Yesterday I opened up the New York Times to see the headline: Khmer Rouge Defendant Apologizes for Atrocities. This, an apology from an aged war criminal, is considered a milestone. A response to unresolved questions buried in vast fields of sunken skulls and bones. It’s a paltry and unsatisfying answer, and infuriating that even this small gesture has met resistance from the current Cambodian government, half of which were in the Khmer Rouge – but better still than denial, of course.
Later on in the evening, the image of Duch’s fault-lined face floating anchorless in the back of my mind, Eli suggested going to see the film Waltz with Bashir. All he knew about it was that it was an animated film, nominated for an Oscar, and that it was about some war. Somewhere. (Actually he thought it was Armenia before I looked it up and corrected him). I knew even less about it, so I had no expectations going into the film.
The film is about an Israeli Defense Force soldier’s attempt to recover his memories of participating in the devastating 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon, twenty years after the fact. He embarks on a quest to interview other IDF soldiers who were there at the time, to pin down where he was on the day of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre. The film dances with the elusiveness of memories and the mind’s defense mechanisms to horror – the brain blots out atrocity, blurs it into something more palatable. One soldier’s adaptation technique during the war was to pretend as though he was viewing everything through a camera lens – “wow, look at all those explosions over there. What fun.” This technique abruptly stops working when, after his outfit has just shot and razed a section on the outskirts of Beirut, he looks down to see maimed and dying horses on the ground. The destroyed buildings and butchered bystanders could be rationalized, sectioned off in the brain as being part of an action film or a video game. Not the horses.
Afterwards I went home and read the Wikipedia entry, and apparently the film has been criticized for putting a soft focus on the IDF’s role in the massacre (this reviewer even calls it IDF propaganda.) That review is definitely over the top, but I did note while watching that the movie was careful to emphasize that it was definitely those Phalangists over there doing the killing and torturing, not the IDF soldiers. But there are plenty of scenes before that which show the soldiers in a pretty negative light, dispatching civilians without a second thought if they happen to be in the way. One scene showed soldiers in a tank, slowly and carelessly rolling over cars and smashing into buildings – for no reason other than that they could. The soldiers are listless, bored by death and destruction; they keep their heads down and follow orders no matter how brutal. Even if it were true that the movie producers downplayed the murky and controversial role that the Israeli army might have had in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, I doubt the IDF is going to be using this film in their promotional materials any time soon.
The actions that were depicted in the movie were bad enough. The soldiers sit outside a wholesale slaughter, with nobody doing more than making a half-hearted phone call to stop it. The Israeli army officials in charge of the operation are stationed high atop a tall building overlooking the area, and can plainly see for themselves what is taking place. The whole reason the massacre is able to happen is because they are there to back up the Phalangists, light the flares in the sky so that the killers can see better, camp just outside the lines of sight and look the other way – skirting just outside the edge of legal culpability in, say, an international criminal tribunal.
In a Phnom Penh courtroom, Duch’s lawyers argue that he should not bear the brunt of guilt, as he was just following orders. And it’s true, in the increasingly paranoid and frenzied inner climate of the Khmer Rouge at that time, if Duch had resisted he and his family would have been the next on the list to be tortured and killed. In fact, that very fate befell the supervisor who trained him. If Duch hadn’t done it, he would have been killed and someone else taken his place.
But this is a familiar refrain. When reading these first-hand accounts of genocide – everyone says that, from the civilians who consciously ignore the fact that their neighbors are disappearing, to the lowly grunts actually physically carrying out the orders, to the officers and officials frantically trying to placate an increasingly demented leader. Which doesn’t invalidate that defense. In essence, the aggregate of hands carrying out orders, to the circulation system that links them, to the heads that contemplate evil, forms a solid and deadly machine.
But the question still remains: how could this machine function, without you?
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