Inhumanity in the flesh

The Cambodian filmmaker was only 11 when his family was expelled from the capital Phnom Penh, deemed to be “oppressors who were to be re-educated in the countryside”. Before he escaped the country three years later, he would watch his parents, siblings, and other relatives executed, starved, or worked to death in the labour camps of the dreaded Khmer Rouge.

Panh returned to Cambodia in 1990 and began to make a series of documentaries about the regime which had so scarred his country. The Elimination tells the story of one of these, a film about a man who, in many ways, personified the atrocities in a way not even Pol Pot ever could, a man by the name of “Comrade Dutch”. Former commandant of a “Security Prison” where over 12,000 were tortured and executed in the infamous Killing Fields, Dutch is one of the few people imprisoned for his crimes during 1975-1979, a period in which 1.7 million people, nearly a third of Cambodia’s population, were killed. For Panh, Dutch is a technician of horror, a man who “never stopped refining the slaughter machine — or its language,” and so the author uses the same words, quoting often from Dutch, to reveal his unrepentant brutality: “I recruited children,” he admits. “They learnt how to guard and interrogate before they learnt their alphabet. Their level of culture was very low, but they were loyal to me.”

These chilling interviews with the smiling commandant (whose “full-throated” laugh is difficult for the reader to shake) are interspersed with recollections of the squalor and depravity Panh’s family was forced to endure. The author never sensationalises here, portraying the horror and the cunning of an organised genocide with an almost supernatural calm. His refusal to hold back the vivid details of his own experience elevates The Elimination from simply the story of a documentary being made into a searing, eye-witness account of the one of darkest moments in Southeast Asian history, a time when, simply put, “Human Rights didn’t exist”.

Indeed, part of the book’s raison d’etre is to dissect the Khmer Rouge themselves. Panh explores everything from the methodology of their murders to the theoretical — one cannot truly say intellectual — basis for their revolution, the “doctrinal radicalisation” which saw rebels dynamite the central bank and parade the heads of long-haired youths around on staffs. An essential volume, Panh’s uncompromising account is particularly affecting in its descriptions of the “feverish disquiet” which accompanied the taking of Phnom Penh, in its exploration of the denunciations which followed, and, in its most discomforting scenes, the deeply conflicted Cambodia which still exists today.

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