 5 May 1954, 2376/KTTTB/ NAVC 3. Công an Tỉnh Lai Châu, Lịch sử Công an, 30–1. “Lời hiệu triệu của Tổng quân ủy gửi toàn thế các đồng chí đảng viên trong chiến dịch XX,” in Một số Va˘ n kiện Chỉ đạo Chiến cuộc Đông xuân 1953–1954 và Chiến dịch Điện Biên Phủ, ed. Trần Trọng Trung (Hanoi: NXB Quân đội Nhân dân, 2004), 294–6. Trường Chinh, “Về mấy vấn đề cần chú ý trong việc phát động quần chúng giảm tô vùng dân tộc thiểu số ở lẫn với người Kinh,” 5 December 1953, in Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam, Va˘ n kiện Đảng toàn tập (Hanoi: NXB Chính trị Quốc gia, 2001), 532. For more on recruitment, known as “striking the root to string the beads” (bắt rễ xâu chuỗi), cf., Ken MacLean, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 45. Hoàng Trang, “BAO CAO Tông kêt huy dông nhân vât luc fuc vu chiên truong,” 29 Mar 1954, 2194/KTTTB/NAVC 3. Greg Lockhart, Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 249–50, 259. Hoàng Trang, “BAO CAO Tông kêt huy dông nhân vât luc …” 29 Mar 1954, 2194/ KTTTB/NAVC 3. Duc Binh, “BAO CAO Thang 2 Nam 1954,” 28 Feb 1954, 2194/KTTTB/NAVC 3; Tinh Lai Chau, “Ke hoach Cong tac Huyen Dien Bien,” 1954, 10/KTTTB/NAVC 3. Hồ Chí Minh, “Thư gửi đồng bào và cán bộ Lai Châu,” 12 Dec 1953, Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập (Hanoi: NXB Chính trị Quốc gia, 1996), 190. “Báo cáo trước hội nghị lần thứ tư an chấp hành Trung ương Đảng,” 1953, in Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, Vol. 7 (Hanoi: NXB Chính trị quốc gia, 1995), 18. Duc Binh, “BAO CAO Thang 2 Nam 1954,” 28 Feb 1954, 2194/KTTTB/NAVC 3. MacLean, The Government of Mistrust, 43. On similar practices of public criticism during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, see Kosal Path and Angeliki Kavenou, “Converts, not Ideologues? The Khmer Rouge Practice of Thought Reform in Cambodia, 1975–1978,” Journal of Political Ideologies 20, no. 3 (2015): 304–32. For more on the causes and effects of withholding land reform from the region, see Lentz, Contested Territory, 98–106; Trần Phương, ed., Cách mạng ruộng đất ở Việt-Nam (Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1968), 218. Unless otherwise noted, responses quoted below are from Hoàng Trang, “BAO CAO Tông kêt huy dông nhân vât luc fuc vu chiên truong,” 29 Mar 1954, 2194/KTTTB/ NAVC 3. For more on the first president of Vietnam and his mass appeal, see William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh (New York: Hyperiod, 2000). Goscha, Vietnam, 229. Hoàng Trang, “BAO CAO Tông kêt huy dông nhân vât luc …” 29 Mar 1954, 2194/ KTTTB/NAVC 3. Lò Va˘ n Mười, “Bao-Cao tháng 4, 5, 6 na˘ m 1949 của Liên tỉnh Sơn La Lai Châu,” 18 July 1949, 187/PTTg (1945–54), NAVC 3; Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 62–3. Nguyễn Kháng, “Báo cáo kiểm điểm công tác 6 tháng đầu na˘ m 1954,” 24 June 1954, 519/PTTg (1945–54), NAVC 3. Hoàng Trang, “BAO CAO Tông kêt huy dông nhân vât luc …” 29 Mar 1954, 2194/ KTTTB/NAVC 3. Ibid. Mai Na Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 288–94. Lò Va˘ n Hạc, “Bao-cao Tong ket Cong tac nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 542/PTTg (1945– 54)/NAVC 3; Ty Công an Lai Châu, “Tinh hinh giai fong Dien-Bien fu Ngay 15–51954,” 1954, 2376/KTTTB/NAVC 3.

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51 Ty Công an Lai Châu, “Tinh hinh giai fong Dien-Bien fu,” 1954, 2376/KTTTB/ NAVC 3. 52 Ibid; Công an tỉnh Lai Châu, Lịch sử Công an, 35. 53 Quàng Va˘ n Đại, “Báo cáo cong tac noi chinh nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 1401/PTTg/ NAVC 3, 54 Tâm Ngô, The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 28–9. 55 Ken MacLean, “Manifest Socialism: The Labor of Representation in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1956–1959),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2, no. 1 (2007): 27–79. 56 “Bao cao van de luong thuc,” 1955, 2632/PTTg (1945–54)/NAVC 3. 57 Lò Va˘ n Hạc, “Bao-cao Tong ket Cong tac nam 1954,” 5 Mar 1955, 542/PTTg (1945– 54)/NAVC 3. 58 Sở Nông Lâm, “Bao-cao Công tac khai hoang,” 28 Feb 1956, 3178/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 59 Mai Na Lee, Dreams of a Hmong Kingdom; James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 60 Khu Cong an Tay Bac, “Bao-cao: Ve nhung tin tuc hoang duong va de cao My tung ra o Luc-Yen,” 2350/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 61 Nguyen Khang, “Bao cao thang 1/1955,” 1 Feb 1955, 06/PTTg/NAVC 3. 62 Giám đốc sở Công an KTT, “Báo cáo tình hình 6 tháng đầu na˘ m 1955,” 1 July 1955, 3178/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 63 John Prados, The Sky Would Fall, 75–7, 154–6; Rebecca Grant, “Dien Bien Phu,” Air Force Magazine (August 2004), 78–84. 64 Giám đốc sở Công an KTT, “Báo cáo tình hình 6 tháng đầu na˘ m 1955,” 1 July 1955, 3178/KTTTB/NAVC 3. 65 Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (New York: Praeger, 1964). 66 Quàng Va˘ n Đức, “Báo cáo tình hình chung tháng 10–1958,” 10 Nov 1958, 134/ KTTTB/NAVC 3; UBHC Châu Điện Biên, “Báo cáo công tác tháng 10 na˘ m 1959,” 1 Nov 1959, 186/KTTTB/NAVC 3.

Bibliography Archival Sources Hanoi’s National Archives of Vietnam Center 3 (NAVC 3) Bộ Lao động [BLĐ], Ministry of Labor Phủ Thủ tướng [PTTg], Prime Minister’s Secretariat Phủ Thủ tướng (1945–54), [PTTg (1945–1954)], Prime Minister’s Secretariat, 1945–1954 Ủy ban Hành chính liên tỉnh Sơn La-Lai Châu [Sơn-Lai], Sơn La-Lai Châu Interprovince Administrative Committee Ủy ban Hành chính Khu tự trị Tây Bắc [KTTTB], Northwest Autonomous Zone Administrative and Resistance Committee

Published Sources Brocheux, Pierre, and Daniel Hémery. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954. Translated by Ly Lan Dill-Klein with Eric Jennings, Nora Taylor, and Noémi Tousignant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Cầm Trọng. Người Thái ở Tây Bắc Việt Nam. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1978. Công an tỉnh Lai Châu. Lịch sử Công an Nhân dân Huyện Điện Biên. Hanoi: NXB Công an Nhân dân, 1994.

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Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam. Va˘ n kiện Đảng toàn tập. Multiple vols. Hanoi: NXB Chính trị Quốc gia, 2001. Đặng Nghiệm Vạn and Đinh Xuân Lâm, Điện Biên trong lịch sử. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1979. Duiker, William. Ho Chi Minh. New York: Hyperiod, 2000. Elden, Stuart. “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” Territory, Politics, Governance 1, no. 1 (2013): 5–20. Fall, Bernard. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Phildelphia: Lippincott, 1966. Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Grant, Rebecca. “Dien Bien Phu.” Air Force Magazine (August2004): 78–84. Hồ Chí Minh. Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập. Multiple vols. Hanoi: NXB Chính trị Quốc gia, 1996. Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Lawrence, Mark Atwood, and Fredrik Logevall, eds. The First Indochina War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Le Failler, Philippe. La rivière Noire: L’intégration d’une marche frontière au Vietnam. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014. Lee, Mai Na. Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Lentz, Christian. Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Lentz, Christian. “Cultivating Subjects: Opium and Rule in Postcolonial Vietnam.” Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 17 (2017): 879–918. Lockhart, Greg. Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Logevall, Fredrik. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2012. MacLean, Ken. The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. MacLean, Ken. “Manifest Socialism: The Labor of Representation in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1956–1959).” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2, no. 1 (2007): 27–79. McAlister, John. “Mountain Minorities and the Viet Minh: A Key to the Indochina War.” In Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, Nations, edited by Peter Kustandter, 771–884. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Muelle, Raymond. Combats en pays Thaï de Lai Chau à Diên Biên Phu, 1953–1954. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1999. Ngô, Tâm. The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Path, Kosal, and Angeliki Kavenou. “Converts, not Ideologues? The Khmer Rouge Practice of Thought Reform in Cambodia, 1975–1978.” Journal of Political Ideologies 20, no. 3 (2015): 304–332. Prados, John. The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954. New York: Dial Press, 1983. Roy, Jules. La bataille de Dienbienphu. Paris: René Julliard, 1963. Scott, James. The Art of Not Being Governed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Shrader, Charles. A War of Logistics: Parachutes and Porters in Indochina, 1945–1954. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geobody of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994.

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Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. Trần Phương, ed. Cách mạng ruộng đất ở Việt-Nam. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội, 1968. Trần Trọng Trung, ed. Một số Va˘ n kiện Chỉ đạo Chiến cuộc Đông xuân 1953–1954 và Chiến dịch Điện Biên Phủ. Hanoi: NXB Quân đội Nhân dân, 2004. Trinquier, Roger. Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Translated by Daniel Lee. New York: Praeger, 1964. Võ Nguyên Giáp. Đường tới Điện Biên Phủ. Hanoi: Quân đội nhân dân, 1999. Windrow, Martin. The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004.

7 THE KHMER REPUBLIC’S MASS PERSECUTION OF THE VIETNAMESE MINORITY IN CAMBODIA 1970–75 Kosal Path

After the successful coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18, 1970, the new Khmer Republic wasted no time in persecuting nearly half a million ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia. On April 23, 1970, President Nguyen Van Thieu lodged an official complaint with US President Richard Nixon, asking for Washington’s intervention to put an end to the widespread racial hatred toward the Vietnamese and the brutal massacre of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia by the security forces of the Khmer Republic government. Why did the newly formed Khmer Republic government under Marshal Lon Nol systematically persecute Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese residents to the point of degrading its important wartime alliance with the Republic of Vietnam during the early 1970s? Documentary evidence of high-level exchanges between the foreign ministries of the Khmer Republic, also known as the Lon Nol regime, and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), combined with selected internal reports from the Vietnamese Embassy in Phnom Penh to the Thieu government, reveal a much deeper rift between the two smaller allies of the United States during an extended and critical period of the Vietnam War, 1970–73. Marshal Lon Nol and his nationalist allies advanced their “neo-Khmer” nationalism, fundamentally defined in terms of a Vietnamese threat to the Khmer nation and national sovereignty, despite the damage such a representation would inflict on its relationship with another US ally, the RVN – that is, the Lon Nol regime’s sole reliance on economic and military aid from South Vietnam and the United States. Vietnameseness was categorically framed by the Khmer Republic political elites, the media, and intelligentsia as an existential threat to Khmer national identity. The regime’s life-and-death war against the formidable alliance between the Viet Cong (the People’s Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam) troops and Khmer Rouge forces, coupled with the undesirable presence of huge numbers of Saigon troops inside Cambodia in 1970, were the enabling conditions for the Lon Nol regime’s lethal deployment of

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racist nationalism against the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia. Furthermore, the Khmer Republic’s indiscriminate mistreatment of the ethnic Vietnamese minority in the early 1970s was even extended to the Khmer Krom, or Lowland Khmers,1 some of whom served in the Khmer Republic’s army. The Lon Nol regime’s violence against the ethnic Vietnamese community was a precursor to the Khmer Rouge’s adoption of its version of a “final solution” to the Vietnamese problem, a brutal policy recognized as genocide by the 2018 judgment of the UN-sponsored tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.2 In the name of national security, the label of “communism” was weaponized and directed against the ethnic Vietnamese minority in Cambodia as the Khmer Republic intensified its war against the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge communist forces inside Cambodia. The result was the exodus of Vietnamese residents along with Khmer Krom to South Vietnam, straining the newly forged alliance between Phnom Penh and Saigon. The mass exodus of the ethnic Vietnamese minority to South Vietnam not only demonstrated a failure of the RVN government in Saigon to protect Vietnamese residents in Cambodia, but also played into the hands of the Viet Cong and its communist patron, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, in Hanoi. The Viet Cong used the exodus to spread propaganda to expand their ranks in South Vietnam. In response, Saigon took punitive actions against Phnom Penh by cutting emergency economic and military assistance to the Khmer Republic, but the latter did not budge. The Khmer Republic’s perception of a racial and territorial threat to the Khmer nation posed by the Vietnamese collectivity was a more powerful force than any material gains from its alliance with the RVN. Lon Nol and his “neo-Khmer” nationalists in Phnom Penh were willing to escalate racial hatred toward the Vietnamese to the point of derailing their already fragile alliance with the Saigon government. From 1970 to 1973, the Khmer Republic’s relations with the Republic of Vietnam turned from an uneasy alliance into outright conflict over the issues of ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia and territorial claims. In short, the regime’s anti-Vietnamese nationalism trumped political realism.

Vietnamese threat to the Khmer nation Just days before their successful coup against Sihanouk, Khmer nationalists were eager to exploit anti-Vietnamese sentiment in Cambodian society to legitimize their rise to power. Once in power, Marshal Lon Nol advocated inclusion of a clause in the Khmer Republic constitution that would have allowed only racially pure Khmers to be considered Cambodian citizens.3 His regime’s “holy war” against the Vietnamese communists turned into a campaign against all ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia.4 Popular perception of the Vietnamese threat to the Khmer nation was stoked and perpetuated by the Khmer media, literati, and anti-Vietnamese slogans in public places. The Lon Nol regime’s articulation of “the great Khmer race” narrative generally manifested itself in anti-Vietnamese, anti-Chinese, and anti-French statesponsored propaganda, media, academia, and popular culture.5 While the past glory

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of the Angkor era was recited and used by Lon Nol and Khmer nationalists to articulate the “great Khmer race” narrative, the readily available racial hatred of the Khmer people toward the Vietnamese provided powerful emotional support for their regime. Such anti-Vietnamese nationalism was amplified by Lon Nol’s perception of inferiority in its asymmetrical relationship with South Vietnam and the United States and the century-old deep inferiority feelings of the Khmer toward their Vietnamese neighbors.6 This is one of many lingering destructive forces of French colonialism in Indochina. Yet again the United States could do little to address its concern about South Vietnam’s encroachment on Cambodia’s territorial sovereignty and its troops’ harassment and arrest of Cambodian villagers during military raids to destroy communist forces inside Cambodia. Phnom Penh strongly resented the fact that the RVN was a more important ally to the United States, and that, contrary to Cambodia’s demand, the majority of American aid to the Khmer Republic came through South Vietnam. In reality, the Nixon administration faced strong opposition from Congress for any request for increased economic and military assistance to Cambodia, and wanted the Saigon government to help pay for the cost of defending the Lon Nol regime. And it was also true that South Vietnam was strategically more important to the Nixon administration’s policy of ending the war in Vietnam. In this atmosphere of identity crisis, a proportionally large ethnic Vietnamese population, estimated to be over 450,000 people out of Cambodia’s population of over seven million in early 1970, became a convenient scapegoat for the regime to stoke Khmer nationalism. The Khmer nation’s growing fear of and ongoing war with Vietnamese communists and invaders in the late 1960s and early 1970s provided a perfect cover for the regime to commit ethnic cleansing of the Vietnamese minority. Seen as exploiters of the Khmer people and as communist sympathizers, the Vietnamese were easy targets for scapegoating and demonizing. According to Prince Sihanouk, who was ousted from power by the coup engineered by General Lon Nol and Prince Sirik Matak, Lon Nol’s ethnic cleansing of the Vietnamese minority began with a demonstration that the Lon Nol faction had mobilized to attack Vietnamese residents in Svay Rieng town (near the border with Vietnam) on March 8, 1970. Lon Nol’s hatred toward the Vietnamese found refuge in a prophecy told by a 20-year-old fortune-teller named Prom Moni that “peace and prosperity can come to Khmer people only when all Vietnamese from both North and South Vietnam were driven out of Cambodian land.”7 In April 1970, the Lon Nol regime began to persecute ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese across the country. On April 9–10, roughly 1,000 ethnic Vietnamese in Svay Rieng and Pursat provinces were reportedly massacred by the Lon Nol army; the Viet Cong extensively broadcast this massacre to South Vietnam to stoke popular anger toward the Saigon government for failing to protect their brethren in Cambodia.8 Two weeks later, in one night Lon Nol soldiers massacred some 800 Catholic Vietnamese laborers in Chrui Changwar (a town on the outskirts of the capital city of Phnom Penh) and dumped their bodies into the Bassac River to

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send a warning to all Vietnamese living in Cambodia.9 What followed was the regime’s systematic persecution of the ethnic Vietnamese community throughout the country, including banning Cambodians from buying properties of departing Vietnamese people. Domestically, the anti-Vietnamese campaign fostered internal unity among Khmer factions and allowed the regime to gain some popular legitimacy. However, the brutal violence enraged its ally, the Republic of Vietnam. The Saigon government lodged frequent protests with the Lon Nol government and even appealed to President Nixon to intervene to stop “racial hatred against all the Vietnamese in general in its efforts to oppose the communist North Vietnamese threat.”10 All ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia were perceived as sympathetic to the communists, thus posing a “threat” to Cambodia’s national security. As early as April 1970, Vietnamese residents were rounded up and sent to concentration/detention camps in towns across the country. Each time the army of the Khmer Republic clashed with Viet Cong, Khmer army officers arrested a number of Vietnamese people from these camps by accusing them of colluding with the communist Vietnamese.11 About 200 officials of Vietnamese descent who served during Sihanouk’s regime were dismissed from government positions. Over 100,000 ethnic Vietnamese in various fishing villages along Tonle Sap Lake were prohibited by the Lon Nol government from fishing; some became laborers for Khmer owners while many others left for Vietnam.12 On May 27, 1970, under pressure from Washington, the Lon Nol regime signed an agreement with the Saigon government in which it pledged to put an end to “forced repatriation” and “forced transfer to concentration camps” of Vietnamese people in Cambodia.13 By the end of 1971, the Saigon government, however, concluded that the Lon Nol regime “harbored deep anti-Vietnamese hatred and intended to repatriate the entire Vietnamese population in Cambodia back to South Vietnam.”14 The Lon Nol regime sought to justify its continued anti-Vietnamese policy by arguing that they sent Vietnamese to detention centers and concentration camps across the country, thereby separating Vietnamese residents from the Cambodian populace, out of security concerns rather than racial hatred. In early 1972, the Lon Nol regime shared intelligence with the Saigon government and revealed that “a large number of Vietnamese people in Cambodia sympathized with the communists.”15 Already in tremendous hardship in the middle of a war, Saigon found itself under additional pressure to shoulder the burden of dealing with the exodus of Vietnamese residents from Cambodia. By February 29, 1972, according to the RVN government’s records, a total of 125,669 Vietnamese citizens, who had been forced to flee from Cambodia to South Vietnam, were settled in South Vietnam. And 70,039 temporarily sheltered in 84 refugee camps across South Vietnam were waiting for resettlement permits from the Saigon government.16 Thus, a total of 195,708 Vietnamese residents left Cambodia for South Vietnam from April 1970 to February 1972, causing a huge burden on the Saigon government. The RVN government allocated a total of US $683,314,372 for resettlement plans in 36 provinces.17 According to historian Ben Kiernan, 310,000 Vietnamese were believed to have fled Cambodia already by April of 1975, leaving at least 160,000 behind.18

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Representation of the Vietnamese threat in mass media To legitimize its rule, the Lon Nol regime relied on mass media to prime and frame the Vietnamese as the greatest threat to the newly established republic in 1970–71; the pro-government media prepared and directed the Cambodian public away from the regime’s widespread corruption, economic crisis, and military defeat to the singular issue of the Vietnamese threat by which Cambodian people should judge their leaders like Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. Anti-Vietnamese nationalism became widespread in the Khmer press, directed at all Vietnamese as a racial collective. In less than two years after coming to power through the March 18, 1970 coup against Sihanouk’s regime, Lon Nol and his Khmer Republic government succeeded in rallying the Khmer majority to support its ethnic cleansing of Cambodia’s Vietnamese minority. At major street intersections and crowded places in Phnom Penh and other cities, the slogan of “The Vietnamese have annexed Khmer land” was put on full display.19 Throughout 1971, local Khmer newspapers were loaded with anti-Vietnamese news cycles. On March 17, 1971, RVN Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc lodged a protest with the Khmer Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the attacks on the Republic of Vietnam by the Khmer press. On March 23, the Khmer Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially informed the Vietnamese embassy that it had intervened to stop such attacks, but also asked in return the Vietnamese government to prohibit Vietnamese newspapers from attacking the Khmer Republic.20 Anti-Vietnamese invective escalated over the ensuing months. For instance, Nokor Thom newspaper stated on June 16, 1971: “South Vietnam like North Vietnam is the hereditary enemy of Cambodia.” The Khmer Ekareach [Khmer Independence] newspaper proclaimed on June 25: “The Republic of Vietnam together with North Vietnam want to swallow Khmer land.” The newspapers Koh Santepheap [Island of Peace], Khmer Ekareach, Mohachon [The Masses], Nokor Thom [The Great Kingdom] and Cheat Yoeung [Our Nation] all wrote on June 27: “Foreign Minister Long Boret said in a press conference that the Khmer government launched a protest against the South Vietnamese government’s encroachment on some 50,000 square meters of Cambodia’s maritime territory.” Other Khmer newspapers blamed the South Vietnamese for “bringing the war from Vietnam into Cambodia, destroying Cambodia’s economy, looking down on Khmer people, and mistreating Khmer villagers.”21 Accounts of the Thieu soldiers being even “more cruel” than the Viet Cong depicted the brutality of the supposed allied troops from South Vietnam.22 Khmer soldiers who were trained in South Vietnam were considered to have been “brainwashed” by the Vietnamese.23 Khmer media propagated the existential threat narrative that “all Vietnamese in both North Vietnam and South Vietnam always want to eliminate the Khmer nation.”24 Lon Nol’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns against ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia were not met with any forceful response from the Thieu government until late 1971, when ethnic Vietnamese residents faced extermination in concentration camps in Cambodia.25

FIGURE 7.1

The Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia situation (May 1971) of the liberation of Cambodia by the People’s Armed Forces for National Liberation of Kampuchea.

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On December 9, 1971, one of the main issues in an inter-ministerial meeting, convened by the office of the President of the Republic of Vietnam, was the Khmer Republic government’s policy of forced transfer of ethnic Vietnamese into concentration/detention camps in Battambang province. RVN Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc was instructed to continue to demand that the Khmer Republic government comply with the May 27, 1970 bilateral agreement which obligated Phnom Penh to avoid forced repatriation and concentration of ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia.26 Reportedly 4,000 Vietnamese people at this time were forced into three make-shift concentration camps under terrible conditions in Battambang province.27 The inter-ministerial committee discussed five important issues: (1) the Khmer Republic’s policy toward Vietnamese residents, especially the mass persecution of Vietnamese people in Battambang province; (2) Phnom Penh’s view of South Vietnamese troops in Cambodia in 1972 (Prime Minister Sirik Matak had told the foreign press that his government requested the Saigon government to move its troops out of Cambodian territory in 1972); (3) anti-Vietnamese newspapers in Cambodia; (4) the territorial dispute; and (5) the issue of beefing up security for the Vietnamese embassy and staff in Phnom Penh.28 The special inter-ministerial committee made the recommendation that their government impose economic sanctions against the Khmer Republic for the latter’s non-compliance with the May 1970 agreement. In the end, the Saigon government pursued a combination of the threat of sanctions and diplomatic pressure. First, the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh was to immediately establish a consulate in Battambang province to protect the rights and interests of Vietnamese residents there. If Phnom Penh were to demand to establish a Cambodian consulate in Vinh-Binh, in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam, then the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs would deny that request on the basis of the reality that “no Cambodian residents, but only Vietnamese of Khmer origin, live there. Therefore, the Cambodian government had no jurisdiction over these people.”29 Second, from 1972 onward, all Vietnamese assistance to the Khmer Republic was conditioned on its satisfactory treatment of Vietnamese people in Cambodia.30 Third, the Vietnamese Embassy in Phnom Penh and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Saigon were to ask the American Embassy in Phnom Penh and Saigon to help explain to the Khmer Republic government that it must cooperate with the Vietnamese government regarding the issue of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia because of the common interests of the two neighboring countries. Yet, the Lon Nol regime refused to give in to the RVN government’s demand. By January 1972, the RVN Foreign Minister Tran Van Lam told his prime minister that “Now the entire Khmer populace have viewed all Vietnamese people as an existential threat to them.”31 On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Agreement was signed by the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to end the war in Vietnam, but the war in Cambodia raged on because Washington refused to have a direct negotiation with Sihanouk, who like the Khmer Rouge also rejected any negotiations with Lon Nol’s regime.32 Lon Nol’s patron, President Nixon, was

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embroiled in the Watergate scandal in the United States and resigned on August 8, 1974. From 1973 onward, congressional support for an activist foreign policy was over, and the US military budget became controversial.33 In addition to the deteriorating economic and political crisis, the Lon Nol regime lost significant military aid from the United States. Yet, its anti-Vietnamese stance remained strong in 1973–74. On April 18, 1973, in the midst of this chaos, the Minister of Information, Keam Reth, publicly declared that all Khmer newspapers must clearly call the enemies of the Khmer Republic by their true name, “Communist Vietnamese” instead of merely “communist forces.”34 Because of the ongoing persecution of ethnic Vietnamese residents, the Saigon government perceived that: The true aim of using this language [Vietnamese communists] was to threaten all Vietnamese residents still living in Cambodia, and the perpetuation of this language [communist Vietnam] would create an anti-Vietnam movement [in Cambodian society]. Ultimately, the victims would be innocent Vietnamese residents, not communist armed forces.35 On October 29, the Khmer Republic Minister of Foreign Affairs delivered a speech at the 28th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated, “Steeped as they are in Buddhist teachings, the Khmer people reject all forms of racial discrimination between human beings, whatever the color of their skin, their ethnic group or their religion.”36 Phnom Penh’s total denial that the Khmer Republic security forces unleashed racial attacks on the Vietnamese minority must have rubbed salt in the Vietnamese wound. In the Khmer Republic government Directive No. 982–73/PRK issued on December 29, 1973, all civil servants, as well as citizens from 18 to 35 years of age, were required to join the army. This policy gave an opportunity to the Lon Nol armed forces to conscript Vietnamese and Chinese residents into the army. Those who wanted instead to go overseas had to pay bribes – one million riels, rumor had it.37 Caught in the midst of anti-Vietnamese nationalism were the Khmer Krom people. According to an internal report from the Vietnamese ambassador to the Khmer Republic to the top leadership of the Saigon government dated January 14, 1972, a large number of Khmer Krom soldiers left the Khmer Republic army and fled to South Vietnam due to widespread prejudice against them.38 Lieutenant Colonel Chau Ouch, who fled to Vietnam in 1971, told the Vietnamese authorities that “the Khmer government always wants to send Khmer people who were born in Vietnam to the frontline to be killed off by the Viet Cong. In 1971, his 48th Khmer Krom Brigade [comprised] 700 soldiers and now [in 1972], only 300 soldiers are still alive.”39 By January 1975, just several months before the Lon Nol regime’s collapse, as economic hardship intensified, local Khmer newspapers spread hatred toward the entire community of foreigners, especially Chinese and Vietnamese residents. They blamed these foreigners for exploiting Khmer people to enrich themselves and for

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enjoying their city life while Khmer people shed their blood in defence of the motherland. These nationalist newspapers demanded that the government send these Chinese and Vietnamese people to the front line.40 On March 1, 1975, a little more than one month before the collapse of the two republics, the Vietnamese ambassador continued to appeal to the Lon Nol government to stop persecuting the remaining Vietnamese residents in Cambodia.41 Its discord with the Khmer Republic partly defeated the Saigon government’s ability to wipe out the Viet Cong along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border and therefore the Viet Cong were able to launch attacks into South Vietnam at will.

Conclusion The massive social engineering under the Lon Nol regime, which involved elites, intellectuals, media, and other sectors of Cambodian society, catalyzed and perpetuated the Vietnam-threat narrative in their efforts to build a pure Khmer nation. By depicting the Vietnamese collectivity as an existential threat to the Khmer nation and homeland, Lon Nol justified his regime’s open policy of murder and persecution of Cambodia’s half a million ethnic Vietnamese residents, as well as his defense of territorial sovereignty even to the detriment of its alliance with the Saigon government. Lon Nol’s racial war against the Vietnamese thus defied the logic of realpolitik of prioritizing a strategic alliance between the Khmer Republic and the Republic of Vietnam. The Khmer Republic harbored racist and irredentist anti-Vietnamese nationalism, which in turn exerted an overriding influence over ideological affinity, material aid, and even pressure by a great power ally, the United States. Anti-Vietnamese nationalism had reared its ugly head at times throughout Cambodia’s modern history. But leaders like Lon Nol and later Pol Pot chose to weaponize the racism to justify their warrior state, i.e., the vanguard of the Khmer nation against the Vietnamese threat. The idea that the Vietnamese nation was a relentless expansionist state and therefore an existential threat to the Khmer nation was a deeply held view that was shared by both Lon Nol and Pol Pot despite their different ideologies.

Notes 1 In 1975, members of the ethnic Khmer minority in Vietnam were estimated at one million (see Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1. 2 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Case 002/02 Judgment, www.eccc. gov.kh/en/document/court/case-00202-judgement, entry date: Sept. 20, 2019. 3 Jennifer S. May Berman, “No Place like Home: Anti-Vietnamese Discrimination and Nationality in Cambodia,” California Law Review 84, no. 3 (1996): 830. 4 Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 1998), 139. 5 Stephen Heder, “Cambodia,” in Language and National Identity, ed. Andrew Simpson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 301; Becker, When the War Was Over, 1998, 120–1.

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6 Becker, When the War Was Over, 121. Becker succinctly observed: “The centuries of defeat and humiliation since Angkor, the effect of the French patronizing of ‘lazy’ Cambodians while promoting those ‘industrious’ Vietnamese, and the vivid fear of those ‘industrious’ Vietnamese taking over Cambodia had their mark.” 7 Dai su Tran Van Phuoc kinh gui Tong Thong ve Tuong Lai Chinh Tri Kampuchea, ngay 20 thang 2 nam 1974 [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc sent the President a report on the Political Future of Cambodia, on February 20, 1974]. National Archives No. 2 (NA No. 2), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, PTTg (the Prime Minister’s Office Folder), file no. 20872, 79–89. 8 PRC’s statement on Lon Nol-Sirik Matak’s “crimes.” Liberation Radio in Vietnamese to South Vietnam 2300 GMT, April 13, 1970. Available online at https://vva.vietnam. ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/121085. 9 Becker, When the War Was Over, 1986, 125. 10 President Nguyen Van Thieu to President Nixon, April 23, 1970. DTTCH (President’s Office Folder), file no. 1195, 2. 11 Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on April 9, 1970, DTTCH 1727, 6. 12 Ibid. 13 Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam kinh gui Thu Tuong Chinh Phu ve Phien hop lien Bo Dac Biet ngay 9.12.1971 tai Bo Ngoai giao de thao luan mot so van de quan trong giua Viet-Nam Cong-Hoa va Kampuchea [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam sent the Prime Minister a report on the special inter-ministerial meeting on December 9, 1971 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss a number of important issues pertaining to the relations between the Republic of Vietnam and Cambodia]. NA No. 2, PTTg, file no. 20687, 1–3 (top secret). 14 Ibid., 2. 15 Tong Truong Bo Ngoai Giao Tran Van Lam kinh trinh Thu Tuong Chanh Phu Viet Nam Cong Hoa, Saigon ngay 28 thang 01 nam 1972 [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Vietnam, Saigon on January 28, 1972]. NA No. 2, PTTg, file no. 20810, 2 (top secret). 16 Thieu ta Le Van Ba [Major Le Van Ba]. Giam Doc Nha Ty-Nan Cong San Kiem Truong Ban Tiep-Cu va Dinh Cu [Director of the Department of Social Affairs and Refugees and Chairman of the Committee on Receiving and Resettlement of Refugees]. So 1460/BXH/KDBVK/TCDC [Republic of Vietnam, Ministry of Social Affairs No. 1460], Saigon, ngay 6 thang 3 nam 1972. “Tinh hinh cuu tro Viet-Kieu Kampuchea hoi huong (tinh den ngay 29–2-72) [Situation of aiding overseas Vietnamese in Cambodia to repatriate (up to February 29, 1972)]. NA No. 2, HDANPT file no. 3729, 1–7. This report was submitted to Department Chief of City Social Affairs and Department of Social Affairs under Military Zone 1 and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 296. Note that Stephen Heder claimed that before its April 1975 collapse, the Lon Nol regime had “repatriated” half of the Vietnamese population, between 200,000 and 250,000, back to South Vietnam (Heder, “Cambodia,” 301). Based on the Saigon government’s records dated February 29, 1972 and the trend of the Lon Nol’s continued persecution of the Vietnamese minority over the following three years (1972–74), between 250,000 and 310,000 is the best estimate of Vietnamese residents leaving Cambodia for South Vietnam by mid-1975. 19 Thu Truong Tran Kim Phuong kinh gui Ong Tong-Truong Ngoai Giao. Saigon ngay 9 thang 4, 1970, V/v Tinh hinh hien nay tai Cambodge [Foreign Affairs Vice-Minister Tran Kim Phuong reported to the Foreign Ministry on “the Situation of Cambodia at Present, on April 9, 1970]. NA No. 2, DTTCH, file no. 1727, 2. This report provided great detail on the Lon Nol regime’s “anti-Vietnamese campaigns” in April of 1970. 20 Dai su Tran Van Phuoc, Toa Dai Su Quan Viet-Nam Cong Hoa tai Kampuchea kinh gui Tong Truong Ngoai giao ve bao chi Khmer cong kich VNCH, ngay 25, thang 3, nam 1971 [Tran Van Phuoc, the Vietnamese Ambassador to the Khmer Republic, sent a

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21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41

report on March 25, 1971 to the Minister of Foreign Affairs about Khmer newspapers attacking the Republic of Vietnam]. NA No. 2, DTTCH, file no. 1797, 1–5. Koh Santepheap [Island of Peace], July 2, 1971. Meatophum [Motherland], July 5, 1971. Koh Santepheap, Nokor Thom [The Great Kingdom], and Mohachon [The Masses], July 13, 1971. Koh Santepheap, June 29, 1971. PTTg, file no. 20687, 1–6. PTTg, file no. 20687, 3. Participants included Nguyen Phuc Duc, Special Assistant to the President on foreign affairs; Doctor Phan Quang Dan, State Counselor in charge of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia; Tran Van Lam, Foreign Affairs Minister; Nguyen Van Vy, Defense Minister; Tran Kim Phuong, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs; Trinh Quang Binh, Assistant to the Minister of Information; and Tran Van Phuoc, RVN Ambassador to the Khmer Republic. Boris Baczynskyj, “Life of Squalor for Vietnamese in Cambodia,” Pacific Stars & Stripes 7 (January 15, 1972). PTTg, file no. 20687, 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Tran Van Lam gui Thu Tuong Chinh Phu, ngay 28 thang 01 nam 1972. “Lien lac giua Vietnam Cong Hoa va Kampuchea” [Tran Van Lam reported to the Prime Minister about “Contact between the Republic of Vietnam and Cambodia” on January 28, 1972]. PTTg, file no. 20810, 2. Kenton Clymer, Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 131. Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger on China (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 292–3. Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam kinh gui Thu Tuong Chanh-Phu Viet-Nam Cong Hoa ngay 27 thang 04 nam 1973 ve Chanh Phu Khmer buoc bao chi phai dung danh-tu “Cong San Viet-Nam” de chi tat ca Cong-quan hoat dong tai Kampuchea [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam sent a report to the Prime Minister on April 27, 1973 about the Khmer Republic government forcing all [Khmer] press to use the terms “Communist Vietnam” to describe all communist forces in Cambodia]. NA No. 2, PTTg, file no. 20813, 319–320 (secret). Ibid. Address of H.E. Long Boret, Minister of State, in charge of Foreign Affairs, Chairman of the Delegation of the Khmer Republic to the 28th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 28, 1973. NA no. 2, PTTg, file no. 20813, 3. Dai Su Tran Van Phuoc kinh gui Ong Phu Ta Chinh Tri Bo Ngoai giao ve tinh hinh quan su va quoc hoi Kampuchea ngay 24 thang 1, nam 1975, [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc sent to Political Advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a report on the situation of Khmer military and national assembly] on January 24, 1975. NA No. 2, PTTg, file no. 20810, 52–5. Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam kinh gui Thu Tuong Chinh Phu Viet-Nam Cong Hoa v/v tin don quan-nhan Khmer Krom bo tron ve Viet-Nam, ngay 14 thang 01 nam 1972 [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam on January 14, 1972 sent a report to the Prime Minister of the Government about Khmer Krom soldiers defected and returned to Vietnam]. NA No. 2, PTTg 20751, file no. 5–6 (secret). Ibid., 6. PTTg, file no. 2081, 58. Dai su Tran Van Phuoc, Toa Dai Su tai Cong Hoa Khmer, Bo Ngoai giao kinh gui Tong Truong Ngoai giao ve tinh hinh chinh tri, kinh te, va quan su tai Cong Hoa Khmer [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc, the Vietnamese Embassy in the Khmer Republic, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sent a report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs about the political, economic, and military situation of the Khmer Republic]. NA No. 2, PTTg, file no. 20813, 207–13 (secret).

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Bibliography Secondary sources Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on April 9, 1970, DTTCH 1727, 6. Baczynskyj, Boris. “Life of Squalor for Vietnamese in Cambodia.” Pacific Stars & Stripes 7 (January 15, 1972). Becker, Elizabeth. When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. New York: PublicAffairs, 1986. Berman, Jennifer S. May. “No Place like Home: Anti-Vietnamese Discrimination and Nationality in Cambodia.” California Law Review 84, no. 3 (1996), 817–874. Clymer, Kenton. Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Case 002/02 Judgment. Accessed September 20, 2019. www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/court/case-00202-judgement. Heder, Steve. “Cambodia.” In Language and National Identity in Asia, edited by Andrew Simpson, 288–311. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 3rd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kissinger, Henry. Henry Kissinger on China. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. PRC’s statement on Lon Nol-Sirik Matak’s ‘crimes.’ Liberation Radio in Vietnamese to South Vietnam 2300 GMT, April 13, 1970. https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/ digital_objects/121085.

Archival sources Sources below are located at Cuc Luu Tru No. 2 (National Archives No. 2), Ho Chi Minh City: Tong TruongNgoai GiaoTran Van Lam kinh gui Thu TuongChanh Phu [Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Prime Minster of Government]. Saigon ngay 24 thang 12 nam 1971. V/v Phien hop lien Bo dac biet ngay 9–12–1971 tai Bo Ngoai Giao de thao luan mot so van de quan trong giua Viet Nam Cong Hoa va Kampuchea [Special inter-ministerial meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 9, 1971 to discuss relations between the Republic of Vietnam and The Khmer Republic]. Phu Thu Tuong [The Office of the Prime Minister], PTTg, h.s., 20687, 1–6. Dai su Tran Van Phuoc, Toa Dai Su QuanViet-Nam Cong Hoa tai Kampuchea kinh gui Tong Truong Ngoai giao ve bao chi Khmer cong kich VNCH, ngay 25, thang 3, nam 1971 [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc, the Vietnamese Embassy to the Khmer Republic, sent a report on March 25, 1971 to the Minister of Foreign Affairs about Khmer newspapers attacking the Republic of Vietnam]. Bo Ngoai Giao, A-Chau/Thai Binh Duong [Department of Asia-Pacific of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs], DTTCH, h.s., 1797, 1–21 (secret). Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam kinh gui Thu TuongChinh PhuViet-Nam Cong Hoa v/v tin don quan-nhan Khmer Krom bo tron ve Viet-Nam, ngay 14 thang 01 nam 1972 [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam sent a report on January 14, 1972 to the Prime Minister about Khmer Krom soldiers escaping to Vietnam]. PTTg, h.s., 20751, 5–6 (secret). Tran Van Phuoc, Dai su Viet NamCong Hoa tai Cong Hoa Khmer. Phnom Penh ngay 20 thang 2, 1974[February 20, 1974]. V/v Tom luoc cuon sach “La C.I.A contre le Cambodge”

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do Sihanouk tu thuat [Summary of Sihanouk’s book “La C.I.A contre le Cambodge”]. PTTg, h.s., 20872, 79–89. Thu TruongTran Kim Phuong kinh gui Ong Tong-TruongNgoai Giao [Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tran Kim Phuong to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, V/v Tinh hinh hien nay tai Cambodge (about the present situation in Cambodia)]. Saigon ngay 9 thang 4, 1970. DTTCH, h.s., 1727, 1–13. “President NguyenVan Thieu to President Nixon, April 23, 1970.” DTTCH, h.s., 1195, 1–4. Tong TruongBo Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam gui Thu TuongChinh Phu, ngay 28 thang 01 nam 1972 [Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tran Van Lam, to the Prime Minister on January 28, 1972]. Lien lac giua Viet Nam Cong Hoa va Kampuchea [Communication between the Republic of Vietnam and the Khmer Republic]. PTTg, h.s., 20810, 1–3. Thieu Ta Le Van Ba [Major Le Van Ba]. Giam Doc Nha Ty-Nan Cong San Kiem Truong Ban Tiep-Cu va Dinh Cu [Director of Social Affairs and Refugees and Chair of the Committee on Repatriation and Residence]. So1460/BXH/KDBVK/TCDC, Saigon, ngay 6 thang 3 nam 1972 [March 6, 1972]. “Tinh hinh cuu tro Viet-Kieu Kampuchea hoi huong (tinh den ngay 29–2-72) [Situation on rescuing ethic Vietnamese repatriating (to Vietnam) up to February 29, 1972].” Bo Xa Hoi, Viet Nam Cong Hoa [Ministry of Social Affairs, Republic of Vietnam], HDANPT, h.s., 3729, 1–7. Dai su Tran Van Phuoc kinh gui Tong Thong ve Tuong LaiChinh Tri Kampuchea, ngay 20 thang 2 nam 1974 [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc sent the President a report on the Political Future of Cambodia, on February 20, 1974]. PTTg, h.s., 20872, 79–89. (secret) Address of H.E. Long Boret, Minister of State, in charge of Foreign Affairs, Chairman of the Delegation of the Khmer Republic to the 28th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 28, 1973. PTTg, h.s., 20813, 1–9. Dai su Tran Van Phuoc kinh gui Ong PhuTa ChinhTri Bo Ngoai giao ve tinh hinh quan su va quoc hoi Kampuchea ngay 24 thang 1, nam 1975 [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc sent to Political Advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: a report on the situation of Khmer military and national assembly on January 24, 1975]. PTTg, h.s., 20810, 52–55. Dai su Tran Van Phuoc, Toa Dai Su tai Cong Hoa Khmer, Bo Ngoai giao kinh gui Tong Truong Ngoai giao ve tinh hinh chinh tri, kinh te, va quan su tai Cong Hoa Khmer [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc, The Vietnamese Embassy in the Khmer Republic, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sent a report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs about the political, economic, and military situation of the Khmer Republic]. PTTg, h.s., 20813, 207–213 (secret). Dai SuTran Van Phuoc kinh gui Ong PhuTa ChinhTri Bo Ngoai giao ve tinh hinh quan su va quoc hoi Kampuchea ngay 21 thang 1, nam 1975 [Ambassador Tran Van Phuoc sent to Political Advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a report on the situation of Khmer military and national assembly] on January 21, 1975. PTTg, h.s., 20810, 56–58. Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van Lam kinh gui Thu TuongChanh-Phu Viet-NamCong Hoa ngay 27 thang 04 nam 1973ve Chanh Phu Khmer buoc bao chi phai dung danh-tu “Cong San Viet-Nam” de chi tat ca Cong-quan hoat dong tai Kampuchea [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam sent a report to the Prime Minister on April 27, 1973 about the Khmer Republic government forcing all [Khmer] press to use the terms “Communist Vietnam” to describe all communist forces in Cambodia]. PTTg, h.s., 20813, 319–320 (secret). Tong TruongTran Van Lam, Bo Ngoai Giao kinh gui Thu TuongChinh-Phu Viet-NamCong Hoa ngay 8 thang 3 nam 1973ve tinh hinh chinh tri va kinh te Kampuchea [Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam sent a report to the Prime Minister of the government, on March 8, 1973 about the economic and political situation of the Khmer Republic]. PTTg, h.s., 20813, 220–222 (secret).

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Tong Truong Ngoai giao Tran Van lam kinh gui Thu TuongChinh Phu ve Phien hop lien Bo Dac Biet ngay 9.12.1971 tai Bo Ngoai giao de thao luan mot so van de quan trong giua Viet-Nam Cong-Hoa va Kampuchea [Minister of Foreign AffairsTran Van Lam sent the Prime Minster a report on the special inter-ministerial meeting on December 9, 1971at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss a number of important issues pertaining to the relations between the Republic of South Vietnam and Cambodia]. PTTg, h.s., 20687, 160–165 (Top secret).

8 THE GENOCIDE OF ROHINGYAS IN BURMA Azeem Ibrahim

Background The background to the current persecution of the Rohingya can be traced back to the history of the region before British colonialism. Crucial to the narrative of the military, the National League for Democracy (NLD), the extremists who run the Rakhine ethnic party, and the leading Buddhist organizations, is that the Rohingya arrived in the Arakan region of Burma only after the British imposed colonial rule there in 1824. In consequence, some 180 years later, the Rohingya are not seen as one of the ethnic groups allowed a place in modern Myanmar.

A contested historical record In this narrative, not only do the Rohingya have no legitimate place in Myanmar, they are described in openly racist terms as being non-Burmese1 and their presence as an existential threat to the survival of Buddhism in Myanmar.2 This view of the Rohingya as unwelcome outsiders was assiduously cultivated by the military under its dictatorship (1962–2012) as a means to divert attention from the economic and social failings of their rule. Unfortunately, it was also accepted by the notionally democratic opposition3 and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The result of this consensus between the military (and their current political party), the democratic opposition, and the Buddhist hierarchy (especially via their control of the educational system4) is that attacking the Rohingya and seeing the Rohingya as unwelcome foreigners is now commonplace across Myanmar. The historical reality does not bear out this narrative. Most evidence points to the Rohingya already living in what was then Arakan by 500 CE5 (and probably earlier6). The Rakhine, a group closely related to the ethnic Burmese who had conquered the Irrawaddy region by 800 CE, crossed into Arakan at the end of the

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first millennium.7 This resulting mixed ethnic (and religiously diverse) region was at various times under Burmese rule, independent, and heavily influenced by Bengal for the next 800 years until it was first conquered by the resurgent Burmese and then by the British.8 British rule saw the return of many Muslims who had fled persecution,9 but thereafter the reality is that Arakan remained a relatively poor region of Britishadministered Burma. While there was immigration from India during British colonial rule, this was to provide labor for the new rubber plantations, the docks, and to staff the civil service. It did not affect the Rohingya who continued to work as before in their local agricultural- and fishing-based economy. However, this favoring by the British of non-Burmese ethnic and religious groups played an important role in framing the struggle for independence, not just as being against the British but also against non-ethnic Burmese, non-Buddhist communities.10 In Arakan, the matter came to a head during the Japanese invasion in 1942. While the arrival of the Japanese was actively supported by many Burmese, this was not true for the Rohingya who, along with many other ethnic groups, remained loyal to the British. The resulting ethnic conflict in Arakan saw the previously mixed Rohingya and Rakhine communities split on geographical lines, with the Rohingya dominating the northern part.11

Persecution after Burmese independence During democratic rule up to 1962, the partial exclusion of the Rohingya from the list of accepted national groups had little practical effect and the authorities were clear they intended to resolve the situation.12 However, under military rule from 1962, the exclusionary practices quickly became systemic persecution with increasing restrictions on the rights of the Rohingya.13 The 1982 Burmese Citizenship Law14 defined the Rohingya as foreigners on the false grounds that they had not been living in Arakan in 1824 (when British colonial rule was imposed there). These legal changes were linked to various attempts to drive the Rohingya into Bangladesh (and the Bengali authorities forcibly returning them). The brief period of democracy from 1988 to 1991 set the basis for the renewed persecution of the Rohingya from two sources. First, renewed military attacks on the community after 1992 saw 250,000 Rohingya flee to Bangladesh. These attacks were marked by the use of forced labour,15 beatings, rape, and land theft.16 The latter involved the construction of villages in northern Rakhine for non-Rohingyas on land taken from older Rohingya settlements,17 often built with forced Rohingya labour. However, less predictably, the nascent NLD joined in with the exclusion of the Rohingya on the grounds that they were not Burmese nationals. The NLD formed an electoral alliance with an extremist Rakhine group that was calling for the expulsion of the Rohingya18 and then the NLD called into question the rights of the few Rohingya who had been elected to the 1990 Parliament. In effect, by the time that a limited form of democracy was restored in 2008,19 the Rohingya had already lost much of their lands, were denied citizenship in the

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land of their birth, and faced exclusion not just by the military regime, but the democratic opposition and the bulk of the Buddhist religious establishment. This has set the scene for the repression and massacres of the period 2012 to the present, and created all the preconditions for genocide.

Persecution since 2012 This limited democracy came into force after elections in 2011, and even though the initial electoral round was rigged, it was clear there was widespread support for the NLD at a national level.20 Within Rakhine, its allies in the extremist Rakhine nationalist parties dominated. However, because the 2008 constitution reinforced the status of the Rohingya as non-citizens, they were excluded from the political process and faced ongoing persecution with the loss of land and access to health and education. This persecution, and the response, can be usefully split into three periods: one of ethnic tension in 2012–2013; the refugee crises of 2014–2016; and the state-sanctioned violence of 2017–2018. In turn this allows an analysis of the shifting nature of the persecution and the response by the Rohingya.

Violence by the Rakhine The initial events in 2012 are probably best characterized as inter-communal violence that started with the rape of a Rakhine woman by three Muslims21 in late May of that year. On June 3, a large group of Rakhine Buddhists stopped a bus and killed the ten Muslims who were travelling on board. The violence then spread to four townships and what began as acts of random violence became a systematic attempt to force the Rohingyas to leave the state.22 Local security forces mostly stood to one side or joined in the attacks.23 The international reaction was disappointing, with both the EU and the US praising the regime for its evenhanded approach to containing the violence24 at a time when the Myanmar president was calling for “illegal” Rohingyas to be sent to “third countries.”25 The next wave of violence, in October 2012, was carefully planned by a combination of Rakhine extremists and Buddhist monks associated with the xenophobic 969 movement.26 The stated goal of the Rakhine politicians was to separate the two communities prior to the Rohingya being forced into exile. This campaign was carefully prepared using social media, especially Facebook.27 A common claim was that the Rohingyas, in league with Al-Qaeda, were planning to massacre the nation’s Buddhist majority. These claims were supplemented with rumors that arms and ammunition were being stored in mosques and that the regime was too scared to protect the local community.28 These arguments became widely adopted among the Rakhine and in addition to spreading virally over social media were also broadcast on state-controlled radio.29 This set of circumstances broadly suggests that the impetus for the October violence came primarily from the Rakhine community and the extremist Buddhist monks rather than the regime itself. In fact, most of the violence was carried out by

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locals, but in some places the military supported them,30 while in other instances they tried to prevent or end the attacks.31 The result of this violence was that many Rohingya were forced from their homes and their land into internal camps where their rights to health, education, and travel were quickly eroded.32 This forced relocation was described by the 969 Movement as “Muslims [were] deliberately razing their own houses to win a place at refugee camps run by aid agencies.”33 The reality was that between October 2012 and April 2013 over 100,000 Rohingya ended up in internal refugee camps in Myanmar, while the UNHCR estimated that 13,000 arrived in Malaysia and 6,000 in Thailand.34 The Myanmar authorities’ initial response was outright denial of any state involvement.35 However, under pressure from the UN and US, they agreed to a commission of enquiry, to address the issues of forced resettlement, and to grant citizenship to the Rohingyas.36

Refugee crisis The claim that the Rohingya were somehow manipulating international opinion has become commonplace among the Rakhine, Buddhist extremists, and the Myanmar authorities. To prevent what these groups see as misinformation, many international aid agencies, especially Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), were ordered out of Rakhine and prevented from supporting the Rohingya community after the events in 2014,37 and UN access was increasingly curtailed. Equally to some Rakhine politicians, if the Rohingya could not be forced out of Myanmar, then ensuring they never left the camps became an acceptable substitute.38 Throughout all this, the NLD remained silent. In the run-up to the 2015 elections, however, the NLD became more complicit, increasing its part in the persecution of the Rohingya. It accomplished this by first creating an electoral roll that would be used as an excuse for a renewed attempt to force the Rohingya to identify as Bengalis (and to ensure they had no voting rights in any case39). The result of this policy was an official census in 2014 that showed one-third of the population in Rakhine as “not enumerated.”40 This effectively eliminated the last civic link between the Rohingya and the country of their birth. However, exclusion this time was extended to almost all Muslims in Myanmar41 and the NLD removed all Muslims from its list of approved candidates.42 The conditions in the camps, especially, provoked many to try and flee Myanmar by sea. This became an annual event from 2013, but only came to world attention in 2015 when Indonesia and Malaysia tried to close their borders.43 In a way this particular crisis came to reflect the enduring issue that Myanmar would like to be rid of the Rohingya, but became very defensive when faced with a refugee crisis.44 There is strong evidence that local Rakhine were involved in allowing individuals to leave the camps (after paying a suitable fee45) and in running at least some of the boats transporting the refugees.46 The government response was in part to deny that the refugees were Rohingya, suggesting they called themselves by this title only to manipulate international opinion and gain access to aid from the UNHCR.47

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Military violence After 2015, violence continued against the Rohingya, especially those still living in villages outside the camps. However, this, allied to the destruction of their last civil rights, led to a significant shift in the response of some in the Rohingya community. A poorly organised military resistance now emerged in the guise of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).48 Initial attacks in October 2016 and August 2017 saw the death of most of the ARSA militants and there was strong evidence that most fighters were from the local community. These events changed the dynamics within Rakhine. For the first time in recent years the military were not bystanders or enablers of Rakhine ethnic violence against the Rohingya. The army now took the lead. Little attempt was made to discriminate between membership of ARSA and the local communities and over 150,000 Rohingya were driven from their homes in August 2017, with many fleeing to Bangladesh. The origins of ARSA are obscure, but they most likely were funded by the small Rohingya diaspora in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan49 and the extent to which they have links to the wider international jihadi movements is limited. This has not stopped the Myanmar authorities seeing ARSA’s emergence as proof of their long-repeated claims about links between the Rohingya community and Al-Qaeda.50 The practical implication is that the violence against the Rohingya that followed in the period 2017–18 was led by the army even if it also involved local Rakhine groups. By the end of 2017 around one million Rohingya had been forced to flee Myanmar and seek refuge in Bangladesh,51 creating the largest refugee camp in the world around Cox’s Bazar. As in earlier crises, Bangladesh is keen to send the Rohingya back and not to normalize their situation as refugees. However, without international pressure and proper support,52 if the Rohingya do go back to Myanmar they will most likely be placed in the internal camps there, which have been widely criticised as lacking basic amenities. The recent violence was aimed at the Rohingya outside the camps. However, if the camps are directly attacked, either by Rakhine extremists or the Myanmar military, one of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing in the world will become outright genocide.

Motivations Understanding why the Rohingya have become so isolated and vulnerable in Myanmar is not easy. At the time of independence, the country was made up of a patchwork of ethnic groups using the borders of the British administrative divisions of India. Many of these rebelled in a confusing set of wars driven by ethnicity, politics, and control over raw materials.53 In contrast, the Rohingya armed revolt was short lived and they accepted their status in the new Rakhine province. Equally, at least initially, the prejudice was not driven by religion, as other Muslim ethnic groups were accepted as part of the new Burmese polity.

The genocide of Rohingyas in Burma 153

The reasons lie in the Burmese narrative about British rule. According to this narrative, the British were unsupportive of the Buddhist traditions54 and they also brought in Indian laborers, which further undermined the Burmese polity. As mentioned above, it is true that many Indians did move to Burma to work in the colonial era, but this was not the case of the Rohingya, who carried on living as they had done before in Arakan/Rakhine as an agricultural and fishing community.55 However, relations with the majority Rakhine population were not easy.56 Low-level tensions came to a head in the period 1942–45, resulting in ethnic cleansing of both communities as the ethnic mix of the region was redefined into a north-south split. The relative isolation of the Rohingya may also reflect that they are not from the Burmese ethnic group, and also their historical ethnic links to northern India not Tibet (where the Burmese tribes originated). For whatever reason, they were placed in a unique category in 1948, where their ethnicity and religion combined to identify them as different to the bulk of the population of the new state. At first it is clear the newly independent civilian government of Burma intended to rectify this, but the intolerance of the military dictatorship after it seized power in 1962 ended such hopes. The military probably targeted the Rohingya because they were different ethnically and religiously, but also because of their history of being treated unfairly. The false narrative of them being foreigners, and of being a threat to Buddhism in Burma, was established at this stage and is now widely accepted among the majority of the population. Equally, the forced relocation from their lands in the 1970s, again in the 1990s, and more recently, has resulted in their former villages and farms being taken over either by ethnic Rakhine or migrants from elsewhere in Myanmar. This is due less to a lack of available farmland in the region and more to a desire to replace the Rohingya with ethnic groups seen to be more in tune with a Buddhist Myanmar. As is clear, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD face no domestic pressure to challenge this. They rely on a close alliance with Buddhist monks for their popular appeal, meaning it tacks very close to what this group sees as acceptable.57 However, the position of the NLD is worse than this appears, for it is not simply silently complicit, but rather fully shares the anti-Muslim prejudices of the extremist monks.58 The military have even less motivation to improve the situation of the Rohingya, not least as ongoing civil unrest fits their narrative that they are the embodiment of the state and their presence in active politics is needed to avoid chaos.59 Moreover, local politics in Rakhine are dominated by variants of the Rakhine ethnic parties that were behind the 2012 violence60 and have long been calling for the expulsion of the Rohingya. These circumstances have created a situation where the ethnicity and religion of the Rohingya marks them out as a distinct group that has been demonised by the various regimes that have ruled Burma/Myanmar since 1962, and which most of the population view as a threat to the very existence of Buddhism in the country. For all their other political disputes, the local ethnically based political parties, the NLD, and the military can all agree on this point – and certainly see no electoral gain to challenging it.

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Since 2012, the violence against the Rohingya can be seen as having escalated from inter-communal violence, organized by political and religious bodies, to being led by the state military forces. The result is one million refugees in Bangladesh, 100,000 in Malaysia, and over 200,000 in the camps inside Myanmar. This means there are no more than 300,000 Rohingya left living in Rakhine outside the camps and they are vulnerable to any renewal of violence by either the state or their neighbors.

Long-term implications The Rohingya are a poor, isolated people. Their diaspora are mostly living in unofficial refugee camps and locked into the least well paid and most marginalised work in their host states. Most of those living in Myanmar are now kept in camps and denied access to health, education, or employment. The result is loss of access to education for the young, a steady destruction of their cultural roots, and widespread physical and mental health problems.61 The young particularly have suffered from the recent mass flight to Bangladesh62 as family ties have been broken and they are denied access to education. If the current situation persists, the ethnic and religious chauvinism that has been present in Burma since 1948 will have succeeded in eliminating a religious and ethnic group that happened to live within its colonial borders. Thus the fate of the refugees in Bangladesh is uncertain. Bangladesh would like them to leave and Myanmar will not provide safe conditions for their return. They are therefore doubly stateless, denied both citizenship in their homeland and formal refugee status when they flee abroad for their lives. Those still in Myanmar, either in the camps or their villages, are also at risk. An escalation of tensions (either by accident or deliberate intent) could easily see a wave of violence leading to the death or flight of the 500,000 Rohingya still in Rakhine. So far, the evidence suggests that there has been only very limited support for militant jihadi groups among the Rohingya. As a community the Rohingya appear to have taken great care to protect their younger members from the allure of groups like IS or Al-Qaeda. However, this may not last. The emergence of ARSA is one worrying trend; if they remain isolated in Bangladesh it is almost inevitable that members of the community will turn to any possible source of support. Taking funding, even for education and health, from Salafist-inspired groups will only fuel the existing intolerance and raise the risk of further violence. In turn, if some members of the community do engage in such acts, the bulk of the Rohingya refugee population will become even more marginalised.

Notes 1 Ishaan Tharor, “Why Does This Buddhist-Majority Nation Hate These Muslims So Much?,” Washington Post, updated February 13, 2015, accessed February 18, 2015, www.wa

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

shingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/13/why-does-this-buddhist-majoritynation-hate-these-muslims-so-much/. Hereward Holland, “Facebook in Myanmar: Amplifying Hate Speech?,” Al Jazeera, updated June 14, 2014, accessed February 19, 2015, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea tures/2014/06/facebook-myanmar-rohingya-amplifying-hate-sp eech-2014612112834290144.html. Michał Lubina, The Moral Democracy: The Political Thought of Aung San Suu Kyi (Warsaw: Scholar, 2019). Matthew Walton, “What are Myanmar’s Buddhist Sunday Schools Teaching?,” East Asia Forum, updated December 16, 2014, accessed July 16, 2015, www.eastasiaforum. org/2014/12/16/what-are-myanmars-buddhist-sunday-schools-teaching/. Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 2. H.H. Wilson, The History of British India, 9 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817). Pamela Gutman, Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendors of Arakan (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001). B.R. Pearn, “Arakan and the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824–1825,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1944). James Baxter, “Report on Indian Immigration” (Rangoon: India Office, 1941). Matthew Walton, “A Primer on the Roots of Buddhist/Muslim Conflict in Myanmar and a Way Forward,” IslamiCommentary, updated October 13, 2013, accessed July 16, 2015, http://islamicommentary.org/2013/10/matthew-walton-a-primer-on-the-rootsof-buddhistmuslim-conflict-in-myanmar-and-a-way-forward/. “Massacre of 1942,” Arakan Bumiputra, updated April 28, 2013, accessed March 4, 2014. Nay San Lwin, “Making Rohingya Stateless,” New Mandala, updated October 29, 2012, accessed July 8, 2015, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/10/29/makingrohingya-statelessness/. Cresa L. Pugh, “Is Citizenship the Answer? Constructions of Belonging and Exclusion for the Stateless Rohingya of Burma” (Oxford: International Migration Institute, 2013); K.S. Venkateswaran, “Burma: Beyond the Law” (Article 19, 1996), 51. UNHCR, “Burma Citizenship Law,” updated October 15, 1982, accessed February28, 2014, www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4f71b.html. International Labour Organisation, “Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma),” ILO, updated July 2, 1998, accessed March 1, 2014, www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ gb/docs/gb273/myanmar3.htm; International Labour Organisation, Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma) (Geneva: United Nations, 2013). Médecins Sans Frontières, “10 Years for the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Past, Present and Future” (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2002), 11. Irish Centre for Human Rights, “Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas” (Galway: GUI, 2010), 154. National League for Democracy, “1990 Multi Party Democracy: General Elections,” updated February 1, 2003, accessed July 2, 2015, www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/1990_elec tions.htm. Zin Linn, “Burma: Shattering of a Democracy Dream?,” The Stateless Rohingya, updated August 17, 2015, accessed August 18, 2015, www.thestateless.com/2015/08/burma-sha ttering-of-a-democracy-dream.html. Kyaw Kyaw, “Analysis of Myanmar’s NLD Landslide,” New Mandala, updated May 1, 2012, accessed October 21, 2015, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/05/ 01/analysis-of-myanmars-nld-landslide/. Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State (Washington: Human Rights Watch, 2013), 165. Ibid.

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23 Human Rights Watch, The Government Should Have Stopped This (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012), 62. 24 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”. 25 Human Rights Watch, “Burma: Communal Violence Undercuts Rights Gains,” updated January 21, 2014, accessed March 8, 2014, www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/21/burma-comm unal-violence-undercuts-rights-gains. 26 Human Rights Council, “Hear Our Screams” (2014), 40. 27 Joseph Allchin, “The Rohingya, Myths and Misinformation,” DVB, updated June 22, 2012, accessed June 18, 2015, www.dvb.no/analysis/the-rohingya-myths-and-misin formation/22597. 28 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”. 29 Matt Smith, Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Fortify Rights International, 2014), 79. 30 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”; Amnesty International, “Myanmar: The Rohingya Minority: Fundamental Rights Denied” (London: Amnesty International, 2014), 23; Tom Andrews and Daniel Sullivan, “Marching to Genocide in Burma” (Washington DC: United to End Genocide, 2014), 16. 31 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray”. 32 Tomás Ojea Quintana, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Geneva: United Nations General Assembly, 2014), 22. 33 Matthew Walton and Susan Hayward, Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar (Honolulu: East-West Centre, 2014), 81. 34 Human Rights Watch, “Burma: Communal Violence Undercuts Rights Gains.” 35 United Nations, Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (New York: UN, 2013), 23. 36 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”. 37 “Burma Tells Medécins Sans Frontières to Leave State Hit by Sectarian Violence,” Guardian, updated February 28, 2014, accessed March 1, 2014, www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/feb/28/burma-medecins-sans-frontieres-rakhine-state. 38 “Will the Rohingya, Driven from Their Homes, Spend the Rest of Their Lives Segregated in Ghettoes?,” Thomson Reuters, updated August 27, 2014, accessed July 20, 2015, www.trust.org/item/20140827082155-p627d/. 39 Human Rights Watch, “Burma: Government Plan Would Segregate Rohingya,” 2014, accessed September 20, 2015, www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/03/burma-government-pla n-would-segregate-rohingya. 40 Republic of the Union of Myanmar, “The Population and Housing Census of Myanmar 2014,” (Department of Population, 2014), 4. 41 Shwe Yi Myintzu et al., “Myanmar Election Body Rejects Muslim Parliamentary Candidates,” Radio Free Asia, updated September 1, 2015, accessed September 22, 2015, www.rfa. org/english/news/myanmar/election-body-rejects-muslim-parliamentary-candidates09012015161036.html. 42 Poppy McPherson, “‘No Muslims Allowed’: How Nationalism Is Rising in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar,” Guardian, updated May 23, 2016, accessed May 23, 2016, www. theguardian.com/world/2016/may/23/no-muslims-allowed-how-nationalism-is-risingin-aung-san-suu-kyis-myanmar?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet. 43 Human Rights Watch, “Southeast Asia: Accounts from Rohingya Boat People,” updated May 27, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015, www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/27/southea st-asia-accounts-rohingya-boat-people. 44 David Graham, “Burma Doesn’t Want the Rohingya but Insists on Keeping Them,” The Atlantic, updated June 12, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2015/06/burma-rohingya-migration-ban/395729/. 45 Nyan Lynn Aung, “First Human Trafficking Case in Rakhine to Head to Court,” Myanmar Times, updated August 12, 2015, accessed August 19, 2015, www.mmtimes. com/index.php/national-news/15939-first-human-trafficking-case-in-rakhine-to-headto-court.html. 46 Human Rights Watch, “Southeast Asia: Accounts from Rohingya Boat People.”

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47 “Burma Military Chief Claims Refugees Pretending to Be Rohingya to Get Aid,” Guardian, updated May 22, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015, www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/may/22/burma-military-chief-claims-refugees-pretending-to-be-rohingyato-get-aid. 48 Azeem Ibrahim, “Why the U.S. Cannot Ignore the Rohingya,” Hurst Publishing, updated September 11, 2017, accessed July 1, 2019, www.hurstpublishers.com/u-s-ca nnot-ignore-rohingya/. 49 Crisis Group, “Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State” (International Crisis Group, 2016). 50 Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. 51 UNHCR, “Refugee Response in Bangladesh,” updated May 31, 2019, accessed June 15, 2019, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/myanmar_refugees. 52 Gert Rosenthal, A Brief and Independent Inquiry into the Involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018 (New York: United Nations, 2019). 53 James Goldston, Human Rights in Burma (Myanmar) (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990). 54 Roger Bischoff, Buddhism in Myanmar: A Short History (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996). 55 Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. 56 Rosenthal,A Brief and Independent Inquiry into the Involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018. 57 Timothy Simonson, “The Taming of the NLD … by the NLD,” New Mandala, updated August 12, 2015, accessed October 11, 2015, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmanda la/2015/08/12/the-taming-of-the-nld-by-the-nld/. 58 Lubina, The Moral Democracy; McPherson, “‘No Muslims Allowed.’” 59 Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. 60 “Rising Arakanese Party Could Further Marginalize Rohingya,” Reuters, updated October 3, 2015, accessed October 13, 2015, www.thestateless.com/2015/10/03/ rising-arakanese-party-could-further-marginalize-rohingya/. 61 “Psychological Support for Refugee Children of Myanmar in Bangladesh,” reliefweb, updated January 22, 2018, accessed April 4, 2018, https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/ psychological-support-refugee-children-myanmar-bangladesh. 62 “U.N. Ramps up Education Efforts in Rohingya Refugee Camps,” Time Magazine, updated January 24, 2019, accessed June 16, 2019, https://time.com/5511598/unicefrohigya-refugee-education/.

References Allchin, Joseph. “The Rohingya, Myths and Misinformation.” DVB. Updated June 22, 2012, accessed June 18, 2015. www.dvb.no/analysis/the-rohingya-myths-and-misinformation/ 22597. Amnesty International. “Myanmar: The Rohingya Minority: Fundamental Rights Denied.” London: Amnesty International, 2014. Andrews, Tom, and Daniel Sullivan. “Marching to Genocide in Burma.” Washington, DC: United to End Genocide, 2014. Aung, Nyan Lynn. “First Human Trafficking Case in Rakhine to Head to Court.” Myanmar Times. Updated August 12, 2015, accessed August 19, 2015. www.mmtimes. com/index.php/national-news/15939-first-human-trafficking-case-in-rakhine-to-head-tocourt.html. Baxter, James. “Report on Indian Immigration.” Rangoon: India Office, 1941. Bischoff, Roger. Buddhism in Myanmar: A Short History. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996.

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Buchanan, Francis. “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire.” Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 219–240. “Burma Military Chief Claims Refugees Pretending to Be Rohingya to Get Aid.” Guardian. Updated May 22, 2015, accessedJune 15, 2015. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/ 22/burma-military-chief-claims-refugees-pretending-to-be-rohingya-to-get-aid. “Burma Tells Médecins Sans Frontières to Leave State Hit by Sectarian Violence.” Guardian. Updated February 28, 2014, accessed March 1, 2014. www.theguardian.com/world/ 2014/feb/28/burma-medecins-sans-frontieres-rakhine-state. Crisis Group. “Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State.” International Crisis Group, 2016. Goldston, James. Human Rights in Burma (Myanmar). New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990. Graham, David. “Burma Doesn’t Want the Rohingya but Insists on Keeping Them.” The Atlantic. Updated June 12, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015. www.theatlantic.com/interna tional/archive/2015/06/burma-rohingya-migration-ban/395729/. Gutman, Pamela. Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendors of Arakan. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001. Holland, Hereward. “Facebook in Myanmar: Amplifying Hate Speech?” Al Jazeera. Updated June 14, 2014, accessed February 19, 2015. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/ 06/facebook-myanmar-rohingya-amplifying-hate-speech-2014612112834290144.html. Human Rights Council. “Hear Our Screams.” 2014. Human Rights Watch. “All You Can Do Is Pray”: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2013. Human Rights Watch. “Burma: Communal Violence Undercuts Rights Gains.” Updated January 21, 2014, accessed March 8, 2014. www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/21/burma -communal-violence-undercuts-rights-gains. Human Rights Watch. “Burma: Government Plan Would Segregate Rohingya.” 2014. Accessed September 20, 2015. www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/03/burma-government-pla n-would-segregate-rohingya. Human Rights Watch. The Government Should Have Stopped This. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012. Human Rights Watch. “Southeast Asia: Accounts from Rohingya Boat People.” Updated May 27, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015. www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/27/southeast-asia -accounts-rohingya-boat-people. Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Ibrahim, Azeem. “Why the U.S. Cannot Ignore the Rohingya.” Hurst Publishing. Updated September 11, 2017, accessed July 1, 2019. www.hurstpublishers.com/u-s-cannot-ignor e-rohingya/. International Labour Organisation. “Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma).” Updated July 2, 1998, accessed March 1, 2014. www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/gb/docs/ gb273/myanmar3.htm. International Labour Organisation. Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma). Geneva: United Nations, 2013. Irish Centre for Human Rights. “Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas.” Galway: GUI, 2010. Kyaw Kyaw. “Analysis of Myanmar’s NLD Landslide.” New Mandala. Updated May 1, 2012, accessed October 21, 2015. http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/05/ 01/analysis-of-myanmars-nld-landslide/.

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Linn, Zin. “Burma: Shattering of a Democracy Dream?” The Stateless Rohingya. Updated August 17, 2015, accessed August 18, 2015. www.thestateless.com/2015/08/burmashattering-of-a-democracy-dream.html. Lubina, Michał. The Moral Democracy: The Political Thought of Aung San Suu Kyi. Warsaw: Scholar, 2019. Lwin, Nay San. “Making Rohingya Stateless.” New Mandala. Updated October 29, 2012, accessed July 8, 2015. http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/10/29/makingrohingya-statelessness/. McPherson, Poppy. “‘No Muslims Allowed’: How Nationalism is Rising in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar.” Guardian. Updated May 23, 2016, accessed May 23, 2016. www.thegua rdian.com/world/2016/may/23/no-muslims-allowed-how-nationalism-is-rising-in-aungsan-suu-kyis-myanmar?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet. “Massacre of 1942.” Arakan Bumiputra. Updated April 28, 2013, accessed March 4, 2014. Médecins Sans Frontières. “10 Years for the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Past, Present and Future.” Médecins Sans Frontières, 2002. Myintzu, Shwe Yi, Khin Khin Ei, Kyaw Thu, and Nay Rein Kyaw. “Myanmar Election Body Rejects Muslim Parliamentary Candidates.” Radio Free Asia. Updated September 1, 2015, accessed September 22, 2015. www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/electionbody-rejects-muslim-parliamentary-candidates-09012015161036.html. National League for Democracy. “1990 Multi Party Democracy: General Elections.” Updated February 1, 2003, accessed July 2, 2015. www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/1990_ elections.htm. Pearn, B.R. “Arakan and the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824–1825.” The Far Eastern Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1944): 27–40. “Psychological Support for Refugee Children of Myanmar in Bangladesh.” reliefweb. Updated January 22, 2018, accessed April 4, 2018. https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/ psychological-support-refugee-children-myanmar-bangladesh. Pugh, Cresa L. “Is Citizenship the Answer? Constructions of Belonging and Exclusion for the Stateless Rohingya of Burma.” Oxford: International Migration Institute, 2013. Quintana, Tomás Ojea. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar. Geneva: United Nations General Assembly, 2014. Republic of the Union of Myanmar. “The Population and Housing Census of Myanmar 2014.” Department of Population, 2014. “Rising Arakanese Party Could Further Marginalize Rohingya.” Reuters. Updated October 3, 2015, accessed October 13, 2015. www.thestateless.com/2015/10/03/rising-arakaneseparty-could-further-marginalize-rohingya/. Rosenthal, Gert. A Brief and Independent Inquiry into the Involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018. New York: United Nations, 2019. Simonson, Timothy. “The Taming of the NLD … by the NLD.” New Mandala. Updated August 12, 2015, accessed October 11, 2015. http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/ 2015/08/12/the-taming-of-the-nld-by-the-nld/. Smith, Matt. Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Fortify Rights International, 2014. Tharor, Ishaan. “Why Does This Buddhist-Majority Nation Hate These Muslims So Much?” Washington Post. Updated February 13, 2015, accessed February 18, 2015. www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/13/why-does-this-buddhist-major ity-nation-hate-these-muslims-so-much/. “U.N. Ramps up Education Efforts in Rohingya Refugee Camps.” Time Magazine. Updated January 24, 2019, accessed June 16, 2019. https://time.com/5511598/unicef-rohigyarefugee-education/.

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UNHCR. “Burma Citizenship Law.” Updated October 15, 1982, accessed February 28, 2014. www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4f71b.html. UNHCR. “Refugee Response in Bangladesh.” Updated May 31, 2019, accessed June 15, 2019. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/myanmar_refugees. United Nations. Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar. New York: UN, 2013. Venkateswaran, K.S. Burma: Beyond the Law. Article 19, 1996. Walton, Matthew. “A Primer on the Roots of Buddhist/Muslim Conflict in Myanmar and a Way Forward.” IslamiCommentary. Updated October 13, 2013, accessed July 16, 2015. http://islamicommentary.org/2013/10/matthew-walton-a-primer-on-the-roots-of-bud dhistmuslim-conflict-in-myanmar-and-a-way-forward/. Walton, Matthew. “What Are Myanmar’s Buddhist Sunday Schools Teaching?” East Asia Forum. Updated December 16, 2014, accessed July 16, 2015. www.eastasiaforum.org/ 2014/12/16/what-are-myanmars-buddhist-sunday-schools-teaching/. Walton, Matthew, and Susan Hayward. Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar. Honolulu: East-West Centre, 2014. “Will the Rohingya, Driven from Their Homes, Spend the Rest of Their Lives Segregated in Ghettoes?” Thomson Reuters. Updated August 27, 2014, accessed July 20, 2015. www. trust.org/item/20140827082155-p627d/. Wilson, H.H. The History of British India. 9 vols. London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817.

PART 4

Technologies, Techniques, and Ideologies

9 THE AIR WAR IN VIETNAM Responses to the machinery of mass violence Sophie Quinn-Judge

Introduction “In this country, you have all these emotions that make even the word ‘war’ very different for Americans and Germans. America has its ‘wars’ against drugs and illiteracy … Germans associate war with the near-total destruction of their cities and homeland.”1 This statement describes German attitudes to the American “War on Terror” and reactions in Europe to President George W. Bush’s identification of an “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. The message is that in the United States wars can be conjured up to demonstrate resolve and virtuous commitment, without much thought of long-term consequences. Europeans have a more sober appreciation for the horrors of war. These German words could just as well be used as an explanation for European reactions to the US military campaign in Vietnam. European governments were cool toward Washington’s decision to pursue a military solution to the crisis in South Vietnam in 1964–65. The German government believed that it was time to look for a political solution to the Vietnamese conflict. The French had publicly made this their position. Fredrik Logevall cites the near universal European disapproval of the US war as a justification for President Lyndon Johnson to have sought a political, negotiated solution, especially following his trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. After all, Johnson had been elected as a man of peace.2 But the US military/foreign policy complex made up its mind to stage a show of military force in Vietnam, largely to demonstrate its resolve to defeat Asian communism. The oft-cited judgment of John McNaughton, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, elucidates their thinking. US objectives were 70% “to avoid a humiliating defeat” to our reputation as guarantor; 20% to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) out of Chinese hands; and 10%

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“to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”3 In 1965 South Vietnam was little known by the American people and few had any knowledge of Vietnamese history or current politics. There was no emotional link between our two nations as there is now. The idea that the US would become committed to a tenyear war there, with 500,000 troops on the ground by 1968, and that we would drop a higher tonnage of bombs over South Vietnam alone than in all theaters of World War II combined, would have been viewed as implausible. This chapter aims to remind readers of the known facts regarding the US air war in Vietnam and all of Indochina.4 Although US ground forces in South Vietnam played a large role in the battle, the use of air power came to define US strategy. Any discussion of post-1945 mass violence in Southeast Asia would be incomplete without a discussion of the longest and most destructive campaign of violence waged in that part of the world. It was massive by any measurement: the weapons used, the number of people killed and crippled, and the dollars spent. No matter how one analyzes the causes of the war, there is little doubt that the US contributed a disproportionate amount of the slaughter. By recalling or learning for the first time the facts of the air war, I hope readers will be motivated to also consider its short- and longer-term impacts on the US. After 1975, when the communist army finally swept into Saigon, there was a strong sense that our citizenry would prevent a repeat of the high-tech war of choice waged between 1961 and 1975 against a small, agricultural nation. As John Kerry put it, after he threw away his medals at the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in 1971, he hoped that Vietnam would be remembered as “the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped in the turning.”5 Yet successive administrations, including the one in which Kerry served as Secretary of State, have continued to develop fighting methods refined in Indochina, in particular the use of air power against peasant societies. I will discuss these issues in my conclusion. The question that is guiding my exploration is prompted by Robert McNamara, who was serving as US Secretary of Defense as the Vietnam War started. Can we, as a human family, think more seriously about how to avoid mass killing of civilians in political conflicts? Watching the 2003 documentary film The Fog of War – interviews with Robert McNamara – I was surprised by the simplicity of the “Life Lessons” he draws from his years as a Cold Warrior.6 One of them was just this: “Learn from your mistakes. I think the human race needs to think more about killing, about conflict.” As the US role in the Vietnam War was being decided, however, he had not yet come to terms with his role as an architect of bombing campaigns. In The Fog of War, Mr. McNamara describes his role in the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities during World War II. He quotes his superior, General Curtis Le May, as saying that, “if we had lost the war, we’d all be prosecuted as war criminals.” The victors of World War II, in the early days of the Vietnam War, failed to account for civilian lives sacrificed, as they had in Japan. The United States started the air war in Vietnam assuming that, as victors, their claims to pinpoint bombing accuracy would be accepted.

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The basic facts of the air war In the early 1960s, when US advisers first went to Vietnam to help build local armed forces, the US leadership had high hopes that the communist insurgency in the south could be defeated with “police actions” and better weapons. The accepted view was that the area below the 17th parallel was being invaded by communist guerillas trained in North Vietnam. However, as the insurgents gained more territory in the Mekong Delta and Central Vietnam, often reclaiming areas the Viet Minh had controlled before the 1954 Geneva peace agreements with France, the US military advisory group felt compelled to become more involved in the fighting. After the death of South Vietnamese President Diem and the chaos of 1964, when a stable, pro-American civilian government eluded the planners, in mid-1965, a military leadership council took over the government and acceded to US demands that they bring in American ground troops. By late 1964, the punishment by bombing of territory of the Hanoi government, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), was seen as the most efficacious way to stop its support for the southern communist insurgency. (Of course, in 1964 the DRV was beginning to send reinforcements to their comrades in the south; the insurgency was composed of southerners, only some of whom had been trained in the North. Both northern and southern communists agreed that their goal was to unify Vietnam as one nation.) The leaders of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), such as Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, endorsed the idea of bombing, as they believed it would take the war north, away from their own territory below the 17th parallel. The US public was told that this would improve the morale of our southern allies and destroy the will of the Hanoi government to fight. There was also a practical aspect of the decision to wage a bombing campaign: military planners relied on the use of “maximum firepower to replace reliance on manpower,” as they did not have the time to organize a large enough force to stop communist advances in 1964–5, when the ARVN was believed to be on the verge of collapse. Technology and air power would also reduce American casualties to an acceptable level, it was hoped.7 Thus, the first US marines landed in Central Vietnam in March 1965 to protect a US airbase in the city of Danang. The civilian Vietnamese leaders still in place were informed of the US deployment as the marines were landing. The campaign to bomb transport links and industrial sites in northern Vietnam, known as Rolling Thunder II, was approved in April 1965 (secret bombing of DRV targets had already begun as early as 19618). In June, B-52s began to attack communist troop concentrations in South Vietnam; over the next eight years, four million tons of bombs would be dropped below the 17th parallel. The decision to bomb the south was made “with no special notice being taken,” in the words of an advisor to the civilian premier, Phan Huy Quat.9 B-52s were used both in the North and in South Vietnam, whose people we were ostensibly in Vietnam to protect. The regular bombing of both North and South Vietnam would continue intermittently from 1965 until 1973, when the Paris Peace Agreement ended the

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direct US role in the war. In November 1968, as the peace talks in Paris were beginning, President Johnson announced that all bombing above the 17th parallel would cease. But Richard Nixon, elected on his promise to bring peace to Vietnam, returned to bombing the DRV in April 1972, as Hanoi’s Easter Offensive began. He had already opened a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia, Operation Menu, in 1969 and intensified air strikes against Laos, in particular, the Plain of Jars.10 After the 1973 agreement the US supplied the aircraft to the South Vietnamese Air Force to continue the bombing of communist troop concentrations. The US government ended its involvement in the Indochina War without any reconsideration of its air war strategy. (Hanoi gradually developed an air force using Soviet-supplied MIGs, but it carried out almost no offensive operations.) The tonnage of bombs dropped in the various theaters of this war defies belief. These theaters were (1) North Vietnam, (2) South Vietnam, (3) the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which wound through southern Laos and the northeast corner of Cambodia, (4) northern Laos (Plain of Jars), and (5) Cambodia. During World War II, “the US dropped about 2,000,000 tons of air ordnance in all theaters; during the Korean War, about 1,000,000 tons.”11 In Indochina, by the end of 1971, the tonnage was around 6,300,000. During the most intense years of the bombing of North Vietnam, 100,000 to 200,000 tons of munitions per year were dropped. The Rolling Thunder campaign from 1965 to 1968 caused 25,000 to 50,000 casualties per year; 80 percent of these were civilians. In South Vietnam, where US ground troops were deployed, the air munitions dropped in the years 1968–1969 amounted to one million tons per year. As the Cornell Air War study points out, “this is five times the maximum annual tonnage deployed against North Vietnam.”12 The casualty figures for civilians in the South are less well documented than in the North, because often the US forces classified all deaths in communist areas as enemy combatants “killed in action.” Guenther Lewy offers a total figure of 220,000 civilians killed in US, ARVN, and other allied operations.13 One of the best examples of the discrepancy between military accounting for enemy combatant deaths and actual civilian deaths was the 1969 “Operation Speedy Express” in the Mekong Delta, when the military first claimed 10,889 enemy dead. Later accounting found that many of the dead had no weapons. The US Army Inspector General eventually estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 of the casualties were civilian deaths. This operation included 3,381 tactical air strikes.14 But we have no comparable extrapolations for civilians killed by bombing in Viet Cong base areas in Central Vietnam, as anyone who remained in those areas was considered to be part of the NLF infrastructure. In 1995 the Hanoi government released its figures on war deaths, claiming two million civilian casualties in north and south. As US troops joined the battle, the use of airpower in South Vietnam began to include direct support of US troops in action. The preferred weapons for this “close air support” were cluster bombs (CBUs) containing smaller bomblets, each holding 300 metal pellets, like ball bearings;15 and napalm, an incendiary gel that contains a volatile petrochemical, with phosphorus added to burn through skin and

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“into the musculature, where it would continue to burn, day after day.”16 These weapons were more effective at wiping out enemy troop concentrations or snipers than high-explosive bombs because they covered a wider area. In an area saturated with napalm, everything in the neighborhood, including peasant houses, would burn.17 The collateral damage from this air support, the civilian casualties caused by what were essentially anti-personnel weapons, was accepted by the military as the cost of preserving a “democratic” South Vietnam. The other major use of air power was to “interdict” the communists’ movements and to “motivate” the population to leave areas under communist control. This wide-open bombing accounted for more than 90 percent of air strikes in South Vietnam. These were carried out under a thin veneer of care for civilian life – “deliberate attacks on the civilian population were not part of the official policy,” the Cornell Air War study says.18 In 1965 the Air Force officially changed the name of areas first known as “Free Fire Zones” to “Specified Strike Zones.” They claimed that these areas had been “cleared by responsible local Vietnamese authority for firing on specific military targets.” But as Jonathan Schell reported, “the procedures for applying these restraints were modified or twisted or ignored to such an extent that in practice the restraints evaporated entirely.”19 American firepower and bombs in South Vietnam led to large-scale movements of civilians away from their villages, to the point where this peasant country became more urbanized than Sweden, Canada, Austria, or Switzerland, that is, about 40% urban by 1971.20 By 1974 this figure would be 65%.

US debates on the effectiveness of the bombing Robert McNamara initially appeared confident that the bombing of the DRV would seal a US victory over Vietnamese communism. He was encouraged in this belief by the Rand Corporation’s ranking expert on air war, Leon Gouré. Gouré, who established his reputation during World War II, wrote reports based on seemingly sound analysis that showed that US airpower was destroying the morale of the DRV’s population. Paid by the Air Force, he was telling his bosses what they wanted to hear. He told one of the Rand staff in Saigon, “When the Air Force is paying the bill, the answer is always bombing.” As author Max Hastings says, “Gouré supplied a fig leaf of intellectual respectability for policies the Johnson administration and many generals favored anyway.”21 For a year or so he was the toast of Saigon, with his comforting presentations to foreign delegations on the havoc the bombing was wreaking in the DRV. By 1966, however, he was being discredited, as fellow Rand analysts disputed his reading of the data from interviews with prisoners and defectors. Moreover, a secret Pentagon JASON “Summer Study Group” report, initiated by a distinguished group of scientists at MIT and Harvard, showed that Rolling Thunder was having the opposite effect to that claimed by Gouré: the bombing was strengthening popular support of the DRV regime by increasing patriotic enthusiasm and the determination of the leadership.22 The report concluded that, “as of

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July 1966 the US bombing of North Vietnam had had no measurable direct effect on Hanoi’s ability to mount and support military operations in the South at the current level.” For a start, “North Vietnam has basically a subsistence agricultural economy that presents a difficult and unrewarding target system for attack.” Further, it stated that, “Since the initiation of the Rolling Thunder program the damage to facilities and equipment in North Vietnam has been more than offset by the increased flow of military and economic aid, largely from the USSR and Communist China.” And in terms of the morale of the DRV’s population, there was no encouragement for US policy makers to continue their course. “The indirect effects of the bombing on the will of the North Vietnamese to continue fighting and on their leaders’ appraisal of the prospective gains and costs of maintaining the present policy have not shown themselves in any tangible way. Furthermore, we have not discovered any basis for concluding that the indirect punitive effects of bombing will prove decisive in these respects.”23 These conclusions were believed to have had a strong influence on McNamara’s thinking and pushed him to place more emphasis on his plans for a “multi-system anti-infiltration barrier” across the DMZ and the Laos panhandle. (This system proved too complex and expensive to develop, although some elements were used to detect movements on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.) The great irony pointed out by the JASON report was that US bombing “had the effect of encouraging greater material and political support from the Soviet Union than might otherwise have been the case.”24 The air war became detached from the people whose lives were being impacted on the ground. The Navy and Air Force used a formal set of numerical objectives to judge the success of their missions. The Air War study notes the competition that arose between these two forces, “where a good show must be made at appropriations hearings: … the performance record of each service comes to depend on such criteria as the aircraft utilization ratio – the number of sorties flown per aircraft deployed, with the real result of those sorties left out of consideration.”25 The former commandant of the US Marine Corps, General David M. Shoup, believed that this contest led to “misleading data or propaganda to serve Air Force or Navy purposes.” His overall conclusion was harsh: “In fact, it became increasingly apparent that the US bombing effort in both North and South Vietnam has been one of the most wasteful and expensive hoaxes ever to be put over on the American people.”26 McNamara himself gradually lost faith that the war could be won, with or without air power. He left the Johnson cabinet in February 1968, just before the president announced that he would halt bombing above the 20th parallel.

Other responses to the bombing Vietnamese in Saigon-controlled areas were often dismayed by the violence of the American war. Buddhist and Catholic representatives demonstrated, joined opposition political parties, and wrote for anti-war newspapers. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh traveled to the US to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, to persuade

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him to take a stand against the war. In 1967 the young Buddhist nun Nhat Chi Mai set herself on fire to persuade Buddhists and Catholics to unite against the war. The Catholic philosophy professor Ly Chanh Trung wrote that he believed that all Vietnamese must follow the example of Nhat Chi Mai in taking a stand against the war: if not, “they are in danger of turning into two-legged beasts,” he said.27 A leader of the Vietnamese community in France, mathematician Nguyen Ngoc Giao, echoes the findings of the JASON study on North Vietnamese morale. As a student leader in Paris in the 1960s and eventually head of the pro-Hanoi Union of Vietnamese in France, he noted that “when the US Air Force and the Seventh Fleet crossed the 17th parallel, they unknowingly unified Vietnam in the hearts of a generation of young people who had grown up south of that parallel, but who had no historical memories because the political situation in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) had wiped them all out of the public consciousness.”28 Giao himself came from a northern family, but had grown up in the South and received his scholarship to study in Paris via the Saigon government. But whether these students came originally from the north or the south, the spectacle of the mighty United States bombing a defenseless peasant country was enough to rouse their patriotism. How did US citizens react to the quite obvious savagery of this war? A February 1967 poll showed that while 85% of Americans acknowledged that civilians were being killed, 67% continued to support the bombing.29 By 1968, however, the tide was turning. Disapproval of the war was driven by resistance to the draft, along with the shock of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Lyndon Johnson was the focus of discontent: six weeks after the attacks began at the end of January, approval of his handling of the war dropped from 40 percent to 26 percent.30 Yet once the US started to draw down their troops, as Nixon implemented his “Vietnamization” plan, the public became less militantly opposed to the war. The bombing of South Vietnam continued until the Paris Peace Agreement in January 1973, with a final flourish against Hanoi at the close of 1972. The “Christmas Bombing” campaign in December 1972, pounding sites in Hanoi and Haiphong for 12 days, reinforced the revulsion that many people around the world felt for the US bullying of the DRV. It was essentially a consolation prize for the Saigon government of Nguyen Van Thieu, which would be cut off by the January Paris Peace Agreement and US Congressional action from the automatic financial and military support to which they had become accustomed. Before the delayed signing of the peace agreement, however, the Americans carried out “Operation Enhance Plus,” a massive transfer of military equipment that left the Republic of Vietnam with the fourth largest air force in the world.31 The promise of US air support in case of serious communist attacks remained on the table until Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in August 1974. The US Congress clawed back control over war-making from the Executive Branch in November 1973. The War Powers Act, passed over Nixon’s veto, limited the time period in which the president could deploy US troops abroad without Congressional approval. This assertion of Congress’s constitutional role in the

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declaration of war was a direct response to the way that the Nixon administration had handled its bombing of Cambodia. That bombing had begun in great secrecy in 1969, with the aim to protect the US troops in Vietnam. The idea was to destroy Vietnamese communist sanctuaries over the border, but eventually the bombing destabilized Cambodia to such a degree that it fostered the growth of the Khmer Rouge resistance. Federal Judge Orin Judd issued an injunction against the bombing in July 1973, on the grounds that the original rationale, the protection of US troops in Vietnam, no longer existed. This injunction would have made the bombing constitutionally illegal, had it held. But by the time the Supreme Court was ready to hear the case, the bombing had stopped.32 There are powerful and simple reasons why military planners continued to bomb and why the Nixon administration had renewed the bombing of North Vietnam, even after Lyndon Johnson had halted it. First, by narrow military criteria, airpower is effective (but the question as to whether it achieves larger political goals is unanswered). Second, “airpower is economical, flexible and unobtrusive.” The air war in Indochina accounted for no more than one-third of dollar costs of the war (as of 1971). The number of US lives lost in the air war amounted to less than 10% of the total.33

The aftermath of the air war in Vietnam: Lessons learned? Another of McNamara’s “life lessons” imparted in The Fog of War is to “empathize with your enemy,” talk to your enemy. But the United States did not formally start talks with the DRV until 1968. This is the reason McNamara can plausibly claim that he never understood why the communists were fighting. He appeared to discount all the previous opportunities to talk, from Geneva in 1954 until 1965, when we sent in our troops and began bombing the DRV. Back then, a negotiated political solution that would have allowed the Vietnamese in North and South to talk to each other was seen as nothing more than capitulation – as was neutralism. Our government stuck to its Cold War perspective of the zero-sum game in Vietnam, while Vietnamese civil society in the South gave numerous hints that they would have preferred a neutral solution or some kind of condominium with the Hanoi government. If both sides had benefitted from Western aid and trade in 1954 or 1964, the two parts of separated Vietnam might have evolved in a more moderate way. The idea that the US government can continue to avoid talking to and compromising with people they dislike has been supported by an unquestioning faith in our technology of war. The promise of drones, night vision equipment, stealth bombers, and smart bombs was already in sight at the end of the wars in Indochina. The evolution of air war technology was moving faster than our ability to digest the lessons of our Vietnam experience. These remarks by General Westmoreland recorded in the Congressional Record of July 13, 1970 are eerily prophetic: On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted

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intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control … I am confident the American people expect this country to take full advantage of its technology – to welcome and applaud the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine.34 A Rand report of 1970 describes the future of drone aircraft: We have in hand the ability to develop systems that are manned, but remotely manned rather than with the man up front in the vehicle … In the remotely manned system the man does the tasks he is best equipped to do: recognize, discriminate, decide, adapt in real time. The machine does what it can do best: fly, track assigned targets, and so forth.35 And now in 2020 we are so accustomed to the idea of drone strikes in distant places that we are desensitized to the continued civilian casualties they cause. With air war as our predominant military response, we have in theory developed more accurate bombs that make the promise of “surgical strikes” and precision bombing a reality. The idea that our military has minimized civilian casualties to the point that they should be of no concern to the general public is leading to a lax attitude on the part of our armed forces, according to recent reports from NGOs. The Pentagon is believed to be undercounting civilian casualties caused by the USled coalition in Syria and Iraq, as a report of June 2018 from website Just Security demonstrates. The authors suggest that “a broader reckoning of the way the US government tracks, investigates and responds to civilian harm is needed.” Some of the specific steps they advocate: improving the way the Pentagon counts casualties by lowering the requirements for a civilian casualty to be deemed “credible,” conducting site visits and witness interviews where feasible and explaining when it is not possible to do so, holding regular meetings with NGOs to discuss specific cases and civilian casualty methodology, and publishing reports on civilian casualties by all government actors, not just the military.36 Military analyst William J. Astore, who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Air Force in 2005, makes a more general critique of our romance with air power in a June 4 article for Tom Dispatch. He believes that the whole idea of “precision warfare” in an oxymoron. “This country’s propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age.” The bombing of the Taliban in Afghanistan has changed nothing, he points out, as they continue to grow stronger. “In a bizarre fashion,” he says, “you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replace the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress.”37 How will this extravagant use of air power end? In the years ahead the blowback for the United States could be more than we have bargained for, as other nations

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catch up on drone technology. When Robert McNamara said that, “I think the human race needs to think more about killing, about conflict,” he may have been hinting that it is time to consider the necessity of developing more robust international rules of air war.

Notes 1 Wilfried Mausbach, “Forlorn Superpower: European Reactions to the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq,” in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, eds. Lloyd C. Gardener and Marilyn B. Young (New York and London: The New Press, 2007), 59–88. 2 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 3 The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel Edition, Vol. III (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 695, McNaughton to McNamara, March 14, 1965. 4 The best critical source on this topic is still The Air War in Indochina, a study prepared by a group of academics from a variety of disciplines at Cornell University, printed in 1971 by Beacon Press, revised in 1972. 5 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York, Harper Perennial, 1991), 258. 6 The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, directed by Errol Morris, documentary, 2003. 7 Air War Study Group, Cornell University, Air War in Indochina, eds. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 4. Hereafter: Air War. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Bui Diem with David Chanoff, In the Jaws of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 131. 10 The Plain of Jars is a plateau in northeastern Laos that became a stronghold of the Lao communists during the Indochina Wars. Its name is derived from the massive, prehistoric stone jars that dot its landscape. 11 The figures on bomb tonnages come from Air War, 9. 12 Air War, 10. 13 Guenther Lewy, The American War in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 442–53. 14 Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 209. 15 Air War, revised edition, Appendix C-3, 222. 16 Sven Lindquist, A History of Bombing (New York: The New Press, 2001), 105. 17 Air War, 54. 18 Ibid., 57. 19 Ibid., 58, citing Jonathan Schell, The Military Half (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 151. 20 Air War, 63. 21 Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945–75 (London: William Collins, 2018), 281. 22 Ibid., 325. 23 Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV. All citations from the JASON report on 116–7. 24 Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 118. 25 Air War, 29. 26 Ibid., citing David M. Shoup, “The New American Militarism,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1969, 55. 27 Sophie Quinn-Judge, The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace, 1954–75 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 106–7. 28 Nguyen Ngoc Giao, “Overseas Vietnamese in the West: The Actors and Attempts at Reconciliation,” Peace and Change 38, no. 4 (October 2013), 440.

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29 Hastings, Vietnam, 324, citing a Harris poll of 12 Feb. 1967. 30 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 546. 31 Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam and the Paris Agreement (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1975), 144. 32 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 284–5. 33 Air War, 183. 34 Air War, 159. 35 Ibid., 149. 36 Daniel R. Mahanty, Rahma A. Hussein, and Alex Moorehead, “The Department of Defense’s Report on Civilian Casualties: A Step Forward in Transparency?,” Just Security, June 13, 2018, www.justsecurity.org/57718/department-defenses-report-civilian-casua lties-step-transparency/. 37 William J. Astore, “The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War,” Tom Dispatch, June 4, 2019.

Bibliography Air War Study Group, Cornell University. Air War in Indochina, edited by Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Astore, William J. “The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War.” Tom Dispatch, June 4, 2019. Bui Diem with David Chanoff. In the Jaws of History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Hastings, Max. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945–75. London: William Collins, 2018. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Lewy, Guenther. The American War in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Lindquist, Sven. A History of Bombing. New York: New Press, 2001. Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mahanty, Daniel R., Rahma A. Hussein, and Alex Moorehead. “The Department of Defense’s Report on Civilian Casualties: A Step Forward in Transparency?” Just Security, June 13, 2018. www.justsecurity.org/57718/department-defenses-report-civilian-casualtiesstep-transparency/. Mausbach, Wilfried. “Forlorn Superpower: European Reactions to the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq.” In Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, edited by Lloyd C. Gardener and Marilyn B. Young. New York and London: New Press, 2007. Nguyen Ngoc Giao. “Overseas Vietnamese in the West: The Actors and Attempts at Reconciliation.” Peace and Change 38, no. 4 (Oct. 2013), 440. Porter, Gareth. A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam and the Paris Agreement. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1975. Quinn-Judge, Sophie. The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace, 1954– 75. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Schell, Jonathan. The Military Half. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Shoup, David M. “The New American Militarism.” Atlantic Monthly, April1969. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara. Directed by Errol Morris. Documentary, 2003. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. III, IV. Gravel Edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Turse, Nick. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014. Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

10 MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS, BLOOD, AND GALL Revolutionary utilization of the body in Khmer Rouge prisons Daniel Bultmann

Introduction Many of the violent practices carried out by the medical staff of Tuol Sleng prison (code-named S-21), and also in regional Khmer Rouge prisons, can be understood as a way of utilizing the bodies of inmates for the revolution.1 This utilization was shaped by both Western and local Khmer ontologies of the body. In loose reference to Philippe Descola’s (2014) concept of ontologies and Mary Douglas’s cultural theory of the body (2007), this paper uses the concept of “body ontologies” to describe cultural ideas about the “nature” of a body, how it is structured, how it functions, and what forces lie within it. Although a great deal has already been published about the operations of S-21, many details of how bodies were used there have remained obscure, as there are few surviving documents that give deeper insight into the work of the medical house on the security compound. Since the publication of David Chandler’s seminal book Voices from S-21, more information has surfaced on this topic, but it comes from unfortunately rather scattered sources – due to the erratic history of the preservation of Cambodian documents, and at times their active neglect. These sources include the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Archives, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and interviews conducted by the author with survivors, interrogators, and medics from S-21.2 While dreaming of the revitalization of the suppressed powers of the ancient Khmer race, the Khmer Rouge were also very keen to be self-reliant, modern, and scientific (Kiernan 2002). They strove to make effective use of all natural and human resources, to utilize every possible material for the advancement of the collective, the revolution, and its industrial development. Since private property had been abolished, absolutely everything belonged to the collective and had to

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serve the “Super-Great Leap Forward” into a highly developed, perfectly socialist order (Bultmann 2018). This paper describes the utilization of the bodies of prison inmates by medical staff, with a focus on S-21 prison but occasional references to the almost 200 other regional security and “reeducation” centers. It focuses on extreme forms of revolutionary bodily utilization that might explain certain particularly violent practices within the security compound of S-21, a compound whose total size only very recently became visible.3 The prison’s main purpose was to interrogate and torture high-ranking “traitors” (especially from the communist movement itself), thereby producing supposed confessions of treason that were then used as pretexts for mass executions. It comprised not only the four buildings that today host the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, but a much wider area over multiple blocks in all directions, including housing for, at its peak, around 1,700 members of staff, burial grounds, houses for political education, registration and documentation, production zones, interrogation houses, laundry facilities, and other services catering to the regime’s extensive security apparatus. There was also what was known as a medical house. And on its territorial margin, it even contained a space for a traditional healer (kru khmai) working with traditional medicines. However, despite heightened attention to S-21 through the criminal proceedings at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal against the head of the facility, Kaing Guek Eav, best known by the revolutionary alias “Duch,” many aspects of the prison, its operations, and its compound remain unclear. What we do know is that there was a medical staff that was responsible for treating prisoners, and likely staff as well. Their main job seems to have been to prevent the premature death of inmates, who could not be killed until they delivered full confessions that included a personal biography and extensive details of their supposed treason, as well as a list of co-conspirators, who could then be arrested. Medical treatment therefore did not serve their well-being, but the regime’s goal of obtaining more confessions. Interviews indicate that there were two groups of medics at the prison. “Special doctors took care of important or former senior leaders, such as secretaries of a region, and those who had serious wounds. They needed oxygen or special treatment, and things like that” (S-21 Medic 2019). A group of less experienced and poorly trained medics mainly assisted the senior ones and distributed pills to sick inmates. Although some more experienced doctors managed to adapt to the new regime, the senior medics, who had received medical training in pre-revolutionary times, were mostly killed early on in the Khmer Rouge’s rule, while the ill-trained medics conformed to the ideal of a Maoist “barefoot” doctor and increasingly took over as senior medics vanished. These “doctors” had limited education and were recruited from the poor peasantry at a young age. They received basic training, usually for a period of three months, where they learned the bare essentials of giving infusions or the administration of Western and self-made medications, plus some basic French (see also De Nike, Quigley, and Robinson 2000, 328). As a result of their limited training and the poor resources at hand, most treatments consisted of administering self-made remedies or saline solutions to treat open wounds (E1/56.1).

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Considered human “clay” that could easily be molded in line with socialist thinking, the juvenile staff were supposed to create a revolutionary and “unspoiled” class of medics combining Western medical knowledge with traditional methods as well as knowledge gathered through practice, or “learning by doing.” This approach created an eclectic mixture of French, Chinese, Khmer, and highly improvised medicine. While medications were initially collected from houses, small clinics, and hospitals after the takeover of Phnom Penh, medics at S-21 quickly ran out of Western drugs and began to replace them with improvised pills that were supposed to combine Western and traditional recipes and methods. These new drugs were produced by medics working in Phnom Penh; they had to be tested on humans, which is why they were given to prison inmates, utilizing them as guinea pigs for revolutionary medicine. The first section of this paper will introduce the theme of revolutionary utilization and provide an example: the drawing of inmates’ blood. The second section deals with various kinds of medical experiments on inmates: medicine testing, training surgeries, and human experiments. The third and last section deals with evidence for the use of human gallbladders taken from inmates of S21 and other regional prisons.

Inmates as blood banks for the revolution A central pillar of the party’s policies in all socio-economic fields was the effective utilization of resources. This affected operations at S-21 and its treatment of prisoners. While prisoners in regional centers also had to do physical labor to reform their minds (sometimes even being freed after rectification), prisoners at S-21 did not work for the revolution (Ea 2005). Only a handful of inmates were utilized, as painters or sculptors to produce propaganda materials for the party (Huy 2009; Nath 1998). But no inmate worked on irrigation dams or in rice fields. This was likely due to the importance of the prisoners, who were drawn from the higher ranks of the party, and leaders’ belief that their heavily deluded minds could not be “reformed” through physical labor. It might also have been due to security considerations. Nonetheless, the ideal of effective utilization permeated all practices on the compound. The clothes of incoming prisoners, for instance, were taken away and redistributed for other uses, leaving prisoners in underwear only (Cruvellier 2011, 20). Prison personnel also had to contribute to the production goal of three tons per hectare and produce food for their own consumption. At the same time, the leadership made clear that it was not enough to produce goods, but that “utilities” also needed to be conserved: “1. We contribute to the growing of different kinds of vegetables [and] raising animals … 2. Besides this, we contribute to the conservation of utilities, such as water, electricity, housing, and community assets” (D00395). According to one interrogator, staff even had to work in the rice fields for two hours a day (S-21 Interrogator 2019). The prison staff also had to economize with their resources. The leadership demanded that they save paper when writing up confessions (D16976) and constantly complained over slow and ineffective work: “Making three documents in

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ten days. Slow because of habit” (E3/833, 11). Inefficiency was seen as a sign of bad revolutionary habits and could be risky for the staff, many of whom ended up as prisoners themselves due to “mistakes” committed at work. Many of these so-called bad habits were seen as leftovers of capitalist, individualist, and exploitative thinking. Therefore, even thoughts and basic reasoning had to be reformed. An interrogator called Chan, for instance, noted that complex thinking was a bad habit that had to be eradicated to speed up work performance: “Don’t be complex – complicated. If this exists, eliminate it in time. Complexity → slow work” (E3/833, 9). These notions of efficiency and utilization of resources also affected the bodies of the inmates in a very literal sense: The excrement of the prisoners and the staff were collected and used as fertilizer (Chandler 1999, 30). The collection of bodily fluids at S-21 was part of the party’s efforts to fulfill its Four-Year Plan, which called for the leadership to make better use of excrement as well as urine: [On the problem of fertilizer:] The possibility of using human urine hasn’t been exhausted either. Urine has yet to be collected. We collect thirty percent. That leaves a surplus of seventy percent. There’s also the urine of cows and buffaloes. We could make enclosures for them and at night they could urinate into troughs and we could gather the urine. In this way we could fulfill the 1977 plan. (Himel 2007, 47) Production goals of three tons per hectare were failing, and the party was trying to make its plan more realistic, while on the other hand accusing “enemies of the people” of sabotaging the economy and harvests in particular. Besides collecting excrement, urine, and confessions, the medical section of the apparatus also made direct use of the bodies of the inmates. Although much of their work remains obscure, the taking of blood from prisoners is one of the better-known practices. Every time blood reserves at one of the main hospitals in the capital Phnom Penh (Hospital 98 or Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital) ran low, inmates of S-21 were taken to a medical office nearby for bloodletting to provide transfusions. Victims were brought to the medical house blindfolded and had to lie down on their backs to be shackled to a bed. Due to a lack of screening for diseases, “Khmer Rouge soldiers who received transfusions often developed skin rashes as a result” (Vilim 2010, 30). Testimony that blood bags were left lying around indicate that the blood intended for transfusions was far from properly taken care of. However, it remains unclear how many inmates went through the procedure and how many died as a direct result of it. While Duch testified that approximately 100 died, another witness claimed that “no fewer than a thousand persons were killed in this manner, indicating that this occurred to 20 to 30 prisoners, every four or five days”; he went on to say that four to five bags would be extracted from each person, leaving them “unconscious and gasping” (E1/5.1, 57). A prisoner list from S-21 carries a dozen entries with a note near the names of certain inmates: “take blood” (yok chheam) (E3/38).

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It seems very likely that all prisoners whose blood was drawn died as a result. The S-21 medic Mak Sithim testified that he treated prisoners whose blood was drawn, indicating that they might have survived the procedure: “The prisoners whose blood had been drawn were pale. I saw about 30 to 40 prisoners whose blood had been drawn” (E3/484, 4). But other witness accounts make it very clear that survival after four to five bags of blood were drawn was highly unlikely. Or as the interrogator Prak Khan said in Rithy Panh’s movie S-21: Killing Machine, “There was nothing [no blood] left. Once the blood was taken, they were left against the wall. They breathed like crickets, their eyes bunched” (E1/53.1, 17). This is confirmed by Suor Thi, the cadre who was responsible for keeping lists of prisoners, who said that all who had blood drawn later died. “I checked those names off my list and that was the end of it,” he said (Cruvellier 2011, 26). The fact that witnesses saw bags of blood “lying around” in the humid temperatures (S-21 Medic 2019, E3/484) makes it unlikely that the blood was properly taken care of or could be used to medical effect.

Medical and human experiments Twenty years ago, David Chandler already had reason to believe that there was more medical experimentation going on at S-21 than we know. The nature of these practices and their likely legal implications would make cover-ups unsurprising. “Elsewhere in the country,” Chandler wrote, “fatal surgery was sometimes carried out on anaesthetized prisoners to teach anatomy to medical cadres. It is possible that experiments of this kind were also conducted on prisoners at S-21 and hardly surprising if the records have not survived” (Chandler 1999, 32). Besides potential cover-ups by S-21 staff, many documents might still be in archives of the Cambodian as well as Vietnamese government, their officials, and even in those of private persons. Duch’s tactic at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, after overwhelming evidence was presented to him, was to admit to the existence of medical experimentation at S-21, but always just as much as had been established by the prosecution already – and to claim that it happened only a few times and that he tried to limit its occurrence. In one case, a note near a prisoner’s name on a list clearly reads, “human experiment” (pisaot menuh). The victim was Ten Sakhoeun, a “dweller in Prasot District, wife of Neang Him” (E3/1671). It is clear that other inmates were also used to train doctors and to learn more about human anatomy: The first type of medical experimentation – surgery on living and dead prisoners – was conducted to study human anatomy and to train new Khmer Rouge medics on operation techniques. Duch testified that anatomy studies were conducted on live prisoners or on prisoners killed specifically for experimental surgery because they were better test subjects than those who had died “naturally” from torture or disease in the detention center. (Vilim 2010, 29)

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However, while talking about the case of medical experimentation with the wife of the prisoner mentioned on the list, Duch tried to give the impression that it happened only rarely, if not just once. He also said he took care that it was done on “unimportant” prisoners: “Nat was advised and admonished by Son Sen that he should not have taken an important person like her to go through a medical experiment and that he should take a normal person’s wife instead” (E1/438.1, 95). It is also clear that some of the surgeries conducted on living or dead inmates was for surgical study, to gather knowledge about the human body. This practice is mentioned in several witness accounts and was already discussed in testimony at the Vietnamese-backed tribunal staged by the government that ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979, indicating its widespread nature: A group of surgeons named Lay, Pei, and Sen were supposed to conduct a study on the healing of tissue and to do it on a live being. A laparotomy was made: a section of small intestine was cut off and the ends joined. A compress was squeezed in to cover the wound. Every day the “researchers” came to study the process of healing of the intestine by looking through the gaping wound of the abdomen. The condition of the “human guinea pig” got worse daily, and he died after three days. Another group of “physicians” made an anatomical and physiological study of the heart. Procedure: a patient was anesthetized, and they made a large incision at the third intercostal space on the right side and then stretched the opening of the wound. Then they began to inspect the wound. The poor patient died immediately. (De Nike, Quigley, and Robinson 2000, 329) The same seems to have happened with inmates at S-21. A former medic reports that he assisted on surgeries in which the main purpose was gathering knowledge about the functioning of human intestines – or rather, how they reacted to a certain “treatment”: Do you remember such a surgery scene? Yes, [in one case] they removed the innards from a human body and cleaned them before putting them back inside. Q: Why did they take it out? […] A: They wanted to find out how the human’s insides function. I felt nervous and afraid because the surgeons were very young, only seventeen years old, and still they were allowed to do that.(S-21 Medic 2019) Q: A:

Not all experiments were carried out for the purpose of anatomy studies or the advancement of medical knowledge. In one case, several inmates, living and dead, were cut open or killed in various ways to find out how long a body in water would take to float back to the surface. Duch described the reasons for that experiment as follows:

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Son Sen told me that Uncle Nuon instructed me to conduct an investigation on that body, and that Angkar could provide me with all kinds of support I needed in order to find out what actually happened. And I went to examine the dead body. It was Comrade Tat who brought the dead body to me for examination. The abdomen of the dead body was cut open and sewn with a two-millimeter-thick wire. However, the wire broke due to the weight of the dead body. Then I ordered to have a piece of the shirt cut from it so that I could attach it to my report to the upper echelon. And I had to find out from which direction the body floated. After I made a report to the upper echelon, I was instructed to investigate the case further. … So at that time, at least two dead bodies were used for such purpose in order to conduct the investigation so that I could make an accurate report to the upper echelon, and I concluded that the dead body was not that of a worker, as Son Sen said. I made my conclusion that it could be a dead body of a prisoner from Preaek Pou. That document did exist at the Central Office. And that’s what happened with the floating body, and then I conducted the investigation into the matter and then, of course, I had to find out how many days it took for a dead body to float after it was dumped in the water. (E1/439.1, 8–9) These explanations of what happened do not fit well with a description of the experiment in an undated Khmer Rouge notebook found on the S-21 compound, in a house just across a street from the prison itself. Using rather crude language, this anonymous notebook describes experimentation on men and women of different ages, and it lists various different kinds of usually deadly wounds inflicted on the inmates that do not correspond with Duch’s descriptions of the dead body that he claims he saw: 1. 2. 3. 4.

A big woman, stabbed in the throat, her stomach slashed and taken out. Put in water at 9.34 p.m., the body rises to the top at 2.27 a.m. As above, but simply slash the stomach. The same happens again. A young male bashed to death, put in water from 7.55 p.m. to 2.40 p.m., when it rises to the top … Four young girls stabbed in the throat and their stomachs slashed, put in water at 7.55 p.m., rise the next day at 8 p.m. (Pisaot Menuh, translation by Ben Kiernan; see also Kiernan 1999)

The regime was keen to develop “revolutionary” medicines that mixed Western with traditional recipes. There are dozens of medical notebooks, some also directly from S-21, many referring to the effects and areas of use of Western drugs such as penicillin, insulin, progesterone (e.g., D21512). However, since the Khmer Rouge were keen to become self-reliant in all spheres, and since the regime was increasingly running out of Western medicines, notebooks show how they also tried to replicate them through mixing local products such as herbs, fruits, honey, or animal

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intestines (e.g., D21830). Then these new remedies needed to be tested on humans. Prison inmates were used for this purpose, although one might argue that the whole populace served as unwilling guinea pigs for revolutionary medicine. All, for instance, mainly received a drug that was dubbed “rabbit shit pellets,” in reference to its appearance rather than its composition. These tablets were also what most of the inmates in S-21 received from the barefoot doctors when they were sick. Most of them were happy to have at least something to eat. Rabbit dropping tablets consisted of herbs, roots, and other natural ingredients that had previously been boiled and were then drunk, “but the bureaucratization of the traditional medicine meant that they were transformed into Western-styled pills and swallowed, which meant a reduction in its curative functions” (Ovesen and Trankell 2010, 91). With regard to human trials to test self-made pills, Duch again tried to claim that he tried to limit potentially harmful effects on the inmates, especially if he knew that the pills would be dangerous: For the third case [of medical experimentation], the medicine which was prepared, normally they would use to experiment on the prisoners because if they used the experiment – if they used the drugs on themselves – that would not be the method, but they used the newly composed medicine to trial on the prisoners. The fourth case, Uncle Nuon [Chea] gave me some medicine to use and test on the prisoners, although I was sure that the powder was used in exchange of the paracetamol, but anyway it was used to test on the prisoners, although the medicine was not poisonous – but the prisoners knew that the medicine was an experimental one. (E1/33.1, 82–83)

Gallbladders for traditional medication The aim of producing a self-reliant medical system led to the utilization of gallbladder liquids to create pills. There is an extensive literature on the eating of human livers during both the Lon Nol regime and the Khmer Rouge period (Hinton 1998b, 289–296). The practice of eating livers seems to have been slightly different from the extraction of gallbladders or bile for medical purposes, although Alex Hinton (1998a) believes that both body parts were part of a cultural belief according to which consumption makes people incorporate the victim’s strength, bravery, and ability to act cruelly. It was also believed that an overdose of bile could lead to madness. However, in many reports from the Khmer Rouge era, it is not clear whether the witness was aware of the difference between gallbladders and livers. What is clear is that bile had a medical function and a long history of being used in traditional medicine. Forty-four different types of animal gallbladder have been used for centuries in Southeast Asian traditional medicine, probably brought to the region by the Chinese. Chinese medicine made use of dog, ox, and common carp gallbladders starting in the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC) to cure a host of maladies, such as liver, biliary, skin, gynecological, and heart diseases (Wang

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and Carey 2014). The extradition of human gallbladders in Cambodia, in turn, seems to be a known practice dating back as far as the Angkor period when a Chinese visitor’s report mentions gallbladder “harvests” as tributes to the Chinese emperor (Daguan 2007, 79–80). While the consumption of the human liver is strongly associated with the incorporation of the victim’s strength and the acquisition of greater bravery (or cruelty), gallbladder fluids seem to have had a place in the Khmer Rouge’s efforts to create a self-reliant medical system. The consumption of human livers was not a centrally planned practice, and hence was far less widespread, although numerous accounts can be found. However, it is still unclear how widespread the policy of taking human gallbladders from inmates for creating medicine actually was. Initial indications can be found in testimonies from the August 1979 Vietnamese-sponsored Phnom Penh trial in absentia of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary: Another group made a comparative study of the gallbladders of the living and the dead. A man was tied to a stake and a large front-to-back incision was made on his body, beginning from the region of the appendix and ending in the right paravertebral area on the back, following the right edge of the rib cage. Then the two sides of the incision were stretched open. Don’t forget that the poor “human guinea pig” was howling in pain with eyes wide open, struggling desperately to get out of the tight ropes that held him to the stake. The surgeon thrust his left hand into the abdominal cavity, groping while smiling and shaking his head. Then he held scissors in his right hand and cut abruptly. The poor victim no longer yelled as he was no longer able to speak. The “surgeon” pulled out the gallbladder and compared it with a gallbladder from a corpse. (De Nike, Quigley, and Robinson 2000, 329) The removal of human gallbladders is the clearest case in which traditional ontologies of the body and its functions were drawn upon in a regular practice to utilize bodily resources. But a note of caution: for many, if not most, cases of violence and torture under the Khmer Rouge, one has to keep in mind that most practices were reported by few witnesses. Although testimony from the Vietnamese-backed 1979 tribunal can be a useful source, individual accounts from that court of gruesome practices under the Khmer Rouge should be treated with great care in view of Cold War politics. In many cases, there are fewer established facts with regard to Khmer Rouge prison practices than one might expect, and many people draw their conclusions from a very limited pool of documents and interviewees (Bultmann forthcoming). That being said, one can find reports of gallbladders being removed from executed prison inmates, and it seems that these were sent to hospitals for further use in the production of medicines. Laura Vilim even states that in some instances Khmer Rouge soldiers cut open bellies of living humans to extract their gallbladders. Medical cadres were able to distinguish between gallbladders from

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healthy persons, which were full of fluid, and those from unhealthy individuals, which were not. The “healthy” gallbladders were sent to nearby hospitals, where their fluids were mixed with flour and a variety of plants to make a version of rabbit pellet medicine. (Vilim 2010, 27) Evidence for this comes from interviews with medical staff at hospitals (Em 2002a, b). This was also confirmed in interviews conducted by the author. In one, the respondent, a former prisoner in a security center in Siem Reap, had to help soldiers carry the dead bodies or dying prisoners from a killing site to a mass grave. When they called him, he could see that they had cut out the gallbladders of the victims (although, rather impractically, from the back – in such cases it was probably the liver that was extracted). They were often still breathing when he dumped them in the grave (Prisoner 2019). There is even a report by a former interrogator from S-21, who claims that, within the wider area of the security compound, there was a traditional healer in charge of making traditional medicines who also used sundried gallbladders: And traditional medicine? Did they have Khmer traditional healers? Yes, they did. The medicine was made of honey and [looked like] rabbit shit. Q: Did they also use the human innards for that? A: [Yes], for making medicine. I saw they dried the innards, but I do not know where they came from. Q: That was inside the prison? A: No, I had never seen it inside the prison, but I saw the sundried galls outside. Q: Near the prison? They dried them or what? A: No, [to be clear] I didn’t see how they actually dried them. But I saw they were rubbing sundried galls with rice water before letting the patients drink it. Q: The healer’s house was nearby? A: The house was near Moha Montrey pagoda. Q: Is it considered inside the prison compound? A: Yes, it is. Q: When did they drink it? A: Mostly when they had a fever.(S-21 Interrogator 2019) Q: A:

The aforementioned notebook on traditional – or made-up – medicine contains recipes using a plant whose name in Khmer translates – confusingly, even for many Cambodians – as “human gall plant” (D21830). But it also contains a recipe that has “dried human gallbladder” as an ingredient, and a supposed replicate of penicillin that contains something literally translated as “gall abdomen bone gall” (bramoat poah tschöng bramoat). However, this notebook, belonging to a naval cadre, contains numerous recipes with “human gall plant” as an ingredient, so it might be that the author of the notebook just forgot to add the word for “plant” (daöm).4

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In addition, there is further but scattered evidence of procedures to extract organs of inmates within S-21 prison. Pictures currently at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, for instance, show dead bodies with the torso cut open at the front. An incision like this might stem from anatomy studies on dead or dying inmates. However, the origin of these pictures, which also appear in Vietnamese video footage from 1979, remains unclear. A former student at Tuol Sleng school remembers that she saw “fresh human gallbladders [hanging] in clusters on the bed” when returning to the site after the collapse of the regime (Interview with Yin Raksa). But this visit seems to have been as late as 1980, which calls into question the “freshness” of any galls she could have seen. An early employee at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum also mentions that she saw green liquids in a house on the compound (probably the eastern building), prompting her to ask Mai Lam, the first Vietnamese director in charge of setting up the museum, what it was. He told her that it was gall liquid (Interview with Pen En).

Conclusion All this information calls for further research, although it is difficult to contend with the fragmented nature of available sources. In all the territory under their control, including prisons and security centers, the Khmer Rouge utilized as much material as possible for the revolution. They collected clothes for redistribution. They made people work until exhaustion, for punishment or “reeducation.” They collected excrement and urine as fertilizer. They economized on resources such as paper, electricity, and other utilities. And they also made use of the bodies of inmates as a source of blood and bile for traditional medicines, and as a resource for medical experimentation. However, we still know only the sketchiest facts about what happened in the “medical house” of S-21. Further archival research is necessary to change that, but it is possible that serious efforts were made to cover up information on how the bodies of prisoners were used, or that the purges at the very end of the prison’s existence are responsible for the silence. The S-21 medic, after all, emphasized that all the prison’s senior medics “were sent to their deaths before the end of the regime” (S-21 Medic 2019). Yet, although the full picture will likely remain blurry, we should understand the Khmer Rouge’s medical policies as an attempt to be self-reliant as much as efficient or even “modern,” while also rooted in traditional ontologies. This also exemplifies how the regime made use of practices that – in traditional ontologies – are associated with a continuum of the civil and the wild to construct a powerful revolutionary society (cf. Zucker 2013, 114–32). Most importantly, we should remember that general Khmer Rouge violence, certainly within the prison system, was informed by traditional and modernist ontologies in a systematic and at the same time improvised way: systematic as medical practices had been in many regards centrally planned, resulted in institutionalized patterns and occurred in a similar vein not only at S-21 but across the country (e.g., shipping blood and gall liquids of inmates to hospitals, using inmates for

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medical experiments to train barefoot doctors or to create “revolutionary” and “practical” knowledge unspoiled by capitalist thinking, or using inmates as guinea pigs for pills on orders from upper levels); improvised as it, on the one hand, comprised practices, in which resources were collected ad hoc to utilize them to meet central planning demands (e.g., collecting excrement and urine of inmates and staff as fertilizers to fulfill the three tons per hectare plan). And, on the other hand, medical practices had been improvised as directives remained – like in other areas of central planning – rather vague and therefore demanded high levels of interpretation and agency to turn them into concrete local, institutionalized, and in this case, oftentimes ineffective systems. The peculiar interplay between systematic and ad hoc characteristics of S-21 medical practices becomes visible when demands of the party center to make systematic use of resources (to extract blood or gallbladder liquids, and to test remedies) are met by improvised attempts of their cadres to meet the demands, even though they neither have the necessary equipment nor the expertise at their disposal to fulfill the plan. The result, for instance, is blood bags lying around in humid temperatures instead of having an uninterrupted cold chain (but still blood bags to meet the demands). This combination of systematic policy and at times ad hoc practices pertained (or are evident) throughout the DK prison system.

Notes 1 This paper is the product of a comparative research project at the University of Siegen, Germany, about body knowledge and torture practices, under the supervision and leadership of Prof. Dr. Katharina Inhetveen, funded by the German Research Foundation. The theoretical framework and research design of this paper is in many regards the result of this collaborative work and discussions, with additional members of the research project working on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (Max Breger) as well as Chile and Argentina (Christina Schütz). 2 I am deeply thankful for the support provided by Ben Kiernan, David Simon, and Eve Zucker at the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, hosting me as a Visiting Fellow for three months to study the archive (including Ben Kiernan’s personal collection) and engaging in fruitful discussions about torture and violence under the Khmer Rouge, among other topics. I would also like to thank Youk Chhang and Ros Sampeou at DCCam, the team at the Legal Documentation Center of the ECCC, Kosal Path from Brooklyn College, Barbara Thimm, Hang Nisay, and Song Pheaktra at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Archive, Christoph Bendick for his medical expertise and knowledge on the medical practices and facilities at S-21, Craig Etcheson for his comments, and Kim Hour Seng and Ratanak Khun for assisting me with documents and in the field. 3 Especially through the efforts of Anne-Laure Porée (2017) as well as reconstruction work by the tribunal (see the areal map E1/474.5). 4 The notebook is catalogued as coming from Tuol Sleng, but it is more likely to have been taken from a naval medical cadre who was imprisoned there, explaining why it was found on the compound.

References Bultmann, Daniel. 2018. Kambodscha unter den Roten Khmer: Die Erschaffung des perfekten Sozialisten. Paderborn: Schöningh.

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Bultmann, Daniel. forthcoming. “Evidence and Expert Authority via Symbolic Violence: A Critique of Current Knowledge Production on Perpetrators.” Journal of Perpetrator Research. Chandler, David P. 1999. Voices from S-21. Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cruvellier, Thierry. 2011. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Daguan, Zhou. 2007. A Record of Cambodia. The Land and its People. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. De Nike, Howard J., John Quigley, and Kenneth J. Robinson, eds. 2000. Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Descola, Philippe. 2014. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 2007. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge. Ea, Meng-Try. 2005. The Chain of Terror: The Khmer Rouge Southwest Zone Security System. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Em, Sokhym. 2002a. “Rabbit Dropping Medicine.” Searching for the Truth 30, 22–23. Em, Sokhym. 2002b. “Revolutionary Female Medical Staff in Tram Kak District.” Searching for the Truth 34, 24–27. Himel, Jeffrey. 2007. Khmer Rouge Irrigation Development in Cambodia. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Hinton, Alexander Laban. 1998a. Genocidal Bricolage, Working Paper 06, Genocide Studies Program, New Haven, CT: Yale University. Hinton, Alexander Laban. 1998b. “Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor.” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1: 93–122. doi:10.2307/ 2659025. Huy, Vannak. 2009. Bou Meng: A Survivor from the Khmer Rouge Prison S-21, Justice for the Future not just for the Victims. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Kiernan, Ben. 1999. “Notes from a Slaughterhouse.” Bangkok Post, May 30. Kiernan, Ben. 2002. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nath, Vann. 1998. A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21. Bangkok: White Lotus Press. Ovesen, Jan, and Ing-Britt Trankell. 2010. Cambodians and their Doctors: A Medical Anthropology of Colonial and Postcolonial Cambodia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Porée, Anne-Laure. 2017. “Tuol Sleng, l’histoire inachevée d’un musée mémoire.” Moussons 30, no. 2: 151–181. Vilim, Laura. 2010. “Keeping Them Alive, One Gets Nothing; Killing Them, One Loses Nothing”: Prosecuting Khmer Rouge Medical Practices as Crimes against Humanity. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Wang, David Q-H., and Martin C. Carey. 2014. “Therapeutic Uses of Animal Biles in Traditional Chinese Medicine: An Ethnopharmacological, Biophysical Chemical and Medicinal Review.” World Journal of Gastroenterology 20, no. 29: 9952–9975. Zucker, Eve. 2013. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Sterling Library, Yale University D00395. Examine old work in interrogation. D16976. A Khieu Samphan’s letter sent to Duch, chief of office S-21 and the office S-21’s circular.

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Documentation Center of Cambodia D21512. Untitled document. D21830. Minute book of comrade Seng on old medicine for treating general diseases.

Legal Documentation Center, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia E1/5.1. Transcript of Proceedings “Duch” Trial, 30 March 2009, EN00301476. E1/33.1. Transcript of Trial Proceedings – Kaing Guek Eav “Duch,” 16 June 2009, EN00341955. E1/53.1. Transcript of Trial Proceedings – Kaing Guek Eav “Duch,” EN00355961. E1/56.1. Transcript of Proceedings “DUCH” Trial – 03 August 2009, EN00358849. E1/438.1. Transcript of Trial Proceedings – Case File 002, 15 June 2016. E1/439.1. Transcript of Trial Proceedings, 16 June 2016, EN01336311. E1/474.5. Annex A: S-21 Security Center – Phnom Penh, EN00210940. E3/38. S-21 Prisoner List (1975–1978), EN00171429. E3/484. Written Record of Interview of Witness: Mak Sithim, EN401868–401874. E3/833. The Chan notebook, EN00184579. E3/1671. List of female prisoners – unoffical partial translation by Bunsou Sour, OCP 14 March 2008, EN00181789.

Additional Sources and Interviews Interview with Pen En. Source: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, copy provided by Barbara Thimm and Hang Nisay. Interview with Yin Raksa. Source: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, copy provided by Barbara Thimm. Pisaot Menuh. Copy and translation provided by Ben Kiernan. Prisoner. 2019. Interview with a former prisoner of a security center in Siem Reap, 7 April 2019, Siem Reap. S-21 Interrogator. 2019. Interview with Former S-21 Interrogator, March 30, Kandal province, Cambodia. S-21 Medic. 2019. Interview with Former S-21 Medical Staff, April 12, Kandal province, Cambodia.

PART 5

Justice, Ethics, and History

11 ASSESSING GENOCIDAL INTENT IN THE CONTEXT OF MYANMAR’S ROHINGYA Katherine E. Munyan1

State-sanctioned persecution has been a fact of life for the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, since the 1970s. This persecution has at times taken the form of oppressive laws and policies denying the Rohingya citizenship and restricting marriages, births, and other aspects of life. At other times, it has taken the form of large-scale campaigns of violence. Two recent outbreaks of severe violence against the Rohingya, one in 2012 and one in 2017, have each prompted widespread discussion of whether – and, if so, when – the longstanding persecution has developed into genocide. As defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”), the crime of genocide requires proof of three elements: the existence of a “protected” group, the commission of one or more prohibited acts against the group, and the intent to destroy the group in whole or in part.2 There is no reasonable dispute that the Rohingya, who speak their own language, share a common religion, have a distinctive history in Myanmar, and both self-identify as a group and are perceived as one by others,3 are protected under the Genocide Convention as a group constituted on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.4 And the Rohingya have been victims of four of the five acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.5 Accordingly, the question of whether genocide is being committed or has been committed against the Rohingya depends entirely on analysis of the Genocide Convention’s intent requirement. Intent is the critical constitutive element of the crime of genocide. It connects the other two elements of the crime, and it distinguishes genocide, sometimes referred to as the “crime of crimes,”6 from war crimes and crimes against humanity involving the same prohibited acts.7 The word

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“intent” itself was a compromise; the drafters of the Genocide Convention extensively debated what showing of mental state should be required for the crime of genocide.8 And intent remains contested today, both in terms of how the requirement should be interpreted9 and how it should be applied to specific cases,10 given that intent, as a mental state, is necessarily a highly contextualized determination made largely on the basis of inferences. While the Rohingya have experienced acts potentially prohibited under the Genocide Convention for decades, views on whether those acts have been committed with the requisite genocidal intent have evolved rapidly in the past few years. In 2010, the mainstream view – to the extent that the question was under sufficient consideration to describe any view as “mainstream” – was that persecution of the Rohingya had not reached a level at which an assessment of whether it constituted genocide would be warranted.11 In 2018, an independent fact-finding mission established by the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a damning report concluding that any inference other than genocidal intent was unreasonable, and recommended referral of high-ranking Myanmar military members to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution for genocide.12 This chapter will briefly survey how understandings of whether genocide was occurring in Myanmar evolved, focusing on the changes in evaluation of genocidal intent and what those changes suggest about how non-judicial institutions approach genocide assessments. As a preliminary note, there is a certain awkwardness inherent in applying the terms of the Genocide Convention to the broad question of whether genocide is occurring in a specific place – an awkwardness not unrelated to the difficulties non-judicial institutions face in making initial assessments of genocide. The Genocide Convention, although providing for broad state liability, is primarily concerned with individual criminal liability, and the case law interpreting it primarily does so with respect to its application to individuals.13 This chapter, however, like the analyses it discusses, will consider genocidal intent with a view toward whether there is evidence generally of such an intent, rather than whether any specific individuals could be said to possess it.

The intent requirement Establishing liability for genocide requires proof of two separate mental elements, sometimes distinguished as “general” and “specific” intent. General intent, a concept common in criminal law, means merely that the prohibited act must be committed consciously, intentionally, or with volition – in other words, that the conduct was not accidental or inadvertent.14 The specific intent element unique to the crime of genocide is the requirement that the prohibited act be carried out with the “intent to destroy the group in whole or part.”15 Accordingly, genocide has sometimes been called a “goal-oriented” crime because it entails a perpetrator performing the prohibited act with an intent or purpose that goes beyond completion of the act itself.16

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What does it mean to intend to destroy a group in whole or part? There is widespread consensus that the word “destroy” refers to physical destruction. Early drafts of the Genocide Convention included a concept of cultural genocide, in which the relevant intent could be to destroy the language, religion, or culture of a group. But the drafting commission was clear as to the final version that “the destruction in question is the material destruction of a group either by physical or by biological means, not the destruction of the national, linguistic, religious, cultural or other identity of a particular group.”17 Physical destruction, however, is not a monolithic concept. The variety of prohibited acts – two of which, imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction and imposing measures intended to prevent births, do not even require use of physical violence – demonstrate that material destruction need not be accomplished through mass killings or exterminations, but may be pursued through gradual, even facially nonviolent, measures. The intended meaning of the phrase “in whole or part” is less clear. The Convention’s preparatory work is far from definitive as to the drafters’ understanding of this phrase, and different courts and ratifying countries have issued varying interpretations.18 There is general consensus that “genocide may be found to have been committed where the intent is to destroy the group within a geographically limited area,” in other words, that the perpetrator’s intent may be assessed against the population of the group within its geographic area of control, as opposed to the global population.19 But debate continues over how much of a quantitative requirement is embedded in the phrase, whether a “part” need be a “substantial” part, and, if so, what qualifies as substantial.20 Genocide expert William Schabas has cautioned against letting this uncertainty distract from the fact that the phrase is a component of establishing intent, not a modification of the act requirement. Therefore, given that intent is typically deduced from the material acts, the major practical significance of any quantitative analysis is that “[w]here genocide involves the destruction of a large number of members of a group, the logical deduction will be more obvious.”21 Finally, the fundamental question in interpreting the intent requirement: what does it mean to possess an intent – and, more to the point, what qualifies as evidence of intent? As a threshold matter, intent is not synonymous with motive, or “the particular reason that may induce a person to engage in criminal conduct.”22 As the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur explained: [I]n the case of genocide a person intending to murder a set of persons belonging to a protected group, with the specific intent of destroying the group (in whole or in part), may be motivated, for example, by the desire to appropriate the goods belonging to that group or set of persons, or by the urge to take revenge for prior attacks by members of that group, or by the desire to please his superiors who despise that group. From the viewpoint of criminal law, what matters is not the motive, but rather whether or not there exists the requisite special intent to destroy a group.23

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Numerous courts have similarly affirmed that motive is irrelevant to the question of intent, as a perpetrator may be motivated by any number of goals while still acting with the intent to destroy a group.24 Courts have also found the question of intent to be distinct from the question of whether a plan or policy existed, although the case law makes this distinction appear somewhat theoretical. Evidence of a plan or policy has been prioritized since the first genocide prosecution: Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was convicted of genocide only for acts committed after implementation of the “Final Solution,” and the court that convicted him expressed doubt as to whether Eichmann possessed genocidal intent before that date.25 Some early courts discussed the existence of a plan as if it was an element of genocide,26 but both International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (“ICTR”) chambers have subsequently affirmed that “the existence of a plan or policy is not a legal element of the crime”27 – while also noting that “in the context of proving specific intent, the existence of a plan or policy may become an important factor in most cases.”28 That said, recognizing that “explicit manifestations of criminal intent are, for obvious reasons, often rare,” courts do not require that any plan or policy be written or otherwise recorded.29 A plan is typically inferred from circumstances upon a finding that the evidence “is consistent with the existence of a plan or policy.”30 As a mental element, intent generally is “not usually susceptible to direct proof” and “thus must usually be inferred.”31 Courts have found a number of facts and circumstances relevant to inferring intent: the scale of atrocities; the systematic nature and degree of planning of attacks; the repetition of destructive acts; the use of violence excessive to an objective other than destroying the group; targeting all members of the group without distinction; a history of other forms of discrimination or persecution against group members; the use of derogatory language or issuance of propaganda against the group; attacks on cultural or religious property associated with the group; attempts to bar humanitarian access to the group; attempts to cover up crimes; and grants of immunity to perpetrators.32 As this list makes clear, assessment of genocidal intent is a widereaching analysis that considers not only the commission and immediate context of the potentially genocidal acts, but also the histories of the targeted group and the perpetrators, the subsequent consequences for the group, and the subsequent behavior of the perpetrators. In sum, there is no clear-cut test for intent. Intent is a highly contextualized assessment that must be made on a case-by-case basis. As the application of this analysis to the Rohingya suggests, this approach has both benefits and costs. It allows for full consideration of the circumstances as they exist, rather than constructing an artificially limited concept of relevance for mere analytic convenience. But it also makes persistent uncertainty about when events can be reasonably assessed as genocide endemic to the analysis.

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Applying the intent requirement to Myanmar The Rohingya’s history under Myanmar’s military government is one of legalized oppression punctuated by outbreaks of extreme violence. The current military regime took power in a coup in 1962, 14 years after the country’s independence from Great Britain. In 1978, it launched Operation Naga Min, or “Dragon King,” targeting persons deemed to be illegal immigrants rather than true citizens.33 The operation rapidly became an exercise in extreme military brutality: Rohingya, who the government claimed were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, were murdered, tortured, and raped, and Rohingya homes and mosques were destroyed.34 More than 200,000 Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, only to be forcibly repatriated after Bangladesh and Myanmar reached a bilateral deal – and Bangladesh reduced food rations in refugee camps to starve the refugees back.35 In 1982, a new citizenship law legally entrenched discrimination against the Rohingya by reserving full citizenship for those belonging to one of the roughly 130 ethnic groups identified in a 1948 law as “indigenous” to Myanmar. The Rohingya were not included. Therefore, the 1982 law, which is still in effect today, provides only limited grounds for Rohingya to apply for any form of state recognition, given that these processes require a high standard of proof that most Rohingya are unable to meet. Accordingly, the majority of Rohingya have lost their citizenship and its accompanying protections.36 Discriminatory laws rapidly followed the citizenship act, imposing restrictions on movement, marriage, childbearing, health care, employment, and education for Rohingya.37 The Rohingya’s status as a stateless population validated further discrimination and persecution by the state and its citizens.38 Intermittent waves of large-scale violence continued. Some 250,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992 because of abuses perpetrated by Myanmar’s security forces, including forced labor, land confiscations, killings, torture, and rape.39 In 2001 and 2002, large-scale violence broke out again, with mobs of local Rakhine Buddhists destroying mosques and killing unknown numbers of Rohingya.40 Government security forces present did not intervene to protect the Rohingya.41 A long history of persecution with intermittent outbreaks of extreme violence is not unique to the Rohingya, or at odds with a finding of genocide.42 Unsurprisingly, some Rohingya groups have argued since the 1990s that genocide was occurring in Myanmar.43 In one of the first extensive analyses of the application of the Genocide Convention to the Rohingya, Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley argued in 2014 that a “slow-burning genocide” had been ongoing over the course of 35 years.44 However, a 2010 report by William Schabas and his colleagues at the Irish Centre for Human Rights is more representative of the mainstream view of the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the Rohingya up until that time.45 Adopting a crimes against humanity framework to examine the abuses against the Rohingya, the authors considered it “not useful at this stage” to pursue a full genocide assessment, reasoning that, while “a simplistic analysis of the factual findings” might allow for an argument that genocide was occurring, such an

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analysis would “necessarily [depend] on an expansive approach to the definition of genocide” that the authors considered foreclosed by the recent “unwillingness of international tribunals and other bodies to interpret the scope of genocide as going beyond the intentional physical destruction of the group.”46 In other words, the authors considered there to be, at least in 2010, insufficient evidence of intent. Mainstream discussion of whether genocide was occurring in Myanmar first began after an outbreak of violence in 2012, which, as Zarni and Cowley point out, was the first wave of mass violence that could be effectively documented as it happened by human rights organizations.47 Ostensibly triggered by the rape of a Rakhine woman by several Rohingya men, multi-month waves of violence spread across 12 townships in Rakhine State, with Rohingya communities burned and extrajudicial and indiscriminate killings of Rohingya of all ages. Human Rights Watch documented at least four mass graves, and satellite footage showed Rohingya communities completely destroyed.48 While Rakhine Buddhist locals perpetrated some of the violence, security forces not only failed to intervene to protect the Rohingya, but also arbitrarily arrested and tortured Rohingya and sometimes joined Rakhine Buddhists in killing Rohingya.49 The Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention (the “Sentinel Project”) estimated that 72% of the violent incidents either involved state security forces or were otherwise connected to the Myanmar government or military.50 After the 2012 violence, approximately 140,000 Rohingya were pushed into what were allegedly internally displaced people camps, but appeared in fact to be internment camps, surrounded by barbed wire and military checkpoints, with no freedom of movement.51 For years, many Rohingya remained in these camps without adequate food, water, toilets, and medical care. The Myanmar government barred the camps’ main medical provider, Doctors Without Borders, from the country for over a year after the institution publicly referenced an attack against the Rohingya.52 The Zarni and Cowley analysis was published after the 2012 violence, although, as discussed above, it did not confine its genocide assessment to that time period. Other studies addressing the possibility of genocide focused primarily on the events since 2012. In 2015, the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) published a report concluding that genocide was taking place in Myanmar, and, adopting Daniel Feierstein’s delineation of genocide into six stages, found that the genocide was in the final two stages – meaning that the Rohingya were facing total annihilation.53 Also in 2015, Yale Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Law Clinic found “strong evidence” that genocide was being committed against the Rohingya, and recommended that the United Nations Human Rights Council establish a commission of inquiry to investigate whether genocide was ongoing.54 In March 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution establishing an independent international fact-finding mission (the “UN mission” or the “mission”) to examine alleged human rights violations by the military and security forces in Myanmar, with a focus on Rakhine State.55

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However, while the word “genocide” was increasingly used following the 2012 violence, descriptions of the situation as at risk of genocide, or exhibiting early warning signs of genocide were more common than full assessments of genocide as potentially ongoing. For example, the Sentinel Project in 2013 described the violence as “part of a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing with the distinct possibility of genocide carried out either through extermination by killing squads or more slowly by isolation and starvation.”56 Similarly, William Schabas in 2012 described the situation in Myanmar as “moving into a zone where the word [‘genocide’] can be used.”57 Tomás Ojéa Quintana, then the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, stated in 2014 that the “possibility of a genocide needs to be discussed,” while clarifying that he avoided using the word for political reasons.58 In a comprehensive book on the Rohingya published in 2016 and updated in 2018, Azeem Ibrahim labeled the violence “a textbook case of pre-genocide.”59 Other analysts continued to find the use of the word “genocide,” even in terms of a warning, unfounded, instead regarding the 2012 violence as “communal,” between Rohingya and local Rakhine.60 In August 2017, Myanmar security forces launched a massive military campaign against the Rohingya. Allegedly responding to attacks on police outposts by Rohingya militants, the military rapidly began “clearance operations,” in which the military and non-Rohingya civilians massacred Rohingya civilians without regard for age, gender, or involvement with militants, and razed hundreds of villages to the ground.61 The United Nations has estimated that 10,000 Rohingya were killed during the campaign, an estimate it describes as conservative.62 As of 2014, approximately one million Rohingya were living in Rakhine State.63 More than 700,000 of them subsequently fled to Bangladesh.64 The violence in 2017 was significant to the assessment of genocidal intent not merely because of its scale but also because of new evidence of preplanning and premeditation. An investigation by the NGO Fortify Rights documented evidence that preparations for the strike against the Rohingya had in fact begun months before the strike’s ostensible trigger – the Rohingya militants’ attack – with the military confiscating weapons from Rohingya, tearing down fencing and other structures around Rohingya homes that might impede military access, training and arming non-Rohingya locals, suspending humanitarian aid and access, enforcing a Muslim-only curfew, and building up an unusually large military presence in the area.65 Similarly, the UN mission described the nature, scale, and organization of the operations as indicating “preplanning and design” by the leaders of Myanmar’s military.66 Evidence of military-directed preplanning significantly moved the dialogue about the violence in Rakhine State away from that of communal violence and toward serious discussion of genocide. Communal violence, the narrative attributing violence in Rakhine State to local tensions between the Rohingya and the Rakhine Buddhists, had served as an extremely successful smokescreen to rebut arguments of genocide and distract from evidence of the military’s involvement in the violence prior to 2017. It had power because it was rooted in some truths.

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Rakhine Buddhists are not an elite group, and have themselves suffered from poverty, experienced government violence, and perpetrated violence and prejudice against the Rohingya. Yet the label “communal violence” ignored the evidence of direct government involvement in the violence long before the 2017 attacks, as well as government statements legitimizing, facilitating, and encouraging violence ostensibly perpetrated by Rakhine locals.67 It also ignored the law on state responsibility. While the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has set an extremely high bar for holding a state directly accountable for the genocidal acts of non-state actors,68 it has also affirmed that the state has a duty to take all measures within its capacity to prevent genocidal acts, a duty that arises when the State “learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.”69 Such liability can be imposed even if the State “had no certainty” that genocide was about to occur, and it can be imposed even if no State actors were involved in the genocide.70 In other words, the communal violence narrative was never sufficient to absolve Myanmar’s government of responsibility. The UN fact-finding mission’s final report, released in September 2019, found that Myanmar’s military had committed the “gravest crimes under international law.”71 In its genocide analysis, the UN mission found that the Rohingya were clearly a protected group and that the Myanmar security forces had propagated four of the five prohibited acts against the Rohingya.72 As to the question of intent, the mission found the crimes perpetrated and the manner in which they were perpetrated to be “similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts.”73 Specifically, it stressed “the broader oppressive context and hate rhetoric; specific utterances of commanders and direct perpetrators; exclusionary policies, including to alter the demographic composition of Rakhine State; the level of organization indicating a plan for destruction; and the extreme scale and brutality of the violence committed.”74 The UN mission explicitly rejected the Myanmar government’s description of the 2012 violence as “intercommunal,” and instead stressed that the violence “resulted from a plan to instigate violence and amplify tensions.”75 The mission ultimately concluded that any possible inference other than genocidal intent “can be discounted as unreasonable.”76 The report recommended referral of senior Myanmar military members to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or an ad hoc tribunal for judicial determination of their individual liability for genocide.77 At that point, the primary remaining “alternative” explanation of the violence against the Rohingya was ethnic cleansing. While ethnic cleansing is not in itself a crime and, accordingly, has no specific legal definition,78 it is understood to refer to the practice of “rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”79 While “there are obvious similarities between a genocidal policy and the policy commonly known as ethnic cleansing,”80 both the ICTY and ICJ have emphasized that the intent to render an area ethnically homogenous and accompanying operations do not necessarily constitute genocide because genocide requires the separate intent “to

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destroy in whole or in part” the group, and forced deportation is not necessarily equivalent to destruction.81 This is not to say that ethnic cleansing cannot be coextensive with genocide where a genocidal intent is present.82 Moreover, ethnic cleansing may be “indicative of the presence of a specific intent” to commit genocide.83 Accordingly, while often offered as a rebuttal to genocide analyses, ethnic cleansing is properly understood not as an alternative conclusion to genocide, but as a tertiary one – and as potential evidence of genocidal intent.84

Reflections on the genocide determinations The scale of violence in Myanmar in 2017 was stunning. It is also stunning to recount the long history of violence that proceeded for decades prior. The ISCI, in one of the earliest serious assessments of genocide in Myanmar, argued that “the gradual multidimensional character of discriminatory and oppressive policies against the Rohingya, the historical unfolding of these policies over many decades, and the fact that they have fluctuated in intensity” have collectively obscured the violence’s genocidal characteristics.85 This description should be deeply concerning as this type of broad context is exactly the type of evidence of intent that the genocidal intent analysis is supposed to bring to light, not bury. Two recent articles have persuasively linked hesitancy to make assessments of genocide to the uncertainty surrounding the role of the non-judicial entities typically performing the initial analyses. Human rights scholar Katherine Southwick has argued persuasively that the “diffusion of authority in naming the crime of genocide” has led non-judicial institutions to tend toward making a “preliminary” assessment of genocide and calling on another institution to finalize the analysis, “leaving the impression that courts or other authoritative bodies largely make definitive genocide determinations, typically, if at all, years after the events have taken place” and, consequently, leaving prevention and suppression in a legal void.86 Beth Van Schaack, former Deputy to the United States’ Ambassador-atLarge for War Crimes, observes that, with no consensus as to what standard of proof non-judicial institutions should adopt, genocide assessments with regard to the Rohingya have been made by applying “numerous – or unarticulated burdens of proof.”87 Many scholars and institutions adopted a standard similar to the UN mission, which found all other inferences concerning intent unreasonable.88 However, while proof beyond a reasonable doubt should be required to hold an individual criminally liable, a lesser standard of proof, more analogous to that appropriate during a pre-conviction criminal process, appears more appropriate for state and multilateral entities making a general finding that genocide is ongoing.89 Legitimacy concerns and role uncertainty may have the greatest potential to affect the almost always uncertain, inference-based assessment of genocidal intent. As detailed above, discussion of a Rohingya genocide began following the 2012 violence, but that discussion generally focused on the risk of genocide rather than assessing whether genocide was already ongoing. Narratives of communal violence and ethnic cleansing distracted from the serious evidence of genocidal intent

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accumulating before 2017, when the large-scale, coordinated violence shifted general discussion toward recognition of a possible ongoing genocide. Evidence of a coordinated, preplanned campaign of violence will always be compelling evidence of an intent to destroy a particular group. However, focusing too exclusively on mass killings may lead to a more conservative assessment than appropriate for a non-judicial assessment of genocide, and it may reflect institutional role uncertainty, leading analysts to focus on only the most compelling, inarguable evidence of intent: coordinated mass killings. A focus on mass attacks is also analytically tempting because of their brutal clarity in what can seem an infinite-factor test for genocidal intent. But overreliance on evidence of mass killings to establish genocidal intent poses three significant problems in the context of non-judicial genocide assessments. First, imposing a de facto mass killings requirement is inconsistent with the text of the Genocide Convention, which sets forth that genocide can be perpetrated without acts of mass violence. The Convention is clear that the coordination of diverse acts other than mass violence can evidence genocidal intent. For instance, a denial of citizenship combined with inflammatory and dehumanizing rhetoric, restriction of a population to internment camps without freedom of movement or adequate food, and a denial of humanitarian aid may be suggestive of a plan to destroy a physical group, even in the absence of mass attacks. Focusing on mass attacks alone therefore narrows the Convention’s text. Second, it ignores the practical conclusions of courts applying the Genocide Convention. Courts have recognized that perpetrators of genocide may consciously choose means other than mass killings to pursue genocidal aims, given that perpetrating mass killings may pose logistical difficulties, heighten the risk of international attention and condemnation, and reduce the perpetrators’ ability to claim plausible deniability.90 Failure to recognize these practical realities unnecessarily divorces genocide assessments from reality – exactly the type of disjuncture that a contextual, case-by-case analysis of intent is intended to avoid. Third, waiting for mass killings to occur before seriously considering evidence of genocidal intent short-changes genocide prevention and suppression and the special role of non-judicial institutions in promoting these goals. Prevention and suppression are enshrined in the Genocide Convention alongside accountability,91 but the case law and, accordingly, the primary interpretations of the Genocide Convention have developed in the context of prosecutions. The result is a body of law oriented toward accountability rather than prevention and toward applications by courts in cases of individual criminal liability, rather than general assessments by non-judicial bodies of whether genocide is ongoing. It is true that cases involving mass killings are generally the cases that have resulted in conviction, and courts have rejected some past efforts to prosecute genocide based on conditions in detention camps.92 However, the likelihood of ultimate criminal conviction may to some extent be more properly seen as a concern for future prosecutors rather than for non-judicial assessments of whether genocide is ongoing, whose focus is more properly on prevention and suppression than conviction. The Genocide Convention requires

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the intent to destroy a group, not the actual destruction of the group. Mass killings are one of the most compelling indicators of a plan evidencing genocidal intent, but they are also an indicator that the goal of prevention has failed. There is no evidence that an earlier finding of genocide would have prompted any greater international action to aid the Rohingya. Despite the extensive discussions of a responsibility to protect, legal findings have no direct translation to political will. But the possibility that serious assessment of genocide could have occurred sooner is one that should prompt reflection about the role of non-judicial institutions in evaluating evidence of genocidal intent and how that role should guide their analyses. Genocide assessments must always be based in the law as developed by the courts, but efforts by non-judicial institutions to conduct their analyses within the narrowest confines of past cases both misunderstand the intent analysis developed by courts, which is supposed to be flexible and contextualized to the situation at hand, and the nature of the law itself, which is not static but develops with each case. Legal changes have already occurred since analysis of the Rohingya crisis began, with the ICC embracing an unprecedented theory of jurisdiction based on the Rohingya’s border-crossing into Bangladesh,93 and more legal developments appear likely as the ICJ takes up a case filed by the Gambia against Myanmar.94 Outside the courtroom, the Rohingya crisis should also be a moment for re-examining the law on intent and the role of non-judicial entities in applying it.

Notes 1 This chapter is heavily indebted to the work of Yale Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Law Clinic, in which this author participated as a clinic member alongside clinic members Alina Lindblom, Elizabeth Marsh, and Tasnim Motala under the supervision of Professor James Silk. Special thanks to Alina Lindblom and Daniel Murphy for their thoughtful feedback on this chapter. 2 United Nations, General Assembly Resolution 260, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948 (UN Doc. A/RES/260(III)), article 2. 3 Myanmar authorities have argued that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh posing as a group with historic roots in Myanmar. This argument is ahistorical, but is in itself suggestive of a view of the Rohingya as the type of distinctive group protected under the Genocide Convention. Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State? A Legal Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale Law School, October 2015), 42– 4, accessed May 30, 2019, www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Yale_Persecution of_the_ Rohingya_October_2015.pdf. 4 The imprecise and often overlapping categories of nationality, race, ethnicity, and religion operate as “four corner posts” shaping a broad area of protection for a variety of groups. William Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 129. 5 United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, article 2; Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, 45–51. 6 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 11.

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7 Ibid., 257; Kai Ambos, “What does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” International Review of the Red Cross 9, no. 876 (December 2009): 835–6. 8 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 257–60, 270–7. 9 Ambos, “What does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” 839–42. 10 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Power provides a history of the disputes over the application of the term “genocide” to atrocities throughout the twentieth century. 11 Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas (Galway: NUI Galway, 2010). The Irish Centre characterized the persecution of the Rohingya as crimes against humanity rather than genocide. 12 United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of The International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, September 12, 2018 (UN Doc. A/HRC/39/64), paras 85–7, 105. 13 Beth Van Schaack, “Determining the Commission of Genocide in Myanmar: Legal and Policy Considerations,” Working Paper (Stanford University, 2018), 5, accessed May 30, 2019, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3256591. 14 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {186 (International Court of Justice Reports 2007); Ambos, “What does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” 835; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 256. 15 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {187; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 257. 16 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 260; Ambos, “What does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” 835. 17 International Law Commission, Report of the Commission to the General Assembly on the Work of its Forty-First Session, UN Doc. A/CN.4/SER.A/1989/Add.1 (Part 2), 102, {4. Some judges have extrapolated from the objects and purpose of the Convention to take a broader view. For instance, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has found that because “the statutory definition of genocide defends a supra-individual object of legal protection, i.e., the social existence of the group … the intent to destroy the group … extends beyond physical and biological extermination.” Prosecutor v. Nikola Jogic´, 2 BvR 1290/99, Judgment, III(4)(a)(aa) (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, December 12, 2000). 18 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 271. 19 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {219; Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95–10-T, Judgment, {83 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia December 14, 1999); Prosecutor v. Krstic´, IT-98–33-T, Judgment {590 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, August 2, 2001). 20 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 273–76. 21 Ibid., 276. 22 International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the U.N. Secretary-General Pursuant to S.C. Res. 1564, {493 (Sept. 18, 2004). 23 Ibid. 24 Prosecutor v. Milomar Stakic´, ICTY-IT-97–24-T, Judgment {45 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia July 31, 2003); Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95–10T, Judgment {49 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia December 14, 1999); Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadic´, IT-94–91-A, Judgment {269 (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, July 15, 1999); Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR-95–1-A, Judgment {161 (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda June 1, 2001); Niyitegeka v. Prosecutor, ICTR-96–14-A, Judgment {49 (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda July 9, 2004). 25 District Court of Jerusalem, Israel, Attorney General v. Adolf Eichmann, No. 40/61, Judgment {{80, 1867, 195 (December 11, 1961).

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26 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 247–8. 27 Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95–10-A, Judgment {48 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia July 5, 2001); Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR95–1-T, Judgment {94 (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, May 21, 1999). 28 Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95–10-A, Judgment {48; Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR-95–1-T, Judgment {94. 29 Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR-95–1-A, Judgment {159 (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda June 1, 2001). 30 Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95–10-A, Judgment {48. 31 Prosecutor v. Gacumbitsi, ICTR-95–91-A, Judgment {40 (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda July 7, 2006). 32 International Commission of Jurists, “Intent to Destroy” as a Special Element of the Crime of Genocide, May 2018, 17–18, 22. 33 Human Rights Watch, Burma: The Rohingya Muslims (1996), 12; Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray”: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State (2013), 138. 34 Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes against Humanity, 91. 35 Human Rights Watch, The Rohingya Muslims: Ending a Cycle of Exodus (1996), 11. 36 Benjamin Zawacki, “Defining Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya Problem,’” Human Rights Brief 20, no. 3 (2013): 18–19, accessed May 30, 2019, www.mcrg.ac.in/WC_2015/Reading/D_ Myanmar.pdf. 37 Ibid., 19. 38 Ibid. 39 Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes against Humanity, 92–3. 40 Zawacki, “Defining,” 18. 41 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray”, 16. 42 As just one example, the massacres and deportation of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 are widely recognized as genocide, but historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi have recently argued that the pattern of longstanding discrimination punctuated by extreme violence against Turkey’s Christian minority that spanned from 1894 to 1924 was part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to destroy the population. Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 43 Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes against Humanity, 29–30. 44 Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (June 2014), 686. 45 Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes against Humanity, 29. 46 Ibid., 29–30. 47 Zarni and Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” 713. 48 Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray”, 64–5. 49 United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, September 17, 2018 (UN Doc. A/HRC/ 39/CRP.2), para. 628, accessed November 16, 2018, www.ohchr.org/Documents/ HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/A_HRC_39_CRP.2.pdf. 50 Steven Kiersons, “Burma: State Apparatus at the Center of Recent Violence and Persecution,” The Sentinel Project, December 22, 2014, https://thesentinelproject.org/2014/ 12/22/burma-state-apparatus-at-the-center-of-recent-violence-and-persecution/. 51 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Myanmar: Internal Displacement in Rakhine State as of November 30, 2013, http://reliefweb.int/sites/relief web.int/files/resources/IDPMap_OCHA_MMR_0131_Rakhine_IDP_locations_A3_ 30Nov2013.pdf; A/HRC/39/CRP.2 para. 517–18. 52 Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, 30; Jane Perlez, “Ban on Doctors’ Group Imperils Muslim Minority in Myanmar,” New York Times, March 13, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/m yanmar-bans-doctors-without-borders.html; Wilson Dizard, “Doctors Without Borders

204 Katherine E. Munyan

53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Resume Work in Myanmar After Government Shutdown,” Al Jazeera America, January 21, 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/21/rohingya-muslims.html. Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (London: Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, International State Crime Initiative, 2015), 15–16, accessed November 18, 2018, http://statecrime.org/data/2015/10/ISCI-Rohingya-Report-PUBLISHED-VERSION. pdf. Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, 64. United Nations Human Rights Council, Resolution Adopted by the Human Rights Council on 24 March 2017, March 24, 2017 (A/HRC/RES/34/22), https://undocs.org/A/ HRC/res/34/22. Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention, Burma Risk Assessment (September 2013), 3, accessed May 30, 2019, http://thesentinelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ Risk-Assessment-Burma-September-2013.pdf. “Expert Warns of Rohingya Genocide,” Al Jazeera, March 3, 2013, accessed May 30, 2019, www.aljazeera. com/pressoffice/2013/03/20133210535530465.html. Maung Zarni, “UN’s Quintana: ‘Elements of Genocide’ against Myanmar’s Rohingya,” (remarks, London Conference on Decades of Persecution and Destruction of Myanmar’s Rohingya, London, April 28, 2014), accessed November 18, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Mpn5Amp_ZfQ. Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2018), 110. Zawacki, “Defining,” 21 (describing the 2012 violence as communal and not “implicat [ing] such an expansive definition of genocide”). United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of The International Fact-Finding Mission, para. 32–4. United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings, para. 1008. Human Rights Watch, “Burma: Government Plan Would Segregate Rohingya,” October 3, 2014, accessed November 15, 2018, www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/03/ burma-government-plan-would-segregate-rohingya. Fortify Rights, They Gave Them Long Swords: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes against Humanity against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 2018, 13, accessed November 16, 2018, www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Fortify_Rights_Long_Swords_ July_2018.pdf. Ibid., 11–12. United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings, para. 753. In its 2015 report, the ISCI found evidence that state actors had manipulated Rakhine locals’ concerns and potential grievances against the state into hostility toward the Rohingya as a means to control a poor, isolated region underserved by government policy. Green, MacManus, and Venning, Countdown to Annihilation, 20. Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Judgment, ICJ Reports 2007, paras 385–97, 431. This judgment has been heavily criticized. Antonio Cassese, “A Judicial Massacre: The International Court Has Set an Unrealistically High Standard of Proof for Finding Serbia Complicit in Genocide,” Guardian, February 27, 2007, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/27/thejudicialmassacreofsrebr. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {{165, 431. Ibid., {432. United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of The International Fact-Finding Mission, 1. Ibid., para. 84. Ibid., para. 85. Ibid. Ibid., para. 25.

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76 Ibid., para. 86. 77 Ibid., paras 85, 104. 78 Ethnic cleansing will often amount to the crime against humanity of persecution. Irish Centre for Human Rights, Crimes Against Humanity, 111–12. A proposal made during the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention to include “measures intended to oblige members of a group to abandon their homes in order to escape the threat of subsequent ill-treatment” as a prohibited act was rejected. Al Bashir, International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber I, March 4, 2009, ICC-02/05–01/09–3, {144. 79 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {190; Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic´, IT-98–33-T, Judgment {{562, 578 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia August 2, 2001). 80 Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic´, IT-98–33-T, Judgment {562; Prosecutor v. Static´, IT-97–24T, Judgment {519. 81 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {190. 82 Decision on the Prosecution’s Application for a Warrant of Arrest against Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, ICC-02/05–01/09–3, Judgment {145 (International Criminal Court, March 4, 2009). 83 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment {190. 84 James Sweeney, “Twenty Years After Srebrenica, Ethnic Cleansing has Become a Defence to Genocide,” The Conversation, July 9, 2015, https://theconversation.com/ twenty-years-after-srebrenica-ethnic-cleansing-has-become-a-defence-to-gen ocide-44376. Sweeney discusses the increasing use of the concept of ethnic cleansing to defend against genocide charges. 85 Green, MacManus, and Venning, Countdown to Annihilation, 13. 86 Katherine Southwick, “Straining to Prevent the Rohingya Genocide: A Sociology of Law Perspective,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (2018): 131–2. 87 Van Schaack, “Determining the Commission of Genocide,” 33–4. 88 Ibid., 29–30. 89 Ibid. 90 Prosecutor v. Krstic´, IT-98–33-A, Judgment {31 (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia April 19, 2004). 91 United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, article 1, 8. 92 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 293. 93 Decision on the Prosecution’s Request for a Ruling on Jurisdiction under Article 19(3) of the Statute, ICC-RoC46(3)-01/18 (International Criminal Court September 6, 2018). 94 Owen Boycott, “Gambia Files Rohingya Genocide Case against Myanmar at UN Court,” Guardian, November 11, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/11/ gambia-rohingya-genocide-myanmar-un-court.

Bibliography Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State? A Legal Analysis. New Haven, CT: Yale Law School, October2015. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/ Yale_Persecution_of_the_Rohingya_October_2015.pdf. Ambos, Kai. “What does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?” International Review of the Red Cross 91, no. 876 (December2009): 835–836, 839–842.

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Boycott, Owen. “Gambia Files Rohingya Genocide Case against Myanmar at UN Court.” Guardian, November 11, 2019. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.theguardian.com/world/ 2019/nov/11/gambia-rohingya-genocide-myanmar-un-court. Cassese, Antonio. “A Judicial Massacre: The International Court has Set an Unrealistically High Standard of Proof for Finding Serbia Complicit in Genocide.” Guardian, February 27, 2007. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/27/ thejudicialmassacreofsrebr. District Court of Jerusalem, Israel. Attorney General v. Adolf Eichmann, No. 40/61, Judgment (December 11, 1961). Dizard, Wilson. “Doctors Without Borders Resume Work in Myanmar After Government Shutdown.” Al Jazeera America, January 21, 2015. Accessed May 30, 2019. http://america. aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/21/rohingya-muslims.html. “Expert Warns of Rohingya Genocide.” Al Jazeera, March 3, 2013. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.aljazeera. com/pressoffice/2013/03/20133210535530465.html. Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Prosecutor v. Nikola Jorgic´, 2 BvR 1290/99, Judgment (December 12, 2000). Fortify Rights. They Gave Them Long Swords: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes against Humanity against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar. July2018. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Fortify_Rights_Long_Swords_July_2018.pdf. Green, Penny, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning. Countdown to Annilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, International State Crime Initiative, 2015. Accessed May 30, 2019. http://statecrime.org/ data/2015/10/ISCI-Rohingya-Report-PUBLISHED-VERSION.pdf. Human Rights Watch. “All You Can Do is Pray”: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State. 2013. Human Rights Watch. “Burma: Government Plan Would Segregate Rohingya.” October 3, 2014. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/03/burma-governm ent-plan-would-segregate-rohingya. Human Rights Watch. Burma: The Rohingya Muslims. 1996. Human Rights Watch. The Rohingya Muslims: Ending a Cycle of Exodus. 1996. Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide. London: Hurst & Company, 2018. International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the U.N. Secretary-General Pursuant to S.C. Res. 1564. Sept. 18, 2004. International Commission of Jurists. ‘Intent to Destroy’ as a Special Element of the Crime of Genocide. May2018. International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment. International Court of Justice Reports 2007, 43. International Criminal Court. Decision on the Prosecution’s Application for a Warrant of Arrest against Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, ICC-02/05–01/09–03 (March 4, 2009). International Criminal Court. Decision on the Prosecution’s Request for a Ruling on Jurisdiction under Article 19(3) of the Statute, ICC-RoC46(3)-01/18 (September 6, 2018). International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95– 10-T, Judgment (December 14, 1999). International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisic´, IT-95– 10-A, Judgment (July 5, 2001). International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic´, IT98–33-T, Judgment (August 2, 2001). International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic´, IT98–33-A, Judgment (April 19, 2004).

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International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Milomar Stakic´, IT97–24-T, Judgment (July 31, 2003). International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadic´, IT-94– 91-A, Judgment (July 15, 1999). International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Eliezer Niyitegeka v. Prosecutor, ICTR-96–14-A, Judgment (July 9, 2004). International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Prosecutor v. Gacumbitsi, ICTR-95–91-A, Judgment (July 7, 2006). International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR95–1-T, Judgment (May 21, 1999). International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR95–1-A, Judgment (June 1, 2001). Irish Centre for Human Rights. Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas. Galway: NUI Galway, 2010. Kiersons, Steven. “Burma: State Apparatus at the Center of Recent Violence and Persecution.” The Sentinel Project. December 22, 2014. Accessed May 30, 2019. https:// thesentinelproject.org/2014/12/22/burma-state-apparatus-at-the-center-of-recent-violenceand-persecution/. Morris, Benny, and Dror Ze’evi. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Perlez, Jane. “Ban on Doctors’ Group Imperils Muslim Minority in Myanmar.” New York Times, March 13, 2014. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/ world/asia/myanmar-bans-doctors-without-borders.html. Power, Samantha. “ A Problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Schabas, William. Genocide in International Law, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention. Burma Risk Assessment. September2013. Accessed May 30, 2019. http://thesentinelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/RiskAssessment-Burma-September-2013.pdf. Southwick, Katherine. “Straining to Prevent the Rohingya Genocide: A Sociology of Law Perspective.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (2018): 119–142. Sweeney, James. “Twenty Years After Srebrenica, Ethnic Cleansing has Become a Defence to Genocide.” The Conversation, July 9, 2015. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://theconversation. com/twenty-years-after-srebrenica-ethnic-cleansing-has-become-a-defence-to-genocide44376. United Nations. General Assembly Resolution 260, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. UN Doc. A/RES/260(III). December 9, 1948. United Nations Human Rights Council. Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. UN Doc. A/HRC/39/CRP.2. September 17, 2018. Last accessed May 30, 2019. www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/ HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/A_HRC_39_CRP.2.pdf. United Nations Human Rights Council. Report of The International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. UN Doc. A/HRC/39/64. September 12, 2018. United Nations Human Rights Council. Resolution Adopted by the Human Rights Council on 24 March 2017. A/HRC/RES/34/22. March 24, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2019. https:// undocs.org/A/HRC/res/34/22. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Myanmar: Internal Displacement in Rakhine State as of November 30, 2013. Accessed May 30, 2019. http://

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reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/IDPMap_OCHA_MMR_0131_Rakhine_ IDP_locations_A3_30Nov2013.pdf. Van Schaack, Beth. “Determining the Commission of Genocide in Myanmar: Legal and Policy Considerations.” Stanford Public Law Working Paper: 2018. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3256591. Zarni, Maung. “UN’s Quintana: ‘Elements of Genocide’ against Myanmar’s Rohingya.” London Conference on Decades of Persecution and Destruction of Myanmar’s Rohingya. April 28, 2014. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpn5Amp_ZfQ. Zarni, Maung, and Alice Cowley. “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya.” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (June2014): 681–752. Zawacki, Benjamin. “Defining Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya Problem’ .” Human Rights Brief 20, no. 3 (2013): 18–25. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.mcrg.ac.in/WC_2015/Reading/D_ Myanmar.pdf.

12 JUSTICE AFTER DICTATORSHIP IN THAILAND Tyrell Haberkorn

Thailand’s “color-coded” political conflict began in 2004 when the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), a coalition of royalist-nationalists known as “yellow shirts” for the color of their t-shirts, called for the removal of the elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, on the basis that he was corrupt and aimed to usurp the king. On September 19, 2006, the military responded to their demands with a coup, ousting Thaksin from power. The “red shirts,” similarly known for the color of their t-shirts, who included supporters of the ousted prime minister, as well as radical democrats, soon emerged to protest. The yellow shirts were primarily urban and middle-class and the red shirts primarily rural and workingclass. Over the next four years, protests and counterprotests took place as each side tried to gain control of politics. The most significant of these protests in terms of both size and the state violence that took place in response was an occupation of Bangkok by the red shirts between March and May 2010. They were protesting the fact that the prime minister at the time, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was appointed. They were calling for free and fair elections to be held. Their presence in the city unnerved Bangkok’s middle-class residents and Abhisit’s government. Between 10 April and 19 May, a military crackdown ended the protests and resulted in the deaths of at least 94 people, including 88 civilians, and over 2,000 people were injured.1 In July 2011, elections were held and Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s younger sister, was elected prime minister. In November 2013, dissatisfied with Yingluck’s government, the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), a new configuration of the royalist yellow shirts, began to protest in Bangkok with the goal of shutting down first the city and then the country in order to force a crisis. Yingluck resigned in December 2013, and called elections for February 2014. But the PDRC obstructed the election. General Prayuth Chan-ocha declared martial law on May 20, 2014.

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Two days later, on May 22, 2014, General Prayuth Chan-ocha and a junta calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) removed the elected government and seized power in a military coup. Upon launching the coup, the NCPO promised to exit power as soon as they restored the rule of law after ten years of “color-coded” political conflict had caused frequent mass protests, lethal open violence, and significant fractures in Thai society. Instead, the NCPO presided over the most repressive regime since the counterinsurgent anti-communist regimes of the 1960s and 1970s in Thailand. The junta combined an overarching rule-by-law regime (martial law until April 2015), a regular choice of authoritarian leaders, with extrajudicial violence to dispossess civilians of their rights and guarantee impunity for human rights violations carried out by state officials.2 Such violations, including assault, torture, disappearance, death, and the threat of harm to persons or their family members, often took place during the processes of arrest, investigation, and prosecution. In other words, extrajudicial violence took place in concert with the exercise of the law, rather than being prevented by it. During their five years in power, the NCPO systematically entrenched itself as a dictatorship in which dissent was criminalized, everyday life was militarized, and access to justice was out of reach of civilians. But the junta was not impervious to domestic and international calls for democratization. It held a national election on March 24, 2019. On July 16, 2019, a new civilian cabinet was sworn in and the NCPO formally ceased to exist. Despite the election and official end to the NCPO, however, structural, legal, and historical factors suggest that nothing will be swift, or certain, about the transition away from military rule, including when, or if, democracy will emerge. The junta-authored 2017 Constitution, and the four organic laws passed along with it, under which the election was carried out, provide a secure role for the military in governance until 2024.3 After pro-democracy parties did far better than expected in the election, despite significant restrictions on campaigning that favored pro-junta parties, the military has made it clear that it was willing to lie, cheat, and bend the law to hold onto power while providing the appearance of electoral democracy.4 General Prayuth Chan-ocha remains the head of government, but now in the position of elected civilian prime minister rather than a military junta leader. The NCPO’s use of the law as its primary tool of suppression empirically altered the Thai legal landscape and also had a broader, deleterious impact on the rule of law. Martial law, which provided authorities with broad powers of suppression, was in force for the first ten months of the regime and civilian cases against the crown and state were placed within the military court system from the coup until September 2016.5 Existing criminal law, particularly measures related to expression of opinion and political demonstration, was used to target dissidents, criminalize their thoughts and actions, and create a climate of fear in which others were afraid to speak out. Alongside the abuse of existing law, the NCPO issued 557 executive orders and announcements declared as legal, binding, and constitutional that authorized detention, re-education, land and property seizure, and other human rights violations. The end of the NCPO did not result in the automatic

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nullification of these instruments; they will remain in force until they are revoked individually or en masse.6 Combined with these structural and legal factors, there is entrenched impunity in Thailand for both coups specifically and state violence generally.7 Members of juntas who have fomented a “successful” coup, meaning that power was seized, have never been prosecuted, nor have state officials who violated human rights during a dictatorship been legally held to account for their actions or subject to any other kind of transitional justice process. The combination of periodic coups and ongoing impunity for state violence, both everyday, such as torture by police, and spectacular, such as the October 6, 1976 and May 1992 massacres, define the form of political violence in Thailand. This is resonant with the difficulty of accounting for the 1965–1966 killings in Indonesia (see Robinson, this volume) as well as the kind of wide-ranging, continuous impunity that characterizes Hun Sen’s extended authoritarian regime in Cambodia (see McGrew, this volume). What differentiates Thailand is the analytic and political challenge posed by the punctuation of coups, each new junta emboldened by the impunity enjoyed by the previous regimes. Despite this record, a constellation of domestic and international factors suggests that present conditions for fostering accountability and strengthening the rule of law are the strongest to have emerged in Thai history. Internationally, there has been what scholar Katherine Sikkink calls a “justice cascade” over the four decades between 1970 and 2011, in which the overturning of amnesties and criminal prosecutions for military dictators and soldiers for perpetrating human rights violations against civilians have increased.8 To date, Asia has been the region most resistant to the justice cascade and Thailand has been no exception. Yet a minority of judges have expressed concern about human rights and accountability during the last five years, even under the NCPO, as opposed to previous indifference.9 A shift may be underway. At once encouraged by these signs of possible justice and concerned about the impact of the NCPO’s regime on law, the people, and the polity, I take the formal end of the NCPO as an invitation to assess this impact and begin to imagine what might be necessary to redress it. My analysis is centered on the law and judicial process, since this is where the NCPO itself located its assault on the people and the polity. I build on the work of civil society activists who challenged the legality and broader justness of the NCPO’s actions by bringing cases against them in the criminal and administrative courts. Two of these cases, the first a criminal case of rebellion filed against General Prayuth and other members of the junta, and the second, an administrative case brought against the junta-appointed minister of justice for opening a prison on a military base, lay bare how the NCPO made the people vulnerable and used the law to facilitate the violation of their rights. Although both cases were dismissed by the respective courts, their existence also foregrounds the acuity of the critique and courage of civil society activists to challenge a ruling dictatorship. In the remainder of this essay, I examine each of these two cases in turn, and first critique the response of the courts and then outline alternative decisions that would substantively foster justice rather than allowing

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injustice to remain. In so doing, I am inspired by the rewriting of court decisions to reflect gender equality by feminist legal scholars in India, Canada, the UK, and beyond.10 Even if such decisions are unlikely to be handed down by Thai courts, the work of analyzing the decisions and outlining how their effects might be redressed is a form of scholarship that both criticizes the repression enacted in the name of the law and specifies what justice would look like.

Challenging the legality of the coup The May 22, 2014 coup by the NCPO was the twelfth successful coup since the People’s Party brought an end to the absolute monarchy on June 24, 1932.11 One approach to understanding the years since 1932 is as an extended and unending conflict over sovereignty between the people and the rulers.12 Every constitution promulgated since 1932, including both the 2014 Interim Constitution and the 2017 Constitution drafted by and promulgated under the NCPO, states that sovereignty belongs to the people. But in practice it belongs to the military – indicated by their ability to repeatedly launch coups with impunity guaranteed by their guns – and the monarchy – its status unquestionable and itself guaranteed by Article 112, the measure of the Criminal Code which defines the crime and the punishment for lèse majesté.13 Together, the military and monarchy are a potent pair and the series of coups has served the stability and wealth of both institutions. Among the range of tools safeguarding the positions of both institutions, the law operates to provide crucial protection in the form of impunity for coups and to place beyond prosecution the military officers who launch them. Depending on the coup, either an amnesty provision in the relevant post-coup constitution, a stand-alone amnesty law, or both kinds of instruments, have been passed. Two provisions in the 2014 Interim Constitution cast the NCPO’s actions of fomenting the coup and governing afterwards as legal. Section 47 affirmed the legality of the orders and announcements of the NCPO or the Head of the NCPO.14 Most significant for my purposes in this chapter, Section 48 stipulated the legality of the coup, as well as preparations for it and the subsequent impact: In regard to all acts which are performed on account of the seizure and control of state governing power on 22nd May 2014 by the Head and the NCPO, including all acts of persons incidental to such performance or of persons entrusted by the Head or the NCPO or of persons ordered by persons entrusted by the Head or the NCPO, which have been done for the benefit of the abovementioned performances, irrespective of whether such acts were performed to have constitutional, legislative, executive, or judicial force, including punishments and other official administrative acts, and irrespective of whether the persons performed such acts as a principal, an accomplice, an instigator or a commission agent and whether those acts have been done on, before or after the aforesaid date, if those acts constitute offences under the laws, the persons who commit those acts shall be entirely discharged from such offences and liabilities.

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This turned the coup – the planned, illegal ouster of an elected government – into a legal act. The temporal range of the provision – “irrespective of … whether those acts have been done on, before or after the aforesaid date” of the coup by the NCPO – extended the amnesty to all actions of the NCPO. The constitutional provision failed to discourage civil society activists from challenging the NCPO in a series of criminal, civil, and administrative cases. The foundational case among these was brought by a group of 15 civil society activists, Resistant Citizen, on the first anniversary of the coup. All 15 plaintiffs were activists who had been directly affected by the coup and persecuted for their dissent against the NCPO; some were summoned for so-called “attitude adjustment,” which was actually arbitrary detention and re-education during the first months following the coup, while others were charged with crimes against the junta and were undergoing prosecution in the military court at the time they brought their case against the NCPO. On the basis of their status as those affected by the coup, they filed a criminal complaint against General Prayuth Chan-ocha and the other four state security officials who comprised the NCPO leadership (Navy General Narong Phitphatnasai, Air Force General Prachin Chanthong, Police General Adul Saengsingkaew, and General Thanasak Patimaprakorn). The 15 Resistant Citizen plaintiffs alleged that the act of the coup by the NCPO, as well as their subsequent and ongoing acts, constituted rebellion and treason, and therefore violated Articles 113 and 114 of the Criminal Code. Article 113 stipulates that, Whoever, commits an act of violence or threatens to commit an act of violence in order to: 1) Overthrow or change the Constitution; 2) Overthrow the legislative power, the executive power or the judicial power of the Constitution, or nullify such power; or 3) Separate the Kingdom or seize the power of administration in any part of the Kingdom, is said to commit insurrection, and shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life. The NCPO committed all of these acts when they fomented the coup on May 22, 2014. Article 114, then, addresses preparation for the actions in Article 113 and notes that, Whoever, collecting the forces or arms, or otherwise making the preparations or conspires to commit the insurrection, or committing any offence as the part of the plot committing the insurrection, or instigating the private persons to commit the insurrection, or knowing that there are the persons to commit the insurrection and making any act to assist in keeping such secret intention to commit such insurrection, shall be punished by imprisonment as from three to fifteen years. Resistant Citizen acknowledged and then dispensed with the amnesty provisions of the 2014 Interim Constitution by arguing that they were “in stark contrast with

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the voice of conscience and the fundamental principles of human justice. They are not law in any way; law must be based in thought and related to and in the service of justice. Law does not exist alone or without relation to values.”15 By bringing the case, even or perhaps especially because they knew that they were unlikely to be successful, Resistant Citizen made a claim to a normative idea of the rule of law, rather than accepting the actually existing situation under dictatorship. The 2014 Interim Constitution and other laws promulgated by the NCPO reflected values of impunity and injustice, while Resistant Citizen countered these values by demanding accountability and justice. The Court of First Instance ruled on their case and dismissed it within several days. Resistant Citizen appealed. The Appeal Court dismissed the case on November 23, 2015. Neither court offered a substantive analysis in their dismissal, and so they appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court also dismissed the case in March 2018, but included a substantive explanation. Although the Supreme Court affirmed the validity of the amnesty for the coup, they simultaneously acknowledged that the values of the NCPO were not beyond question. They wrote that, The NCPO instead entered to exercise the authority of the sovereign, even though, as the fifteen plaintiffs have claimed, that authority was secured in a manner not in accordance with democracy. Whether or not that power was legitimately obtained is another issue to be discussed elsewhere. But the NCPO still retains power in the sense that it is a group of individuals that exercises the administrative and legislative power by controlling the mechanisms and agencies of the state. Therefore, the 2014 Interim Constitution that was enacted by the NCPO has the status of law.16 The court then explained that, “Therefore, all of the actions of the five defendants according to the accusation are therefore exempt from all offences and liabilities according to Section 48 of the 2014 Interim Constitution.” One interpretation is that the Supreme Court ruling is a victory for the NCPO: the legality of their actions, and so their evasion of accountability, is ruled to be intact. But at the same time, in going beyond the strict requirements to rule on the legal matter at hand and including a sentence querying the legitimacy of how the NCPO gained power, the Supreme Court made a small gesture toward the normative ideas of the rule of law and justice underlying Resistant Citizen’s challenge. What if the rule of law and justice were to be made the foundational ideas behind the Supreme Court decision? How might the case then be adjudicated? Such an approach would necessitate the refusal of the legality of the coup and therefore a serious evaluation of how General Prayuth and the other members of the NCPO violated Articles 113 and 114 of the Criminal Code. This would mean first designating Section 48 of the 2014 Interim Constitution illegal, or perhaps simply inapplicable. Once the amnesty for the coup was stripped away, the Supreme Court would then need to adjudicate whether or not Articles 113 and

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114 of the Criminal Code were violated when the NCPO launched the coup on May 22, 2014 and then during the five-plus years of their regime. Their violation of Article 113 is evident in the very actions that constituted the coup: they abrogated the 2007 Constitution, dissolved the parliament, and seized the executive power of the caretaker government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Although it is likely that violation of Article 113 required planning, and therefore so did the concomitant violation of Article 114, the Supreme Court would not be able to rule on that matter without additional evidence. As the Thai Supreme Court does not itself convene hearings, but rather makes its rulings on the basis of documentary evidence submitted by the parties and the records of hearings and rulings by the lower courts, they could instead rule that additional information was needed and recommend that hearings, or a series of hearings, be held. These hearings could cover three topics. The first would be the matter of violation of Article 114. The second would be the matter of the impact of the coup: the very rights violations that were the basis for the members of Resistant Citizen to bring their case. Section 48 of the 2014 Interim Constitution was written to be temporally wide – on, before, or after the day of the coup. But if the amnesty provision is judged to be null, then it would invite the examination of a range of possible crimes committed by the NCPO in addition to the original act of the coup itself. To undertake such an examination would be one way to respond to the Supreme Court’s provocative but vague statement, “Whether or not that power was legitimately obtained is another issue to be discussed elsewhere.” The third topic of possible hearings would be to consider what form of redress – legal, social, political, cultural, or a combination – should be undertaken in response to an identification of the crimes of the NCPO in launching the coup and ruling as a dictatorship. In so doing, the very history of impunity for state violence that operated as a condition of possibility for the coup could be examined and therefore called into question.

Challenging military detention The first day after the 2014 coup, the NCPO began summoning its critics – including editors, journalists, human rights activists, red shirts, politicians, and other dissidents – for what they called “attitude adjustment.” Despite the name, those summoned were subject to arbitrary detention and interrogation. Under first martial law until April 1, 2015 and then Head of the NCPO Order No. 3/2558, anyone seen as suspicious or a possible threat to national security, which was left undefined, could be held incommunicado without any judicial process in a nonstandard place of detention for up to seven days. After seven days, a person had to either be released or transferred to the police to be formally charged with a crime and detained as any other criminal suspect. What “non-standard place of detention” means is any place that is not a police station holding cell or a prison, and it often translated as a military base. However, other than those held for “attitude adjustment,” all of those arrested and prosecuted under the NCPO, even for

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crimes against the crown and state, which were adjudicated in the military court system, were initially held within the existing prison system operated by the Department of Corrections. Then, on September 11, 2015, the then Minister of Justice, General Paiboon Kumchaya, issued Ministry of Justice Order No. 314/2558, which allowed for extended military detention of those facing prosecution. The order designated an area of one rai (1/4 of an acre) inside the 11th Military Circle base on Nakhon Chaisri Road in Bangkok as the Nakhon Chaisri Temporary Prison for “detainees in national security and related cases.” Within two months after the order was passed, two deaths in custody led to serious concerns about safety in the prison. Two individuals close to then crown prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, who would become king following the death of his father in October 2016, Police Major Prakrom Warunprapa and Suriyan Sucharitpolwong, were accused of violating Article 112. Both were arrested on October 16, 2015, along with a third person, Jiraeong Watthanathewasilp, and remanded to the temporary prison on 21 October. Police Major Prakrom hanged himself on October 23, 2015. Then, on November 7, 2015, Suriyan died due to sepsis. Although the Criminal Procedure Code states that autopsies must be carried out for all who die in state custody, no autopsy was carried out in the case of the death of Police Major Prakrom and the full autopsy report for Suriyan has never been made public. The combination of the relatively hidden location of the temporary prison on a military base, the alleged closeness of the two men to the monarchy, and the departure from procedure raised significant concerns among human rights activists about these two specific deaths and the conditions and safety of the temporary prison in general.17 On December 9, 2015, Pansak Srithep, one of the members of Resistant Citizen who had brought the case against the NCPO for the coup, brought a complaint against this Ministry of Justice Order 314/2558 to the Administrative Court. The Administrative Court, established in 1999, allows citizens to bring cases against state officials or agencies that have caused harm or otherwise not carried out their duties appropriately. Pansak, working with Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), the primary human rights advocacy and documentation organization established on the night of the coup to defend those targeted by the junta, brought the case on the basis that he might be subject to remand in the temporary prison and was concerned about his safety and rights if this occurred. He had been charged in the military court with violation of Article 116, or sedition, for organizing a walking protest against the coup. Although he was then free on bail, he argued that this could be revoked at any time and his case, as one against the state, might be interpreted to fall within the category of “national security.” He identified four problems with the order and the temporary prison in his complaint. First, the meaning of “national security” in the order was unclear and therefore the designation of who was to be held at the temporary prison was vague. Which cases precisely would this include? Second, the use of the designation “national security” to separate some detainees from others was political. His

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explanation was that General Paiboon was a member of the NCPO that launched the coup on May 22, 2014, and part of the NCPO’s general goal was to deal with individuals who were a threat to their own security. This indicated that the order was not made in good faith. Third, the order contravened the principle of equality in the constitution. To separate those who committed crimes against national security from those who committed other crimes was an instance of arbitrary selection since they were all violations of the Criminal Code. In addition, the inequality was furthered by the fact of the conditions in temporary prison being inferior to those in regular prisons, as indicated by reports of torture, a lack of windows in cells, little space for exercise, and restrictions on detainee meetings with lawyers. The fourth point made by Pansak was that this was an instance in which the Minister of Interior could have performed his duties more proportionately and carefully. The Administrative Court delayed for almost a year before they accepted the case on November 3, 2016. While waiting for the case to be accepted, TLHR requested that the Department of Corrections provide basic information about the temporary prison, namely the number of detainees, their alleged crimes, and the number of army officials and correctional officers serving as staff. The Department of Corrections refused to respond and so TLHR filed an appeal with the Committee on Government Information, which subsequently ordered the release of the requested information. TLHR learned that a total of 45 civilians and 2 government officials were detained at the temporary prison between September 14, 2015 and March 8, 2016. There were 86 staff – 6 correctional officers and 80 army officials. Those being held were accused of committing drug offences, lèse majesté, robbery, malfeasance in office, weapons and explosives crimes, computer crimes, attempted murder, and violation of Head of the NCPO Order No. 3/2558, which prohibits political gatherings of five or more persons. TLHR noted that they had been aware of only 16 of the 45 civilian cases, which indicated “more civilians might be or have been detained in cases related to national security charges without any public awareness.”18 The Administrative Court dismissed the case on April 26, 2019. The court ruled on two main matters. The first was whether or not Pansak had met the grounds of being sufficiently affected by the order to bring a case. The Ministry of Justice had argued that since he was not being held in the temporary prison, he did not have the right to bring a case. However, the Administrative Court ruled that as a person accused of sedition, which was a national security case, he could potentially be held in the temporary prison if his bail was revoked. The second point the Administrative Court ruled on was whether or not the order was lawful. They argued that it was lawful because the Prisons Act of 1936 allowed officials to separate prisoners into different categories, including gender or alleged crime, and so the separation of national security prisoners was acceptable. They further argued that the meaning of national security in the designation of who would be subject to detention at the temporary prison was sufficiently clear. With regard to the complaint of unjust treatment at the temporary prison, including torture and the poor physical

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conditions in the prison, the Administrative Court said that those affected could use existing channels to complain and so it did not necessitate the revocation of the order or the closure of the prison. Significantly, the Administrative Court did not deny the allegations of torture or poor physical conditions, but instead asserted that torture and the two deaths in custody did not result from the order establishing the prison. The Administrative Court also alleged that its examination of the statistics showed that the majority of those being held were for drug offences, and so the concern that the use of the prison was politically motivated was incorrect.19 What is striking about the Administrative Court ruling is that it does not dispute the existence of problems at the temporary prison, but merely rules that they do not merit the revocation of the order or the closure of the prison. A rewriting of the ruling in the service of justice would require the Administrative Court to place the protection of civilians, rather than state officials or agencies, at the center of its action. It had nevertheless recognized Pansak as a legitimate complainant and implicitly acknowledged the existence of poor conditions at the prison. Rather than dispensing with the reports of torture and the unresolved deaths in custody merely by stating that they were not caused by the order, the Administrative Court could propose an investigation to discern which individuals or agencies were responsible. Doing so would require a shift from ruling solely on the basis of the written law to ruling in the service of justice.

Postscript The court decisions in the Resistant Citizen criminal case against the junta for launching the coup and Pansak Srithep’s administrative case challenging the Ministry of Justice for establishing the Nakhon Chaisri temporary prison are only two of many unjust decisions handed down during the NCPO’s rule-by-law regime. I chose to examine these two cases because they illustrate how the courts have used the law to protect the NCPO. Thinking through different outcomes operates as both critique and a way to imagine what justice would look like and would require. There are many more decisions that can, and must, be taken up, first for analysis and rewriting, and one day, for actual re-examination. This includes, for example, the Criminal Court decisions in which civilians have been found guilty and imprisoned for lèse majesté, sedition, and protest, which illustrate how a jurisprudence restricting political expression and participation was developed under the NCPO. In those cases, hundreds of civilians have undergone drawn-out prosecution and, in some cases, spent years behind bars for daring to think differently or protest. In these cases, as well as other politicized cases under the NCPO, including weapons possessions and terrorism charges, those accused have also faced procedural irregularities ranging from the inconvenient to the grave. These, too, must be recognized. How, and in what form, these and the other human rights violations that have characterized the five years of the dictatorship of the NCPO are redressed are decisions that must be made by those affected. The will to make justice possible

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will then require social and political change because it will challenge over 80 years of coups and accompanying impunity. But as unlikely as it may seem, for either the Supreme Court or the Administrative Court to rule in the manner I have suggested in my rewriting of their decisions, or for a broader accountability process to take place, I want to conclude with a claim to its necessity. A key step toward ending impunity is taking seriously the possibility of accountability and preparing for it. In the immediate aftermath of the first election since the May 22, 2014 coup – which left General Prayuth Chan-ocha still sitting in the seat of prime minister – it may not seem possible. But it will not always be this way.

Notes 1 People’s Information Center, Truth for Justice: A Fact-finding Report on the April–May 2010 Crackdowns in Thailand (Bangkok: People’s Information Center for Those Affected by the Dispersal of Protests in April–May 2010, 2017). 2 Tamir Moustafa and Tom Ginsburg, eds., Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 The most significant of these is that the military will retain the power to appoint the 250 senators who comprise the upper house of parliament for the first five years after the 2019 election. This means that even though the lower house of 500 members is elected, anti-military parties would have to win a significant number to displace the easy majority of those affiliated with the military. The NCPO further indicated their willingness to go beyond the law to intervene in the election when their power was threatened and it appeared that they might not secure a majority in parliament, even with the aid of the 250 appointed senators. The composition of the lower house is a mix of constituencybased representatives and party-list representatives (on the basis of the proportion of constituency-based representatives a given political party secures). After anti-dictatorship parties won an unexpectedly high proportion of seats, even despite restrictions on campaigning that favored pro-junta parties, the NCPO delayed the announcement of final election results until it had shifted the formula to calculate party-list representatives so that the pro-junta parties retained a majority. 4 Punchada Sirivunnabood, “Thailand’s Puzzling 2019 Election: How the NCPO Junta has Embedded itself in Thai Politics,” ISEAS Perspective, May 29, 2019, www.iseas.edu. sg/images/pdf/ISEAS_Perspective_2019_44.pdf. 5 Martial law was in force between May 20, 2014 and April 1, 2015. Head of the NCPO Order No. 55/2559, issued on September 12, 2016, halted the initiation of new civilian cases in the military court, but any civilian cases in progress remain within its jurisdiction. Between May 25, 2014, and October 3, 2017, there was a total of 2,408 civilians being prosecuted in 1,892 cases in the military court system. In May 2018, a total of 450 civilians being prosecuted in 369 cases remained active in the military court system. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), Collapsed Rule of Law: The Consequences of Four Years under the National Council for Peace and Order for Human Rights and Thai Society (Bangkok: TLHR, 2018). On July 12, 2019, Head of the NCPO Order No. 9/2562 transferred all of the civilian cases still active in the military court system to the civilian courts of justice. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), “Public Statement on the Fifth Anniversary of the Seizure of Power by the NCPO: The Lingering Remnants of the Coup,” July 17, 2019, www.tlhr2014.com/?p=13027&lang=en. 6 While martial law was in force (May 20, 2014–April 1, 2015), 214 NCPO Orders and 132 NCPO Announcements were issued. After martial law was revoked in 2015, General Prayuth Chan-ocha then relied on Article 44 of the 2014 Interim Constitution, which authorized him to take any action or issue any order he deemed necessary for the security of the nation, to issue 211 Head of the NCPO Orders. On July 9, 2019, 70

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7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

orders and announcements were repealed by Head of the NCPO Order No. 9/2562, but the remainder remain in force. TLHR, “Public Statement on the Fifth Anniversary of the Seizure of Power by the NCPO.” Tyrell Haberkorn, In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (New York: Norton, 2011). One of the key examples, the response of the Supreme Court to a civil society challenge of the legality of the coup, will be discussed below. In addition, in many civilian and military court cases that I observed during the five years of the NCPO’s regime, human rights lawyers used Thailand’s status as a state party to nearly all major human rights conventions to defend their clients’ rights. Many prosecutors and judges did not dismiss these claims, but rather attempted to refute them, indicating that the conventions carry weight. For example, the Feminist Judgment Project in India is a group of legal scholars who write shadow judgments rewriting sexist judgments to instead embody principles of gender equality and justice. See www.fjpindia.wixsite.com/fjpi. There have been at least seven unsuccessful coups (and likely many more dreamed up but never realized by disgruntled and/or ambitious military officers). Haberkorn, In Plain Sight, 37. Article 112 stipulates that “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished (with) imprisonment of three to fifteen years.” “All announcements and orders of the National Council for Peace and Order or orders of the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order which had been announced or made between 22nd May B.E. 2557 and until the date the Council of Ministers takes office under this Constitution, irrespective of their constitutional, legislative, executive or judicial force, including the performance in compliance therewith, irrespective of whether those acts have been performed before or after the date of entry into force of this Constitution, shall be considered lawful, constitutional and final. Those announcements and orders applicable on the date before the promulgation date of this Constitution shall continue to be in force until there are laws, rules, regulations, resolutions of the Council of Ministers, or orders, as the case may be, issued to amend or repeal them. In the case where the National Council for Peace and Order issues an order appointing any person to assume office or removing from office of any position mentioned in section 24 before the date this Constitution comes into force, the Prime Minister shall respectfully present to the King for appointing such person to assume office or removing such person from office.” Criminal Court Indictment, Mr. Pansak Srithep et al. versus General Prayuth Chan-ocha et al., May 22, 2015. Supreme Court, Decision No. 1688/2561, March 27, 2018. International Commission of Jurists and Human Rights Watch, “Joint Letter to Permanent Mission of Thailand to the UN, Re: Nakhon Chaisri Facility,” November 24, 2015. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), “A Year of Civilian Detention in a Prison on Military Base: What Do We Know about the Detainees There?” November 14, 2016, www.tlhr2014.com/?p=2730. Administrative Court, Decision Black Case No. 2132/2558, April 26, 2019.

Bibliography Administrative Court. Decision Black Case No. 2132/2558. April 26, 2019. Criminal Court. Indictment. Mr. Pansak Srithep et al. versus General Prayuth Chan-ocha et al. May 22, 2015.

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Haberkorn, Tyrell. In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. International Commission of Jurists and Human Rights Watch. “Joint Letter to Permanent Mission of Thailand to the UN, Re: Nakhon Chaisri Facility.” November 24, 2015. Moustafa, Tamir, and Tom Ginsburg, eds. Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. People’s Information Center. Truth for Justice: A Fact-finding Report on the April–May 2010 Crackdowns in Thailand. Bangkok: People’s Information Center for Those Affected by the Dispersal of Protests in April–May 2010, 2017. Punchada Sirivunnabood, “Thailand’s Puzzling 2019 Election: How the NCPO Junta has Embedded itself in Thai Politics.” ISEAS Perspective, May 29, 2019, www.iseas.edu.sg/ images/pdf/ISEAS_Perspective_2019_44.pdf. Sikkink, Kathryn. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. New York: Norton, 2011. Supreme Court. Decision No. 1688/2561. March 27, 2018. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR). “A Year of Civilian Detention in a Prison on Military Base: What Do We Know about the Detainees There?” November 14, 2016. www.tlhr2014.com/?p=2730. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR). Collapsed Rule of Law: The Consequences of Four Years under the National Council for Peace and Order for Human Rights and Thai Society. Bangkok: TLHR, 2018. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR). “Public Statement on the Fifth Anniversary of the Seizure of Power by the NCPO: The Lingering Remnants of the Coup.” July 17, 2019. www.tlhr2014.com/?p=13027&lang=en.

13 INVESTIGATING GENOCIDE Rithy Panh’s S-21 (2004) Phirum Laurence Gaillard

S-21, Rithy Panh’s documentary film, reinvestigates the Khmer Rouge’s interrogation center of that name, convening 11 former torturers and 2 victims. Between 1976 and 1979, the buildings of Tuol Svay Prey High School, in the south of Phnom Penh, had housed the confidential activities of the Santebal, the secret Security Service meant to protect the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK): these activities included imprisonment, torture, coerced productions of autobiographies falsified in conformity to the will of the Communist Party leadership, then the executions of nearly all its prisoners. The total institution, which trapped approximately 14,000 men, women, and children,1 left as few as 7 survivors. The buildings were turned into a genocide museum after the CPK regime of Democratic Kampuchea collapsed in 1979. Yet no one had ever collected and documented testimonies of the Tuol Sleng survivors on camera, neither had they been brought to closure, nor had it been proposed that the prison staff reenact their former, everyday activities. The French press hailed Panh’s achievement and highlighted its difficulty and its benefits in a psychological and educational perspective. They have praised the reactivation process of traumatic memory by gesture, the reunion of the prisoners and the guards for their cathartic properties, and the possibility of bringing everybody back to a humane order.2 They have acknowledged that exchanging views based on the records of the prison and reappropriating its premises had a didactic impact. Mr. Panh himself maintains that his film is “a way to start speaking.”3 While preparing it and creating complex situations, he asserts that he is an archaeologist who has to dig up the truth. He also appears as a psychologist, who has to listen to people, and he revealed himself as a good teacher by his edifying intentions. But he declines being labelled a historian because of his lack of neutrality or that of a confessor because he refuses to grant any absolution. Neither does he consider himself a judge, a dispenser of justice, or a public prosecutor, because he refrains from pronouncing any sentence.4

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Still, the making of the movie in 2002 must be framed within the larger context of a politico-legal crisis. The initial steps taken toward the establishment of a tribunal empowered to judge the Khmer Rouge’s leaders for crimes against humanity and genocide were halted in February 2002. In 1999, the negotiations initiated between the United Nations and the Cambodian authorities had crystallized contradictory preoccupations – a respect for international standards of justice and defense of human rights on the one hand, and the affirmation of national sovereignty and of a control over the tribunal on the other hand.5 The Cambodians voted for a law instituting unilaterally and ipso facto the Extraordinary Chambers according to a national vision of justice, and broke off the tense relationship, which resumed only in November 2002. In this context of legal impunity, collective amnesia, and social taboo, this paper points out the political nature of this film, and in particular its judicial nature, by considering its genesis. I demonstrate how the filmmaker adopted the approach of a criminal investigator. First looking to cover the trial of the Khmer Rouge, he is soon compelled to make up for its absence and to carry out an investigation based on the traditional techniques of confrontation and reconstruction in order to reveal a deeply denied truth.

A judicial legacy From his first ideas to the three years of shooting, Rithy Panh’s project was continually undergoing experimentation and metamorphosis: the changing scenario was completed only three months before the film was cut.6 Nevertheless, the film evolved completely under judicial auspices, revealed at the same time by the preparation before the shooting and the rushes.

Changing titles: From The Trial of the Khmer Rouge to S-21 Rithy Panh shifted his focus from the trial of the Khmer Rouge to the evidence of the crimes, as evidenced by the evolution of the titles for his documentary. Between December 13, 1999 and November 6, 2002, the project was alternately named in the production folder as the Trial of the Khmer Rouge, Autopsy of a Trial, then Trying the Khmer Rouge, and once only as Development Around a Trial, an Archaeology of Memory or The Khmer Rouge. Only one document, the agreement n.60 between the National Audiovisual Institute (NAI) and the National Center of Cinematography (CNC) from June 18, 2001, clarifies the nature of the subject: “The Trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders responsible for the Cambodian Genocide.”7 At that point Ta Mok, a member of the standing committee of the CPK, and Duch, the former head of S-21, were the only two prospective defendants yet detained by the court. It is likely that their arrests had led to the film. The arrests preceded by six to eight months the first contract between NAI and Mr. Panh. There is every reason to believe that the initial project would have come in the traditional form of a

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documentary covering the march of justice in progress. The title Autopsy of a Trial redirected that plan. It evokes a scientific and technical approach to the analysis of what had turned out to be a failure, and it matches de facto with the prolonged and strained uncertainty prevailing on the holding of the trial. At this stage, one can legitimately wonder to what extent a potential denunciation of the precise causes of its failure presented many risks for the filmmaker. A second reorientation, clear in the title Trying the Khmer Rouge, turned a state into an action, a situation into an order. At the end of November 2002, this drive to try the Khmer Rouge that shapes the final documentary becomes an explicit denunciation: less than ten days before the completion of the film, the title was changed from S-21, the Khmer Rouge War Machine to S-21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.8 Unsurprisingly, the final title was settled only at the last moment. It shows the choice to center the history of S-21 at the editing stage, but it has above all a double antithetic effect. Continuing the previous logical idea, it signals the deepest commitment, by selecting the evidence over the process, the personal implication over the deciphering: setting down the unquestionable reality of S-21, Mr. Panh participates in the trial. At the same time, the clarity of this gesture is blurred by the explicit removal from the film of any allusion to the trial, a topic also carefully avoided in Panh’s public communications.

Preparing the investigation The raw footage shows that Rithy Panh was able to provide a damning portrait of Duch, supported by testimonies and evidence. Panh’s decision to focus on prison staff may have arisen from artistic reasons, either to keep the former torturers, whom he was working with, from any interaction with Duch or to keep Duch, and the prospect to meet him, for the subject of a later film. Moreover, Panh’s freedom of expression may have been limited by the Cambodian political authorities after Hun Sen’s Win-Win policy put an end to the civil war in 1998 with the Khmer Rouge defecting and joining the government. In this existing uncertain judicial context, the filmmaker had already expressed his disappointment about the delaying of the prosecution of crimes committed during the period of the Democratic Kampuchea up to June 6, 2003, when an agreement between the Royal Government and Cambodia and the United Nations was reached after six years of negotiations to set out the legal basis and the principles of modalities of the cooperation between the national and international jurisdictions. His film project compensated for a nonexistent policy, anticipating legal procedures: he recognized it only in a few interviews: “I am doing all this because I want a trial one day.”9 Moreover, looking for an acknowledgment of the facts from the criminals models a similar expectation from the leaders: “these men will have done what we are expecting from our leaders.”10 From then on, the filmmaker’s scheme is a patient and mastered struggle against the defense mechanisms deployed by the 11 S-21 agents, torturers, and guards, to obtain their confessions in front of the camera.11

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It required appropriate preparation. It took Panh ten years to get sufficient distance from his personal grief and to confront his torturers. He himself trained seven young Cambodian technicians, considering his fellow countrymen to be the appropriate choice and better suited for shooting such an intimate subject. He chose witnesses among people who had already testified, like Vann Nath, incarcerated on January 7, 1978 and who escaped on January 7, 1979, and Him Houy, Deputy Chief of the Santebal. The first had published his memoirs in 1998, the second had surrendered to the Cambodian authorities in 1995 and had given several interviews. The filmmaker undertakes a survey of the other members of the staff from S-21 and traces them. With the acquisition of the investigation file – two bags of archives – he conducts a deep reconnaissance of the prison. The initial contact with S-21’s former staff required building a long-term relationship of trust. A quarterly meeting for three years was meant to contribute to a favorable climate.12 Two production budgets record more than 60 days of location scouting and more than 100 days of shooting.13 This approach is accompanied by placatory gestures whose meaning can be guessed from the later publicity for the film: Panh defended them on the basis of the film’s the cathartic effect on the criminals. As they confronted their past, they would regain part of their humanity. The filmmaker is not afraid to socially isolate his subject in situations where the subject displays great difficulty in verbalizing his experience.14 Beyond the dramatic, psychoanalytic, and memory critiques about S-21, the documentary film is by its original conception a powerful project by which the filmmaker pursues a quest for the truth and justice with the former Khmer Rouge.

Techniques of confrontation “To begin with they would turn me away, lie to me”:15 the painful and silenced struggle that unfolds between the filmmaker and the former Khmer Rouge is rarely alluded to. The emotional demands of being involved in the project are only given voice during the film’s opening and closing scenes when Houy, a former perpetrator, refers to a code of silence and when Nath, a victim, speaks of the agony of the meetings.16 A power struggle is nevertheless at the very heart of the filming, as Rithy Panh sets out to reduce the ways in which facts were minimized, responsibility shirked, empathy sought, or a blanket of silence adopted by the former members of the Khmer Rouge in confronting them with their victims, their colleagues, and their families over 500 hours of rushes.

Torturers confronted with their victims: A subdued violence Panh quickly adopted confrontation with the victims as a means of questioning the perpetrators. The raw footage reveals the tensions that are more heightened than in the violently constrained dialogue. While Houy persistently claimed that he faced the threat of death for disobeying orders, Nath’s words betray Houy’s real ambition and true cruelty in obeying the orders. The conclusion of the first meeting with

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Houy, absent from the final cut, is the inverse of an onscreen appeasement. After having shown the former torturer his paintings of life in S-21 in order to try and get him to identify the truth of the matter, Nath expresses his own anger and disbelief: “Even if, at the time, you had a conscience, there was no other option,” the former torturer said in an attempt to prove his innocence. “I don’t believe you,” Nath responded. “You managed to make your way steadily up the hierarchy, which shows your determination. You were in charge of hundreds in the prison.” Although the reassembled former Khmer Rouge appear in the film as civil and obedient, Nath recalls the daily brutality that had possessed them and the hate that burned within them, in the successive commentary on the painting of the group of detainees laid out in a room. In a passage cut from the final edit: At the time, it was worse than being an animal in hell. You went about your work then as if you were a devil and the prisoners were animals in hell. You would express so much hatred towards the victims. … Take him for instance, he was a devil. He had no morality, not a shred of pity, nothing. I don’t understand the reasoning behind such brutality. And how could you people who worked here, how could you get used to this behavior, to seeing this suffering? I just don’t understand. This line of questioning reveals a critical element at stake in this confrontation: the recognition of the prisoners as human beings, as possessing an inalienable dignity, and the conscience of the torturers as being capable of absolute moral violation. These appeals to conscience are prominent throughout Nath’s discourse and are equally matched by the conflicting rhetoric of absolute obedience to the Party, when they do not disappear into an awkward silence on the part of the individual being questioned. This request is laid bare toward the end of the film in a unedited camera sequence when Nath is confounded, defiant, and insistent and then orders Houy to say “sorry” five separate times – a request that falls on deaf ears, the former torturer feeling that he has already done so, having suffered enough himself and since turned his life around.17

Torturers confronted with each other: A discipline of solidarity If the meeting of torturers does not necessarily bring about mutual recognition, notably on the part of the superiors toward their subordinates, it is quickly framed by the four principles of Angkar: “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, know nothing.” This unspoken discipline crystallizes in the end through the adoption of a monolithic defense and the cloak of silence that descends in the face of the more troubling questions. But the disguise slips at unexpected moments of filming. The solidarity and unspoken camaraderie of former employees, even a fear on the part of some toward their former leaders, becomes evident in times of stress or when that solidarity is fractured. Nath’s questions on the fate of the children at S-21, asked in 1994, are settled intermittently among the torturers behind closed doors.

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The scene in the film when Hô, a guard, accuses Thi, who was in charge of registration, of lying to the detainees by pretending to take the children to be looked after, when in actual fact they were taken to be killed behind the prison, was originally interrupted. Rithy Panh had asked for a meeting between the guards to discuss this point. Hô had started to describe the lies told by Thi to the mothers, pointing directly at him, as he went on to detail everything he knew, all the while with his gaze fixed on his silent counterpart. The hierarchical gulf between the lowly, modestly educated guard who remained taciturn and spoke with a stutter and the eloquent record taker was suddenly breached as the former stated, “if you say you didn’t do it, you still did it,” insisting, “you just have to tell the children of those prisoners what you did.”18 The extent to which Thi played down his role was subsequently revealed. Confused and lost for words, he could no longer be filmed: filming was interrupted and could only be started again the next day, when the prison record taker again found his voice and agreed to accept his responsibilities. Confrontation between one torturer and another therefore becomes an effective tool in the sense that it contrasts different perspectives and allows for a deeper mutual examination of recollections.

Torturers confronted with their families: A forbidden story The mention of S-21 within the families of the torturers and in their presence reinforced an emotional violence equal in scope to that of the silence itself. The opening scene revealing Houy and his parents, sitting on the covered porch of their home, draws its dramatic tension from the orders they give one another to confess, perform ceremonies for the dead, and purify his karma. They know and say that he has killed, without going into further detail. His mother’s consternation, as she offers assurances of her son’s good upbringing and the pity which she feels for him, is doubled by another tragedy that is not specified on screen and that she does not know. The former deputy leader has kept his distance from his parents since the Liberation in order to avoid having to ever take responsibility for the death of his younger brother. After having been able to come to Phnom Penh under Houy’s supervision, his young brother found himself forbidden from leaving again for fear that he might reveal the secret of S-21’s existence. Forced to work in the prison, he was eventually executed by Duch and his group on the arrival of the Vietnamese: but Houy’s parents always believed that the boy was a casualty of war.19 This confidence afforded to the filmmaker corroborates the idea of an individual who is both torturer and victim. It is worth noting that the corresponding sequence is absent from the film, like the one when Khân, as questioner, confesses that he himself was responsible for the disappearance of his mother and two brothers.20 In terms of the raw footage, a confrontation or non-confrontation with family members paradoxically led to the recognition that the victims deserved: the guilt of the torturers found its expressions through their feelings of suffering and assumed

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shame or even through what they continue to withhold from their families. Khân’s distressing confession of his story to his wife, in the presence of the filmmaker, defines his torment and culminates in his outburst, “I hate all of that, and it disgusts me, but it’s too late.”21 His wife, who has learnt none of this in 20 years, is left speechless. He just about manages to then explain that he doesn’t want to inflict this suffering on his children. The confrontations play on a process of interaction with the aim of obtaining a confession and conclude with mixed results. The interview with the victims that is guided by the appeals to conscience runs up against an unflinching line of defense; the meeting between torturers is hamstrung by a shared discipline of secrecy and later cracks into weak accusations and mutual confessions; family communion culminates both in violent rifts and fleeting and indirect recognition.

Recall techniques Faced with the limited success of the confrontations with witnesses or family members, Rithy Panh redefined his approach, by using physical evidence as a starting point. By contextualizing the meetings with the written records of the prison, he creates both the conditions enabling the return of a memory and stands in the way of any resistance to a release and evasiveness on the part of the torturers. By stripping away consciousness’s flaws and its pitfalls of aphasia and amnesia, he focuses on the mechanical everyday procedures of the employees by reconstituting recorded details: it is a matter of making employees assume their own role.

Reconstructions Noticing that the guard, Poeuv, used gestures to make up for his difficulties with speech,22 the filmmaker made the decision to draw upon this physical memory and to find a “neutral” location and documentation. He quickly decides to film at S-21. The gesture now becomes instrumental in the facilitation of memory. The filmmaker states: “The everyday gestures related to the crime are placed back in their original setting. Taking the torturers to the place where they used to work submerges them back in that reality and allows access to a part of their memories that is usually closed off in an act of defense by the individual who only responds to orders, on pain of death.”23 This method differs in no way from that of a reconstruction in the legal sense, in terms of its aims and form. Before revealing a language, it has a practical objective: it enables a genuine verification of the versions offered by different witnesses and their compatibility with the reality on the ground. This is part of the examination and is based on repetition and referred to by the filmmaker: “We worked on repetition, by reconstructing scenes numerous times. Memory then returns, gaining improved clarity with every renewal.”24 Rithy Panh becomes the investigating judge to the extent that he is the one who orders the procedural act, as if it is a simple investigation. In effect, the crime scene reconstruction is essential in the event of a preliminary investigation.

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The work carried out can be demonstrated by Houy, who for a long time maintained that he had not carried out any killings but who finally confessed to his role as mass executioner, between his declarations in Bophana: a Cambodian Tragedy (1996) and a nighttime reconstruction in Choeung Ek in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2002). To begin with, Houy stated that he had done no more than drive the trucks that held the condemned, carry out registration, and lead the detainees to the “permanents” who executed them, by striking them on the nape of their necks and slitting their throats. Under the orders of Duch on one sole occasion, he confesses to having taken an iron bar and striking five people, without finishing the job. He would later admit to the murder of over 1,000 people to Rithy Panh, or half the figure he had given the Cambodian authorities in 1995. Under the guidance of a psychiatrist familiar with the psychological make-up of a murderer, the filmmaker attempts to use the information at his disposal to reach an accurate estimate, convinced that no figure so far offered is correct.25 In the end he gives up, focusing his interests on one gesture, with the result that Houy assumes the entirety of his responsibilities, speaking solely in the first person plural as when he describes the executions in Choeung Ek: “we brought them out one by one … we took down their names. We lied to them … we made the prisoners kneel.” His first statements come across as lies through omission: the deputy leader of the Santebal was active at all stages of the process that led detainees inexorably to their deaths. The reconstructions do, however, have their limitations in covering neither the complete functioning of the prison nor the inevitable violations. Regular cell inspections and the arrest of detainees revived the perpetrators’ excitement in the daily physical or verbal abuse of prisoners, and the killing at Choeung Ek by Houy constitutes the climax of this process of destruction. The heart of S-21 itself, torture, has not been dealt with.

Physical evidence Once in the possession of records, Rithy Panh was never again parted from them. One piece of physical evidence remains the best way of gaining confessions: reading the daily report, the medical record, torture instructions, the method of writing out confessions, and submission of photos of tortured men and of the dead all inevitably put pressure on a denial. “With the document in hand, they concentrate and can no longer deny, pretend. They sit clutching a text and a photo, both of which, despite their best efforts, testify to a reality which they attempt to hide.”26 This evidence, which is also part of the filmmaker’s dossier, is in the end rarely denied, but not commented on with ease, the former S-21 employees not going beyond a reading or technical description, replying tersely to any raised comments. Nath is critical of the former members of the Khmer Rouge in their last interview for not taking these documents into consideration. “There is still all this proof, witness accounts … It’s there, but you’re just ignoring it.” The eventual unfolding of truth does not always lead to acknowledgment of its meaning.

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A comparison of the comments made by Houy in his autobiography in the film of the witness statements of other former members of the Khmer Rouge reveals an element of recognition of his writing. The disclosure of his reasons for involvement in the Revolution is bound up in a demonstrative rhetoric, and he himself takes on the determination to prove his loyalty to Angkar once it called upon him. However, he summarizes and legitimizes his actions in a single desire to survive. “I did that to survive” is his explanation of his exemplary record that eventually led to his appointment as deputy leader of the Santebal. Houy appears in the war as a model of virtue and discipline, the sole reason – given his humble social background – for his ascent to a high-ranking position. Ta Ho, his division superior, then emphasized his irreproachable industriousness, seriousness, and endurance, as well as his high sense of personal sacrifice, which all led to his promotion.27 The terrifying order that Houy imposed on S-21, described not only by the survivors but also by other employees of the prison, such as Hein, a photographer, represents a pure and simple radicalization of his attitudes and his natural abilities, to which the effect of a permanent threat subsequently became closely associated. Not all evidence can be put into perspective: the quarterly or thrice-annual “destructions for blood tests” carried out by the doctor Thi, who had been trained for three months and twenty days to get such prisoners back into a condition where they could be interrogated, again weigh heavily due to the numerous pages listing the names of victims. These documents play their decisive role in determining the truth and hearing them takes the form of a police interview: the filmmaker-cum-investigator, previously informed, starts by questioning the subject, then confronts him with his own denials in presenting him with contrary evidence drawn from his dossier. * Considering the production file and the raw footage of S-21, it appears that Rithy Panh’s approach and filmic set take up the structure of an investigation in its preliminary and operating stages: investigation file review, location scouting, making contacts, carrying on an interview, and assessing the information given, checking its accuracy, confronting words and pieces of writing. The filmmaker claims little responsibility for this position, and scarcely communicates on this topic. Thus, the more significant explanations cannot be found in critical reviews but in an academic article: I used to discuss with them the themes I wanted to tackle, then I confronted them with evidence: a picture of a prisoner who committed suicide, an infirmary or execution record, a former comrade’s testimony … But each time it was a struggle. I had to alternate elements of surprise and time for reflection, avoid routine so that they do not replenish their defense system. When one of them did not recognize one’s act or minimized its significance, he knew he took the risk of facing his own contradictions.28

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The continuous strategic reflection that must break the denying resistance of the subject, the method consisting in exhausting their lies then obliging them to face their contradictions, this is what is more officially claimed as empathic listening, a neutral judgment, and an unfailing patience, but is in fact the everyday life of investigators. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, during the investigation phase, made no mistake when they approached the filmmaker to provide them with a copy of about 100 hours of filming – a request he dismissed, or when they conducted reenactments at the S-21 center with Duch, more than 30 years after the fact. S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine anticipates and takes on an investigation politically delayed in 2002, when the Khmer Rouge’s trial was under question. More than being a human achievement and an esthetic renewal, this documentary film is a committed manifesto for justice that establishes the perpetration of crimes against humanity.

Notes 1 David Chandler, S-21 ou le crime impuni des Khmers Rouges (Paris: éd. Autrement Frontières, 2002) 31. 2 Jean-Claude Loiseau, “Rithy Panh, le Cambodgien qui filme les âmes,” Télérama, August 2, 2003. 3 Jacques Mandelbaum, “Victimes et bourreaux dans le champ de la mémoire,” Le Monde, February 11, 2004, 26. 4 Antoine de Baecque, “Mon travail n’est pas celui d’un procureur,” Libération, February 20, 2004, 7. 5 Scott Luftglass, “Crossroads in Cambodia: The United Nation’s Responsibility to withdraw Involvement from the Establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to Prosecute the Khmer rouge,” Virginia Law Review 90, no. 3 (2004), 893–964. 6 The contract between the National Audiovisual Institute (NAI) and Rithy Panh of December 13, 1999 and its amendments, an agreement about the development of a program dated May 5, 2000 between the European Society of television programs and the NAI ordered indeed the delivery of an “unpublished original text” or a “scenario.” An explanatory note of November 28, 2000 about the payment of M. Panh by the NAI’s creation and research department dates its completion to March 2002. Dossier de production de S-21, la machine de mort khmère rouge de Rithy Panh, NAI. 7 NAI, ibid. 8 NAI, ibid. These titles are respectively part of “the Avenant n°2 au contrat du réalisateur n°1 100754 du 14 mai 2001” and “the Avenant à la convention d’inédit du 22 janvier 2001” – both of November 18, 2002. 9 Florence Colombani, “Rithy Panh, dans les replis du génocide,” Le Monde, May 17, 2003, 30. He admits a first defeat in only one interview: “Then I started to work on the Khmer Rouge trial with great optimism! As the trial did not come, it is all ended with S-21.” Serge Kagantski, “Rithy Panh, réalisateur de S-21 la Machine de mort khmère rouge,” Les Inrockuptibles, February 11, 2004. 10 François-Guillaume Lorrain, “Cambodge l’aveu,” Le Point, May 30, 2003, 123. 11 Some critics say that Rithy Panh has worked without any scenario. Valérie Ganne, “S-21, la Machine de mort khmère rouge, un documentaire sans scenario,” Synopsis, no. 29 (2004), 78–9. 12 Jean-Claude Raspiengas, “La vie, je la dois à tous les morts du génocide,” La Croix, February 11, 2004, 22.

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13 NAI, Dossier de production de S-21. Production budget in the co-production agreement between Arte and the NAI, April 12, 2001. Vehicles for location scouting were rented for 60 days. Production budget of November 9, 2002 – renting of a DV-CAM for 100 days. 14 Raspiengeas, “La vie, je la dois à tous les morts du génocide,” 22. “As soon as I felt there was a problem, I isolated myself with them in a paddy-field so that nobody could hear what they had been hiding for such a long time.” 15 Christine Chaumeau and Rithy Panh, La Machine khmère rouge (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 91. 16 Ibid., 51 and 243. Houy here interrupts his father’s grieving “Stop it! I’ve got a headache.” Nath addresses the torturers with these words “For me, every one of our meetings is a source of pain.” 17 Ibid., 233–5. 18 Ibid., 202. 19 Ibid., 49. 20 Ibid., 228. 21 Ibid., 230. 22 Kagantski, “Rithy Panh, réalisateur de S-21.” 23 Chaumeau and Panh, La Machine khmère rouge, 91. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 210. 26 Ibid., 91. Rithy Panh also refers to his progress in an article by Orianne Charpentier, “S21, The Khmer Rouge death machine,” Le Monde, February 11, 2004. “Each time we start off with a photo, the minutes of an interrogation. Because it’s difficult to lie to your victims’ faces. The records, these are the dead who did not want to die that way and are coming back. In all these documents, meticulously compiled by the Khmer Rouge, I personally saw the signs of resistance: a defiant glance, the cry of a man who continues, even when tortured, to reject the regime.” 27 Ibid., 110–11. 28 Christian Delage, “La place du témoin filmé, de Nuremberg au procès des Khmers Rouges,” Le Débat, no. 158 (2010).

Bibliography Chandler, David. S-21 ou le crime impuni des Khmers Rouges. Paris: éd. Autrement Frontières, 2002. Charpentier, Orianne. “S-21, The Khmer Rouge death machine.” Le Monde, February 11, 2004. Chaumeau, Christine, and Rithy Panh. La Machine khmère rouge. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. Colombani, Florence. “Rithy Panh, dans les replis du génocide.” Le Monde, May 17, 2003, 30. De Baecque, Antoine. “Mon travail n’est pas celui d’un procureur.” Libération, February 20, 2004, 7. Delage, Christian. “La place du témoin filmé, de Nuremberg au procès des Khmers Rouges.” Le Débat, no. 158 (2010). Ganne, Valérie. “S-21, la Machine de mort khmère rouge, un documentaire sans scenario.” Synopsis, no. 29 (2004): 78–79. Kagantski, Serge. “Rithy Panh, réalisateur de S-21 la Machine de mort khmère rouge.” Les Inrockuptibles, February 11, 2004. Loiseau, Jean-Claude. “Rithy Panh, le Cambodgien qui filme les âmes.” Télérama, August 2, 2003. Lorrain, François-Guillaume. “Cambodge l’aveu.” Le Point, 2003, 123.

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Luftglass, Scott. “Crossroads in Cambodia: The United Nation’s Responsibility to withdraw Involvement from the Establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to Prosecute the Khmer Rouge.” Virginia Law Review 90, no. 3 (2004): 893–964. Mandelbaum, Jacques. “Victimes et bourreaux dans le champ de la mémoire.” Le Monde, February 11, 2004, 26. NAI (National Audiovisual Institute). Dossier de production de S-21, la machine de mort khmère rouge de Rithy Panh. Paris, 2004. Raspiengas, Jean-Claude. “La vie, je la dois à tous les morts du génocide.” La Croix, February 11, 2004, 22. S-21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Directed by Rithy Panh. France: Arte France Cinéma, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, 2004.

14 VIETNAM, ASEAN, THE GREAT POWERS, AND THE CHALLENGES OF LEARNING FROM THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE Hoang Minh Vu

Historians, genocide studies, and politicians alike are fond of quoting George Santayana’s famous warning, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”1 Yet diplomatic historians have for many years studied the potential pitfalls of attempting to apply historical lessons to contemporary situations. Recently, US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez faced a media backlash for her use of the term “concentration camps” to correctly describe the detention centers on the Mexican border and garner support for their closure or improvement, highlighting the potential for distraction when a policy maker attempts to employ historical lessons in a politically charged environment.2 In any given situation there are often multiple and contrary historical lessons that policy makers may choose from. When deciding whether to intervene in Vietnam in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson weighed the different lessons learned from the Korean War and the First Indochina War in order to avoid another costly land war in Asia for minimal security gains. There were also lessons to be learned from the failure of appeasing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, from which the need to stand up to an expansionist, authoritarian enemy was made patently clear. In choosing the wrong lesson and embroiling the United States in a brutal, long, costly, and unnecessary engagement that ultimately ended in defeat and derailed his domestic reforms and political fortunes, Johnson demonstrated how difficult it sometimes is for decision makers to take the right lessons from history, even when they consciously try to do so.3 These difficulties partly explain why the major actors involved in the Cambodian conflict, namely Vietnam, China, Cambodia, ASEAN, and the Western democracies, have come away with all the wrong lessons from history, leading to norms and conduct that serve to lessen the chances of an effective international response to the recurrence of genocide in Southeast Asia, as we are witnessing today in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Vietnam’s long and costly military

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adventure in Cambodia between 1979 and 1989 has convinced many of its leaders that it should never again intervene in the internal affairs of a neighboring state, no matter the degree of atrocities. Similarly, the writings of most historians of ASEAN and contemporary leaders of the five original ASEAN member states still portray the Cambodian crisis as an exemplary display of ASEAN states’ maturity and unity in defending the cherished value of non-intervention that is so central to the “ASEAN Way.” These strongly condemned the Vietnamese invasion and pressured for their immediate withdrawal despite the high likelihood of a return of the Khmer Rouge. As for the great powers, China, for its part, has never publicly admitted to or apologized for materially and diplomatically aiding the Khmer Rouge regime, nor has it unequivocally condemned this regime long after its total defeat. It continues today to be the leading advocate for the principle of absolute sanctity of state sovereignty in international fora. As for the West, the development of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and the organizing of the slow, inefficient, and costly Khmer Rouge Tribunal are largely a product of experiences in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia, ignoring the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia (1979–1989), and their rapid and cost-efficient 1979 tribunal that convicted Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia. The standard narrative largely credits Cambodia’s rejuvenation to the influx of capital from the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and subsequent economic liberalization, ignoring the role of the Vietnamese intervention in ending the genocide and the massive socialist bloc aid that rebuilt the basic infrastructure and headed off an imminent famine in the immediate aftermath. In Cambodia itself, Tram Luong’s chapter eloquently explains how the last decade has seen a revival of anti-Vietnamese sentiments in the opposition movement, partially directed at the resident ethnic Vietnamese community, one of the targets of the last genocide. I argue that a first step to drawing the kind of historical lessons that would actually prevent genocide from repeating is for scholars and policy makers to be bold in expressing their opinions, to dare to question established tenets like the ASEAN Way, and, to discuss in practical and specific terms the real lessons of the Cambodian genocide when dealing with ongoing and potentially future genocides in the region.

Vietnam: A reluctant and tardy intervention In the aftermath of the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, there has been plenty of scholarship highlighting the incompetence of various international actors in preventing these terrible tragedies.4 In the case of the Cambodian genocide, William Shawcross, Kenton Clymer, Ben Kiernan, and Taylor Owen have written extensively about how the US bombing had been culpable in radicalizing the Khmer Rouge and contributing to the genocide. But few have chastised the Vietnamese (and other international actors as well) for waiting over three years before acting to stop the genocide.5 In fact, Vietnam’s decision to help topple the Khmer Rouge

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has been widely criticized for violating the prohibition against the use of force in international relations as expressed in the UN Charter Article 2(1), as well as the emerging regional norm against intervention in other states’ affairs as expressed in the 1967 Bangkok Declaration, the 1971 Declaration on the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), and the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC).6 Though Vietnamese troops had entered and held Cambodian territory on the border by the end of 1977, the Vietnamese only began their campaign to drive the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh after an intense border conflict, a genocide of the Vietnamese community in Cambodia, and multiple unsuccessful efforts at courting Chinese mediation.7 When Vietnam finally launched a full-scale invasion in December 1978, it was primarily for national security and strategic objectives.8 Its inability to destroy the Khmer Rouge forces, aided in great part by Thailand’s decision to allow the Khmer Rouge and other opposition groups haven on its side of the border, bogged Vietnamese troops down in the country until 1989, at great human and material cost to both Vietnam and Cambodia. Even after the discovery and publicization of the mass graves of the Khmer Rouge regime, the international community continued to support the seating of the Khmer Rouge-led Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) at international fora and called for the Vietnamese withdrawal throughout the 1980s.9 It was only with significant Soviet bloc support that Vietnam was able to sustain its military efforts to prevent the return of the Khmer Rouge until the Soviet Union collapse in the late 1980s.10 The uncomfortable truth is that Vietnam knew far more than it admitted about the ongoing genocide in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, but did nothing until forced to defend itself from Pol Pot’s aggression. My 2013 interview with Nguyễn Hiệu, who served as a spy and advisor to Lê Đức Thọ and later replaced him as chief advisor to the Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS) and the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), and served as deputy head of the military attaché delegation in Cambodia before becoming a member of the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party, was particularly illuminating. Hiệu was among the staff who remained in the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975 through the severance of relations in January 1978. Hiệu also participated in the unsuccessful negotiations on the Vietnam-Cambodia border following the Khmer Rouge attacks on Phú Quốc (Koh Tral) and Thổ Chu islands between 3 and 5 May 1975. In that time, Hiệu and his colleagues witnessed first-hand many atrocities, including “executions of monks, officers, authorities under Lon Nol’s regime, even Lon Nol’s family” accompanying the forced evacuation of the city’s population.11 In his memoirs, General Lê Đức Anh, who led Vietnamese forces in Cambodia before becoming Defense Minister and President of Vietnam, described the situation when many Cambodian refugees first fled to Vietnam in 1975: “according to international law, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave the order to turn them over [to the Cambodian authorities]. All refugees we repatriated were executed, some of whom right on Vietnamese territory, before our very eyes.

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Later, we made the decision to not repatriate any more but instead give them food and look after them.”12 Accounts such as these indicate that Vietnam had good knowledge of the genocide that was taking place in Cambodia, but never seriously considered humanitarian intervention until attacked. Even more troubling, according to Nguyễn Quốc Khánh, who later became Vietnamese Ambassador to Thailand, there were whispers in the halls of Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the late 1970s that Vietnam needed to emulate the Khmer Rouge’s resolve in its ongoing land reform efforts in the South.13 It was only in 1977, after the Khmer Rouge had launched costly attacks on Vietnam beginning on Vietnamese Unification Day (April 30), that the Secretariat of the Vietnamese Communist Party hastily formed a Provisional Subcommittee Researching the Cambodian Problem (colloquially known as Group 77). Between December 5, 1977 and January 5, 1978, Vietnamese forces advancing as far as 30km deep into Cambodian territory to destroy Khmer Rouge supply lines “captured a number of secret documents of the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, which became the basis for the correct identification and evaluation of the nature and plot of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique.”14 After months of internal debate, much of which was spent arguing over the precise political character of the Khmer Rouge regime by Marxist theoreticians, Group 77 finally came out with their report in January 1978, which concluded that “the Cambodian nation is in the grips of a serious crisis; the people of Cambodia are currently living in a giant concentration camp.” Yet, all four key political goals it identified for Vietnam’s Cambodian policy – “(1) Protection of our people; (2) Fight hard to punish those invaders who killed our people; (3) Recover lost territory, defend our territorial integrity; and (4) Undermine the plot to divide the people of the two countries, isolate the reactionaries” – were all defensive in nature and did not explicitly advocate for a military intervention to bring about regime change. However, the report did recommend that Vietnam “actively support, aid, and protect the patriotic Cambodian forces and true revolutionaries,” particularly in helping the refugees who fled to Vietnam. It also called for Vietnam to “pursue an offensive diplomatic push” as “we have the right to punish the invaders and murderers. We are at an advantage diplomatically because we are righteous and humane.”15 The inclusion of this moralistic language suggests that the final report was a compromise between Politburo members who favored a more activist foreign policy and those who were more wary of the significant costs of expanding a defensive war into an offensive one with a humanitarian dimension. But in practice, even after privately and publicly recognizing the genocidal nature of the Khmer Rouge regime, the Vietnamese opted to withdraw from Cambodia in January 1978, “respecting the independence and sovereignty of our neighbor,” and pinned their hopes on Chinese mediation, until relations with China broke down definitively by mid-1978.16 In the end, it was not until December 25, 1978, after more than a million Cambodians had already perished in the genocide, and only when Vietnam faced an imminent two-front war with China and Cambodia if it did not quickly eliminate the Khmer Rouge as a security threat, that Vietnam

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finally launched the invasion that liberated Phnom Penh. Lê Đức Anh perhaps summarizes best Vietnam’s inaction in these years: “We need to seriously self-critique our response to the Cambodian issue. In every stage we made mistakes.”17 In the recent celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Phnom Penh, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc spoke at length about the critical role of Vietnam in ending the genocide and historic friendship between the two countries, but offered no reflection on Vietnam’s complex relationship with its erstwhile Khmer communist allies, its role in helping these allies topple the Lon Nol regime and seize power in 1975, and, perhaps most importantly, its inaction in the face of genocide between 1975 and 1978.18 From Santayana’s instrumentalist perspective, the most important lesson Vietnam should have learned from the Cambodian genocide is that it should evaluate its allies with objectivity and clarity, and undertake to prevent any recurrence of genocide in the region even if it is perpetrated by an ostensibly friendly regime. Vietnam should also have learned that its widespread use of landmines in Cambodia injured many innocent civilians and turned public opinion against the Vietnamese military presence, playing into the hands of the Khmer Rouge.19 Yet today, Vietnam has learned the completely opposite lesson. Since acceding to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and joining ASEAN in 1995, Vietnam has internalized the ASEAN Way’s core tenet that international humanitarian interventions are too costly, and national selfinterest should be the only guide for foreign policy, which explains its silence over gross human rights abuses perpetrated by fellow ASEAN members in both East Timor in 1999 and Rakhine State in Myanmar especially since 2012. Vietnam’s experience with asymmetric warfare against the Khmer Rouge insurgency has also played a part in convincing its military leaders that landmines are a cost-efficient, effective, and legitimate means of self-defense, as evidenced by its continuing refusal to sign on to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (Ottawa Treaty).20

ASEAN and China: The triumph of amorality On May 31, 2019, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong posted on his Facebook page a tribute to the recently deceased Thai Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda that waxed lyrical about his leadership of ASEAN in the face of Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia. “General Prem was resolute in not accepting this fait accompli, and worked with ASEAN partners to oppose the Vietnamese occupation in international forums. This prevented the military invasion and regime change from being legitimised. It protected the security of other Southeast Asia countries, and decisively shaped the course of the region.”21 The post ignited strong reactions from Vietnam and Cambodia, with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen lamenting on his own Facebook page that Lee Hsien Loong’s statement “reflects Singapore’s position then in support of the genocidal regime and the wish for its return to Cambodia. Singapore was the host of the tripartite meeting that led

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to the formation of the coalition government of the Democratic Kampuchea, which had prolonged the war and the suffering of Cambodian people for another 10 years. It’s an act against the survival of the Cambodian people.”22 Lee’s valorization of ASEAN opposition to Vietnam and the PRK may have been tone-deaf and insensitive, but it was also well within the mainstream of ASEAN historiography. For most experts on ASEAN, the Third Indochina War was the regional organization’s defining moment. By 1970, ASEAN was over a decade old. Despite the high hopes of economic and political cooperation that were enunciated in the Bangkok Declaration in 1967, it had little to show in terms of concrete accomplishments. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Singapore’s Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam initiated a special ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ closed meeting in Bangkok, where he encouraged the other ASEAN countries to take a strong stance against what he saw as a challenge to the core ASEAN principle of non-intervention.23 ASEAN then played a crucial role in lobbying for continued recognition of Democratic Kampuchea in important international fora like the UN and Non-Aligned Movement, and in the formation of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. Most experts consider the Cambodian conflict a major turning point for ASEAN as its first major foreign policy victory that launched the organization into international prominence and brought about the conditions favorable for its institutionalization in the 1990s.24 In a key 2011 address, former Singaporean Foreign Minister Wong Kan Seng identified five lessons Singapore learned from the Cambodian conflict, all of which were actionable tips for a small nation to punch above its weight and lead the world on an important foreign policy issue. According to Wong, the Cambodian conflict’s most important legacy was that it made ASEAN “a more cohesive and coordinated grouping. It was through the careful handling of the Cambodia issue that ASEAN proved its mettle and showed the international community that it had the ability to solve problems, and was a ‘serious’ and ‘credible’ organisation.”25 There was no room in Wong’s fond reminiscences for critical reflection on the impact of ASEAN actions in prolonging a bloody civil war and buttressing a genocidal regime for over a decade. Today, the principle of absolute non-intervention regardless of a regime’s human rights record that was reaffirmed at the 1991 Paris Peace Conference continues to shape ASEAN’s lackluster approach to human rights. Various scholars and organizations have cited concerns that the 2014 ASEAN Human Rights Declaration outlines such a cultural relativist definition of human rights that it could potentially justify any governmental infringement of these rights.26 Article 6 stipulates that “the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms must be balanced with the performance of corresponding duties as every person has responsibilities to all other individuals, the community and the society where one lives.” Article 7 further conditions that “the realisation of human rights must be considered in the regional and national context bearing in mind different political, economic, legal, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds,” and Article 8 subjects the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms “to such

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limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of others, and to meet the just requirements of national security, public order, public health, public safety, public morality, as well as the general welfare of the peoples in a democratic society.” If all that was not enough, Article 9 gives governments the ultimate getout-of-jail-free card by stipulating that “the principles of impartiality, objectivity, non-selectivity, non-discrimination, non-confrontation and avoidance of double standards and politicisation, should always be upheld.”27 Given these caveats, ASEAN will never have to censure any member state for human rights violations. This heavy privileging of stability over justice explains ASEAN’s silence over the Indonesian military crackdown in East Timor in 1999 and Myanmar’s ongoing genocide of its Rohingya population, severely circumscribing its regional leadership role.28 Until there are more concerted efforts at critically reexamining ASEAN’s role in supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and, with it, the entire ASEAN Way of absolute sovereignty and non-intervention, Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia will remain the last de facto humanitarian intervention in Southeast Asia for the foreseeable future. At least, the recent spat between Cambodia and Singapore illustrates how even this fundamental and longstanding principle is increasingly being questioned within ASEAN by its newer members. Attitudes toward absolute sovereignty are trending the opposite way in China, the country that had once been the Khmer Rouge’s main ally. Like ASEAN, China also considers the Cambodian conflict a major success. Deng Xiaoping supported the Khmer Rouge despite the ideological incompatibility between his moderate, pragmatic philosophy and their radical revolutionary zeal to show the US that China could be a valuable partner in containing Soviet clients and to create the stable conditions necessary for his Reform and Opening Up (改革开放) policy, focusing on economic growth after decades of internal revolutionary upheavals.29 At the July 1981 International Conference on Kampuchea, Chinese Foreign Minister Han Nianlong roped in the Americans to veto the ASEAN proposal of disarming the Khmer Rouge, leading even the relatively anti-Soviet Singaporeans to conclude that Beijing was not interested in a workable solution to the Cambodian problem, but was hoping either for the return of the Khmer Rouge to power, or the prolongation of the war to bleed Vietnam dry.30 In the Chinese government’s view, it achieved all its foreign policy objectives in diplomatically isolating Vietnam, garnering ASEAN and Western support for their genocidal allies, and ultimately forcing a Vietnamese withdrawal and a chance for the return of the Khmer Rouge and renewal of their partnership with China.31 More than just rallying domestic support to secure Deng Xiaoping’s hitherto insecure position in Chinese domestic politics, for the Chinese leadership, the Third Indochina War also vindicated Deng’s emphasis of realpolitik over morality and ideology in foreign policy. Today, we see China’s disdain for international law and treaties in its actions in Hong Kong and the South China Sea, its willingness to support regimes with especially poor track records in human rights like North

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Korea and Syria, its penchant for employing the practice of debt-trap diplomacy toward countries like Sri Lanka and Djibouti to secure its national interests, and its own genocidal policies and practices against the Chinese Uighurs. China’s disdain for humanitarian laws and norms was also readily apparent in its amoral foreign policy over the Third Indochina War.32 The Chinese government has also internally taken steps to limit public debate of this war, thereby making it difficult for this narrative to ever be questioned. While the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Third Indochina War was allowed to be publicly commemorated in Vietnam with some censorship, in China veteran groups who served in this war are unable to publicly voice their demands for government recognition and medical support and still gather only in private.33 While the ostensible reason is to avoid antagonizing Vietnam, the Chinese government is also trying to avoid awkward questions regarding its cozy relationship with the Khmer Rouge. The Sino-Khmer Rouge relationship of the late 1970s offer an important case study of how a fiercely independent smaller ally (Democratic Kampuchea) could, in the right conditions, gain the leverage necessary to dictate the bilateral relationship with the bigger partner (China), a risk Beijing should keep in mind as it builds analogous relationships abroad today.34 But as long as the Chinese government refuses to reexamine its existing orthodoxies surrounding the Third Indochina War, it will be unable to learn from these past errors, and the war will continue to lend credence to an amoral foreign policy that may eventually sap away the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, reputation, and, ultimately, even its ability to pursue its interests at home and abroad.

The West and Cambodia: Selective forgetfulness In the wake of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, the Western democracies quickly moved to suspend development aid to both countries, and supported ASEAN and China’s efforts to secure votes for continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge in international fora. International humanitarian aid to the refugee camps on the Thai border that were controlled by the Khmer Rouge also unintentionally gave the Khmer Rouge a safe haven from whence they could harass Vietnamese and PRK troops, and thereby indirectly undermined the nation-building efforts of the PRK.35 While some European countries like France and Germany were willing to consider resuming aid to Vietnam in 1989 when the Cold War was ending and Vietnamese troops had already withdrawn from Cambodia, the US pressured its European allies to drop these proposals. When they refused, the Americans vetoed the European loans outright, thereby pressuring Vietnam and the PRK to accept a final peace agreement that gave no mention of the genocide and allowing the Khmer Rouge to participate in the 1993 UN-sponsored election (which they eventually decided to boycott).36 It would not be until 2003 that the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), also known as The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, would begin formal proceedings against the former Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity and genocide, and not until 2018 that all the

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major surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge had been convicted of these crimes.37 Despite criticism from many quarters, no Western government has publicly apologized for having supported the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s or for delaying recognition of Cambodia’s genocide. The experience of the Cambodian conflict did help inform the development of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, an important intermediary in the resolution of the Cambodian conflict, later identified this conflict as a pivotal event that convinced many world leaders at the 2005 World Summit of the need to radically transform the existing principle of sovereignty from absolute to conditional.38 The Summit defined R2P as “the responsibility of a state to its own people not to either commit such mass atrocity crimes or allow them to occur (now referred to as Pillar One); the responsibility of other states to assist those lacking the capacity to so protect (Pillar Two); and the responsibility of the international community to respond with ‘timely and decisive action’ (including ultimately with coercive military force if that is authorised by the Security Council) if a state is ‘manifestly failing’ to meet its protection responsibilities (Pillar Three).”39 However, in overstepping the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) mandate of establishing a no-fly zone by carrying out airstrikes in support of regime change in Libya in 2011, the NATO coalition irreparably lost the trust of Russia and China, making it deeply unlikely that these two permanent members of the UNSC l will in the future allow for R2P to become established policy.40 The 1991 Paris Peace Agreement provided for Cambodia to be administered UNTAC for a period of two years (1992–1993). While this period was largely stable, peaceful, and heralded the arrival of massive humanitarian aid to the warweary Cambodian people, its success in reviving the Cambodian economy was founded on the previous wealth of humanitarian aid given by that set by the socialist bloc in the 1980s to the PRK. Yet, these earlier humanitarian interventions are mostly absent in Western narratives, which credit the successes on UNTAC, Western leadership, and capital injection. These narratives thereby serve to perpetuate the myth of the white savior of Cambodia from domestic authoritarianism and Vietnamese expansionism.41 By downplaying or erasing the role of the Vietnamese (and their Soviet and Eastern bloc sponsors) in rebuilding Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, these works inadvertently paint the Vietnamese military occupation as being of little benefit for Cambodia, opening the door to a return of anti-Vietnam sentiments. The two actions by the Khmer Rouge that catalyzed the Vietnamese intervention were the border attacks and the violence targeting Cambodia’s Vietnamese population. Yet today, both the Cambodian government and opposition continue to use the ethnic Vietnamese and the border demarcation as tools to evince their nationalistic fervor and to question the opposition’s patriotism. For example, on August 15, 2017, Prime Minister Hun Sen signed sub-decree 129 announcing the “cancellation and revocation of irregular documents used by foreigners in Cambodia” and set a deadline to exit the country by June 30, 2019. The Cambodian

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government has gone on to withdraw more than 30,000 documents (90% of which were held by ethnic Vietnamese), deport around 15,000 illegal immigrants, and forcibly relocate around 2,300 residents from the floating villages to dry land, though many have returned to the water due to poor conditions at the sites of their relocation.42 In March 2018, responding to opposition leader Sam Rainsy’s baseless claim that the government was handing over land to Vietnam in the border demarcation negotiations, Hun Sen turned the tables on Rainsy, accusing him of treason over a 2013 video in which he pledged some autonomy to Montagnard minorities on the borderlands.43 It is clear that despite having first-hand experience of the dangers of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide that targeted the ethnic Vietnamese, among other minority groups, and the war with Vietnam, today Cambodians on both sides of the political divide are very willing to risk stoking ultranationalist sentiments and use the ethnic Vietnamese minority and relations with Vietnam as pawns for an advantage in the polls

Conclusion It would be well for all who were involved in the Cambodian conflict to carefully learn from history to avoid repeating their past mistakes. Recording the atrocities, employing this evidence to convict purveyors of ethnic cleansing in international tribunals and inform post-conflict truth and reconciliation committees, and disseminating information to the public through commemorations, education, and media are all important steps forward, but not enough to produce an environment truly hostile to a repeat of past mistakes. As I have tried to show, there are many other factors, including state censorship in China, political opportunism in Cambodia, institutionalized norms in ASEAN, pride in the West, and selective memory in Vietnam, that hinder countries from drawing the lessons from history that would help them avoid a repeat of the mistakes of the past. Given these constraints, the onus for identifying the right lessons and arguing passionately for their wider recognition fall upon the dedicated scholar. My hope is that this chapter, alongside others in this volume, will speak truth to power and play a part in highlighting the lessons we ought to learn from the Cambodian genocide. It is therefore most troubling for me to have heard many fellow scholars privately admit their reticence to express positive views of the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia lest they alienate local interlocutors. Scholars play too important a role as public intellectuals to self-censor and act as bystanders to a potential return of genocide. We, too, should learn from history.

Notes 1 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Santayana, George,” accessed October 5, 2019, www.iep.utm.edu/santayan/. 2 “AOC Wasn’t Wrong About Concentration Camps,” accessed August 12, 2019, www. bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-21/aoc-wasn-t-wrong-about-concentrationcamps.

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3 Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1846). 4 Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000); Jared Cohen, One-Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), http://newcatalog.library.cornell. edu/catalog/5997802; Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2009); Stjepan Mestrovic and Thomas Cushman, eds., This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 5 William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (London: Hogarth Press, 1986); Kenton J. Clymer, The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000: A Troubled Relationship (London: Routledge, 2004); Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications,” Global Research, April 28, 2015, www. globalresearch.ca/making-more-enemies-than-we-kill-calculating-u-s-bomb-tonnages-dropp ed-on-laos-and-cambodia-and-weighing-their-implications/5446040. 6 Jurgen Haacke, ASEAN’s Diplomatic and Security Culture: Origins, Development and Prospects (London: Routledge, 2013), 81–101. 7 Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War after the War (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). 8 Kosal Path, Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). 9 Wilfred G. Burchett, The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle (Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1981); Chanda, Brother Enemy; Grant Evans, Red Brotherhood at War: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos since 1975 (London and New York: Verso, 1990); Eva Mysliwiec, Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea (Oxford: Oxfam, c1988); Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide: Cambodia’s Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 10 Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). 11 Interview with Nguyễn Hiệu, 2013. 12 Đức Anh Lê, Cuộc Đời và Sự Nghiệp Cách Mạng (Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Chính Trị Quốc Gia, 2015), 260, https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/9897067. 13 Interview with Nguyễn Quốc Khánh, 2019. 14 Joint project of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Cambodian People’s Party, “Lịch Sử Quan Hệ Việt Nam-Campuchia, Campuchia-Việt Nam 1930–2010, Bản Thảo Lần Thứ Ba [History of Vietnam-Cambodia, Cambodia-Vietnam Relations 1930– 2010, Third Draft],” 2015, 180. 15 Anh Dũng Huỳnh, “Ghi Chép về Campuchia 1975–1991,” 1995, 12–13, Phông Vụ Châu Á II – Ban thư ký ASEAM, Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, www. diendan.org/tai-lieu/ghi-chep-ve-campuchia-1975-1991. 16 Joint project of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Cambodian People’s Party, “Lịch Sử Quan Hệ Việt Nam,” 181. 17 Lê, Cuộc Đời và Sự Nghiệp Cách Mạng, 260. 18 “Phát Biểu Của Thủ Tướng Tại Lễ Kỷ Niệm 40 Na˘ m Chiến Thắng Biên Giới Tây Nam,” baodientu.chinhphu.vn, accessed October 3, 2019, http://baochinhphu.vn/ Ca c-bai-phat-bieu-cua-Thu-tuong/Phat-bieu-cua-Thu-tuong-tai-Le-ky-niem-40-namChien-thang-bien-gioi-Tay-Nam/356209.vgp; Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” Yale Genocide Studies Program, Working Paper no. 15, 2000, accessed November 30, 2015, http://gsp.yale.edu/node/297.

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19 Margaret Slocomb, “The K5 Gamble: National Defence and Nation Building under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 195–210. 20 “Mine Ban Policy,” The Monitor, accessed October 3, 2019, www.the-monitor.org/ en-gb/reports/2015/vietnam/mine-ban-policy.aspx#_ftn12. 21 Lee Hsien Loong, Facebook post, accessed October 3, 2019, www.facebook.com/leehsien loong/photos/a.344710778924968/2475833219146036; “PM Lee’s Facebook Post on Vietnam’s Invasion of Cambodia Draws Ire,” The Straits Times, June 7, 2019, www.straitstimes. com/singapore/pm-lees-facebook-post-on-vietnams-invasion-of-cambodia-draws-ire. 22 Samdech Hun Sen, Cambodian Prime Minister, Facebook post, accessed October 4, 2019, www.facebook.com/hunsencambodia/photos/a.887656284616203/ 2260019794046505/?type=3&theater. 23 Cheng Guan Ang, Singapore, ASEAN, and the Cambodian Conflict, 1978–1991 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 20–41. 24 Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 99–118; Haacke, ASEAN’s Diplomatic and Security Culture, 81–101; L. Jones, ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 75–91. 25 Wong Kan Seng, “Speech by Former Deputy Prime Minister & Former Coordinating Minister for National Security Wong Kan Seng at the S. Rajaratnam Lecture at Shangri-La Hotel on Wednesday, 23 November 2011,” Republic of Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed November 1, 2016, www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/overseasmission/ phnom_penh/press_statements_speeches/embassy_news_press_releases/2011/201112/ press_201112_06.html. 26 Nicholas Doyle, “The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration and the Implications of Recent Southeast Asian Initiatives in Human Rights Institution-Building and StandardSetting,” International & Comparative Law Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 2014): 67–101, https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0020589313000390; International Commission of Jurists, “The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration: Questions and Answers,” 2013, www.icj.org/wp-content/ uploads/2013/07/ASEAN-leaflet-240713.pdf. 27 ASEAN, “ASEAN Human Rights Declaration,” 2014, https://asean.org/asean-huma n-rights-declaration/. 28 Alan Dupont, “ASEAN’s Response to the East Timor Crisis,” Australian Journal of International Affairs; Canberra 54, no. 2 (July 2000): 163–70; “Outcry as Asean Report Predicts ‘smooth’ Return of Rohingya to Myanmar,” The Straits Times, June 8, 2019, www. straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/outcry-as-an-asean-report-predicts-smooth-return-of-rohingyato-myanmar. 29 Xiaoming Zhang, “Deng Xiaoping and China’s Decision to Go to War with Vietnam,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 3 (2010): 3–29; Xiaoming Zhang, Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), http://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ 9129058. 30 Ang, Singapore, ASEAN, and the Cambodian Conflict, 1978–1991, 38–41. 31 Xiaoming Zhang, “Deng Xiaoping and China’s Decision to Go to War with Vietnam”; Xiaoming Zhang, Deng Xiaoping’s Long War. 32 “China Says Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong No Longer Has Meaning,” accessed October 5, 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversarychina/china-says-sino-british-joint-declaration-on-hong-kong-no-longer-has-meaningidUSKBN19L1J1; Isaac Kardon, “China Can Say ‘No’: Analyzing China’s Rejection of the South China Sea Arbitration,” University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review 13, no. 2 (January 1, 2018), https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/alr/vol13/iss2/1; Christian von Soest, “Democracy Prevention: The International Collaboration of Authoritarian Regimes,” European Journal of Political Research 54, no. 4 (2015): 623–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1475-6765.12100; Mark Green, “China’s Debt Diplomacy,” Foreign Policy (blog), accessed October 5, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/25/chinas-debt-diplomacy/.

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33 Keegan Elmer and Minnie Chan, “Chinese Veterans Defy Official Silence to Mark Vietnam Border War,” South China Morning Post, February 18, 2019, www.scmp.com/ news/china/military/article/2186692/40-years-chinese-veterans-defy-official-silenceremember-vietnam. 34 Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); John D. Ciorciari, “China and the Pol Pot Regime,” Cold War History 14, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 215–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14682745.2013.808624. 35 Margaret Slocomb, The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1989: The Revolution after Pol Pot (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003); Va˘n Lợi Lưu, Ngoại Giao Việt Nam, 1945–1995 (Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Công an nhân dân, 2004); Mysliwiec, Punishing the Poor. 36 James Baker III, “Letter to Roland Dumas,” September 22, 1989, Asie-Oceanie 1987– 91, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives; Amitav Acharya, Pierre Lizée, and Sorpong Peou, eds., Cambodia – The 1989 Paris Peace Conference: Background Analysis and Documents (Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1991); United Nations and Paris Conference on Cambodia, eds., Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, Paris, 23 October 1991 (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 1992). 37 Some of the worst perpetrators, including Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Son Sen, were incapable of being tried due to having died or old age, and trials for those below the very top level were deemed too politically divisive. To date, only Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Kang Kek Iew (“Duch”) were tried, and it is unlikely there will be any others. See Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide; Seth Mydans, “11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?,” New York Times, December 22, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rou ge-united-nations-tribunal.html. 38 Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 24. 39 “The Responsibility to Protect: After Libya and Syria,” accessed October 5, 2019, www.gevans.org/speeches/speech585.html. 40 David Rieff, “R2P, R.I.P.,” New York Times, November 7, 2011, www.nytimes.com/ 2011/11/08/opinion/r2p-rip.html. 41 Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC (Oxford: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1995); “Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,” accessed October 6, 2019, www.sipri.org/publications/1995/cambodia-lega cy-and-lessons-untac; Tom Riddle, Cambodia and the Year of UNTAC: Life and Love in Cambodia’s 1993 Election (Toronto, Buffalo, Lancaster (UK): Guernica Editions Inc, 2017). 42 Long Kimmarita, “Immigration Department to Revoke ‘Irregular Documents,” Phnom Penh Post, accessed March 24, 2019, www.phnompenhpost.com/national/immigrationdepartment-revoke-irregular-documents; “Vietnamese Evicted from Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Begin to Return,” Radio Free Asia, accessed March 24, 2019, www.rfa.org/english/ news/cambodia/return-01252019152315.html. 43 Ben Sokhean and Andrew Nachemson, “PM Hun Sen Questions Vietnam’s Loyalty, Accuses Sam Rainsy of Treason,” Phnom Penh Post, March 14, 2018, www.phnompenhpost.com/ national/pm-hun-sen-questions-vietnams-loyalty-accuses-sam-rainsy-treason.

Bibliography Acharya, Amitav. Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Acharya, Amitav, Pierre Lizée, and Sorpong Peou, eds. Cambodia – The 1989 Paris Peace Conference: Background Analysis and Documents. Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1991.

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Ang, Cheng Guan. Singapore, ASEAN, and the Cambodian Conflict, 1978–1991. Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. “AOC Wasn’t Wrong About Concentration Camps.” Accessed August 12, 2019. www. bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-21/aoc-wasn-t-wrong-about-concentrationcamps. ASEAN. “ASEAN Human Rights Declaration,” 2014. https://asean.org/asean-humanrights-declaration/. BakerIII, James. “Letter to Roland Dumas,” September 22, 1989. Asie-Oceanie 1987–1991. French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives. Burchett, Wilfred G. The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle. Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1981. “Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC.” SIPRI. Accessed October 6, 2019. www.sipri.org/publications/1995/cambodia-legacy-and-lessons-untac. Chanda, Nayan. Brother Enemy: The War after the War. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. “China Says Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong No Longer Has Meaning.” Accessed October 5, 2019. www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-china/ china-says-sino-british-joint-declaration-on-hong-kong-no-longer-has-mea ning-idUSKBN19L1J1. Ciorciari, John D. “China and the Pol Pot Regime.” Cold War History 14, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2013.808624. Clymer, Kenton J. The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000: A Troubled Relationship. London: Routledge, 2004. Cohen, Jared. One-Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. http://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/5997802. Dallaire, Romeo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2009. Doyle, Nicholas. “The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration and the Implications of Recent Southeast Asian Initiatives in Human Rights Institution-Building and Standard-Setting.” International & Comparative Law Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January2014): 67–101. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0020589313000390. Dupont, Alan. “ASEAN’s Response to the East Timor Crisis.” Australian Journal of International Affairs; Canberra 54, no. 2 (July2000): 163–170. Elmer, Keegan, and Minnie Chan. “Chinese Veterans Defy Official Silence to Mark Vietnam Border War.” South China Morning Post, February 18, 2019. www.scmp.com/news/ china/military/article/2186692/40-years-chinese-veterans-defy-official-silence-remembervietnam. Evans, Grant. Red Brotherhood at War: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos since 1975. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Evans, Gareth. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington, DC:Brookings Institution Press, 2009. Fawthrop, Tom, and Helen Jarvis. Getting Away with Genocide: Cambodia’s Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge. London: Pluto Press, 2004. Findlay, Trevor. Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC. Oxford: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1995. Green, Mark. “China’s Debt Diplomacy.” Foreign Policy (blog). Accessed October 5, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/25/chinas-debt-diplomacy/. Haacke, Jurgen. ASEAN’s Diplomatic and Security Culture: Origins, Development and Prospects. London: Routledge, 2013.

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Hun Sen, Samdech, Cambodian Prime Minister. Facebook post. Accessed October 4, 2019. www.facebook.com/hunsencambodia/photos/a.887656284616203/ 2260019794046505/?type=3&theater. Huỳnh, Anh Dũng. “Ghi Chép về Campuchia 1975–1991,” 1995. Phông Vụ Châu Á II Ban thư ký ASEAM. Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive. www.diendan.org/ta i-lieu/ghi-chep-ve-campuchia-1975-1991. International Commission of Jurists. “The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration: Questions and Answers,” 2013. www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ASEAN-leaflet-240713.pdf. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Santayana, George.” Accessed October 5, 2019. www.iep.utm.edu/santayan/. Joint project of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Cambodian People’s Party. “Lịch Sử Quan Hệ Việt Nam - Campuchia, Campuchia - Việt Nam 1930–2010, Bản Thảo Lần Thứ Ba [History of Vietnam-Cambodia, Cambodia-Vietnam Relations 1930–2010, Third Draft],” 2015. Jones, L. ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kardon, Isaac. “China Can Say ‘No’: Analyzing China’s Rejection of the South China Sea Arbitration.” University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review 13, no. 2 (January 1, 2018). https:// scholarship.law.upenn.edu/alr/vol13/iss2/1. Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1846. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79, 3rd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kiernan, Ben, and Taylor Owen. “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications.” Global Research, April 28, 2015. www.globalresearch.ca/making-more-enemies-thanwe-kill-calculating-u-s-bomb-tonnages-dropped-on-laos-and-cambodia-and-weighingtheir-implications/5446040. Kimmarita, Long. “Immigration Department to Revoke ‘Irregular Documents’.” Phnom Penh Post. Accessed March 24, 2019. www.phnompenhpost.com/national/immigrationdepartment-revoke-irregular-documents. Lê, Đức Anh. Cuộc Đời và Sự Nghiệp Cách Mạng. Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Chính Trị Quốc Gia, 2015. https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/9897067. Loong, Lee Hsien. Facebook post. Accessed October 3, 2019. www.facebook.com/leeh sienloong/photos/a.344710778924968/2475833219146036. Lưu, Va˘ n Lợi. Ngoại Giao Việt Nam, 1945–1995. Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Công an nhân dân, 2004. Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide. London: Zed Books, 2000. Mertha, Andrew. Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Mestrovic, Stjepan, and Thomas Cushman, eds. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press, 1996. “Mine Ban Policy.” The Monitor. Accessed October 3, 2019. www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/ reports/2015/vietnam/mine-ban-policy.aspx#_ftn12. Mosyakov, Dmitry. “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives.” Yale Genocide Studies Program, Working Paper no. 15, 2000. Accessed November 30, 2015. http://gsp.yale.edu/node/ 297.

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Mydans, Seth. “11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?” New York Times, December 22, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/ world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html. Mysliwiec, Eva. Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea. Oxford: Oxfam, c1988. “Outcry as Asean Report Predicts ‘Smooth’ Return of Rohingya to Myanmar.” The Straits Times, June 8, 2019. www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/outcry-as-an-asean-report-p redicts-smooth-return-of-rohingya-to-myanmar. Path, Kosal. Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. “Phát Biểu Của Thủ Tướng Tại Lễ Kỷ Niệm 40 Na˘ m Chiến Thắng Biên Giới Tây Nam.” Accessed October 3, 2019. http://baochinhphu.vn/Cac-bai-phat-bieu-cua-Thu-tuong/ Phat-bieu-cua-Thu-tuong-tai-Le-ky-niem-40-nam-Chien-thang-bien-gioi-Tay- Nam/ 356209.vgp. Pike, Douglas. Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. “PM Lee’s Facebook Post on Vietnam’s Invasion of Cambodia Draws Ire.” The Straits Times, June 7, 2019. www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pm-lees-facebook-post-on-vietnams-inva sion-of-cambodia-draws-ire. Riddle, Tom. Cambodia and the Year of UNTAC: Life and Love in Cambodia’s 1993 Election. Toronto, Buffalo, Lancaster (UK): Guernica Editions Inc, 2017. Rieff, David. “R2P, R.I.P.” New York Times, November 7, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/ 11/08/opinion/r2p-rip.html. Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New ed. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Slocomb, Margaret. “The K5 Gamble: National Defence and Nation Building under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 195–210. Slocomb, Margaret. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1989: The Revolution after Pol Pot. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003. Soest, Christian von. “Democracy Prevention: The International Collaboration of Authoritarian Regimes.” European Journal of Political Research 54, no. 4 (2015): 623–638. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12100. Sokhean, Ben, and Andrew Nachemson. “PM Hun Sen Questions Vietnam’s Loyalty, Accuses Sam Rainsy of Treason.” Phnom Penh Post, March 14, 2018. www.phnompenhp ost.com/national/pm-hun-sen-questions-vietnams-loyalty-accuses-sam-rainsy-treason. “The Responsibility to Protect: After Libya and Syria.” Accessed October 5, 2019. www. gevans.org/speeches/speech585.html. United Nations, and Paris Conference on Cambodia, eds. Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, Paris, 23 October 1991. New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 1992. “Vietnamese Evicted from Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Begin to Return.” Radio Free Asia. Accessed March 24, 2019. www.rfa.org/english/news/cambodia/return-01252019152315. html. Widyono, Benny. Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Wong Kan Seng. “Speech by Former Deputy Prime Minister & Former Coordinating Minister for National Security Wong Kan Seng at the S. Rajaratnam Lecture at Shangri-La Hotel on Wednesday, 23 November 2011.” Republic of Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Accessed November 1, 2016. www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/overseasmission/

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phnom_penh/press_statements_speeches/embassy_news_press_releases/2011/201112/press_ 201112_06.html. Zhang, Xiaoming. “Deng Xiaoping and China’s Decision to Go to War with Vietnam.” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 3 (2010): 3–29. Zhang, Xiaoming. Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. http://newcatalog. library.cornell.edu/catalog/9129058.

PART 6

The Shadow of the Past on the Present

15 THE MOBILIZATION OF STATESPONSORED MASS ORGANIZATIONS SINCE THE 2006 COUP IN THAILAND Puangthong R. Pawakapan1

The use of violence toward villagers by state forces in remote rural areas was not uncommon during Thailand’s counterinsurgency campaigns. The name of the armydominated Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) often surfaced in connection with cases of mass violence. One of the best known that the military and ISOC perpetrated was the so-called Red Drums massacre, which happened in 1971– 72 to villagers in the southern provinces of Phattalung, Trang, Nakhon Sithammarat, and Surat Thani. People were rounded up because they were accused of engaging in communist activities or providing support for them. Many were tortured. Some were released. Those most unfortunate were killed in a very brutal way. They were forced inside empty 200-liter petrol drums, doused with petrol, and burned alive. It was estimated that around 3,000 people were killed. This incident became known to the public after the military-dominated regime was toppled by the popular uprising of October 1973 (Haberkorn 2017, 79–82; Chulalak 2016). Even after the October 1973 uprising ended the military government led by Field Marshal Thanom Kittikhachon and his brother-in-law, Field Marshal Prapas Jarusathian, some of the abuses of state power worsened. The military crackdown on the uprising alone had killed 77 people. The end of the 26-year rule by a series of military regimes since the Phibun Songkhram era (1948–1957) did lead to elections and a more open politics for the people. But against the backdrop of the fall of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to communist regimes in 1975, anxiety among the Thai establishment that the country would be the next falling domino became widespread. Thai society began to witness the aggressive activities of rightwing militia groups. One of the measures the Thai establishment employed to respond to the growing radicalized movements of students, workers, and farmers was the mobilization and organization of royalist mass organizations. The ISOC is now known to have been behind over 20 paramilitary groups and organizations of rightist thugs (Saiyud 1986, 84).

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The case of Ban Na Sai village in Nongkhai province in the northeast in January 1974 showed how state forces and the ISOC’s paramilitary forces were involved in large-scale violations of human rights against people suspected of being or of supporting communists. Eyewitnesses testified that the operation was carried out by the Border Patrol Police, the military, and members of a paramilitary group, the Village Defence Volunteers. In this case, 106 houses were burned with their owners’ newly harvested crops and belongings. A family of three people, including a young child, refused to leave their home and died in the burning house. Accounts of the two massacres of 1971–72 and 1974 show how ISOC and other state forces had, with impunity, employed oppressive violence against people in politically sensitive areas. Even though the two incidents hit the national news headlines, the responsible authorities reacted to public and media inquiry with denial and contempt. The lack of accountability was possible because state forces were often protected (Haberkorn 2017, 80–108). Then, on October 6, 1976, came the massacre of 40 students and activists at Thammasat University. The massacre was an orchestrated attempt by rightist elites to eliminate the increasingly radical student movement. The students were accused of being communists and of disloyalty to the monarchy. Apart from the state forces, the ISOC-supported rightist thugs, i.e., the Red Gaurs (Krathing Daeng), Nawaphon, and the Village Scouts, the last of which remains under royal patronage even today, were evidently involved in these brutal killings and lynchings (Thongchai 2019). The military immediately seized power again. Slow democratization from the early 1980s saw these rightist groups become dissipated or inactive. Members of the public rarely heard about ISOC’s activities and tended to believe that its mass organization activity was ended. Quite the opposite; evidence indicates that the massacre did not affect the conservative elite’s goal of popular control. Mass violence was, in fact, seen as beneficial to the state’s oppressive operations. Laws and executive orders were introduced in order to institutionalize and facilitate ISOC’s militia groups. Their activities understandably slowed down after the collapse of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) in the early 1980s, but the opportunity to reinvigorate them emerged when the old powers faced new challenges from the highly popular Thaksin Shinawatra, who was elected prime minister in 2001, his political parties, and electoral politics. The old military-sponsored groups were expanded and many new such groups were then created. This chapter focuses on the objectives of the revival of the Cold War-era mass organizations since the coup d’etat in 2006, which toppled the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra. It is, nevertheless, imperative to begin with a discussion of the original idea of the Thai state’s mass organization since the 1960s, as its legacy still largely prevails in current operations.

Building the Cold War popular defense From the 1960s, mass control was one of the most important components of the US-supported counterinsurgency operations by the Thai state for the struggle

State-sponsored mass organizations since 2006 255

against the CPT. Building a loyal citizen base was the major tenet of the Thai state’s mass organizations and their mobilization. The solid popular base could become a powerful state apparatus. On the one hand, it could be used against enemies of the state. On the other hand, the establishment could claim that its mass base represented Khwamsamakki khong chat, national unity, to counter the communist aliens. Its presence confirmed the legitimacy of the establishment and of the existing social order. Since the 1965 creation of the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC), which later became ISOC, the civilian-police-military joint operation (CPM) was the basic framework of the counterinsurgency’s political offensive operations. Mass organization was born out of the CPM concept. It remains valid today. The original term “civilian” meant civil servants only. Later, it was broadened to include the people, especially locals living in the areas under the counterinsurgency operations (Thammasat University Archive – hereafter TUA, So. bo.9.7.2/65; So.bo.9.7.2/148). Some mass organizations are under the direct authority of the Ministries of Interior or Public Health, but ISOC has a mandate to oversee, coordinate, and command the works of all government agencies involved in internal security matters (Saiyud 1986, 198). CPM was based on the doctrine that communist guerrilla warfare was a people’s war; that the insurgents tried to win the people’s support by various means, such as indoctrination, anti-government propaganda, and pro-poor economic policies. The Thai state must therefore try to compete with the insurgents, winning the hearts and minds of the people as opposed to ruling with brute force alone. It would win over the insurgents only when it could mobilize popular cooperation and support for a variety of programs. The assumption was that active participation of the people would ensure the success of these programs and would eventually lead to widespread public loyalty (Tanham 1974, 72–84). This idea gave birth to the stateorganized mass organizations, through which several programs were administered, including village development projects, vocational and skills training programs, indoctrination, propaganda, paramilitary forces, intelligence gathering, and surveillance. Mass organizations, therefore, embodied counterinsurgency’s political offensive measures. In security matters, principally, civil servants, the police, and the military would work together with local people. The role of each branch was designated in accordance with each agency’s expertise. For example, police took care of day-today safety within the remote communist-infiltrated areas; soldiers provided arms training to the militias; soldiers and police and village strongmen formed village defense units; police and soldiers took part in the special offensive forces, patrolling and defending the areas with local militias; and civil servants carried out the socioeconomic development and indoctrination program. In practice, their roles could overlap, i.e., the Army and the Border Patrol Police participated in economic development and indoctrination programs. Ideally, people should be satisfied with the improvement in living standards that would purportedly arise as a result of these programs, while state propaganda and royal-nationalist indoctrination would

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enhance their loyalty, turning them into a popular defense, state surveillance, and propaganda machine (TUA, So.bo.9.7.2/65; So.bo.9.7.2/70; Tanham 1974, 136). Some groups had a small unit of armed paramilitaries attached to them, such as the Village for Development and Self-Defense Volunteers (VDSV) program or Muban a-sa phatthana lae pongkan ton-eng (Oo.pho.po), but not all mass organizations participated in arms training. Some were permanent groups with the legal legitimacy to support their existence, while others were ad hoc groups that lacked legal constitution. The one activity that every group had in common was royal nationalist indoctrination, imbuing loyalty to the three national pillars: the nation, religion, and, particularly, the monarchy. Royal patronage or symbolic royal recognition, i.e., flags, emblems, an audience with members of the palace, was crucial for their success (Hyun 2014, 363–4). Such practices continue to the present day (Royal Thai Armed Forces 2018). Village development projects were created in order to improve the living standards of people in communist-influenced areas, ranging from construction of infrastructure, improvement of agricultural methods, education, vocational training, and public health facilities. Civilian state agencies, together with the army and ISOC, also undertook so-called “information programs” and anti-communist psychological operations. Mobile information units were established to visit remote areas and inform local people of government policy and promises (Tanham 1974, 75–7). From a security perspective, the objective of the CPM was for state agencies to provide safety and security for villagers living in areas sensitive to communist infiltration. The strategists believed that, on one hand, support from people living in these areas was essential for establishing state defense operations, while on the other hand, people would not collaborate with the state if the authorities failed to ensure long-term safety and security. It was assumed that otherwise the people would quickly shift their allegiance to the communists, who promised them a better future. State surveillance over the remote areas would never be effective unless the government could recruit loyal villagers who had a comprehensive knowledge of the local area and could keep a constant watch over their neighbors in a way that outside authorities never could. Arming local people would enhance the tie and trust between the people and state authorities, making them feel authoritative and proud to be part of the powers that be. ISOC leads these operations with personnel support from the police, the Border Patrol Police, and the army (Saiyud 1986, 41–7; Tanham 1974, 78–84). Lately, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the military junta that seized power from the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra on May 22, 2014, forced eviction of small-scale farmers from the forest reserve areas. It heavily employed CPM in these operations. Many pictures of them are posted on the internet (www.isoc.go.th/?s=ทวงคืนผืนปา).

The expansion period Numerous such military-sponsored mass organizations mushroomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Some have maintained official status and still exist today. Many others

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were ad hoc and dissipated with the demise of the CPT. The army, the Ministry of Interior, and ISOC were the main agencies in charge of these mass organizations. Although the original idea of state-sponsored mass organizations was to establish security in the remote communist-infiltrated areas as described above, the royalist mass organizations became a useful political apparatus to counter the student movement in the capital during the brief period of open politics between 1973 and 1976. During the COIN period, the best-known right-wing militias were the Village Scouts, the Red Gaurs, and Nawaphon (the New Strength). However, there were many more of them. According to Saiyud Koedphol (1986, 82), there were at least 20 state-supported paramilitary groups in the 1970s. Some of them were Asasamak raksa dindaeng (the Volunteers Defense Corp), A-sa phatthana lae pongkan ton-eng (Volunteers for Development and Self-Defense, VDSD), Asa samak pongkanphai fai phonlaruen (the Civil Defense Volunteers, CDV), Ratsadon raksa khwamsa-ngop lae phatthana muban (Peace Keeping and Village Development People), Chutpatibatkan chuai-luea prachachon unit (Emergency Response Team), Thai a-sa pongkan ton-eng (Thai Self-defense Volunteers), Ratsadon a-sasamak phatthana thongthin lae pongkan prappram atchayakam (Volunteers for Community Development and Crime Suppression), Ratsadon a-sa lae pongkan ton-eng (People Volunteers and Self-defense), Kongkamlang tid a-wut (Armed Group), Klumsiang chaoban (Voice of the People Group), Klum bangrachan (Bangrachan Group), Chaoban phithakthin (Homeland Defenders), Ratsadon samakki (United People), Ratsadon a-sasamak pongkan chaidaen (Volunteers for Borders Defense), Ratsadon a-sasamak pongkan phukokanrai (Volunteers for Counter-insurgents), and A-sapongkan atchayakam lae a-sasamak banthao satharanaphai (Volunteers for Crime Prevention and Disaster Mitigation) (ISOC 2012a, 2–3). Mobilization of the populace became increasingly urgent after the 1973 popular uprising, when the ruling elites witnessed the rise of leftist movements domestically and regionally. Meanwhile, the withdrawal of American troops from the Vietnam War and Thailand was underway. A report signed by General Saiyud Koedphol in his capacity as Deputy Director of the CSOC, dated August 1976, reflected such anxiety. Saiyud urged the government of M.R. Seni Pramoj to support his plan for the expansion of VDSD. Saiyud believed that locally based mass organizations would be the decisive factor for the fate of Thailand. He urged his superior to pool the resources of the armed forces and of the Ministry of Interior into a comprehensive expansion plan. Saiyud’s intention was to have the VDSD branch out to all levels: national, regional, provincial, district, sub-district, and village (TUA, So. bo.9.7.2/148). In 1975–1976, ISOC successfully created the VDSD in around 1,000 villages nationwide (Santi 1990, 37). Meanwhile, several ad hoc right-wing civic groups also proliferated. They were Chomrom a-chiwa seri (the Free Vocational Students Club), Phet thai (Thai Diamond), Chang Dam (Black Elephant), Phithak Thai (Protection of Thai-ness), Sahaphan naksuksa khru haeng prathetthai (Federation of Teacher College Students of Thailand), Naeo-ruam rakchat (League of the Patriots), Prachachon phurakchat (the Nation-loving People), Naeo-ruam totan phadetkan thuk rupbaep (League of Anti-All

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Forms of Dictatorship), Khabuankan patirup haengchat (National Reform Movement), Sahaphan pkuru a-china (Federation of Vocational Teachers), Kammakon seri (Free Laborers), Khangkhao thai (Thai Bats), Kluaimai thai (Thai Orchids), Wihok saifa (Lighting Birds), Sahaphap range naan ekachon (Union of Private Enterprise Labors), Chomrom maeban (the Housewives Club), and Nawaphon (Suthachai 2008, 154–6). These groups were well known for their royal-nationalist campaigns against students prior to the 6 October massacre. All of them gradually faded from the public eye and ceased to exist after 1976.

Success of royalism As Bowie shows, the Village Scouts movement was the most powerful statesponsored mass organization during the highly polarized period of 1973–1976, thanks to the explicit support and involvement of the monarchy. The palace’s interest in the movement stemmed from dissatisfaction with the incompetency of the army-led counterinsurgency operations. King Bhumibol was deeply concerned about the military’s heavy use of armed forces and injustices that would only exacerbate people’s distrust and resentment toward the government. On multiple occasions, he expressed his concern to the public about the military’s hostility toward villagers and hill-tribe people. Bowie argues further that despite the existence of 20 paramilitary groups, by the early 1970s there was no strong stateorganized mass movement until the king and members of the royal family came to engage openly with Village Scout activities. At its peak in 1976, about two million Thais or ten percent of the adult population were Village Scout members (Bowie 1997, 85–111). Regarding the role of the right-wing mass organizations at the October 1976 Thammasat University massacre, state forces, mainly various branches of police, were involved in the storming, shooting, and killing of students, but most of the incidents involving torture, lynching, and corpse desecration perpetrated that morning were carried out by hysterical members of mass organizations, including the Village Scouts and the Red Gaurs. These brutalities were well recorded in the press and shown in film clips and, later, made available on the internet (Puangthong and Thongchai 2018). The cruelty of these military-organized militias and thugs during the Thammasat massacre exhibited how royalist citizens became a powerful weapon against those considered to be enemies of the state. Importantly, the involvement of ordinary people provided a convenient opportunity for the rightist elites to distance themselves from any accountability for the atrocity. The booklet published by the National Reform Committee, the military junta that staged the coup after the massacre, explained that the violence at Thammasat University took place because of repeated provocations by the radical students, who had tried to turn Thailand into a communist country. The portrayal of one incident in particular, in which a drama student had enacted a mock hanging, outraged ordinary Thais because it was (falsely) alleged that the students had intended to make the hanged actor look like Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn.

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This was an insult to the monarchy and therefore the gravest offence.2 The NRC also accused the students of carrying heavy weapons and initiating the attacks against authorities. The patriots thus had finally lost their patience and wanted to give the students a lesson. The booklet continued to claim that the authorities were trying to control the situation but were outnumbered by the fiery civilian patriots. Because of their love for the country, these patriots were willing to protect the nation’s sacred institution with their lives. It was impossible for state forces to prevent 100,000 angered patriots from attacking the students. In this official narrative, the rightist perpetrators were honored as patriots while the students were accused of being treasonous and un-Thai (National Reform Committee 1976). A similar narrative can be found in the court testimonies of police and rightist witnesses (for example, Salang Bunnag).3 Violence by citizens was, therefore, used to shield state forces, elites, and ruling institutions. It also conferred legitimacy on the ruling elite’s claim that the majority of Thai people supported them. Civic engagement in state violence against the enemy of the state was effectively provided with the ruling elite’s impunity and with political justification for the atrocities at Thammasat University. The participation of rightist thugs in the Thammasat massacre was clearly the result of a heavy dose of royal nationalism.

Remobilization of the royalist mass ISOC’s 2012 publication, entitled Thai asa pongkanchat or the TNDV, discloses the royalist elite’s plan to revive its Cold War mass organizations amid the ongoing political polarization since the 2006 coup. Its preface is a letter signed by General Prayut, then Army Commander and ISOC Deputy Director, dated August 31, 2012. The letter is addressed to the Personal Secretary of then Queen Sirikit, requesting her to convey the message of the letter and the report to Her Majesty the Queen. The letter also refers to General Naphon Bunthap, then Deputy Chief Aide-de-Camp General to then King Bhumibol.4 According to the letter, General Naphon had earlier made a suggestion that ISOC should try to strengthen TNDV and other mass organizations under its command. Prayut now indicated that his advice was well heeded (ISOC 2012a, 1–2). The palace clearly paid special attention to the Cold War measure. The TNDV report states that ISOC’s role and TNDV activities had slowed down since the termination of the Anti-Communist Activities Act in 2000. They nevertheless persevered with their annual monarchical-related ceremonies. The report adds that since the country was facing new security problems, an effective integration of all state agencies and mobilization of people’s participation was necessary. Its introduction informs readers that General Prayut had ordered ISOC to distribute the report to all state agencies, which should try to develop and ensure that members of mass organizations under their responsibilities upheld the patriotic ideology:

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[ISOC] must try to revive the Thai National Defense Volunteers, make it strong and expand its networks nationwide with fast and effective outcome. In addition, all the mass organizations under the ISOC must give the first priority to the protection and respect of the monarchy while other objectives are second. (ISOC 2012a, 9) Such deep concern was also shown in the National Security Policy of 2015–2021 and ISOC’s Strategic Plans of 2012–2016 and 2017–2021. Threats to the monarchical institution and ideological differences among the population were the first two internal security threats that state agencies must urgently deal with. The security strategists blamed the deviation from the traditional norms on ordinary people’s poverty, lack of education, and ignorance. People were deceived easily by subversive political groups and media (National Security Council 2015, 5; ISOC 2012b; 2017, 25). Kasetsart University’s Education Faculty has produced a guidebook entitled “Kanhai khwamsamkan kap sathaban phramahakasat lae kanthoetthun sathaban” [Giving Importance and Respect to the Monarchy] for ISOC’s Office of Policy and Security Strategy. It serves as a guideline for ISOC’s trainers and outlines issues they should emphasize during the training sessions. This text underlines the importance of the royal institution, such as King Bhumibol and the ten virtues or Rajadhamma, King Bhumibol’s wisdom and devotion, the royal development projects, growing royalist consciousness among the people, as well as teaching people how to protect the institution and to express their gratitude to the king (Faculty of Education, Kasetsart University and Office of Policy and Security Strategy, ISOC, 2010). The ISOC report (2012) also reveals that in recent years state agencies have begun to give new energy to several other state-supported civic organizations, such as the Village Health Volunteers, the Civil Defense Volunteers, and Forest Protection Volunteers.5 Activities of the Village Scouts are increasingly visible too. Websites of ISOC (www.isoc.go.th; www.massisoc.isoc.go.th) show there are several new groups and mass mobilization programs. These are: a b c d e f g

The The The The The The The

Association of Business People for National Security. Association of Catholics for Internal Security Association of Muslim Community Leaders for Internal Security Association of Thai-Sikh Business People for Internal Security Association of Thai-Indian Business People for Internal Security Thai Big Bikes Love the Nation ISOC Club Thai Offroaders Love the Nation

Members of these new groups usually received a one-day training session, while those of permanent organizations went through a three-day training session. A video recording of one of these sessions shows that the training activities include

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royal-nationalist indoctrination, games, group singing, acting performances, cooking, parachute jumping, and a bonfire party (Phonchai Sae Tang 2016). They looked like the initiation rituals for the Village Scouts in the 1970s (Bowie 1997, chapter 6), albeit with less intensity and emotion. Furthermore, “the People Participation” is a notable program, which recruits the broadest and largest population for training programs. Its target groups comprise a wide range of the Thai demographic, including businesspeople, civil servants, teachers, students, journalists, new social groups, and ordinary folk. In addition to royalist indoctrination, creating a network of mass surveillance by loyal citizens is notably prioritized.6 There are special training programs entitled the Pineapple Eyes project, Program of Expansion of ISOC’s Mass Network, and Network of People’s News and Surveillance. Most of the above groups also received the same training programs.7 They were trained to keep watch over crimes and political activities in the neighborhood. Being active in cyberspace is also one of their main missions. While they should promote the monarchy by posting and sharing positive messages about it, they should report to the authorities any posting on social media deemed insulting to the monarchy, and not share anything that appears to challenge the government’s authority (interview with a vocational student, November 2, 2018, Kanchanaburi). It has become customary for ISOC to hold annual press conferences to report how many websites carrying content against the monarchy it had shut down.8 Since the late 2000s, websites, Facebook accounts, and YouTube Channels belonging to ISOC and its group members are filled with numerous activities of various military-sponsored mass organizations.9 Most of their activities were related to monarchical and Buddhist ceremonies, such as the Chakri Dynasty Day, birthdays of the royal members, the Coronation Day, the Vesak Day, the royal cremation of the late King Bhumibol, etc. Their members habitually donned yellow clothes, for both King Bhumibol and King Vajiralongkorn, and light blue, for Queen Sirikit. The objective of strengthening and expanding the network of royalist citizens is rather obvious: that is, to protect the monarchy, the royal hegemony and status quo of the establishment. Since the coup in 2006, the establishment has faced a series of challenges: the unbeatable popularity of the exiled Thaksin Shinawatra and his parties, the emergence of the Red Shirts movement, the rise of the lèse majesté cases and the critical messages toward the monarchy in cyberspace (Streckfuss 2014), the ending of the reign of King Bhumibol, the crisis of royal succession, and the polarized color-coded politics. Despite the military crackdown of the Red Shirts demonstrators by the royalist government of Abhisit Vejjajiva in April and May 2010, which killed 82 civilians and injured over 2,000 people (People Information Center 2012), the Red Shirts remained an imminent challenge to the royalist elites.10 They soon remobilized themselves and organized robust political activities in the provinces and Bangkok. The claims that Thailand is a unified country and that the monarchy is universally respected are fiercely contested (Thongchai 2014). The two military coups of 2006 and 2014, the 2010 violent

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crackdown, and numerous judicial measures still failed to prevent the electoral successes of Thaksinite parties. All these were the causes of anxiety about a decline of royal hegemony and, consequently, the feared effect on the dominant power and privileges of the ruling elites (Kasian 2016). Before the 2014 coup, the military had their eyes and ears positioned in the Red Shirt villages. Therefore, immediately after the coup, armed soldiers quickly moved to detain, arrest, or summon many Red Shirt leaders in the north and northeast. After the coup, their movements were restricted. A red flag, a symbol of their political identity, was removed from the entrance of many villages. People dared not wear red shirts. They had to ask for a permission from the provincial military office if they wanted to travel out of their areas (Interview with Mr. Bun (a pseudonym), August 19, 2017, Ubon Ratchathani; Head 2014; Prachatai July 1, 2014). It is clear that their activities were under watch long before the coup and this remains true long after the coup. Many Red Shirts received phone calls from military officers warning them not to organize any activities to show support for Thaksin’s political faction (Interview with Somchit, August 21, 2017, Ubon Ratchathani). The surveillance and intimidation of the local and national Red Shirt leaders effectively suppressed any chance to mobilize their fellows to counter the military junta since the coup in 2014. While ISOC has been busy with the construction of royalist defense, in the world of high technology, the military governments have put into force two cyber laws with the aim of controlling internet content deemed threatening to national and monarchical security. These are the Computer Crime Act passed by the government of General Surayut Julanond in 2007, and the Cybersecurity Act of Prayut’s government in 2019. These laws have made people protest at their political motivation and violation of basic human rights. The Cybersecurity Act, in particular, was termed a “cyber martial law” by advocates for internet freedom, as it provides the authorities with sweeping power to intrude on citizen’s privacy regardless of the rule of law. For example, in an emergency situation or a moment of actual or anticipated cyber threats, the authorities can summon individuals for questioning and enter private property without a court order to access computer data and networks, to make copies of information, and to seize computers or any devices. Those who refuse to comply can face criminal charges (Reuters 2019). Clearly, the Thai establishment believes that tightening control over public activities is a solution to intransigent political conflict. Furthermore, as the military government of General Prayut has increasingly faced challenges from various civil society groups, such as student activists, the antimilitary groups, and people affected by government-supported industrial projects, members of paramilitary forces have often been called in to assist the police and the army to quell protesters (see pictures in Prachatai, November 27, 2017). They have been extensively employed in the forced eviction of small-scale peasants from reserve forest areas.11 The case of a coal fire power plant in Thepha District, Songkhla province, shows how the military government was able to exploit its mass organizations to

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support its policy or to counter their fellows who stood on the opposing side. In November 2017, the Prayut cabinet had approved a plan to build the coal-fired power plant in Thepha district in Songkhla province of southern Thailand. In fact, the project had earlier faced a strong protest from local people in Songkhla and nearby provinces for fear of a serious environmental impact on their communities. Past civilian governments had yielded to local demands and suspended it. The project was then revived, possibly in the belief that the military’s iron fist would be able to suppress protests. However, about 3,000 people fearlessly organized a demonstration under the banner of “the Network of Songkhla-Pattani People against the coal-fired power plant.” At least 15 people were arrested for violating the NCPO’s order banning the gathering of more than 5 people. However, on the same day, the office of the ISOC Fourth Region Forward in Songkhla welcomed a group called “the Network of Thepha People for Sustainable Development,” which claimed to represent 67 civil society groups with 50,000 members in the area. These groups voiced their support of the plant project. Its leader, Mr. Phanawat Phongprayun, claimed that his group represented a number of people much higher than those opposed to the project (Prachatai, November 27, 2017). What is interesting is that Mr. Phanawat had earlier appeared on an online news feed of Prachatai (April 8, 2016), which reveals that he and his group had organized a public forum promoting the benefit of the plant to local people. The same news piece noted that Colonel Pramot Saengloi, then Head of Public Relations of the ISOC Fourth Region Forward, was responsible for dispatching information about Mr. Phanawat’s activity to the media. Mr. Phanawat and the ISOC appear to have forged a link long before the protest took place. It is difficult to know the exact number of the state-organized masses. A large number of people are not permanent members of any organization. However, in May 2016, ISOC’s spokesperson told the press that ISOC would mobilize its mass membership of over 500,000 to assist with the referendum campaign for the NCPO’s draft constitution (Post Today, May 7, 2016).

Conclusion The state-sponsored mass organizations originated in the Thai state’s battle with the CPT people’s war. The idea was to have citizens function as a civilian force, which included vigilantes, patriots, and intelligence-gathering hands, acting as a bridge between the central power and remote localities, a propaganda machine, and agents of development. People were turned into both ideological and suppressive apparatuses of the Thai establishment. The end of the anti-communist war did not bring an end to the mass control program. The ruling elite continued to see the great importance of controlling popular consciousness and used it to pursue its domination over various civic groups and classes in both rural and urban areas. The revival and expansion of this Cold War legacy since the 2006 coup was in response to the unprecedented popularity of Thaksin Shinawatra and his parties. The emergence of the “color-coded” polarization of Thai politics further

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challenged the power of the Thai establishment. Such popular manipulation has deepened the political divide among the people. Despite the end of King Bhumibol’s reign in October 2016, the royalist elites remain dependent on the royal hegemony of the late King Bhumibol for they cannot expect the same from the new king. It is, however, increasingly difficult for them to deny that royal hegemony is in decline.

Notes 1 Associate Professor at Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. This article is part of my research on the Thai military’s internal security affairs. I would like to thank the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Kyoto University and the HarvardYenching Institute, Harvard University for granting me research fellowships to work on this research. 2 This is the propaganda of the military media and the rightist newspaper, Dao Sayam. The students’ mock hanging performance at Thammasat University was about two activists in Nakhon Pathom Province, found hanged in the public area on September 24, 1976, a day after they had put up posters protesting against a return of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikhachon to Thailand. The mock hanging was intended to show the ongoing brutality of the state authorities towards activists. 3 Museum of the Office of the Attorney General, “Ekkasan khamhaikan phayan fai joet 078 Phantamruattho Salang Bunnak” [Testimony of a Witness for Prosecution No. 078 Police Major Colonel Salang Bunnag] October 21, 1976, downloaded from Documentation of October 6 Online Archives, accessed February 1, 2019, https://doct6. com/archives/1647. 4 General Naphon Bunthap was dismissed from the position by King Vajiralongkorn in December 2016. See Bangkokbiz News, December 12, 2016. 5 Forest Protection Volunteers is a joint program of the army, the Department of Royal Forestry, and the Department of National Parks, Wildlife, and Plant Conservation. It was created in response to Her Majesty Queen Sirikit’s idea. www.pttreforestation.com/ ForestProjectview.cshtml?Id=3, accessed November 5, 2018. 6 See www.massisoc.com/2_mass_main.php, accessed November 20, 2018. 7 Office of Intelligence, ISOC. “Khrueakhai khao prachachon faorawangpai,” accessed December 1, 2016, http://center.isocthai.go.th/images/doc_information/sor-kor-wor/ 1.NetworkSecurity/NetworkSecurity2.pdf. The Second Army Region, “Ko.o. ro.mo. no. changwat udonthani poet kanfuek oprom khlongkan phattanasamphan khayai khrueakhai muanchon runthi 5 prachampi 2561” [ISOC of Udonthani Province Opens Training Programme on Expansion of Mass Network, 5th Class, of the Year 2018.], December 1, 2018, accessed November 30, 2018, www2.army2.mi.th/th/isoc2/isoc2_ 20/2018/05/09/11851/; Thanjai News Online, “Oprom laksut khayai khrueakhai muanchon ko.o.ro.mo.no. klum suemuanchon phuekhwammankhong” [Training Programme for Expansion of ISOC’s Mass Network, Media for National Security Group], July 21, 2018, accessed November 20, 2018, http://thanjainews2017.blogspot.com/p/ blog-page_277.html; Thairath, October 22, 2018, “Tho.so.po.cho. yuk suek klai naewrop tasapparot” [TVDC in Time of Domestic Warfare, the Pineapple Eyes Battle Line], accessed October 22, 2018, www.thairath.co.th/content/68392; INN News, February 5, 2018. “Chat oprom khrueakhai khao prachachon faorawangphai” [Training for the People News and Surveillance Network], February 5, 2018, accessed October 12, 2018, www.innnews.co.th/politics/news_7304/. 8 For example, MThai, December 25, 2014, “Ko.o.ro.mo.no phuey pi 57 phopwepmin thueng 907 wep” [ISOC Founds 907 Websites Deemed Insulting the Monarchy in 2014], accessed April 8, 2019, https://news.mthai.com/politics-news/408375.html;

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Manager Online, 7 September 2015, “Bik tu khuen kao-i, khwanchai-chusak chong ICT pit 143 wepmin” [Gen Prayut returns positions to Khwanchai and Chusak, Propose to ICT to Shut Down 143 Websites deemed Insulting the Monarchy], accessed April 8, 2019, https://mgronline.com/daily/detail/9580000101509. 9 For example, “Facebook accounts of the Thai Big Bikes Love the Nation Club,” ISOC (Chomrom bik bai thai chai rak phaendin ko.o.ro.mo.no.), accessed January 30, 2018, www.facebook.com/Bigbike.center/; Information Center of the Village Scouts under the Patronage of His Majesty the King [Sun khomunklang luksuea chaoban nai phraboromrachanukhro], accessed November 3, 2018, www.facebook.com/ศูนยขอมูลกลาง ลูก เสือชาวบานในพระบรมราชานุ เคราะห-304590370059353/; Directorate of Civil Affa irs of the Army, accessed April 20, 2019, www.facebook.com/pg/doca.thaiarmy/posts/. See www.massisoc.isoc.go.th/2_mass_isoc/2_mix_mass_isoc/3_pochoro/1_hist_pochoro/ hist_pochoro.html, accessed November 20, 2018. 10 The Red Shirts demonstration was led by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), which supported Thaksin Shinawatra. Several hundred thousand Red Shirts, mainly from the northern and northeastern regions, gathered in Bangkok to call for the Democrat Party-led government of Abhisit Vejjajiva to dissolve parliament and hold elections. The Red Shirts believed that elections would prove that the majority of voters supported Thaksin, while the Democrat Party depended on support from the royalist elites and the military. 11 See pictures on the website of ISOC here www.isoc.go.th/?p=1630, accessed April 8, 2019.

References Archival materials Thammasat University Archives (TUA). So.bo.9.7.2/65. “Kong amnuaykan pongkan lae prappram kommiownit, rueang kanpongkan lae prappram kommiownit” [Communist Suppression Operations Command Regarding Prevention and Suppression of Communists], July 31, 1971. Thammasat University Archives (TUA). So.bo.9.7.2/70. “Kong amnuaykan pongkan lae prappram kommiownit, khumue kanpongkan lae prappram kommiownit [Communist Suppression Operations Command, A Guidebook for Prevention and Suppression of Communists], 1972. Thammasat University Archives (TUA). So.bo.9.7.2/148. “Bunthuek khokhwam suanratchakan ko.o.ro.mo.no. rueang naewkit thangyutthasat” [Official Record of ISOC Regarding Strategic Idea], August 5, 1976.

Publications Bowie, Katherine A. 1997. Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Chulalak Thamrongwithitham. 2016. Thangdaeng: kansomsang prawattisat lae khwamsongcham naisangkhomthai [Red Drums: Restoring A History and Memories in Thai Society]. Bangkok: Thammasat University Press. Faculty of Education, Kasetsart University and Office of Policy and Security Strategy, ISOC. 2010. Kanhai khwamsamkan kapsathaban phramahakasat lae kanthoetthun sathaban [The Focus on the Royal Institute and the Institute Warship]. Accessed November 20, 2018. www. isocthai.go.th/SorNorYor/TrainingCourses&CurriculumGuide/1.FocusOnRoyalInstitution& InstituteWarship.pdf.

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Haberkorn, Tyrell. 2017. In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Hyun, Sinae. 2014. “Indigenizing the Cold War: Nation-building by the Border Patrol Police of Thailand, 1945–1980.” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. ISOC (Internal Security Operations Command). 2012a. Thai asa pongkan chat [National Defence Volunteers]. Office of the Masses and General News, ISOC. ISOC (Internal Security Operations Command). 2012b. Yutthasat kong amnuaikan raksa khwammankhong phainai ratcha-anachak pho.so. 2555–2559 [Strategy of the Internal Security Operations Command A.D. 2012–2016]. Bangkok. ISOC (Internal Security Operations Command). 2017. Yutthasat kong amnuaikan raksa khwammankhong phainai ratcha-anachak pho.so. 2560–2564 [Strategy of the Internal Security Operations Command A.D. 2017–2021]. Kasian Tejapira. 2016. “The Irony of Democratization and the Decline of Royal Hegemony in Thailand.” Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto University) 5, no. 2: 219–237. National Reform Committee. 1976. Khothetching kieokap hetkan mue wanthi 6 Tula 2519 [Fact about October 6th, 1976]. Bangkok: Rongphim kromphaethi thahan. National Security Council. 2015. Nayobai khwammankhong haengchat 2558–2564 [National Security Policy 2015–2021]. Bangkok: Samnakphim khanaratthamontri lae ratchakitcha. People Information Center. 2012. Khwamching phue khwamyuttitham: hetkan lae phonkrathopchak kansalai kanchumnum mesa-phruesapha 53 [Truth for Justice: Facts and Impact of the Crackdown of the Demonstration, April–May 2010]. Nonthaburi: Fakiewkan. Puangthong Pawakapan and Thongchai Winichakul. 2018. “Kanthamraisop muea 6 Tula 2519: khrai yangrai thammai?” [Corpse Desecration on October 6, 1976: Who, How, and Why?] Fadiewkan 16, no. 2 (July–December): 43–64. Phonchai Sae Tang. 2016. “Kanfuek oprom phunamchumchon ko.o.ro.mo.no phak 2 khrangthi 1” [The 1st Training Programme for Community Leaders by ISOC Region Two]. November 15. Accessed September 20, 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v= wM8OqCeHvKc. Royal Thai Armed Forces. 2018. “Phubanchakanthahan sungsut pen prathan nai phithi mopsingkhong phraratchathan tamkhrongkan chit-asa thamkhwamdi duai huachai” [Military Supreme Commander Chairs A Ceremony Giving Apparels to the Volunteer Spirits, Doing Dood Deeds with Heart]. July 24.www.rtarf.mi.th/index.php/th/. Saiyud Kerdphol. 1986. The Struggle for Thailand: Counter-Insurgency 1965–1985. Bangkok: S. Research Center. Santi Khananurak. 1990. “Phawaphunam nai-muban asa-phatthana lae pongkan ton-eng (O.pho.po.) Suksachapho korani prathan khanakammakanklang muban asa-phatthana lae pongkan ton-eng nai phuenthi kong amnuaikanraksa khwammankong phainai (Ko.o.ro. mo.no) changwat ratchaburi” [Leadership in the Volunteer and Self Defence Village (VSDV): Study of the Chairpersons of VSDV’s Village Central Committee of the Internal Security Operations Command in Ratchaburi Province]. Master’s Thesis, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. Streckfuss, David. 2014. “Freedom and Silencing under the Neo-Absolutist Monarchy Regime in Thailand, 2006–2011.” In “Good Coup” Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Developments since Thaksin’s Downfall, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 109–140. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Suthachai Yimprasoet. 2008. Saithanprawattisat prachatipatai thai [The Historical Stream of Thai Democracy]. Bangkok: Foundation of Saithanprawattisat. Tanham, George. 1974. Trial in Thailand. New York: Crane Russak and Company. Thongchai Winichakul. 2019. Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok. Honolulu: Hawai‘i University Press.

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Thongchai Winichakul. 2014. “The Monarchy and the Anti-Monarchy: Two Elephants in the Room of Thai politics and the State of Denial.” In Good Coup Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Developments since Thaksin’s Downfall, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 79–81. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

News articles Bangkokbiz News. December 12, 2016. “Protklao hai 6 naiphon pon rong samut-haratchaongkarak” [H.M. the King Endorsed the Announcement of the P.M.’s Office for Demoting Six Generals from Deputy Chief Aide-de-Camp Generals]. Accessed November 4, 2018. www.bangkokbiznews.com/news/detail/731410. Head, Jonathan. 2014. “Thai Army’s Struggle to Unite Polarised Country.” BBC News, Thailand, June 9. Accessed February 16, 2016. www.bbc.com/news/worldasia27735992. Post Today. May 7, 2016. “Ko.o.ro.mo.no chaeng rang ratthathammanun triamradom muanchon nun ko.ro.tho.” [ISOC Explains Draft Charter, Prepares to Mobilize Mass to Support the CDC]. Accessed May 6, 2017. www.posttoday.com/politic/430568. Prachatai. July 1, 2014. “Rai-ngan pramuan sathanakan sitthi manutsayachon chiangmai lang ratthaprahan” [Report on the Post-Coup Human Rights Situation in Chiangmai]. Accessed February 21, 2016. https://prachatai.org/journal/2014/07/54344. Prachatai. April 8, 2016. “Ko.o.ro.mo.no. chaengkhao klumphatthana khunnaphap chiwit chumchon chatsonthanaphati rongfaifa ma thepa phatthana yangrai” [ISOC Sends News of Seminar organized by Community Development Group on How the Coal Power Plant Impacts Thepha]. Accessed February 8, 2018. https://prachatai.com/journal/2016/ 04/65147. Prachatai. November 27, 2017. “Pata-chap 16 khan rongfaifa thanhin- fainun khao khaiingkhayut kho rengsang” [Clash-Arrest 16 Opponents of Coal Power Plant - the Proponents Enter the Ingkhayut Military Base, Urge to Speed up Construction]. Accessed February 7, 2018. https://prachatai.com/journal/2017/11/74317. Reuters. February 28, 2019. “Thailand Passes Internet Security Law Decried as ‘Cyber Martial Law.’” Accessed April 8, 2019. www.reuters.com/article/thailand-cyber-idUSL3N20G3R5.

16 SOMETHING IN THE WATER Toward a symbolic history of otherness in Chrouy Changvar, Cambodia Ngoc Tram Luong

The Sokha Hotel in Phnom Penh stands at the tip of the Chrouy Changvar peninsula, a densely populated sand bar that juts into the middle of the Mekong River. Immediately across from the royal palace, this eminent location is where the Mekong meets the Tonlé Sap and Bassac rivers, forming a junction that looks like four entwined arms, hence the name quatre bras (meaning four arms in French) or chaktomuk (meaning four faces in Khmer). From the windows of the hotel, one sees the water embrace the sand, blending into a muted silky color that forms the waterfront of Cambodia’s beloved capital. The arrival in 2014 of the Sokha Hotel, a luxury establishment owned by an ethnic-Vietnamese tycoon known as Okhna Sok Kong, embodies on the surface a common tale of urban development. The lack of access to sanitary living conditions, health care, and education has provided the state with an excuse to put into motion an urban development project. Unwittingly, this very effort of modernization necessitated the forceful displacement of local communities, those the state claimed to represent. Mired in a neverending process of land commoditization, the diverse population of ethnic Khmer, Vietnamese, and Cham Muslims still struggles today to make a livelihood in the face of economic adversity and sustained gentrification. On the canvas of Chrouy Changvar, the cement modernity of the hotel and similar high-end establishments stands in stark contrast to the greenery and abandoned settlements around it. There is, however, something else in the water at this confluence of rivers. Far from the swirling forces of capitalism, they are the ripples and eddies of a more complex history of space infused with the lingering effects of ethnicity, nationalism, and war. Standing on the riverbank of this peninsula, in a spot where luxury and rubble coexist, one can gaze at the rapidly developing skyline of urban Phnom Penh – its palaces, temples, markets, and aspirational skyscrapers. Little might the visitor to this city know that the ground beneath her feet was the site of one of the most egregious massacres in Cambodian history against its Vietnamese population,

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five years prior to the infamous Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–1979). In 1970, undermined by the ongoing war in Vietnam, Cambodia found itself in the middle of a political feud between the royal head of state Norodom Sihanouk and the military faction of General Lon Nol. After deposing Sihanouk, Lon Nol launched a virulent countrywide anti-Vietnamese campaign, known colloquially among the Vietnamese in Cambodia as “Cap Yuon” (a Khmer term which translates roughly as “exterminate the Viets”). Home at the time to a thriving Vietnamese neighborhood called Xóm Biển (meaning “the ocean hamlet” in Vietnamese), Chrouy Changvar witnessed a spate of anti-Vietnamese attacks that took the lives of the majority of its male residents and continues to haunt the collective memories of ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia today. The peninsula is thus nestled in a network of significances beyond economic terms. As a site where the histories of the most powerless and the most powerful ethnic-Vietnamese coincide, Chrouy Changvar testifies to the curious complexity of what it means to be Vietnamese in Cambodia, to survive mass violence only to see that history buried under modern concrete. Far from being “the peaceful side of the congested capital,”1 Chrouy Changvar is the space where multiple narratives collide – a symbolic interface that aids our understanding of the controversial existence of Vietnamese in a Khmer land. Any attempt to understand anti-Vietnamese aggression in Cambodia therefore must take into consideration the convergence of these contrasting narratives in shaping one’s imagination of ethnic difference, and subsequently, processes of dehumanization fundamental to ethnic violence of all kinds. Like the landscape of Chrouy Changvar itself, the ethnic Other herein is multifaceted and multilayered, anything but a monolithic whole.

From built forms to affliction The map of modern Cambodia bears multiple marks of the Sokimex empire – from casinos and gas stations to luxury hotels and resorts. The imposing presence of Oknha Sok Kong on the Cambodian economy is no novel tale to the average citizens, who still remember raising their eyebrows at the story of an ethnic-Vietnamese tycoon running the Angkor world heritage site in the 1990s. An emblem of Khmer nationhood, Angkor Wat has been the staple of the visual paradigms of many Cambodian regimes since the end of French colonialism.2 It is an understatement to say that the image of Angkor inspires in Cambodians great love for their nation. At several historical moments, Angkorian images were purposefully fashioned to fan the flame of xenophobia against several ethnic minorities, especially those ethnic Vietnamese who often took on the status of the “enemies from within.”3 Having an ethnic Vietnamese tycoon operate the Angkor National Park had severed the fault line between ethnic Vietnamese and their Khmer neighbors. In 1999 Oknha Sok Kong, known in Vietnam by the name of Sáu Cò, entered a pact with the Cambodian government. Under the terms of this cooperation, Sokimex became responsible for the sale of tickets to Angkor Wat. In exchange, a minimum amount of one million US dollars came back to the government’s treasury every

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FIGURE 16.1

The Chrouy Changvar peninsula and the Sokha Hotel. Photograph by author.

year.4 Notwithstanding Sok Kong’s effort to improve the services and infrastructure in and around Angkor Wat, the revenue from this tourism gold mine soon eclipsed any initial estimates. At some point, rumors started to circulate that the Vietnamese was swindling money from Angkor Wat. Corruption allegations against Sokimex and the Apsara Authority, the government agency that oversees the park, led to an eventual withdrawal of Sokimex from the heritage site.5 After Sok Kong publicly declared his connection to Vietnam in the early 2000s, his involvement with the Angkor National Park undoubtedly rekindled what were for some Cambodians bitter memories of the decade-long Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979–1989) and their latent Vietnamphobic sentiments. It is against this background that one needs to situate the construction of the Sokha Hotel on Chrouy Changvar, immediately across the river from the National Palace of Cambodia. More than a mere symbol of modern success, the luxurious hotel on the other side of the Tonlé Sap River embodies an enduring idea of ethnic otherness in Cambodia. As often as not, the history of Cambodian nationalism has been framed within a picture of a looming takeover by the Vietnamese.6 As such, the hotel materializes not only the promise of modernity and capitalist aspiration, but also an existential menace for the Khmer Kingdom. Its symbolic juxtaposition with the various Khmercentric monuments just across the river makes reference to a set of mental images associated with the most powerful Vietnamese in Cambodia. This vision of a menacing Vietnamese Other leaves concrete traces in the form of a gigantic structure, where one finds some of the most expensive meals in a country still ravaged by poverty.

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Lon Nol’s “Religious War” One kilometer down the riverbank from the hotel, concrete pavements turn into dirt roads. Gravel and potholes line the way to what remains of the Xóm Biển hamlet since 1970. There, the fortune of Sok Kong seems a distant dream. Save for a number of Vietnamese households scattered along the road, many Vietnamese who used to live and fish in Chrouy Changvar have been evicted to make room for development projects since 2015. Living among the rubble of demolished structures, the remaining ethnic Vietnamese continue to lead a precarious life, without proper identification, let alone access to sustainable health care and education. One encounters here a very different kind of ethnic history. With no monument erected in its memory, the 1970 “Religious War” (Khmer: sangkream sasana) continues to haunt the collective memory of this Vietnamese community. At the height of the Vietnam War, Cambodia found itself in a political impasse between the US and the communist bloc. The head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, managed to maintain political neutrality until the mid-1960s. At the time, the prince’s diplomatic ties with China and his tolerance of the Vietnamese communists turned him into a problematic figure for Washington DC and Saigon, which conflated neutrality with communism.7 In 1965, Sihanouk broke off relations with the United States. With alleged help from the CIA, an alternative leader emerged on the political scene. General Lon Nol, then aged 53, had been largely absent from most elections in Cambodia since 1951. He was an ex-Defense Minister, a fervent Theravada Buddhist, and a politically attuned figure. Lon Nol enjoyed popular support from the civil servants, the monks, and the non-communist youth. His calm and modest exterior put him in direct contrast to the “flamboyant and restless” royal family.8 While Sihanouk was head of state, Lon Nol was elected Prime Minister of Cambodia on October 22, 1966. The general quickly installed a cabinet of 16, the maximum allowed by the constitution, and soon saturated parliamentary politics with right-wing, anti-royalty sentiments. By late 1969, a conspiracy to overthrow Sihanouk had started to gain traction.9 In March 1970, as Sihanouk left the country for a vacation in France, his regime fell into the hands of a group of anti-monarchic, anti-Vietnamese, pro-US nationalists. On the streets of Phnom Penh, supporters of the newborn Khmer Republic celebrated with enthusiasm and splendor. The Khmer Republic was explicit in its anti-communist, anti-Vietnamese agenda. The new government and its supporters were enraged at the North Vietnamese use of Cambodian land for sanctuary from US attack and interpreted it as evidence of Vietnamese aggression in Cambodia, if not an outright invasion. What transpired in the months of March and April 1970 soon revealed the nightmarish nature of anti-Vietnamese politics. As a strongly hostile constituency displaced a relatively neutral monarch, a campaign of violent ethnic cleansing known as “Cap Yuon” materialized. “Cap” in Khmer means to cut or kill, while “Yuon” refers to Vietnamese people. “Cap Yuon” as a whole was a state-licensed operation to locate and terrorize en masse the Vietnamese minority around the country, a population of approximately 450,000 at the beginning of 1970. Between 20,000

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FIGURE 16.2

An image of the demonstration populaire against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in Phnom Penh in March 1970. Notice the anti-Vietnam banner in the background.13

and 30,000 Vietnamese were killed during the spate of attacks,10 something the French ambassador and others described as threatening a real “genocide.”11 Unsurprisingly, this outbreak of violence and the memories left in its wake continue to haunt Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority, over 300,000 of whom soon fled to South Vietnam.12 What started out as a demonstration against the Vietnamese communists on March 11, 1970 soon turned into complete pandemonium. The violence began with the looting of the North Vietnamese and the PRG’s (Provisional Revolutionary

Something in the water 273

Government of the Republic of South Vietnam) embassies, as well as their attaché’s offices. The theatre of mayhem then expanded to several Vietnamese neighborhoods in Phnom Penh.14 Vietnamese flags were torn down and burned, replaced with Cambodian flags. Khmer youths roamed the streets of the Vietnamese quarters, throwing stones, ransacking shops, and burning houses. A notable Vietnameseowned bookshop named Hon Du was also burned to the ground.15 Soon, the Lon Nol government decreed a dawn-to-dusk curfew for all Phnom Penh residents of Vietnamese descent, a quarter of the city’s population. In the countryside, government trucks were transporting Vietnamese people to unknown destinations. Their houses were looted and razed for being alleged communist sanctuaries. The Vietnamese were coerced into forced labor while the national radio aired its frenzied broadcasts, condemning not only the Vietcong but all Vietnamese in Cambodia as “eaters of Cambodian territory.”16 Towns in the countryside such as Takeo and Prasaut later witnessed the killing of defenseless women and children. In Chrouy Changvar itself, Vietnamese houseboats near the riverside were smashed and emptied on the eve of April 13, 1970, while their residents disappeared into the water.17 The currents turned red, punctuated by floating bodies of Vietnamese people tied together on bamboo sticks. The motivation behind such acts of corporeal brutality went beyond ethnic difference and political maneuvering. It is revealing to focus on the proliferation of religious doctrines during this episode of violence. A fervent believer of Theravada Buddhism, the general himself was known for his subscription to Buddhist mythology, having erected earlier a Monument of the Republic in front of the Royal Palace adorned with Buddhist slogans.18 Lon Nol perceived both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese communists as existential threats to Buddhism, describing them as the atheist devils thmil.19 His propaganda paradigm drew heavily from a Buddhist prophecy that warns of an imminent attack by the non-believers, when the four tributaries of the Mekong River, convening right at the tip of Chrouy Changvar, would be filled with blood.20 Without fail, Lon Nol put in place a massive campaign of psychological warfare. His government not only recruited Buddhist monks for propaganda purposes but also deployed religious imagery to its advantage. Buddhistinspired posters were frequently displayed on the street of Phnom Penh in 1970. As the saffron gowns of the monks and other religious symbols saturated the visual palette of urban Phnom Penh, the government found a means to inject its rhetoric into the material fabric of a society in sudden flux.

Phantasmal imagery: Anti-Vietnamese propaganda The Khmer Republic government encouraged artists from the Phnom Penh University of Fine Arts to turn Buddhist mythology into raw materials for publicity. Drawing from religious tales and scriptures, these visual producers were able to fine-tune the well-known visual idioms in Khmer culture into operative wartime instigation. One such story is the tale of Maravijaya, which recalls the defeat of the devil Mara. In Khmer cosmology, the Maravijaya recounts the story of Thorani,

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the goddess of fertility. In an encounter between the future Buddha, Sakyamuni, and the evil god of desire, Mara, Thorani arises from the Earth and protects Sakyamuni from the threats of the devils.21 Thorani lets down her locks of hair and unleashes from them a flood of crocodiles, sharks, and swordfishes. Her aquatic forces defeat Mara and his army of monsters, allowing Sakyamuni to reach Buddhahood. The tale of Maravijaya immortalizes the image of Thorani as the guardian of the Buddha, and by extension of Cambodia as a whole. Traditional depictions of the Maravijaya situate Thorani in the middle of the scene, her hands wringing water out of her hair, her body standing upright by the crocodile.

FIGURE 16.3

A traditional depiction of Maravijaya. In this typical illustration of the Maravijaya, Mara appears on the left with his spear, leading a band of demons against the meditating Buddha, who sits under a Bodhi tree. Below the Buddha, Thorani assumes her common pose, wringing a flood from her hair onto the army of monsters. On the right, Mara is shown accepting defeat. Courtesy of Steven Boswell.22

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The mental images that arise from the physical poster index a tale of self-realization rooted in Theravada Buddhist cosmology. They concretize a celebration of the triumph of good against evil that still holds purchase in contemporary Cambodia. In 1970, however, this constellation of religious iconographies underwent a major recalibration. The Lon Nol administration found a way to deploy the mental images associated with Thorani by repurposing the set of visuals. In this reinterpretation, the evil Mara takes the form of a North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldier in the emblematic conical hat on the left side. He stands on top of a tank, near a red flag emblazoned

FIGURE 16.4

Anti-Vietcong poster during the Lon Nol period reinterpreting the Thorani myth. In this image, the “demons” common to such depictions now wear conical hats associated with the Vietnamese and carry Soviet-style military weapons. The red stars on the hats further associate these “demons” with communism. The text of the poster reads, “Non-believers who are the enemies of Buddha must be destroyed.” Courtesy of Steven Boswell.24

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with the communist yellow star. Beneath him, an army of Viet Cong “monsters” aim their weapons at the Buddha. This stands in contrast to the powerful image of Thorani who, dressed in gold, conjures a flood of water against the monstrous army.23 On the right-hand side, the Vietnamese Mara bows down to the Buddha, pleading for mercy. As part of a regime of state-led propaganda, these kinds of posters took on a double role. They at once inspired hatred against the ethnic Vietnamese and justified ethnic violence in a time of unprecedented tension. This visual rhetoric effectively inserted itself into an existing visual paradigm that was intelligible to the average Cambodian. As visual studies scholar Toby Clark posits, wartime propaganda often attempts to adapt people’s priorities and moral standards to the abnormal needs of war by repurposing visual conventions. While in the West print propaganda materials have usually taken the forms of mass advertisements and movie posters recognizable to the public, in 1970 Cambodia, wartime posters leveraged the traditional form of religious art to make a new war familiar. Such tactics unwittingly glamorized wartime conflict by “exploiting the habits of fantasy and desire” associated with widely accepted visual codes.25 The Thorani-Vietcong poster served its purpose by virtue of its relatability in Khmer society. It deployed a highly legible visual vocabulary to redirect existing xenophobic sentiments toward the Vietnamese population, while simultaneously celebrating Khmer national identity and religio-cultural heritage. It drew from a field of affects rooted in Buddhist beliefs and practices, yet rerouted these emotions toward new violent meanings.26 Through the manipulation of a highly relatable story in Khmer society, Lon Nol was able to establish a common ground between his agenda and the Khmer public, some of whom in fact participated in this violence, though most of it was perpetrated by General Lon Nol’s troops. The memory of the 1970 killings took on an almost abstract quality in my ethnographic work with the Vietnamese residents of Chrouy Changvar today. Tales of corpses floating down the river have become what I call a phantasmal image that haunts the other history of the area. In March of 1970, at the height of “Cap Yuon,” several reporters came across the sight of some 600 bodies floating in the river near the rural town of Neak Loeung. The corpses seemed to have come from upstream in Ta Chhor, a small island 40 miles down the Mekong from Phnom Penh, where wooden boats carrying about 100 Vietnamese each had been putting in at the island for several days.27 After tying the hands of the Vietnamese captives and marching them to the far side of the island, the Khmer soldiers drowned them in the water of the river. Corpses of many killed in Chrouy Changvar were said to have followed the same track down the majestic river, if only a few weeks later. Floating away from the peninsula, the bodies quickly went out of sight. Except for an image captured by the foreign press, the religious war left no trace on the contemporary landscape of Phnom Penh writ large. This phantasmal image bears an uncanny resemblance to the image of the drowning Vietnamese devils in the Thorani poster. In 1970, the Khmer army and commoners who internalized the position of the goddess acted to protect their

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FIGURE 16.5

A photograph of Vietnamese victims in 1970 captured by a Newsweek reporter. In the photograph, the bodies of Vietnamese civilians reportedly killed by Cambodian troops are seen lashed together, floating in the currents of the Mekong River. Xóm Biển informants report similar techniques being used on their deceased family members in April 1970, a time of haunting memories.28

country by drowning the devils. The only difference was that those who died floating down the Mekong were unarmed civilians, whose families had lived in Cambodia for generations. The physical poster evoked a set of mental images in the Khmer imagination but materialized in the bodies of the ethnic Other a phantasmal image, that something in the water that haunts the collective consciousness of Vietnamese people in Cambodia even today. Indeed, two decades after “Cap Yuon,” the ousted Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) head of state Khieu Samphan again evoked this phantasmal image to demand the deportation of ethnic Vietnamese civilians. Samphan only needed to put it simply – either those people must choose to leave, or wait until “the Mekong River became choked with the corpses of Vietnamese residents.”29

Epilogue Today, the plot of land where Vietnamese people used to live in the peninsula sits squarely between the fences and banners of a new development project. In 2016, Sokimex announced the planning of the new Chrouy Changvar Mega Multi-Use Development Project, which will include a riverfront entertainment complex, luxurious hotels, high-end villas, shopping centers, club houses, and exclusive

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service apartments. If it comes to pass, the design of the new Mega Complex will take the form of a futuristic rendition of the famous Khmer boat race.30 It epitomizes a national aspiration to put Cambodia on the map of world cities with its unique architectural statement. This vision of futurity, despite its claim to Khmer heritage and culture, will not be without contestation for its apparent entanglement with Vietnamese economic interests. The figures of Sok Kong and many other ethnic Vietnamese entrepreneurs will continue to confirm the age-old image of a powerful Vietnamese economic sector in the midst of Cambodia. However, whether this image will be efficiently countered by contrasting accounts of ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia remains an open question. In the case of Chrouy Changvar, the confluence of symbolic histories discussed here, the stories of Xóm Biển risk imminent obliteration. As the force of development catches up with the last settlements by the riverside, the dream of the future coincides with the suppression of multiple pasts, including those that connect Cambodia to its most controversial ethnic minority. The materiality of urban intervention, embodied by the image of the Sokha Hotel today, will continue to register the extraordinary aspiration of urban developers and the enduring sense of economic injustice in Cambodia. And yet, what this paper shows is a different way of looking and learning about such materiality. While the hotel evokes a symbolic image of ethnic Vietnamese as an existential menace to Cambodia, its surrounding bears witness to a hidden history of violence, one that proves that the Vietnamese commoners in Cambodia were anything but powerful. As aggression against Vietnamese in Cambodia remains today, we face the task of rethinking the construction of otherness beyond totalizing, monolithic terms. Within such a small yet significant patch of land in Phnom Penh, one can see the complexity of the Vietnamese experience in Cambodia manifest itself in both material and imaginative forms. It is apropos to revisit the image of the drowning Vietnamese army in closing. Like what Roland Barthes calls a punctum, a bit of visual information that pricks and disturbs, this poignant image ties up the several narratives mentioned in this paper.31 An instrument of wartime indoctrination, it drew from and reshaped the conventions of a Buddhist regime of images to inspire acts of terror. Meanwhile, its double image, that of the mutilated bodies of the Vietnamese victims in 1970, indexes another story of mutual suspicion, misunderstanding, and misguided actions between two peoples. The double image leaves no physical trace of the massacres, and yet it lives on in the collective memory of a people at the margin. This phantasmal image lingers in the palimpsest of Chrouy Changvar, waiting to be unearthed. A true punctum, its visuality captivates the viewer, its detailed contours demand to be looked at, and thus encountered in its most terrifyingly realistic form – as human bodies taking the blow of abstract ethnonationalism. Perhaps one day, in the reflection of those skyscrapers on the Mekong River, one will find the vestige of this image. As the eddies surge in swelling motions, under the glaring lights of the growing waterfront, one might come to realize – there has been something in the water all along.

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Notes 1 “Sokha Phnom Penh Hotel and Residence,” Sokha Hotels & Resorts – Our Hotels, accessed May 15, 2019, www.sokhahotels.com/phnompenh/. 2 See, for example, Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007) and Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War after the War (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986), which both describe in detail the prioritization of the Angkorian narrative in the political agendas of different Cambodian regimes. 3 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Stephen R. Heder and Judy Ledgerwood, Propaganda, Politics, and Violence in Cambodia: Democratic Transition under United Nations Peace-Keeping (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 4 Đoan Trang, “Tôi Là Người Việt Nam,” Tuổi Trẻ Online, last modified November 20, 2004, https://tuoitre.vn/toi-la-nguoi-viet-nam-56609.htm. 5 Channyda Chhay and Shaun Turton. “Gov’t Takes Angkor Ticketing Back from Powerful Sokimex,” Phnom Penh Post, last modified November 7, 2015, www.phnomp enhpost.com/post-weekend/govt-takes-angkor-ticketing-back-powerful-sokimex. 6 Shawn McHale, “Ethnicity, Violence, and Khmer-Vietnamese Relations: The Significance of the Lower Mekong Delta, 1757–1954,” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 2 (May 2013): 368. For different perspectives, involving Khmer-Vietnamese cooperation in anti-colonial and nationalist causes, see Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942–1981 (London: Zed Books, 1982), e.g., 1–4, and Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power (London: Verso, 1985), chapters 1–4. 7 See, for example, Donald Kirk, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos (New York: Praeger, 1971). 8 Justin J. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!: A History of the Cambodian Government 1970–1975 (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1994), 41. Corfield took notes from “Prince Sihanouk answers to Dr David Chandler,” Cambodia Information Office (Australia) Newsletter (July 1988), 14. Republished in The Khmer Nationalist (Tokyo), no. 53 (Sept 1988). For an extensive review of Cambodian politics leading up to the 1970 coup, see also, David Chandler, History of Cambodia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), chapter 11. 9 Ben Kiernan, “The Overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Kampuchea – Interview with Prom Thos, Senior Minister in the Sihanouk (1969–70) and Lon Nol (1970–73) Governments in Kampuchea,” personal interview, Paris, February 12 and June 3, 1980, 2; and Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, 57. 10 Jean-Claude Pomonti and Serge Thion, Des Courtisans aux Partisans: Essai sur la Crise Cambodgienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 187. 11 Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 545; François Debré, Cambodge: La Révolution de la Forêt (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 133. 12 See, Jacques Migozzi, Cambodge: Faits et problems de population (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS, 1973). 13 “Deuxième manifestation anti-vietcong devant l’Asemblée Nationale le 16 mars 1970,” in Magazine Illustré du Cambodge Moderne paraît en anglais et en français (Phnom Penh: Khmer Republic, 1973), 6. 14 Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, 66–7. 15 Ibid., 68. 16 Robert Sam Anson, War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 119. 17 Anonymous ethnic Vietnamese resident of Chrouy Changvar, interview by author, Phnom Penh, August 5, 2018.

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18 Yang Sam, Khmer Buddhism and Politics from 1954 to 1984 (Newington, CT: Khmer Studies Institute, 1987), 50. 19 Lon Nol, Chambang Sasana (Religious War) (Phnom Penh, 1970), 1–4. 20 Yang Sam, Khmer Buddhism and Politics from 1954 to 1984, 51. 21 Steven Boswell, King Norodom’s Head: Phnom Penh Sights beyond the Guidebooks (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016), 73–4. 22 Ibid., 74. 23 Boswell, King Norodom’s Head, 76. There is a long genealogy of scholars who worked on this very image and to whom I owe a great debt, among them are Steven Boswell, Erik W. Davis, Elizabeth Guthrie, Ian Harris, and François Bizot. The image also appears in Ian Harris, Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 57, and Erik W. Davis, “Sounding on Cambodia for April 18, 2011,” Imagining the Real World, last modified April 18, 2011, https://erikwdavis.wordpress. com/. 24 Davis, “Sounding on Cambodia.” The image also appears in Ian Harris, Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice, 57. 25 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 103. 26 In Peircean terms, the visibility of a sign influences the way an agent makes references to and arrives at an interpretant of it. An effective interpretant depends largely on the way a sign is “readable” to an agent as an index, icon, or symbol of something else, providing a ground for common understanding between the producer of the sign and the agent that comes into interaction with it. 27 Anson, War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina, 119. 28 Denis Cameron, “SHATTERED PEACE: Lashed Together, the Bodies of Vietnamese Civilians Reportedly Killed by Cambodian Troops Float Down the Mekong River, 1970,” in “Cambodia: Caught in a Crossfire,” Newsweek, May 4, 1970, 23. 29 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 554. 30 Sokimex Investment Group, “Mega Multi-Use Development ‘Chroy Chang Va Riverside!’” last modified June 4, 2016, www.sokimex.com/media-libraries/press-release. 31 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

Bibliography Anson, Robert Sam. War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Boswell, Steven. King Norodom’s Head: Phnom Penh Sights beyond the Guidebooks. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016. Cameron, Denis. “SHATTERED PEACE: Lashed Together, the Bodies of Vietnamese Civilians Reportedly Killed by Cambodian Troops Float Down the Mekong River.” In “Cambodia: Caught in a Crossfire,” Newsweek. May 4, 1970. Chanda, Nayan. Brother Enemy: The War after the War. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. Chandler, David. History of Cambodia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008. Channyda, Chhay, and Shaun Turton. “Gov’t Takes Angkor Ticketing Back from Powerful Sokimex.” Phnom Penh Post. Last modified November 7, 2015. www.phnompenhpost. com/post-weekend/govt-takes-angkor-ticketing-back-powerful-sokimex. Clark, Toby. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. Corfield, Justin J. Khmers Stand Up!: A History of the Cambodian Government 1970–1975. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1994.

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Davis, Erik W. “Sounding on Cambodia for April 18, 2011.” Imagining the Real World. Last modified April 18, 2011. https://erikwdavis.wordpress.com/. Debré, François. Cambodge: La Révolution de la Forêt. Paris: Flammarion, 1976. “Deuxième manifestation anti-vietcong devant l’Asemblée Nationale le 16 mars 1970.” In Magazine Illustré du Cambodge Moderne paraît en anglais et en français (Special Edition). Phnom Penh: Khmer Republic, September1973. Đoan Trang. “Tôi Là Người Việt Nam.” Tuổi Trẻ Online, November 20, 2004. http:// tuoitre.vn/tin/the-gioi/20041120/toi-la-nguoi-viet-nam/56609.html. Edwards, Penny. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Harris, Ian. Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. Heder, Stephen R., and Judy Ledgerwood. Propaganda, Politics, and Violence in Cambodia: Democratic Transition under United Nations Peace-Keeping. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power. London: Verso, 1985. Kiernan, Ben. “The Overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Kampuchea – Interview with Prom Thos, Senior Minister in the Sihanouk (1969–70) and Lon Nol (1970–73) Governments in Kampuchea.” Paris, 1980. Kiernan, Ben, and Chanthou Boua. Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942–1981. London: Zed Books, 1982. Kirk, Donald. Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. New York: Praeger, 1971. Lon, Nol. Chambang Sasana (Religious War). Phnom Penh, 1970. McHale, Shawn. “Ethnicity, Violence, and Khmer-Vietnamese Relations: The Significance of the Lower Mekong Delta, 1757–1954.” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 2 (2013): 367–390. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911813000016. Migozzi, Jacques. Cambodge: Faits et problems de population. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS, 1973. Pomonti, Jean-Claude, and Serge Thion. Des Courtisans aux Partisans; Essai sur la Crise Cambodgienne. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Sam, Yang. Khmer Buddhism and Politics from 1954 to 1984. Newington, CT: Khmer Studies Institute, 1987. Short, Philip. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Sokha Hotels & Resorts – Our Hotels. “Sokha Phnom Penh Hotel and Residence.” Accessed May 15, 2019. www.sokhahotels.com/phnompenh/. Sokimex Investment Group. “Mega Multi-Use Development ‘Chroy Chang Va Riverside!’” Last modified June 4, 2016. www.sokimex.com/media-libraries/press-release. Widyono, Benny. Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

17 MASS VIOLENCE AND MOB VIOLENCE IN CAMBODIA Responses and social repair – Hope for the future? Laura McGrew

Introduction Among the various examples of violence in Southeast Asia since 1945, the Khmer Rouge experiment in Cambodia stands out as one of the most heinous, as almost a quarter of the population perished. The origins of this violence, as well as its massive effects and continuing violence decades afterwards, reverberate throughout present-day society. After the 1991 peace accords, despite billions spent by the international community to bring peace and social recovery in Cambodia by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), assisted by hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Cambodia today is an increasingly authoritarian state with citizens living under threat of violence. This chapter first summarizes the genocide and mass violence perpetrated by the infamous Khmer Rouge when approximately two million died in Cambodia from starvation, overwork, torture, assassination, and a lack of social services. Second, more recent episodes of violence in contemporary Cambodian history are reviewed, including everyday mob violence against accused street criminals in the face of lack of rule of law, and multiple attacks against opposition politicians and human rights activists since the UNTAC period. Causes and connections between these incidents are explored. Third, other important factors in the incidence of violence in Cambodia are discussed, including social movements (which spurred state violence when power balances were threatened), such as those for opposition politicians, as well as for labor and land rights. Fourth, mechanisms for resilience and recovery are explored considering this past mass and mob violence. The peace movement, which was centered around the Dhammayietra Buddhist peace walks,1 is discussed as one of those mechanisms, as are various transitional justice measures created since the trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders were launched in 2006.

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Inequality, exclusion, and indignity are common root causes of many conflicts and of genocides, including in Cambodia, resulting in political, social, and economic instability.2 Violent conflict weakens social fabric, reducing trust and disrupting norms and values, which need time and interventions to repair: “economic and social development will be hindered unless social capital stocks are restored.”3 There are many types of violence: structural, cultural, direct, verbal, psychological, interpersonal, societal, gender-based, sexual, physical, cultural, etc.; however, this chapter focuses on structural,4 physical, and political violence. Broadhurst et al. argue that there has been a substantial decline in crime and violence in Cambodia: 90 percent overall decline from 1992 to 2012, though there have been spikes and surges.5 Although physical violence may have declined, psychological and structural violence seem to be on the rise. Currently, Cambodians are subjected to persistent structural violence stemming from a malfunctioning government with violations of their social and economic rights resulting in poor and costly health care, education, and other social services, as well as the oppression of their political rights including land and labor rights.

Background Cambodians often speak of the idealized utopia of a peaceful past before the 1970 overthrow of former King Sihanouk, recalling it as a time when there was plenty of food to eat. However, the reality is not quite so simple. After Cambodia became independent from France in 1953, Sihanouk began terrorizing his opponents, putting many in jail and compelling others to flee abroad. The US war in Vietnam spilled over into Cambodia in the 1960s through the early 1970s, with thousands of tons of bombs falling in the Cambodian countryside, resulting in thousands of deaths.6 After the 1970 overthrow of Sihanouk, US-backed Lon Nol became president, and ground invasions of Cambodia by both communist and anti-communist Vietnamese as well as US forces, massive US aerial bombardments, and an escalating Khmer Rouge insurgency resulted in a raging civil war across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians and military personnel were injured or killed and numerous were displaced, all resulting in enormous disruptions of daily economic and social life. During the Lon Nol period, ethnic Vietnamese were targeted for elimination and horrifying images of bloated Vietnamese bodies floating down the Mekong river were featured in the media (see Luong’s chapter, this volume). When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the population was at first relieved, thinking that the civil war would finally end, and they would have peace. However, the reality was much different. Cambodia descended into a cauldron of mass violence where approximately two million people perished during the “3 years, 8 months, and 20 days” of Khmer Rouge rule. As people suffered unbelievable torture and hardship under the brutal regime, which replaced family loyalty with forced allegiance to the Khmer Rouge’s all-powerful “Angkar” leadership, society’s fabric was torn apart and trust was broken, and social

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institutions, including hospitals and schools, were destroyed. Violence was part of everyday life – the threat of death meted out by black-clad youngsters, guards, and spies; people led away (never to be seen again) for stealing a few grains of rice or being too ill to work; children forced to report on their parents; and hundreds of people gathered together for Mao-like criticism meetings where sometimes people were publicly killed as an example for others. Extreme structural violence was the underlying daily fare, with scant watery gruel to eat, 18-hour workdays of harsh manual labor in the hot sun, and no medical care, education, or social services. In 1979, after neighboring Vietnam and the figurehead former Khmer Rouge leaders of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) pushed the other factions of the Khmer Rouge to the Thai-Cambodian border, a civil war ensued for another decade. Structural violence continued inside Cambodia under a political Westernled embargo, with up to a million refugees languishing along the border. Tens of thousands were killed in the civil war, by landmines and by the harsh K-5 scheme along the border where Cambodian civilians were forced to support the PRK’s military effort.7 Finally, in 1991 a peace accord was signed between four Cambodian factions, though the Khmer Rouge soon dropped out and attempted to sabotage the planned nationwide elections. From 1992–3, UNTAC returned refugees, trained and monitored human rights and the civil administration (though only partially), demobilized and integrated military factions, and cleared mines. In 1993 UNorganized elections went ahead and led to a coalition government of the remaining three factions (the Royal Government of Cambodia–RGC) which included the PRK (including many former Khmer Rouge who had renamed themselves as the Cambodian People’s Party or CPP) and two non-communist resistance factions. An unwieldy co-government system was created with co-ministers from the two strongest factions, the CPP and the royalist FUNCINPEC (National United Front for an Independent, Peaceful, Neutral and Cooperative Cambodia) party led by Prince Ranariddh (Sihanouk’s son). However, Prime Minister Hun Sen and the CPP, with a strong network of cronies at all levels, have firmly kept power up until the present time. In 1997 the co-prime ministers wrote a letter to the UN asking for assistance to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. After years of negotiations, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) finally began in 2006 to try the senior leaders and those most responsible for the Khmer Rouge regime. Two trials have been held, in a hybrid court consisting of both national and international staff at all levels (most hired by the UN). The first trial of “Duch” (Case 001), the head of the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison (“S-21”), resulted in a guilty verdict, as did the second trial (Case 002) of senior leaders Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea (though only the latter two leaders lived through the trial). Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s deputy, and Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge regime’s head of state, were both convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Both were subsequently also convicted of genocide against ethnic minorities. Nuon Chea died in 2019 while his genocide conviction

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was under appeal. Two additional cases (003 and 004) of lower-level leaders are currently being deliberated in the court, but due to lack of political will of both the UN and the RGC, they will probably not move forward. Nonetheless, most Cambodians were relieved to see the guilty verdicts.8 Starting during UNTAC, despite a low-level conflict between the Khmer Rouge (who had fled back to the jungles and their previous strongholds primarily along the Thai-Cambodian border) and the RGC, levels of violence finally decreased, though life was not easy for most Cambodians. With the defections of some Khmer Rouge leaders in 1996 and 1997, followed by the death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1998, Hun Sen finally achieved his plan of national reconciliation by forcing the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders to surrender or defect to his government (except for a few leaders who were jailed). Rule of law has been lacking, first under the socialist PRK when political and economic rights were severely limited, then slightly improving from 1992–2000 when massive international aid worked to support the police and judiciary, but since 2000 rule of law has again been diminished as the CPP faction of the RGC has moved to severely curtail political rights (the other three original factions have essentially stopped functioning, having been absorbed by the CPP). While the public’s trust in the courts improved between 2008 and 2011 as reported in two large comparative surveys, trust remains low, increasing from only 35 percent to 52 percent, with the percentage of respondents reporting that going to court still means paying a bribe having increased from 61 to 68 percent.9 When the population has such a great distrust of the courts, there are few avenues of recourse when violence occurs. There were two major peaks in the political violence in Cambodia since UNTAC, first a grenade attack at a rally organized by opposition leader Sam Rainsy, followed by a coup led by Hun Sen in 1997; and second, between 2013 and 2017 when the opposition party gradually began to gain enough power to threaten Hun Sen’s position.

Cambodian society and culture Cambodia’s unique cultural mix profoundly shapes the way the people have responded to the political violence, and how they are recovering. The country is 98 percent Buddhist, about half of the population is less than 25 years of age, literacy rates are low, and it is one of the poorest countries in Asia with high levels of corruption.10 Buddhism profoundly shapes the Cambodian identity: “To be Khmer is to be Buddhist”.11 However ancient Hinduism and animist spirit worship also undergird Cambodians’ views and practices of everyday life. Nonviolence is inherent in the Buddhist religion: behavior is governed by the belief that one’s present life is just the latest in a long series of lives, shaped by the law of karma or the acts done in proceeding lives.12 After the terror, starvation, overwork, and instability of Cambodia’s past, especially the Khmer Rouge period, many Cambodians are plagued with health

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problems that include mental health disorders, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.13 The mental health disorders include major depression, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and conversion disorder (loss of specific sensory or motor functions without any organic cause).14 Globally, however, there is little evidence that a history of PTSD leads directly to violent behavior.15 On the other hand, although one cannot draw clear conclusions about the relationship between a desire for revenge and violent behavior, a 2009 mental health survey found that people with high levels of PTSD were more likely to desire revenge than those with lower levels.16 Traditionally in Cambodian history, extreme violence has been carried out against enemies.17 But this extreme violence was perfected by the Khmer Rouge through the practice of disproportionate revenge against one’s enemies or a “head for an eye.”18 Following the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1980s, during the civil war, the PRK cultivated feelings of insecurity so as to encourage the population to fight the Khmer Rouge “genocidal clique.” In the 2000s, according to Lim, several reports suggested that violence has increased around issues related to Cambodia’s great economic growth19: much of the state violence against citizens is related to land and labor rights. There remains much debate on the nature of Cambodian society – conflict avoidance, or conflict-seeking “warriors.” Cambodia’s (violent) “warrior heritage” is inscribed in numerous bas reliefs on the epic Angkor Wat temples, which embody Khmer history, and is described in the book by Seanglim Bit of that title.20 On the other hand, primarily foreigners writing about the Khmer people describe them as complacent, peaceful, and gentle Khmer, especially in contrast to the violent Khmer Rouge regime.21 My research has found both of these conflicting styles in the various communities of study.22 Even if there was underlying or latent anger and frustration, especially when known perpetrators were living in the villages, the situation on the surface remained calm.23 Another example of this dichotomy was found in the immediate post-Khmer Rouge period (1979–1981) when there were many acts of revenge against perpetrators by victims, but soon thereafter many communities showed remarkable acceptance of former Khmer Rouge returning to their villages. Nevertheless, in many cases the so-called reconciled perpetrators have been living very separate lives.24 May 20 has been celebrated as a public holiday – the “Day of Hate” (also translated as the “Day to Tie Up Anger”, though recently it was changed to the “Day of Remembrance”). In the 1980s, the government was openly using this day to remind the population of their suffering during the Khmer Rouge period, to give them the motivation to continue a grueling and painful civil war. The purpose was also to remind Cambodians of their indebtedness to Vietnam for liberating them and was celebrated with violent re-enactments of Khmer Rouge atrocities.25 While the Day of Hate, and other reminders of the Khmer Rouge regime were used frequently in the 1980s and 90s to vilify the evil Khmer Rouge, now that the trials for their leaders are essentially over, the government no longer uses these methods to inflame anger.

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Breakdown of social structures after mass violence, especially at the community level, is well documented in many countries.26 But scholars debate whether Cambodians’ pasts have “atomized” their society,27 social ties have remained intact, or whether societal reconstruction is dependent upon its particular location and its socio-historical past.28 However, scholars agree that mistrust is a major issue; as Zucker describes in her chapter on the subject such uncertainty could be related to apprehension around unknown situations, circumstances, people, political change, and sorcery.29 Luco argued that mistrust lies just below the surface of everyday village life: “at the slightest hurdle, mistrust comes running back.”30 Eisenbruch posited that as a result of the Khmer Rouge tactics, basic trust was lost and remains lost.31 This lack of trust, in particular of outsiders, has implications when considering societal violence, as fear of future violence has stayed with many survivors for decades, especially those living in the war-affected areas in the northwest and southwest of Cambodia. The country is still awash in weapons, and there is much political violence. These fears are very real, as law and order remain a challenge as the security forces are underpaid and corruption is rampant.

Mob violence and political violence Violence today in Cambodia is linked to the violent past, the lack of trust in society, and the gaps in the slow but ongoing societal repair process. Mob violence and political violence are two major types of violence that continue to plague Cambodia. Worldwide, attacks on witches or sorcerers, accused thieves, political figures, and others have sometimes been characterized or exacerbated by mob violence (a category of collective violence). In Cambodia, authority figures often stand by and do nothing when mobs attack. Although many such attacks have occurred without the attention of the authorities, some cases have been reported, though inconsistently and intermittently. A 2002 report by the UN Special Representative for Human Rights, working with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Cambodia, reported 65 assaults and killings by mobs between 1999 and 2002 – in many of which the police did not intervene, or even took part in the violence by handing the accused persons back to the angry crowds.32 The report found only five cases when police intervened and saved lives, all in 2002. There was a surge of mob attacks, with 50 percent of them occurring between May 1999 when the Ministry of Interior created civilian defense forces, and March 2000. After the February 2000 announcement by the Governor of Phnom Penh to decrease mob actions and increase judicial responses, the mob killings decreased in number to one per month instead of four per month by 2002. However, the killings increased again around the time of the elections in 2003, and in 2005 the Special Representative for Human Rights reported 100 mob killings since 2000. There has then been a gap in reporting, with only a short mention of the issue in the US State Department Human Rights 2010 report, and the human rights organization the Cambodian League for the

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Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) reported only four cases in 2016, and as of April 2017 there had been only two cases in that year.33 Finally, OHCHR has issued a new report on “Popular Justice” and has recorded 73 cases of mob violence between 2010 and 2018: injuries occurred in 16 of the cases, while the victims of the mob died in 57 cases.34 There are several types of mob violence: spontaneous versus planned, statesponsored or assisted, and instances resulting from personal vendettas, car accidents, theft or accused theft, witchcraft, demonstrations, and in one case, anger over election irregularities. The incidents were often triggered by people yelling “stop thief!” and would immediately become violent – even in cases when thievery was not involved: for example, parents of a bullied schoolboy yelled “stop thief” at his two young tormenters who were then killed by a crowd.35 In 2015 three brothers and a cousin used machetes to attack a neighboring couple they accused of being sorcerers, resulting in this case in the arrest of the four attackers. A land dispute was said to be behind these attacks, though other attacks against accused sorcerers had occurred.36 In another case, in 2016 a wandering mentally ill man was killed by a mob in a village that had been plagued with thefts – yet after his death the thefts continued.37 Several cases have involved drivers who had hit and killed pedestrians, and were then murdered themselves. Understandably, an important factor is related to observers’ fears to intervene, because the mobs may turn on them. In Cambodia explanations for mob killings cite the impunity in Cambodia, and citizen frustration with police and judicial officials who are corrupt, lazy, untrained, and/or politically motivated. Divisions between the regular citizen struggling to make a living and the ruling corrupt elite can exacerbate anger, as can stresses in urban areas due to flight from rural areas due to joblessness. Currently, there is still little done to arrest and prosecute those who participate in mob violence, and police may or may not intervene.38 In some cases there may be encouragement from the authorities as when crowds are told that rewards may be given or when accused criminals are handed back to angry mobs. In some cases, angry crowds requested payments they said had been offered by the police. Investigations and reports of the mob killings are rarely made by the police or passed on to judicial authorities. As the OHCHR and local human rights organizations carry out investigations, perhaps public awareness has increased that may have contributed to the decreasing numbers of cases, though reports in the press continue to quote participants or observers who say the victim deserved to die. The public has little awareness of the law, and some even seem to think that such mob violence is legal. The role of the state in mob violence (allowing or encouraging either during the act, or by acts or inaction by institutions and laws) has profound effects on the efficacy of the mobs, as does the role of the state/authorities during acts of genocide. Political violence and impunity are well documented in Cambodia (and elsewhere, for example in Thailand; see Haberkorn’s chapter in this volume), in particular by OHCHR, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and by local organizations.39 In many cases, accused perpetrators, almost always state agents or individuals linked to the state, are never prosecuted, much less arrested, and in

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some cases even promoted.40 Recommendations have been made dozens of times, in dozens of reports by the international community and NGOs, to strengthen the judiciary, improve the police services, arrest and try accused perpetrators, reduce corruption, and ban perpetrators from public office. However, efforts have been largely uncoordinated, sporadic, and there has been minimal effect on the government. There have been countless demonstrations, the majority peaceful (though occasionally demonstrators have wielded rocks and bottles), but often the response from government forces (or semi-private militias) has been violent and extreme. For example, in 2012 and 2013, Magnum photographer John Vink reported numerous episodes of violence in the more than 200 demonstrations he attended.41 Hundreds of human rights activists and opposition politicians have been attacked: beaten, arrested, disappeared, and assassinated. Opposition politicians have called repeatedly for dialogue, peace, and nonviolence, understandably since they have no military power and are the target for the violence. These calls have had negligible results. In Cambodia today, though there is less overt violence, there is more hidden violence, reminiscent of the PRK days. The CPP has been very effective in using legal avenues to get rid of the opposition – in spite of the laughable arguments, obviously threatened witnesses, unfair trials, etc. The CPP has also been very successful in either co-opting many opposition and civil society actors or using newly created institutions to infiltrate or otherwise incapacitate them. Although Cambodians were no strangers to oppression and dirty tricks, when in November 2017 the government used the Supreme Court to dissolve the main opposition party (the Cambodian National Rescue Party or CNRP), waves of fear came quickly, especially as two Radio Free Asia journalists were arrested. In the context of more than 20 radio and TV stations and several NGOs being shut down in a period of 3 months, one international news outlet observed: “What shocks rights activists is the speed at which a new climate of fear has been established.”42 The government continues to use the very effective divide-and-conquer tactics that have been perfected over decades, sowing even more disunity and mistrust in society. Neither the past nor current violence, nor their origins and triggers, are often discussed in public. The CPP uses bribes, threats, and intimidation to silence journalists and activists. The museum of the former Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng Prison serves to display the violent excesses of the Khmer Rouge regime, yet does not reveal the complicated history of how the regime came to be. Tyner notes that “rather than directly addressing the violent past, the new regime promoted (and continues to promote) national ‘reconciliation’ through a selective erasure of the past.”43 With the manipulation of politicized memory, there are few opportunities to reflect upon the causes and possible ways to prevent genocide in the statesponsored sites of memory in Cambodia. Tyner concludes that three false dichotomies of “bounding” limit the discussion of the past as well as the ability of Cambodian society to reconcile and seek broader justice: social – blaming just a few senior leaders; spatial – focusing only on the two major sites of violence in Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek (the Khmer Rouge killing field associated with Tuol Sleng); and temporal – addressing only the 3–4 years of the Khmer Rouge genocide.44

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Peace movements, social recovery, and violence prevention Since the end of the Khmer Rouge period, the first major peace movement was started by Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda in 1987 after he visited the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand, and created a “fifth army” for peace, to contrast with the four Cambodian factions vying for political power. He attended the various efforts at peace negotiations between 1987 and 1991 by waiting patiently and calmly in the international hotels, quietly promoting peaceful solutions to the conflict. Using Buddhist terminology and metaphors, his army would use ammunition of “bullets of loving kindness … It will be an army absolutely without guns or partisan politics,” he announced, “an army of reconciliation with so much courage that it turns away from violence, an army dedicated wholly to peace and to the end of suffering.”45 Maha Ghosananda and his supporters organized a monumental peace walk from the refugee camps in Thailand across Cambodia to the capital of Phnom Penh after the Peace Accords in 1991. The purposes of the Dhammayietra are to teach the Five Buddhist Precepts – the first of which is to refrain from killing. Furthermore, each Dhammayietra would have different focuses, depending upon its route, focusing on reducing different types of violence related to such issues such as weapons, health, and the environment. The walks have continued annually, though Maha Ghosananda passed away in 2007. Skidmore has argued that the Dhammayietra has played an important role in assisting Cambodians to resist the fear and violence of their pasts.46 Most of the peace and nonviolence programs in Cambodia have been affected by, if not created by, experiences with the Dhammayietra or people involved with the Dhammayietra. It is nothing short of a miracle that relative peace exists today in Cambodia, given the many years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge years, and the persistent human rights violations. Peace can be defined as freedom from, or the cessation of war or violence. After periods of mass violence, peacebuilding activities are “designed to prevent conflict through addressing structural and proximate causes of violence, promoting sustainable peace, delegitimizing violence as a dispute resolution strategy, building capacity within society to peacefully manage disputes, and reducing vulnerability to triggers that may spark violence.”47 Understanding the nature and type of conflict and mass violence is crucial in the design of peacebuilding activities. Rebuilding the trust that was shattered by the Khmer Rouge is also essential. Numerous NGOs in Cambodia focus on reducing violence of all kinds, both directly and indirectly, with projects to reduce weapons; resolve conflicts, mediate, and provide such training; provide human rights monitoring, training, interventions, and accompaniment; advocate for land and labor rights; promote and support development and poverty reduction; provide training on management and leadership; and promote and prevent sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).48 Many education programs are specifically targeted at reducing violence and focus on educating people about peace and conflict, nonviolence (including some specific programs to show that mob violence is wrong as well as training in nonviolent

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resistance), and legal rights and the legal system. These, and many other projects, some related to democracy building, also include activities to build individual, community, and civic trust. Support to transitional justice projects may also focus on reducing violence in the long term, by measures including documentation, legal support, education, memorialization, reparations, truth-telling, and promoting dialogue between various groups. There have been a variety of theatre, dance, instrumental and voice music, artworks, literature, and other events related to either the Khmer Rouge period, or more general recovery and rebuilding.49 While mob and political violence still exist in Cambodia, these measures to reduce violence are an important and pervasive presence in today’s society. Although transitional justice mechanisms have a stated goal of promoting reconciliation and rule of law, which in theory should (eventually) reduce violence, they often put criminal trials as the centerpiece of all activities, neglecting truthtelling,50 memorialization, and other non-judicial measures that focus attention on victims and societal healing. However, the utility of trials alone to bring about social repair is debated; instead research suggests that transitional justice mechanisms should be made to fit the particular cultural and historical characteristics of countries such as Cambodia, and should include capacity-building measures for social repair and civic reconstruction.51 Fortunately, in Cambodia, though limited, some ancillary measures around the ECCC have focused on capacity building as, for example, NGO staff gain skills in facilitating dialogue and also share these skills with local facilitators at the village level. In a toolkit produced by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), transitional justice is listed as one of five tools to prevent atrocity.52 The argument is, as the legacy of human rights violations and mass atrocities is addressed, the chance of future violence can be reduced through “providing official recognition and redress to victims, establishing historical truth, achieving accountability for human rights abuses, and rebuilding civic trust.”53 However, in spite of the costly and lengthy trials for Khmer Rouge leaders, and initial claims that they would bring an end to impunity and promote national reconciliation, many issues remain unaddressed in Cambodian society – most notably the continuing and in fact recently increasing authoritarianism and impunity. Sadly, those lofty goals of the ECCC have not been achieved. In the context of a weak, corrupt, and biased judiciary, and a lack of societal trust in the courts and police, what may be more important is the public space that was created around the ECCC for other activities carried out by the ECCC and NGOs, including public education, dialogue, intergenerational programs, reparations, and memorials. These important activities have made a difference in allowing Cambodians to more openly deal with the past, and equip several generations in peaceful dispute resolution.54

Conclusion As noted in the introduction, inequality, exclusion, and indignity are common root causes of conflict, all of which fanned the flames toward violence in the middle of

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the twentieth century in Cambodia. Unfortunately, these phenomena are all increasing under the current authoritarian regime. Some even suggest that the violence reminiscent of the 1970s could rise again.55 However, hope lies with the next generation (a majority of Cambodians are under 30), civil society, and the effects of globalization, education, and relative peace since the years of civil war. Cambodians have hopefully gained a modicum of tools and skills (education, leadership, mediation, negotiation, etc.) and a sense of stability, to avoid a return to the past. Survivors’ horrific memories should also act as a deterrent. Kok Thay Eng, the Director of the Cambodian Institute for Peace and Development, spoke about the importance of peace in today’s Cambodia, ending with a note of caution about violence: “Please don’t consider Cambodia safe from war. We are not. We are enjoying a period of tranquility where there is ‘zero’ guerilla force in the forest. I do not take our peaceful period lightly and I embrace it.”56 Civil society, notably peace-oriented organizations, has made concerted efforts to educate younger generations about the past, violence, conflict, and peace, and provide them opportunities to study. Unfortunately, in informal interviews with Cambodians in the past few years, all expressed profound disappointment with the current political situation, and felt that the current prime minister and government would never relinquish power, so that any hope for change would only likely come with future generations.

Notes 1 The Dhammayietras were started in 1991 at the Thai-Cambodian border with monks, nuns, and lay persons walking to the capital Phnom Penh, and are discussed further below. 2 Nat Coletta and Michelle L. Cullen, Violent Conflict and Transfer of Social Capital: Lessons from Cambodia, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Somalia (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2000), 87. 3 Ibid., 3–4. 4 Johan Galtung, the “Father of Peace Studies” describes three main types of violence: direct, structural, and cultural. In contrast to direct violence, which threatens life immediately (e.g., killing), structural violence can be described as indirect, and includes exclusion from social structures or institutions that fulfill basic needs, resulting in poverty, lack of education, and health care, etc. See Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. 5 Roderic Broadhurst, Thierry Bouhours, and Brigitte Bouhours, Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6 Ben Kiernan originally reported estimates ranged from 50,000 to 150,000, though this 2007 article suggests casualties could be even higher: see Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War,” Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 5, no. 5 (2007): 2. 7 A detailed estimate of deaths was not available; Broadhurst, Bouhours, and Bouhours, who wrote an entire book focusing on violence in Cambodia including detailed research to find statistics of casualties, “have not found any comprehensive records of the total number of casualties on both sides during the 1979–1991 war.” See Broadhurst, Bouhours, Bouhours. Violence, 232. 8 Open Society Justice Initiative, Performance and Perception: The Impact of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (New York: Open Society Justice

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9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

Initiative, 2016), www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/performance-and-perceptionimpact-extraordinary-chambers-court-cambodia. Puong Pham et al., After the First Trial: A Population Based Survey on Knowledge and Perception of Justice and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (Berkeley: Human Rights Center, University of California Berkeley, June 2011), 4, https://hhi.harvard. edu/sites/default/files/publications/after-the-first-trial.pdf. This paragraph relies on statistics from the Central Intelligence Agency “World Factbook: Cambodia,” last modified November 13, 2019, www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/geos/cb.html. The sex ratio is 0.95 males to one female, 48.6 percent of the population is under 25 years of age, and life expectancy is 65 years (ranked 182 out of 223 countries). The literacy rate is 81 percent (87 percent for males, 75 percent for females). It is one of the poorest countries in Asia, despite strong economic growth of 7 percent: employment is in agriculture (48.7 percent), industry (19.9 percent), and services (31.5 percent). Most Cambodians are ethnic Khmer (97.6 percent, with 1.2 percent Cham Muslim, 0.1 percent Vietnamese, and 0.9 percent other). In 2019 Cambodia was ranked 161 out of 180 countries on the Transparency International corruption perception index (www.transparency.org/cpi2018). Nancy Smith-Hefner, Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21–63. Eva K. Neumaier, “Missed Opportunities: Buddhism and the Ethnic Strife in Sri Lanka and Tibet,” in Religion and Peacebuilding, eds. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 70. Mary F. Scully et al., “Health and Well-Being of Cambodians Living in the United States” (West Hartford: Khmer Health Advocates, Inc., 2010). W.A.C.M. van de Put and Maurice Eisenbruch, “The Cambodian Experience,” in Trauma, War and Violence: Public Mental Health in Socio-Cultural Context, ed. Joop De Jong (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002), 104. David Brown, “Link between PTSD and Violent Behavior is Weak,” Washington Post, March 31, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/link-between-p tsd-and-violent-behavior-is-weak/2012/03/31/gIQApYFZnS_story.html?noredirect= on&utm_term=.1a4f18011f4c. Jeffrey Sonis et al., “Probable Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Disability in Cambodia: Associations with Perceived Justice, Desire for Revenge, and Attitudes Toward the Khmer Rouge Trials,” Journal of the American Medical Association 302, no. 5 (2009). Jan Ovesen, Ing-Britt Trankell, and Joakim Öjendal, When every Household is an Island: Social Organization and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia (Uppsala: Uppsala University Dept. of Cultural Anthropology and Swedish International Development Authority, 1996); Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 7. Alexander L. Hinton, “A Head for an Eye: Revenge in the Cambodian Genocide,” American Ethnologist 25, no. 3 (1998). Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim, “Cambodia Rising: Neoliberal Violence and Development,” Jati 18 (December 2013): 61. Seanglim Bit, The Warrior Heritage: A Psychological Perspective of Cambodian Trauma (El Cerrito: Seanglim Bit, 1991). For example, in Karl Jackson’s edited book, there are four references to “gentle” Khmer: Karl Jackson, ed. Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix, 38, 131, 215. I conducted field research in Cambodia independently (1999–2006) for my dissertation on reconciliation (2006–2011), as part of research for the Open Society Justice Initiative on the impact of the ECCC (2013–14), and for Participatory Action Research on civil society and transitional justice (2014–15). See for example Laura McGrew, “Pathways to Reconciliation in Cambodia,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 23, no. 4 (2012), www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10402659.2011.625851. McGrew, “Pathways.” Ibid.

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25 Rachel B. Hughes, “Remembering May 20: Day of Anger,” Searching for the Truth (December 2000): 39–42, www.dccam.org/Projects/Magazines/Previous%20Englis/ Issue12.pdf. 26 Laurel E. Fletcher and Harvey Weinstein, “Violence and Social Repair: Rethinking the Contribution of Justice to Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2002): 576–7. 27 Oveson, Trankell, and Öjendal, When Every Household is an Island. 28 Eve M. Zucker, “Transcending Time and Terror: The Re-emergence of Bon Dalien after Pol Pot and Thirty Years of Civil War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (October 2006): 527–46. 29 See chapter 3, “Trust and Distrust,” in Eve M. Zucker, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 47–74. 30 Fabienne Luco, Between the Tiger and the Crocodile: An Anthropological Approach to the Traditional and New Practices of Local Conflict Resolution in Cambodia (Phnom Penh: UNESCO, 2002), 87. 31 Maurice Eisenbruch, “The Uses and Abuses of Culture: Cultural Competence in PostMass-Crime Peacebuilding in Cambodia,” in After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities, eds. Beatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman, and Albrecht Schnabel (New York: United Nations University Press, 2007), 93. 32 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia, “Street Retribution in Cambodia” (Phnom Penh: United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 6, 2002). 33 Socheata Hean, “Lack of Social Justice Leads to Mob Killings in Cambodia, Experts Claim,” Voice of America, April 5, 2017, www.voacambodia.com/a/lack-of-social-justiceleads-to-mob-killings-in-cambodia-experts-claim/3796247.html. 34 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights in Cambodia, “People’s Court: Preventing and Responding to ‘Popular Justice,’” (Phnom Penh: United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 4, 2019), http://cambodia.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/report/other-report/OHCHR%20Report% 20EN.pdf. 35 UN, “Street Retribution,” 2002, 2. 36 Phak Seangly, 2015 “Arrests in Sorcerer Attack,” Phnom Penh Post, April 22, 2015, www. phnompenhpost.com/national/arrests-sorcerer-attack?utm_source=The%20Phnom%20 Penh%20Post%20News%20Brief&utm_campaign=2593a0efa3-atphga&utm_medium= email&utm_term=0_53e48d7faf-2593a0efa3-287909833. 37 Harriet F. Little and Vandy Muong, “Power in Numbers: Mob Killing in Cambodia,” Phnom Penh Post, February 13, 2016, www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/powernumbers-mob-killing-cambodia. 38 George Wright and Sony Ouch, “On the Streets, It’s Mob Justice or Corrupt Courts,” Cambodia Daily, March 31, 2017, www.cambodiadaily.com/editors-choice/on-the-streetsits-mob-justice-or-corrupt-courts-127324/. 39 Human Rights Watch, “Tell Them I Want to Kill Them: Two Decades of Impunity in Hun Sen’s Cambodia” (New York: Human Rights Watch, November 13, 2012), www. hrw.org/report/2012/11/13/tell-them-i-want-kill-them/two-decades-impunity-hun-senscambodia. See also multiple human rights reports at www.hrw.org/publications and www.amnesty.org/en/. 40 Human Rights Watch, “Cambodia: Hun Sen Promoting, Rewarding Killers: Obama Should Make Ending 20 Years of Impunity Central Goal of Upcoming Visit” (New York: Human Rights Watch, November 13, 2012), www.hrw.org/news/2012/11/13/ cambodia-hun-sen-promoting-rewarding-killers. 41 John Vink, “Bearing Witness: A Farewell to Cambodia,” Magnum Photos, 2016, www. magnumphotos.com/newsroom/politics/john-vink-farewell-cambodia/. 42 Mary Boland, “Cambodia’s Long Road to Democracy takes a Dangerous Turn,” Irish Times, December 2, 2017, www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/cambodia-slong-road-to-democracy-takes-a-dangerous-turn-1.3312358.

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43 James Tyner, “Violent Erasures and Erasing Violence: Contesting Cambodia’s Landscapes of Violence,” in Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, eds. Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 30. 44 Tyner, “Violent Erasures,” 32. 45 Ian Brown, Cambodia: The Background, the Issues, the People (Oxford: Oxfam, 2000) 67. 46 Monique Skidmore, “In the Shade of the Bodhi Tree: Dhammayietra and the Reawakening of Community in Cambodia,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 1–32. 47 Alliance for Peacebuilding, “Selected Definitions of Peacebuilding: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),” accessed November 29, 2019, https://allianceforpeacebuilding.org/2013/08/selected-definitions-of-peacebuilding/. 48 Some of these organizations are American Friends Service Committee, Bophana Center, Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, Catholic Relief Services, Cambodian Women Peacemakers, Caritas, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS), Documentation Center of Cambodia, Gender and Development, Kdei Karuna, Human Rights Organizations (LICADHO and Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association or ADHOC), Mennonite Central Committee, Youth for Peace, and Youth Resource Development Program. 49 See for example Cambodian Living Arts, Java Café, Khmer Arts Academy, and Metahouse. 50 Truth-telling mechanisms can take place on individual, community, and/or national levels. 51 Fletcher and Weinstein, “Violence and Social Repair,” 579, 584–5; Jaya Ramji-Nogales, “Designing Bespoke Transitional Justice: A Pluralist Process Approach,” Michigan Journal of International Law 32, no. 1 (November 18, 2010): 573–639. 52 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI), Internews, and Global Rights, “Preventing Atrocities: Five Key Primers” (Washington, DC: USAID, September 2014). 53 Ibid., 20. 54 See, for example, Open Society Justice Initiative, “Performance and Perception.” 55 Simon Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2010). 56 Kok Thay Eng, “Opinion: Peace in Cambodia: Enjoy It While It Lasts,” Cambodia Daily, April 27, 2017, www.cambodiadaily.com/news/opinion-peace-cambodiaenjoy-lasts-128704/.

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to information in tables, italics to figures. Those followed by n refer to a note with its number. Abhisit Vejjajiva 209, 261, 265n10 accountability: genocide 200, 243; rule of law 211, 214, 219; for violence 35–6, 254; see also responsibility Aceh 22, 27, 80 Administrative Court, Thailand 217–18, 219 Adul Saengsingkaew 213 Afghanistan 171 AFP 67 aftershocks, of violence 125–8 air warfare 10; drones 171–2; effectiveness of 164, 170; First Indochina War 117, 121; psychological detachment 13, 168; reactions to 168–70; Vietnam War 5, 6, 165–8, 283 Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Law Clinic 196 Al-Qaeda 150, 152 Alsa Masa 67 ambiguous orders: central-local coordination problem 82–3, 87, 95; interpretation 81; strategic ambiguity 84, 86 Amnesty International 31 amnesty laws 212–13, 214–15 amorality 238–241; see also moral failure and moral violation Ancillary Committee for Reconstruction of Rakhine National Territory 109 Angkor Wat, Cambodia 269–70, 286 anti-communist activities 29, 65, 259

Appeal Court, Thailand 214 Aquino, Benigno “Ninoy,” Jr. 65 Arakan civilization 104, 148–9; see also Rohingya people Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) 105 Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO) 105 Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) 46, 101, 109, 152; as security threat 103, 107–8, 152; see also Rohingya people Armenians 203n42 army 32; control of history 31; institutional culture 26, 32; leadership 22, 25–8; provisioning tactics 122–3; see also military regimes ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 238; and Cambodia 234–5, 238–40, 241; Laos conference (2016) 69 Apsara Authority 270 Astore, William J. 171 Ata Ulla 107–8 atomic weapons see nuclear weapons attitude adjustment 213, 215–16; see also indoctrination programs Aung San Suu Kyi 45, 51–2, 106, 107, 148, 153 authoritarianism 8, 32; Cambodia 242, 282, 291–2; Indonesia 22–3; Philippines 64, 66; Thailand 210–11

300 Index

Bali 23, 27, 80, 81 Bangkok Declaration (1967) 236, 239 Bangladesh: as alleged origin of Rohingya 46, 201; Rohingya refugees 101, 109, 149, 152, 154, 195, 197 Barthes, Roland 278 Benedicto, Roberto S. 65 Bengalis see Rohingya people Bhumibol, King of Thailand 258, 259, 260, 261, 264 Bidault, Georges 117 Black River Region, Vietnam 118–19, 125–6 blood taking 177–8 body ontologies 174, 182, 184 bombing see air warfare border conflict, Vietnam-Cambodia 236, 242 Border Patrol Police, Thailand 254, 255, 256 Bosnia 235 Bowie, Katherine A. 258 Britain: colonial rule of Burma 104, 148, 149, 152–3; support of Indonesian regime 29–31 Buddhism 42, 46, 48, 104, 153; Cambodia 271, 273, 290; imagery 273–6; Myanmar 148, 150, 153; Rakhine state 45, 104, 195, 196, 197–8; Thailand 261; Theravada Buddhists 106, 271, 273; Vietnam 168–9 Bundy, McGeorge 5–6 Burma see Myanmar Burman people 41, 52, 106 Calida, Francisco 67 Cambodia 5, 9, 80, 139; ASEAN 234–5, 238–40; China 234–5, 240–1; death toll 89–95; Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) 6, 89–90, 224, 236, 239, 277, 283–4; ethnic cleansing/genocide of Vietnamese 89–90, 134–42, 235–8, 242, 268–9, 271–3, 276–8; independence 118; international relationships 234, 239, 241–3; Khmer Republic (1970–75) 134–42, 271–7, 283; peace movements 290–2; People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK, 1979–89) 236, 241, 284, 286; Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) 284, 285; society 285–9, 293n10; theoretical mass violence model 86–8; Vietnam 234–5, 270; Vietnam War 5–6, 166, 170 Cambodian Institute for Peace and Development 292

Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) 287–8 Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) 289 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) 284, 285, 289 capitalism 1, 8, 270; crony capitalism 65 Carter, Jimmy 31, 64–5 Central Java 23, 28 central-local coordination problem 81–5, 90–5 Cham Muslim minority 7 Chandler, David 174, 178 Chau Ouch 141 Cheung Ek see Choeung Ek children: ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) 46; ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese 273; S-21 prison 226–7 China 5, 240–1, 242; and Cambodia 234–5, 240, 241, 271; and Indonesia 30; Khmer Rouge 240, 241; and Philippines 69, 70; Pol Pot 5, 6; Vietnam 163, 168; Vietnam-Cambodia mediation 236, 237 Chinese communities 3–4, 64, 81, 135, 136, 141–2 Choeung Ek, Cambodia 229, 289 Christians 25, 48, 168 Chrouy Changvar peninsula, Cambodia 268, 270, 271, 273, 276, 277–8 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): Indonesia 31; Laos 5; Vietnam 2–3 Civil Defense Volunteers (CDV) 257, 260 civil society activists 211, 213 civil wars: Cambodia 224, 239, 283–4, 286, 290; Vietnam 6 Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF) 66 civilians: casualties 166, 171; and landmines 238; mass organizations 255–8; mobilization 120–5; and royalism 258–64; targeting 41, 80–2, 102–3, 109; see also peasants; Rohingya people Clark, Toby 276 Clifford, Clark 6 Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) 236, 239 Colby, William 3 Cold War 1, 8; global ideology 29–30, 34; Thailand 254–5; Vietnam 118, 170, 241 collective action problem 82, 83–4 colonialism 1, 2–3, 120–1; impact of 7–8; independence movements 2, 8–9; see also Britain; France commander’s dilemma 83

Index 301

communal violence 197–8, 199–200; see also mob violence communism 2, 8, 38n16; Cambodia 135, 137, 141, 170, 271; Indonesia 5–6, 21–3; Khmer Rouge 5–6, 86, 174–5; Malaya 3–4; repression of 21–3, 25–8; Thailand 253–4; Vietnam 6, 141, 165, 170; see also anti-communist activities Communist Party of Burma 2 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) 5, 80, 88–9, 222, 223 Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) 254–5, 257 compliance 84–5, 86, 95, 124 concentration camps see detention camps confessions 224–5 confrontation (personal) 230; filming of 225–8 control of subordinates 80–4 convergence 86, 95 coordination problem, central-local 81–5, 87, 90–5 corruption 10, 138, 270, 285, 287 coups: Cambodia 134, 135; Indonesia 26, 29; Myanmar 105, 195; Thailand 4, 210–11, 212–16, 218–19, 220n9, 254, 261–2 Court of First Instance, Thailand 214 CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea) 5, 80, 88–9, 222, 223 CPM (civilian-police-military) joint operations, Thailand 255 CPP (Cambodian People’s Party) 284, 285, 289 Criminal Court, Thailand 218 criminal liability, of individuals 192 Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 194 cultural genocide 193 Curato, Nicole 68–9 Dao people 126, 127 Davao City, Philippines 66–9 Davao Death Squad (DDS) 67–8 Declaration on the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN, 1971) 236 dehumanization 26, 33–4, 200, 226 dela Rosa, Roland 68 democracy see elections Democracy and Human Rights Party, Myanmar 105 Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) 6, 224, 236, 239, 277, 283–4; death tolls 89–90; see also Khmer Rouge

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) 117–18, 120, 165, 170; morale 167–8; state-making process 122; wars of independence 2 Deng Xiaoping 240 Descola, Philippe 174 detention camps 137, 138, 140; Rohingya 151, 154, 196, 200; see also prisons Dhammayietra Buddhist peace walks 282, 290, 292n1 Diem, President 2–3, 165 Điện Biên Phủ (battle) 117–18, 125 Dimaporo, Ali 65 dis-identification 42 distrust 12, 258, 285; see also mistrust doctors see medical staff Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) 151, 196 documentary film on S-21 prison 222–3; confrontations 225–8; reconstructions 228–9; staff confessions 224–5; titles 223–4 documentation, S-21 prison 229–30, 232n26 domination 43, 49, 53n10 Douglas, Mary 174 Dragon King (Naga Min) 7, 105, 195 drones 171–2 drug wars 50, 68–9 Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) 224, 227, 229; testimony of 177, 178–80, 181; trial 175, 223, 231, 246n37, 284 Dulles, John Foster 117 Durano, Ramon 65 Dutch colonial rule 2 Duterte, Rodrigo 59, 66–9, 70 East Java 23, 28 East Timor 9, 22, 238, 240 Eichmann, Adolph 194 elections 8; Cambodia 284; Philippines 60–3; Thailand 209–10, 219n3, 262 entrepreneurial violence 81, 84, 85–6, 95 Erdogan, Recep 60, 70 ethnic cleansing 89–90, 109, 199, 205n78; explanations for 102–3; and genocide 198–9; Rohingya 7, 101–3, 108, 153–4, 197; Vietnamese 89–90, 134–42, 235–8, 242, 268–9, 271–3, 276–8; see also genocide; mass violence ethnic minorities, Myanmar 42–3, 103, 105–6 Evans, Gareth 242 exclusionary ideologies 33–4, 46, 101, 102–3; see also otherness

302 Index

executions 229, 236; children 227 expulsive violence 45–7 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) see United Nations (UN) families of torturers 227–8 fear: climate of 287, 289; of nuclear weapons 118, 120, 121, 126, 127–8 Federal Constitutional Court of Germany 202n17 Feierstein, Daniel 196 Feminist Judgement Project, India 220n10 Filipinos see Philippines First Indochina War (1946–54) 117 food shortages see starvation Forest Protection Volunteers 260, 264n5 forgetting 23, 35–7, 278, 289 Fortify Rights 197 France 127–8; attitude to war 163; colonial rule 2, 117, 118–19, 136, 143n6; Điện Biên Phủ (battle) 117–18, 120, 125 gall bladder removal 181–4 Geneva Conference (1954) 2, 118, 165 genocide 191–2; conditions for 25, 32, 34; determination of 199; escalation to 81, 84–6, 95; and ethnic cleansing 198–9; Indonesia 29, 36, 80–1; intent 191–4, 196, 198–201; by Khmer Rouge 236–7, 282–4; and mass violence 200; prevention 200–1, 235; Rohingya 46, 194–9; substitutes for 87; Vietnamese 135; see also ethnic cleansing; mass violence Genocide Convention (1948) 191–2, 200–1, 205n78; Rohingya 195–6 Germany: attitude to war 163; World War Two 83, 84, 97n17, 194, 234 Gerwani (Indonesian Women’s Movement) 26 Giao, Nguyen Ngoc 169 Goscha, Christopher 120 Gouré, Leon 167 Green, Marshall 31 group identity 191, 201n4, 202n17 Group 77 Committee 237 Gustilo, Armando 65, 66 Gutiérrez Sanín, Francisco 103 Han Nianlong 240 hate crimes 44 hate speech 46 haunting 8,10–11, 14, 269, 271, 272, 276, 277; see also memories

Hiệu, Nguyễn 236 Him Huoy 225–6, 227, 229, 230 Hinton, Alexander Laban 181 history: control of 31, 35–6; lessons from 234–5, 240–1, 243 Hmong people 120, 123, 124, 126–7 Hồ Chí Minh 2, 122, 123 Holbrooke, Richard 65 Huk rebellion 2, 4 human rights 22, 65; activists 289; ASEAN 239–40; China 241; organizations 31, 35, 36, 196 humanitarianism 8 Hun Sen 224, 238, 242–3, 284, 285 Huoy, Him see Him Huoy identity 9; group identity 191, 201n4, 202n17; identity-based prejudice 102 ideologies 34; competing 8; exclusionary ideologies 46, 101, 102–3; and violence 9, 82 Ieng Sary 182, 235, 284 Ieng Thirith (Khieu Thirith) 284 imagery: Buddhist mythology 273–6; dehumanizing 33–4 imagination 8, 11, 12, 34, 103, 269, 277, imagined enemies 11; imagining intention 11; imagining peace 11; imagining nuclear winter 11; of ethnic difference 269; Khmer 277; national 12; political 8, 103 impunity 10, 219, 288–9; coups 210–11, 212–13, 215; daily state violence 23, 29, 35–6, 211; genocide 223; massacres 254; political violence 288–9 incomplete orders 80–1 incorporative violence 48–9 independence movements 2, 8–9 indoctrination programs 255–6, 260–1; see also attitude adjustment Indonesia 5, 24, 60, 80; accountability 23, 25–8, 35–6; anti-communist violence 21–3; communism 5, 6, 21, 22, 25; foreign support 28–31; wars of independence 2 inference of intent 91, 192, 194, 199 institutional culture 26, 32 instrumentalist values, ethnic cleansing 102 insurgencies: communist 2, 3–4, 5–6, 165, 170; Rohingya 105 intent: general intent 192; genocide 91, 191–2, 198–201; Rohingya genocide 194–9; specific intent 192–4 Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), Thailand 253–5, 256–7, 259–63

Index 303

international community 28–31, 35, 69–70; intervention of 34, 235, 236, 238, 239–40 International Court of Justice (ICJ) 198, 201 International Criminal Court (ICC) 198, 201 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 194 International People’s Tribunal (2015) 36 International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) 196, 199, 204n67 internment camps see detention camps interrogation 176, 215 Iraq 171 Irish Centre for Human Rights 195 Islam see Muslims Japan 4, 104, 149, 164 Jiraeong Watthanathewasilp 216 Johnson, Lyndon B. 5–6, 163, 166, 169, 170, 234 Judd, Orin 170 judicial process: Thailand 211–15; see also legal system justice 35–6; justice cascade 211; promise of 69 Kachin Independence Army (KIA) 46 Kaing Guek Eav see Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) Kaman people 42 Kampuchea: Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) 6, 89–90, 224, 236, 239, 277, 283–4; People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK, 1979–89) 236, 241, 284, 286; see also Cambodia Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS) 236 Kang Kek Iew see Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) Karen people 42, 44, 48–9, 51 Keam Reth 141 Kennan, George 65 Kerry, John 164 Khieu Samphan 6, 246n37, 277, 284 Khin Nyunt 50 Khmer Krom people 135, 141 Khmer people: nationalism 134–6, 142, 174, 270; in Vietnam 142n1 Khmer Republic (1970–1975) 283; ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese 134–42, 271–3; see also Cambodia; Lon Nol Khmer Rouge 6, 140; Chinese support 235; genocide 277, 282–4; growth of 134–5, 170; ideology 86, 174–5, 180–1, 184; leaders’ trials 6, 182, 223–4, 241–2, 246n37, 284–5, 291; remembrance of

286–7; S-21 documentary film 222–3; support from Thailand 236; and USA 235; see also Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) Khmu people 126, 127 Khoman, Thanat 4–5 killing: mechanisms 8; technology for 10 King, Martin Luther 168–9 Kinh people 121, 124, 125, 126 Kok Thay Eng 292 Ky, President 165 Lacson, Rafael 61–2 land distribution 3–4 landmines 238, 284 Lansdale, Edward G. 2, 3 Laos 5, 118, 126, 127, 166 Laurel, Jose P. 61 Lê Ðức Anh 236, 238 Lê Ðức Thọ 236 leadership 59; civilian targeting 103; in mass killings 81, 82, 88, 96n11; populist 60, 69–70 Lee, Michael J. 60 Lee, Yanghee 41, 42 Lee Hsien Loong 238, 239 legal system: Cambodia 289, 291; Thailand 211–15; as tool of suppression 210 LICADHO (League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights) 287–8 Lim Seng 64 livers (human) 181–3 Lò Văn Hặc 120 Lon Nol 6, 134–5, 136, 138, 271, 273; family 236; see also Khmer Republic (1970–1975) Lorenzana, Delfin 70 Ma Ba Ta, Myanmar 46, 107 McNamara, Robert 6, 164, 167, 168, 170, 172 McNaughton, John 163 Magsaysay, Ramon 2, 4, 62–3 Maha Ghosananda 290 Maha Vajiralongkorn 216 Mak Sithim 178 Malaya 3, 3–4 Malayan Communist Party (MCP) 2, 3 Maravijaya 273–6 Marcos, Ferdinand 59, 63–6 Marcos, Ferdinand, Jr. 68 marginalization 1, 8, 9; Rohingya 104–5 mass displacement 199; by modernization 268; Rohingya 45, 108, 109, 152, 154, 196; Vietnamese 135, 137, 140, 143n18, 167; see also relocation

304 Index

mass killings 80–2; in Cambodia 90–5, 136–7; conditions for 32; escalation of 81, 84–6, 92–4; Rohingya 200 mass surveillance 255–6, 261, 262 mass violence 43–5; Cambodia 86–8, 283–7; and ethnic cleansing 102; First Indochina War (1946–54) 121; and genocide 200; against Karen 48–9; against Rohingya 45–7, 101–2, 108–9; theoretical model of 84–8; against Wa 49–51; see also ethnic cleansing; genocide massacres: Ban Na Sai village, Thailand 254; Red Drum massacre, Thailand 253; Rohingya 197; Thailand 211; Thammasat University, Thailand 254, 258–9; Vietnamese in Cambodia 136–7 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 151, 196 medical experimentation 178–81 medical staff 184, 230; training 175–6, 178, 184–5 medical treatment 174, 175–6; traditional 175–6, 181–5 memories: collective 269; control of history 31, 35–6; forgetting 23, 35–7, 169, 278, 289; reactivation of 222; recall techniques 228–30; of violent events 10–11, 272, 292; see also haunting mental health disorders 286 military regimes: Indonesia 22, 25–8; Myanmar 41–2, 105–6, 149, 195; Thailand 4, 209–10, 215, 219n3, 219n5, 219n6, 253, 256; see also army militias 26–8; anti-communist 65; private 64, 66; right wing 253, 257 minority groups 1, 81; in Myanmar 41, 47, 49, 103, 105–6, 149, 153 mistrust 102, 287, 289; see also distrust mob violence 44, 290; Cambodia 287–9; see also communal violence mobilization: civilians during Điện Biên Phủ battle 120–5; populace in Thailand 255–8, 258–64 modernization 270–1, 277–8 moral community 34 morality 11, 226; parables 45 moral crisis 64 moral failure 13; see also amorality moral restraints 34 moral standards 276 moral system10 moral violation 226; see also amorality Muslims 25; anti-Muslim feeling 42–3, 106–7, 150–1; Islamic fundamentalism 70, 150, 152; Myanmar 42, 149, 151; Rohingya 7, 46–7, 104, 197

Myanmar 6–7, 9; Buddhism 148, 150, 153; Burma independence 2, 104; military regime 41–2, 105–6, 149, 195; minority groups 41, 47, 49, 153; Rakhine state 104; taingyintha (national races) 49, 103, 105–6, 149, 195; see also Rakhine state; Rohingya people Naga Min (Dragon King) 7, 105, 195 Nakhon Chaisri prison, Thailand 216, 218 napalm 13, 121, 166–7 Naphon Bunthap 259 Narong Phitphatnasai 213 Nath, Vann see Vann Nath National Audiovisual Institute (NAI) 223, 231n6 National Center of Cinematography (CNC) 223 National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), Thailand 210–17, 218, 219n3, 220n14, 256 National League for Democracy (NLD), Myanmar 106, 107, 148, 149–51, 153 National Reform Committee, Thailand 258 National United Front for an Independent, Peaceful, Neutral and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC) 284 nationalism 8, 59, 86; Khmer 134–6, 142, 174, 270; Myanmar 101, 103, 106–7; Thailand 209, 256 Nawaphon (New Strength) 254, 257, 258 Ne Win 6, 105 Netherlands, colonial rule 2 New Order 22 New People’s Army (NPA) 66–7 Ngô Đinh Diệm 2–3, 165 Nguyen Cao Ky 165 Nguyễn Hiệu 236 Nguyen Ngoc Giao 169 Nguyễn Quốc Khán 237 Nguyen Van Thieu 134 Nguyễn Xuân Phúc 238 Nhat Chi Mai 169 969 Movement, Myanmar 106, 107, 150, 151 Nixon, Richard 6, 134, 136, 137, 140–1, 166, 169–70 North Sumatra 28 NU (Nahdlatul Ulama, Council of Islamic Scholars) 25, 28 nuclear weapons 1; fears of 118, 120, 121, 126, 127–8; First Indochina War (1946–54) 117 Nuon Chea 6, 246n37, 284 Nursyazwani 46

Index 305

Obama, President Barack 69 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 287 Oknha Sok Kong 268, 269–70, 278 Operation Menu 166 Operation Naga Min (Dragon King) 7, 105, 195 Operation Speedy Express 166 organizational dynamics 81, 82, 95 otherness 269, 270, 277–8; see also exclusionary ideologies Padilla, Moises 62–3 Paiboon Kumchaya 216, 217 Pala, Juan “Jun,” Jr. 67–8 Panh, Rithy see Rithy Panh Pansak Srithep 216–18 Paris Peace Agreements (1973): 140–1, 165–6, 169; (1991) 239, 242, 282, 284 peace 11; Cambodian peace movements 282, 290–2 peasants: Black River Region, Vietnam 119, 122–3, 124; land distribution 3–4; see also rural communities People Participation program, Thailand 261 People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), Thailand 209 People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN), DRV 118, 119 People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), Thailand 209 People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK, 1979–89) 236, 241, 284, 286 performative violence 60, 66, 69–70, 102 Phan Huy Quat 165 Phanawat Phongprayun 263 Philippine Human Rights Commission 68 Philippines: communism 3; economy 59; Ferdinand Marcos 63–6; Huk rebellion 2, 4; independence 2, 59; populism 60; presidential elections (1949) 60–3; Rodrigo Duterte 66–9 Philippines Constabulary 60–4, 66 Phnom Penh, Cambodia 268–9, 273, 276 PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) 21, 22, 25; propaganda against 26, 28, 29 planning: of genocide 200; and intent 194, 197–8 PNI (Indonesian Nationalist Party) 25, 28 Poeuv (guard) 228 Pol Pot 5, 6, 246n37, 284; death of 285; trial in absentia (1979) 182, 235; and Vietnam 142 police: Cambodia 288, 289; Philippines 61; Thailand 255

political prisoners: Cambodia 175, 176; Indonesia 31, 36; Thailand 215–18 populism 8, 59–60, 69–70 poverty 126, 290 power plant, Songkhla, Thailand 262–3 Prabowo Subianto 60 Prachin Chanthong 213 Prak Khan 178 Prakrom Warunprapa 216 Pramot Saengloi 263 Prapas Jarusathian 253 Prayut, General 259, 262 Prayuth Chan-ocha 209–10, 211, 213, 214, 219, 219n6 Prem Tinsulanonda 238 principal-agent problem 82, 83–4 prisons: S-21, Kampuchea 174–5, 222–3, 224–5, 228–30; Thailand 211, 216–18; treatment of prisoners in S-21 176–85; see also detention camps Prom Moni 136 propaganda 264n2; anti-Muslim 106–7; anti-Rohingya 107; anti-Vietnamese 135, 138, 141, 176, 275–6; anti-Western 128; Indonesia 26, 28, 29 Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), Vietnam 272–3 provisioning 124–5; military tactics 122–3 psychological warfare 34 public display 21, 66 Putin, Vladimir 60, 70 Quintana, Tomás Ojéa 197 Quirino, Elpidio 61–2 racism 8, 42–3; Cambodia 142; Rohingya 148 Rainsy, Sam see Sam Rainsy Rajaratnam, Sinnathamby. 239 Rakhine state 104, 238; Buddhists 42, 45, 104, 195, 196, 197–8; communal violence 150–1, 196–8; communities 204n67; Muslims 46–7; resettlement 109, 149; state violence 152, 196; World War Two 153; see also Rohingya people Ranariddh, Prince Norodom 284 rape 108; of Rakhine woman 107, 150, 196; as weapon of war 41, 43, 44–5, 51–2, 125, 290 Raval, Vicente 64 Reagan, President Ronald 65 recall techniques 228–30 reconstructions 228–9 Red Drum massacre, Thailand 253 Red Gaurs 254, 257, 258

306 Index

Red Shirts 60, 209, 215, 261–2, 265n10 reduction of violence 290–1 refugees: Cambodian 236–7, 241, 284, 290; Rohingya 47, 101, 149, 150, 151–2, 154, 195, 197; Vietnamese 137 regional variation 84, 87, 98n35; Cambodia 90–5; Indonesia 23, 27, 32; timing of mass killings 88, 90–1, 92–3 relocation: of Karen 48–9; of Wa 50–1; see also mass displacement repertoires of violence 32 Resistant Citizen 213–15, 216, 218 Respicio, Zafiro 67 responsibility 25; see also accountability Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 201, 235, 242 revenge 107, 193, 286 right wing groups 253, 257–8 Rithy Panh 178, 222; S-21 documentary film 223–4, 225, 227, 228, 230–1; use of documentary evidence 229–30 Rohingya people 7, 104; armed revolt 152; ASEAN 240; citizenship rights 195, 200; clearance operation (2017) 101–2, 109, 197; colonialism 148; diaspora 109, 154; ethnic cleansing 101–3, 108, 153–4; genocidal intent 46, 152, 191–2, 194–9; identity 46–7; independence movement 107–8, 152; marginalization 42, 104–5, 149–50; Operation Naga Min 7, 105, 195; rape 52; referred to as Bengalis 42, 104, 107, 108, 151, 201n3; refugee crisis 47, 151–2; violence against 42, 45–7, 101–2, 108–9, 149–51; see also Arakan civilization; Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA); Rakhine state Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) 105 Rolling Thunder campaign 165, 166, 167–8 Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) 284, 285 royalism, Thailand 209, 253, 256, 258–62 rural communities: Cambodia 273; Malaya 3–4; Thailand 209, 256, 261–2; Vietnam 121–6, 167; see also peasants Russia 60, 65, 70, 242; see also Soviet Union RVN (Republic of Vietnam) 135, 136–7, 140 Rwanda 235 Saiyud Koedphol 257 Saloth Sar see Pol Pot Sam Rainsy 243, 285 Santayana, George 234, 238

Santebal (Secret Service), Democratic Kampuchea 222, 225, 229, 230 Sáu Cò see Oknha Sok Kong Schabas, William 193, 195, 197 Second Indochina War (1960–74) see Vietnam War Second World War see World War Two Seni Pramoj, M.R. 257 Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention 196, 197 September 30th Movement 21, 26 Shan people 50, 51 Shinawatra, Thaksin 60, 209, 254, 261, 263, 265n10 Shoup, David M. 168 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom 136; overthrow 134, 137, 269, 283; policies of 5, 6, 140, 271, 283 Sikkink, Katherine 211 silence 23, 29, 31, 34 Singapore 238–9, 240 Sirik Matak, Prince 136, 138, 140 Sirikit, Queen of Thailand 259, 261 social media 46, 108, 261, 262; Myanmar 106, 152 society, impact of violence 283–4, 286–9 Sok Kong, Oknha 268, 269–70, 278 Sokimex 269–70, 277 Son Sen 246n37 South China Sea 69, 70, 240 Southwick, Katherine 199 Soviet Union 65, 168, 236; see also Russia specific intent 192–4 starvation: Cambodia 89; Myanmar 41, 48, 197; Vietnam 120–1, 124–5, 126, 128 state sovereignty 34, 235, 236, 238, 239–40 state violence 1; Cambodia 271–3, 282, 285, 288–9; expulsive violence 42–3; incorporative violence 43; Indonesia 22, 36; against Rohingya 101–2, 108–9, 154, 195–9; Thailand 210–11, 254 state-making process 9, 121–2, 124–5 strategic ambiguity 84, 86 Strategic Hamlet campaign, South Vietnam 3–4 Straus, Scott 32, 91, 103 structural violence 43, 52–3, 283–4 students, Thailand 254, 257, 258–9, 264n2 S-21 prison 174–5, 184–5, 224, 284, 289; documentary film 222–3, 224–5, 229–30; documentation 229–30; reconstructions 228–9; staff confessions 224–5; treatment of prisoners 176–85 Suharto, General 9, 24–5, 26, 29, 36, 80–1 Sukarno, President 2, 5, 9, 21–2, 29–30

Index 307

Suor Thi 178 Supreme Court, Thailand 214–15, 219, 220n9 Surajayat Julanond 262 Suriyan Sucharitpolwong 216 surveillance 255–26, 261, 262 survivors: confrontations 225–6; testimonies 222 Suu Ky, Aung San 45, 51–2, 106, 107, 148, 153 Syria 171 Ta Mok 223, 246n37 Tai people 118–19, 120, 123–4, 126 taingyintha (national races) 49, 103, 105–6, 149, 195 Tapol 31 Tatmadaw 41, 45, 48–9, 49–51 technological warfare 10, 170–2 Ten Sakhoeun 178 territorialization 48–9, 123–4; area of control 193; ethnicity 106; First Indochina War 118, 119, 122 terrorism 44, 108; and Rohingya 42, 45–6, 108 Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) 216–17 Thai National Defense Volunteers (TNDV) 259–60 Thailand 4–5, 50, 253; constitutions 212–15, 220n14; counter-insurgency operations 254–8; court rulings 214–15, 216–18, 218–19; democratization 210, 254; elections 209–10, 219n3, 262; military detention 215–18; military regimes 4, 209–10, 215, 219n3, 219n5, 219n6, 253, 256; mobilization of people 255–8; political conflict 212; Red Shirts 60, 209, 215, 261–2, 265n10; royalism 253, 256, 258–62; rule of law 211–12; rural communities 256; support for Khmer Rouge 236 Thaksin Shinawatra 60, 209, 254, 261, 263, 265n10 Thammasat University, Thailand 258–9 Thanasak Patimaprakorn 213 Thanat Khoman 4–5 Thanom Kittikhachon 253 Theravada Buddhism 106, 271, 273 Thi (guard) 227, 230 Thich Nhat Hanh 168–9 Thieu, President 134 Third Indochina War 236, 239, 240–2, 270, 286 Thompson, Sir Robert G.K. 2, 3

Thorani (goddess of fertility) 273–6 torture 66, 108, 182, 253; S-21 prison 175, 222, 224–6; Thailand 211, 218 Tovar, Hugh 31 Tran Van Lam 140 Tran Van Phuoc 138, 140 transformational processes 8–9 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC, 1976) 236, 238 Trump, Donald 69 Tun Abdul Razak 2 Tunku Abdul Rahman 3 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum 175, 184, 222, 289; see also S-21 prison Turkey 60, 70, 203n42 Tyner, James 289 UK see Britain Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), Myanmar 106 United Nations (UN) 31; Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) 135, 231, 241, 284, 291, 293n22; General Assembly 141; HCR 151; Human Rights Council 68, 192, 196; Human Rights rapporteurs 41, 42, 197; Rohingya Fact Finding Mission 45–6, 198; Security Council 242; Special Representative for Human Rights 287; UN Transitional Authority (UNTAC) 235, 242, 282, 284, 285 United Wa State Army (UWSA) 49–51 USA: Agency for International Development 291; attitude to war 163, 165; Cambodia 134, 136, 137, 141, 235, 271, 283; and China 240; CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 2–3, 5, 31; First Indochina War (1946–54) 2–3, 117, 127–8; Philippines 2, 64–5, 66, 69; support of Indonesian regime 6, 29–31; technological warfare 170–2; Thailand 4–5, 254–5; Vietnam foreign aid 241; Vietnam War 5–6, 140–1, 163–7; World War Two 164 Vajiralongkorn, King of Thailand 258, 261 Valentino, Benjamin 32 Van Schaack, Beth 199 Vann Nath 225–6, 229 Viet Cong 134–5, 136, 137, 275–6 Việt Minh 2, 3 Vietnam: and Cambodia 234–5; communism 3; DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) 2, 117–18, 120, 122, 165, 167–8, 170; independence 118;

308 Index

invasion of Cambodia 235–8, 242, 270, 286; isolation of 240, 241; RVN (Republic of Vietnam) 135, 136–7, 140 Vietnam War 3, 5–6, 140–1, 163–4; air warfare 117, 165–8; Cambodia 283; Strategic Hamlet campaign 3–4; Tet Offensive 169 Vietnamese people: persecution in Democratic Kampuchea 89–90, 236–8, 242; persecution in Khmer Republic 134–42, 268–9, 271–3, 276–8 Vilim, Laura 182–3 Village Defence Volunteers, Thailand 254 Village for Development and Self-Defense Volunteers (VDSV) 256 Village Health Volunteers 260 Village Scouts, Thailand 254, 257, 258, 260–1 violence: accountability for 35–6, 254, 288–9; aftershocks 125–8; attitudes to 34; memories of 10–11; repertoires of 32; types of 43, 52–3, 283, 292n4; see also ethnic cleansing; genocide; mass violence visual codes 276, 280n26 Võ Nguyên Giáp 120 Volunteers Defense Corp, Thailand 257 Volunteers for Development and SelfDefense (VDSD) 257

Wa people 49–51 War on Terror 106, 107–8, 163 warfare, attitudes to 34, 163 warlords 61, 63–4, 65–6 Weiner, Myron 102, 106 West Papua 9, 22 Western powers: and Cambodia 234, 241–3; Indonesia 29; see also Britain; France; USA Westmoreland, General 170 Wirathu (monk) 42, 46, 106 women: intermarriage 104, 106; rape as weapon of war 41, 43, 44–5, 51–2, 125, 290 Wong Kan Seng 239 World Bank 65 World War Two 3, 4–5, 8, 60, 104, 164; Germany 83, 84, 97n17; Rohingya 104, 149, 153 Yellow Shirts 209 Yingluck Shinawatra 209–10, 215, 256 Zarni, Maung 195, 196 Zaw Aye Maung 42 ZOPFAN (Declaration on the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality, 1971) 236