Abstract
On the 17th April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, colloquially known as the Khmer Rouge, marched into Phnom Penh and took control of Cambodia. During their rule of three years, eight months, and twenty days, an estimated 1.7 million people died. Their remains were buried or abandoned across the country. Since the deposal of the regime in January 1979, the human remains of those who died have been central to memorialisation and political rendering of the Khmer Rouge regime. This chapter offers a case study of the treatment of these remains, outlining the Khmer social, political, and religious frameworks affecting their treatment. By doing so it offers a consideration of ethics and human rights related to the location, identification, and treatment of human remains from the Khmer Rouge regime in contemporary Cambodia.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The most notorious of these is M-13 in Kampong Speu province.
- 3.
In their mapping, DC-Cam has located 158 prisons, whilst historian Henri Locard suggested that in all likelihood, there was one per district, which would be 171 prisons in total (Locard and Moeng 1993).
- 4.
Ta Mok (nicknamed the butcher because of his reputation for brutality) was a leading Khmer Rouge commander, and according to Hinton (2006) one of the key architects of the Khmer Rouge genocide. In 1977 he became chief of the Khmer Rouge army and oversaw the internal purges of the regime.
- 5.
Because he had buried them himself, he was one of the few able to locate loved ones’ remains after the regime; in the 1980s he unearthed their remains and took them to a local pagoda.
- 6.
Sometimes these features were used as killing, as well as burial, sites. One example is Phnom Sampeau in Battambang province, where people were thrown from cliffs to their deaths on the cave floors below.
- 7.
There were no specific guidelines or standards for this beyond the directive to preserve evidence.
- 8.
This directive was primarily aimed at turning the former Khmer Rouge settlement of Anlong Veng into a “historical museum for national and international tourists” (Royal Government of Cambodia 2001, 1).
- 9.
The remains from Koh Sap were split between three local pagodas because of this—the one closest to the commune government office took the majority, but two smaller pagoda were able to claim some for themselves.
- 10.
Sometimes these relics are kept within wooden spirit houses at the front of the homestead rather than concrete stupa.
- 11.
Not all those who lost relatives visit pagoda with remains: some visit their closest pagoda and by giving offerings to the monks, provide offerings to the dead by simply stating their names.
- 12.
Guyer (2009) gives a good discussion of this in relation to the Rwandan genocide.
- 13.
The exception being M-13 in Kampong Speu, arguably because this could be directly linked to Duch, the first person to be tried in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).
- 14.
There are various reasons for this, including short time-frames for research trips, high levels of malaria in some areas, and, especially at the beginning of the project, the Khmer Rouge still functioning and being dangerous in some areas.
- 15.
The detailed records of this research are kept at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) . Shortened versions of records for each site can be accessed on the DC-Cam database, which also contains reports on the project (DC-Cam 2005). Etcheson (2005b), one of the founding researchers on the project, has also written extensively about the project (see also Klinkner 2008).
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Bennett, C. (2019). Human Remains from the Khmer Rouge Regime, Cambodia. In: Squires, K., Errickson, D., Márquez-Grant, N. (eds) Ethical Approaches to Human Remains. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32926-6_27
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