News on the BBC, this week, brought a flood of memories and made me pensive about ‘crime and punishment’. Two Khmer Rouge surviving leaders, Khieu Samphan, 83, and Nuon Chea, 88, who were given life sentences for their crimes against humanity, were not like Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, who expiates for his crime and suffers in jail.

Carnage in Cambodia

Once again, I remembered the humble Cambodian painter Vann Nath whom I met in Phnom Penh in 2008 at a seminar. He had become an icon of ‘dark tourism’, sought out by seminars and political pundits for conversations. I too got an opportunity to talk to him and listen to his story, which I published in a Nepali daily (Naya Patrika, September 13, 2008). He was reluctant to become a narrator of ‘dark tourism’ even though he suffered in the Khmer Rouge’s torture camp. He showed me the last torture camp, Tuol Sleng—a school-turned museum where he was dying. But he taken away to make a portrait of Khieu Samphan, one of the two convicts who has now been given a life sentence. He was not released, but not tortured after that. I wrote in the memory of this artist, who combined pain, sublimity and wisdom, in The Kathmandu Post when I heard the news of his death on the BBC (‘From the killing fields,’ September 28, 2011). I do not want to repeat what I have already written in those articles. But I would like to touch upon a few issues raised by this genocide of two million people in four years from 1975 to 1979.

While at Phnom Penh airport, I was struck by the titles of the books I saw there. These were theory books written about ‘dark tourism’ and genocide. In no other airports had I chanced to see such a constellation of books on this subject. One big pictorial glossy book written entirely about the notorious Pol Pot was a bit too expensive. It featured photographs of this man being carried in a palanquin down some steppes to see the samadhi of Mao Zedong. Pol Pot, who was groomed in the Cambodian palace and sent to Paris to study, where he became a communist, never overthrew the monarchy. Though Prince Norodom Sihanouk did not support his methods, Pol Pot brought him back to see the devastation.

When you browse through the pictures, you find what you can see in Cambodia as memories of the Khmer Rouge era. However, they focus little on the indiscriminate killings of innocent Cambodians in air bombings under a different regime before the nasty era of the Khmer Rouge began, in the name of cleaning the fields of guerrillas. In any case, the story of the killings is horrendous. But theorisation of the killings, challenges and their excitement in turning such places into museums, reminds us of a few important points about inscribing memories in history. A good read for those who do not remember them.

More of the old

The 20th century saw the greatest number of killings in human history. Humans killed one another ten times more than nature did. People believed that the new century would usher a different era. We believed the 21st century would be a period of retrospection and remorse about the killings of fellow human beings. We thought this century would begin with mutual forgiveness and confessions but punishments for very serious unpardonable crimes. However, the process of killing continued. Children became canon fodder in adults’ wars involving regimes and rebels. Powerful states bombed children’s homes and centres. Presidents gave orders to poison their own citizens’ children. Tens of thousands of children have been killed in the past few years. Law and ethics have become uneasy bedfellows.

A certain chaos rules the 21st century. Generations change, and histories become myths; events and deaths become items of memory tourism and discourse. I did hear about such mass killings far away somewhere in India when I was young. The stories were grim; they sounded exaggerated. But later, reading about the partition of India and Pakistan, I found they were true. Three million people died in the late 60s in the Bangladeshi war of independence. The Liberation War Museum of Dhaka records some of these grim memories, and friends have been staging plays about this brutality.

Home realities

In Nepal, we did not have incidents of such colossal and horrendous proportion. The ‘people’s war’ (1996-2006), which pit the state against the insurgents, resulted in the death of over 13,000 people. That did, and does raise an important debate about the question of culpability and responsibility. Now, there seems to be tremendous political will among political parties, and a positive desire, to collectively look into the results of history. I have always admired Nepali political parties for frankly assessing the past and turning it into positive action.

It happened in a theatrical manner, because we in theatre see action and dialogue as the two mantras of performativity. Those involved in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) say that directly communicating about past sufferings has a healing effect. But truth telling has problems, too. Still, Nepali political parties have made far-reaching agreements and have recently passed a legislation to create a TRC.

The sentencing of the two perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia may be a turning point. People’s discontents and legitimate voices have found no expression and justice. The 21st century should have begun not with more killings but with reconciliation and forgiveness. The argument that acts of serious crimes should be brought to justice is as valid as the argument that reconciliation, confessions, forgiveness and service to victims by perpetrators—which is being experimented with in Cambodia—should be, in some cases, abiding principles. But who will stop megalomaniacs from killing the innocent everyday in a world where power, arrogance and mistrust reign supreme?