I am thinking of Cambodia
In Part One of Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s The Mother/Child Papers, the American poet braids the trauma of her hospital birth with the violence exacted on the people of Cambodia by American bombs. The prose poem begins:
“My son Gabriel was born on May 14, 1970, during the Vietnam War, a few days after the United States invaded Cambodia, and a few days after four students had been shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest demonstration.”
For everyday of my baby’s life, I have seen images livestreamed from a genocide.
If you know anything about Cambodia it will probably be related to temples or trauma. At the end of the 20th century, the Southeast Asian country came to the attention of the world as the horror of what had occurred under the brutal Khmer Rouge Regime between 1975 and 1979 came to global attention.
The Khmer Rouge sought to erase history, eradicate culture, and create a pure agrarian society. Artists, intellectuals and other ‘enemies’ of the regime were murdered. The rest of the population was put to work in the countryside, dying in their thousands from malnutrition, disease, exhaustion, torture or execution. The population of the Phnom Penh was completely evacuated and the city - once known as the ‘Pearl of Southeast Asia - became a near-ghost town.
How could a third of the population be killed in such a short time? Why didn’t the West intervene? How could it happen? How was it allowed to happen? When I tell people I worked in, and on, Cambodia these are the questions they ask me.
I answer them by referring to Nixon’s secret war, when over 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia by U.S. forces between 1964 and 1973, a figure that was publicly acknowledged only in 2000.
I say the bombing forced the Viet Minh further into Cambodia where they met with members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge. The devastation wrought by the U.S. aerial campaign along Cambodia’s eastern border also meant the population was increasingly amenable to the Khmer Rouge’s policy of opposing American imperialism. Cambodia’s attempts to stay neutral in the Cold War were failing.
I talk of America’s defeat in the Vietnam-American war. Of how there was little appetite to return to Southeast Asia in the aftermath. Of how when, in 1979, the Vietnamese removed the Khmer Rouge from power, and backed a new Cambodian government, the West refused to recognise it. Diplomatic manoeuvrings in New York meant Cambodia's seat in the United Nations was awarded to the Khmer Rogue, now exiled on the Thai border. This continued until 1991.
I describe the way Cambodia in the late 1970s was largely sealed off from the world, although of course many accounts of the horrors taking place within slipped out.
I used to naively think that if the right images had emerged, if the right amount of evidence collected, the fate of my friends’ families might have been different.
Now, I hope I don’t need to say anything when someone asks: how could we let it happen?
We are all witnessing a genocide contained with the palms of our hands.
I think about images and the hopeful lies we tell ourselves.
I think about Gaza every day. And, at night, I find myself dreaming of Cambodia until I am woken by my daughter cooing at the vivid green leaves shivering in the breeze outside our bedroom window.
Bomb Ponds: Making legible the perhaps otherwise unseen legacy of America’s Bombing campaigns
Processes of (re)documentation are a method of rendering visible that which is overlooked or unrecognisable to an unknowing eye, tracing the outlines of ghosts. At the same time, this attention - this act of looking - honours those who already know what they are seeing and possess the relevant knowledge. Vandy Rattana’s photographic practice achieves this balance through his explorations of the indeterminate evidences of war on the Cambodian landscape.
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