Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia

[MUSIC] Never over promise and under deliver is one of the most important maxims of sales. Yet according to University of Bath Sociologist Pete Manning, this is precisely what happened with the extraordinary chambers of the courts of Cambodia. The E-Triple C, as it is also known, was responsible for identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators of the 1.5 to 2 million lives lost during the Cambodian genocide. Anchored in Western understandings about traumatic memory applied wholesale to nations, Pete Manning argues that the E-Triple C made far-reaching claims about how transitional justice would help Cambodia heal and move towards a healthier future. These claims massed the very real international and domestic political constraints that limited the work of the court. They also failed to recognize how Cambodians might remember and make use of the past in ways that had little to do with Western assumptions. It was when Pete Manning first traveled to Cambodia over 20 years ago that he was struck by the gap between Western preconceptions and the reality of how Cambodians remembered the genocide. Part of my curiosity started because of this sort of disconnect, as we're describing it, or this Gordon, I suppose, on the one hand between the representation, the depiction of Cambodia as this basically a backward space, a broken dysfunctional, sort of amnesiac, politically corrupt space, all these sort of quite problematic, freighted assumptions about Cambodians. My people's sort of inability to remember this violent history, or assumptions about culture of denial. And actually, people don't think and feel about the past like that. Well, they didn't think and feel about the past like that, even back then. It was striking because I'd have friends that would say things quite-- these conversations, let's say, that just weren't perhaps visible to the Western eye in the way that you would sort of expect them to be. So mum saying things to their kids, like, if you don't eat up all your rice, then the pulp also come and get you. So memory was being reproduced, right? This violent history was being remembered. And at least it was being remembered in ways that were more complicated or more elusive than perhaps sort of prevailing human rights discourse on the one hand and human rights scholarship on the one hand was able to grasp. And I suppose on the other, the way the guidebooks wanted to depict Cambodia as a sort of tourist destination that was a bit world-west, right? So that was my entry point, I suppose. Pete Manning has spent years studying the relationship between memory, transitional justice, and the genocide in Cambodia. This is the basis of his book, transitional justice in memory in Cambodia, beyond the extraordinary chambers. Pete Manning, welcome to Realms of Memory. Thank you for having me on, Ray. One of the lenses that you try to look through to understand memory and justice in Cambodia is you use Foucault and you use his ideas about discourse. And I mean, is it fair to say that if there's a language and a way of thinking at least from the outside about how the people in Cambodia experienced that past or how they remember it, that those are just discourses, that that's a language that comes from someplace else. It comes from other entities or other institutions that have their own agendas. Yeah, I think-- I mean, if I can sort of unpack it a little bit, I suppose. Because Foucault is guilty of lots of sort of Eurocentric assumptions and problems I don't get sort of too distracted by that. And Foucault just point out, I suppose, or just make a gentle observation. I think it's useful to think about memory via Foucault. Because in these contexts in particular around responses to violent pasts in particular, because his work is fundamentally concerned with a relationship between power and knowledge, right, that's the typical or the classic relation that people or gravitate towards when they're reading Foucault. And that critique at work in across Foucault's writing and thinking really helps us sort of problematize the idea that to remember is a neutral process, right? That memory is sort of innocent. Or that memory is-- two remember is-- has got a sort of like an automatic relation to sort of social and political betterment in the present. You remember to make things better. And what Foucault's work-- exactly as you say, if you're picking up on the idea that memory might be discursive, there might be discourses that claim over memory, seek to act on and intervene on memory in doing so they sort of enable certain people to sort of make those interventions in particular ways. There's a politics to all of this, right? There's a power-- set of power relations that work in all of this. So for me, I mean, I read Foucault I suppose in two sort of maybe slightly clumsy ways. I mean, the first is, think about the sort of content of memory as discursive. And in that, I just mean the sort of-- the stories of what isn't is not remembered. We'll have ellipses. We'll have gaps. We'll have emissions. There will be erasers. And there's this sort of discursive ordering an architecture to that sort of sense of story telling I suppose. And then, in the second way, Foucault is very relevant. And this is very obviously linked to his work that explicitly addresses questions of memory I suppose. Encyclonellysis, his interest in histories of mental health and psychiatric intervention. Memory is an object of work. Memory is something that certain people are licensed to act on and intervene on in the name of certain claims for social progress and social vetting. And the techniques of memory that are at work in Cambodia, I mean, invariably quite often rooted in quite limited and Eurocentric assumptions about trauma, for example, and the benefits of therapy and therapeutic thinking for intervening on past violence. And I don't think they necessarily tell all the story. One of the main things you're looking at here is this connection between transitional justice and memory. And there are these assumptions about the health-related dimensions of memory that apply to individuals, but then you can also apply them to nations. And they have their own history. And I guess if you go back to the idea of Foucault, there are institutions, there are entities that define how we understand memory that are at the root of the authority of those institutions or disciplines. And a lot of those ideas about memory that are time and discipline-specific just get incorporated into transitional justice and become the justification for intervention in places like Cambodia and elsewhere. Where do these ideas about memory and healing? And I thought this was fascinating. Yes. So it's a fascinating question. I think quite a lot going on in terms of what you would need to really furnish a genealogy of the role of therapeutic idioms, I think, because that's fundamentally what this is about, and the way that they've leached almost to become a just to take them for granted set of shiver less, essentially, that really order the most fundamental and basic assumptions about working in human rights and transitional justice. And in that respect, Foucault's work is important again, because he wants us to pay attention to what he would describe as the Savoid of the grammar, the grammatical knowledge, the basic organizing principles of these realms of social and political action. And I suppose just a few quick observations would be, firstly, yes, I think this is rooted in a very specific Western European psychiatric history. And what's interesting there is the mobility of those assumptions about memory. And exactly as you picked up on Rick, how they start in the first instance as a set of quite individualized and individualizing sets of claims about individual capacities to remember, and how the memory of the mind and the psychic will work. And they essentially became inflated and applied wholesale to the body politic of nation states. Now that has got all sorts of problematic consequences and effects in the way that it sort of pathologizes these contexts. And it goes back to the point I was making previously about the rendering of Cambodia as this broken and politically dysfunctional space, or as depiction at least on those terms. And exactly as you picked up Rick, this is-- connected again to to full-grounding certain agents and certain you know experts as able to sort of intervene within these spaces and you know licensed authorities that connect to make these these experiences better or apparently to make these these experiences better I think one of the points you may is well if you want to trace the roots at least some of the roots of the genocide It goes back in part to the the ward Vietnam and there's bombings that the American bombings of What Viet Cong in Cambodia they're using Cambodia as a staging ground for the for the war in South Vietnam and That's a destabilizing factor for for the government and But the point of this is that there's a broader context right and one of the one of the points that you make is that If you have this idea of transitional justice that Based on these therapeutic ideas of memory that this is a wounded country. It's got this horrific past that it needs to deal with and all of that is All of that ends up being Limited in time and focus right you you have this conflict that really has much broader broader origins It involves lots of different groups that and a history that goes beyond the genocide that don't end up even getting included in the process of transitional justice that that the whole focus is very narrow and And limited and that's something I was hoping you could talk about that if you have this horrific event And it is possible to limit it in time. It's a 1970 75 to 1979 But it's not really just that that there's there's more going on and there are more people involved so And I think that's one of the things you point out that's one of the problems with transitional justice is that it ends up being very it makes broad claims But it ends up being very narrowly focused that that's that's absolutely right. I think you know the What's what's key here is to bear in mind that the transitional justice? It's is not inevitable, you know these these mechanisms Don't you know pop out of thin air and the way that they mandated to redress these kinds of violent histories will always be shaped by you know Not just international you know political pressures, but domestic ones too, so you know in Cambodia I mean of course we've not you know was you have a handful of senior leaders Who were or would be put on trial at the extraordinary changes in the course of Cambodia That that transitional justice process in no way was going to look at for example You know the US bombing in the years prior to Prior to the rise of the Parisian by some estimates that that bombing campaign killed upwards of 500,000 civilians, right? You know, it was illegal even even according to to US law right and as it was sort of executed in 1970 73 70 Period of 1973 You know simply simply you're not gonna have you're not gonna have transitional justice efforts that look at what happened after the Cameras were removed from power You know the sponsorship of the Cameras by by China other Western governments and this is a period where they were You know continuing to commit quite terrible sort of violence against Against civilian groups, particularly sort of ethnic minorities still throughout the 1980s and 1990s, so you're absolutely right, you know transitional justice even has it It wants to sort of call attention to some episodes of conflict and atrocities. It's it's productive of its own You know illusions as well, you know, it's essentially sort of attenuating any scrutiny of Of you know crimes and histories that that were perpetrated by by You know powerful powerful actors, you know the US in particular China as well No, you know of course there's a domestic politics to all of this as well So you know within Cambodia there's there's you know there was the reconciliation a tree you know Politics of the 1980s and 1990s We've really you know hinged upon bringing lower-level Khmer Rouge back into the fold, you know So so essentially sort of after the Khmer Rouge were removed from power in 1979 you have a Very protracted civil war that goes on for 20 years and the government essentially had to buy off lower-level Khmer Rouge And the way that they were doing this is essentially by granting de facto amnesty's So throughout the transitional justice process you know around the triple C But then also you know in lots of the work that other NGOs have been doing you What's you know a real sort of hallmark of it all has been you know this this idea that the senior leadership of the Khmer Rouge were to blame You know, which is ultimately sort of a sort of crafting on framing of responsibility There's actually quite common in international criminal law context. Yeah, the idea that it's senior senior leaders sort of command responsibility That's where the sort of the focus of redress efforts have got a got a full And in Cambodia, you know, this has gone hand in hand with You know essentially this sort of an articulation of lower-level Khmer Rouge quite often as as victims as well of the regime So quite often you'll have you know around the Etrebal C process you know you had to A lot of quite explicit reassurance work going on you know saying low-level Khmer Rouge had nothing to fear For example, and an emphasis on on the fact that lots of lower-level Khmer Rouge were victimized as well, right? They they lost relatives or witness things were biased and just the things that perhaps they have no Not so much control eyes that let's say that So so you know that those are you know those are the interesting sort of Gap, so I suppose that I would I would highlight in in the work that's gone on within Cambodia You know on the international side there's a lot of impunity and and domestically as well People would argue or some people would argue that there's there's quite a lot of impunity to because because you know mid-ranking a lower-level Guys who might still live you know very Remedial around people that suffered under their hands, you know these these people will not be not be punished But it's not like the the current government of of Cambodia that initiates this whole invites this process of transitional justice They're not hiding from this limited focus limited scope That's what they those are the terms and conditions that they establish to begin with and they justify right in terms of Of uh, that's the the best way to bring about reconciliation that if if the focus of the Of the justice mechanism is too broad that they they argue that's going to be too disruptive That's absolutely right and you know, this is a point that The point that I think um, you know is is is misrepresented slightly um in lots of these conversations about the the transitional justice process in Cambodia I mean, you know you have you have critics of the Cambodian government and the you know the Cambodian government has gotten a pool in human rights record You know these are not these are not the good guys, but but you know The sort of very limited jurisdiction personal jurisdiction, you know, is it's become a bit of a beating stick, you know Where and it's sort of you know a bit of a lightning rod I suppose for accusations of sort of corruption and you know domestic Compunity and I think for some critics of the government, you know the the people weren't People not have been happy with the transitional justice process unless it was visibly breaching The sort of acceptance of the the Cambodian government around that sort of limited jurisdiction, you know Which which I just find sort of slightly slightly baffling, you know what the the the Consent for this process. Yeah exactly as you say Rick, you know In terms of sort of the initial invitation from the Cambodian government in 1997 to initiate Um a war crimes tribunal process, you know was was predicated on on you know Only a handful of leaders former command rouge leaders essentially being being brought into the dock Um, and that was you know that was clear from from the get go so so you know the idea that The idea that that sort of limited jurisdiction is the sort of central and key Failing of the court, you know, I I'm I think yeah, it's wider than mark Yeah hypocrisy of the whole process is on the one hand you have this therapeutic language of You need to intervene Because you have this wounded country and you've got to work through this difficult pass that they haven't confronted And uh and this is the only way for the country to move on but in reality That you have all kinds of political agendas that uh that are that are driving the process uh Countries that don't want to have their histories connected to this in any way at all and uh Um So you wonder you know the the the importance of you have these broad claims that are being made about what this good This is going to do for the country and then you have the reality of of what's what's behind it that you have It seems to be in it's inevitably setting every every and everyone up for for disappointment I think that's that's right you know This was also an incredibly expensive process, you know And it and it took a long time, you know the tribunals started in 2006 and and it Really was driven in part by By a sort of a broader set of international tropes around you know The urgency and the need for the need for for justice in this in this context. And to what this is maybe slightly sort of crude and clumsy argument, but to justify the expense, big claims were made. The sort of language that was mobilized to justify the tribunal process, setting the record straight, moving forward through justice, all of these sorts of slogans. I think it probably was always destined to inflate expectations and then probably disappoint them. I think what's really, really sort of problematic about this is that a lot of the same sort of organisations and actors who were very, very involved in the initiation of the process and the inflation of those expectations, the insistence on the importance of a tribunal process were quite quick to sort of turn on it. You know, they were the first to also sort of decry, you know, the findings and the outcomes of the tribunal process is sort of, you know, almost second rate, you know, and this is again, tethered to arguably this problem around the limited jurisdiction, right? The idea that the Cambodian government were obstructing the tribunal process and, you know, they did, they did do that. But they did that on terms that were apparent from the get-go. So, so I spoke my question there is just what was the surprise. And you argue that it, well, if you're going to understand what 300 plus million dollars and then you have what, what is it, three convictions at the at the end of all of it? And then you explain that if you go through these these actual trials and they're only a handful of them, what four altogether? Yeah. That the ones that are most successful, the ones that fit into that political agenda and they're ones that that neatly serve the interests of, especially the government of Cambodia. And that's that's the first trial and maybe to a certain extent, the two people that can that are still alive, they can convicted in the second trial. So could you explain what, what, what makes the the initial convictions or especially the first trial a lot easier? And then it becomes much more complicated and there's more resistance at least within Cambodia to when it comes to the later trials. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So, so the first trial was was the most straightforward for for several reasons. I mean, you know, the first of which was just the the focus of that trial was principally around the 12 slaying S21 crime site, right, which is a former extermination center in Penon Pen. And the sheer weight of sort of documentary evidence that was that was retrieved from that site as a sort of evidential base. It was it was just very very clear and that the the gentleman that was overseeing that that site, you know, Dauik, was was also not really a political sort of sensitivity for the Cambodian government, you know, he was he wasn't quite a senior leader and he fell under the the the jurisdiction as a sort of most responsible person as it was described under the the the Etrepoc mandate. So, so in that sense, that first trial, it didn't really ruffle any feather feathers and that sort of evidential weight was just so so so significant, I suppose. Now, the second set of trials, K-Cyria 0-2 were more were more sensitive because they concerned the sort of the senior leadership. And in terms of the legal machinations that were at play around that second trial, it was more complicated just because you're you're having to sort of draw a picture of sort of command responsibility, I suppose, you know, what was described or what's called in the the legal process joint criminal enterprise where the senior figures were giving orders and they were knowingly bringing about situations where you know, was within was foreseeable that the violence for either occurring or being directly directly ordered. But, you know, depending down the sort of paper trails and and the the actual sort of evidence base there is is is just by the scale of the crime is much much harder. So that's why that that took a lot longer. Now, it's it's a third set of cases, 0-0-3 where the the real sort of accusations of political interference sort of pick up. And these were directed at a group of sort of not quite senior, more mid-ranking, commemoration officials, you know, mid-ranking senior commemoration officials who the government essentially opposed the prosecutions of and I don't think that because they were particularly sort of, you know, on board with the government or particularly, you know, clients of the government so to speak. But certainly they were, you know, the government as a point of principle I think was was always going to refuse any sort of prosecution that started to impinge upon their sense of what the jurisdiction should be should be limited to. And those cases were essentially sort of shut down on behalf of on behalf of this sort of kind of the Cambodian co-cross cuters and co-investigating judges who just would not would not consider sort of pushing forward with those. And this was in the context of a tribunal that sort of brought together by international and Cambodian staff, you know, so you know, you'd have an international prosecutor at international co-investigating judge and a Cambodian counterpart for each of those offices. So where they're they're loggerheads or were those sort of persons or loggerheads in the tribunal process things just didn't go forward. And this all fed up broad narrative of, you know, political interference, political corruption, I suppose, and really led to that sort of sense of all the accusation from some international human rights organizations that the tribunal process was a sham. But your point too is that these trials are, it's like a stage where you have these struggles over framing this past, struggles over competing memory claims is how you describe it. And so you've got to try to control the narrative of how this is how this is remembered. And the accused are often trying to challenge the way that that narrative is framed. And they can do it, you mentioned, in all kinds of different ways by working through the narrative, by just rejecting it outright, by trying to broaden it. So you mentioned, and you look at these the scripts of the actual cases as examples of what, counter discourses that are at work challenging the dominant ways of framing this particular path. So how does that work? Yeah, so you see this play out in sort of uneven ways across the cases that were heard at the tribunal. The first trial against Doik, which was wrapped up pretty quickly. And that was partly because Doik's admissions of guilt essentially. He played along with with the tribunal script and he offered apologies. There are some people will still say that the apologies were poorly worded or maybe not so sincere. But essentially what you saw in that trial was a sort of a strategy of acquiescence, I suppose you would say, where Doik was really acquiescing and playing along to the preferred scripts of the prosecution. And in the second case where charges are brought against the senior leaders, it gets more complicated. And you see, I think two things that really characterize what I suppose that's a sense of contested memory within the court room. And the first of which I suppose would be denial. And I use Stan Cohen's work here actually to try and think about this. Stan Cohen sort of describes denial in sort of three ways. First is that you'll get literal denials where somebody will say something just didn't happen. Then you'll get denials by interpretation where certain forms of wording might just tweak and adjust the meaning that is attributed to events. And then you've got an sort of an implicatory denial, almost a denial by justification. And you see that play out in that second trial. Also the second sets of trials quite often. Now a final point on this is I think it's quite interesting because it goes back to this question of sort of hypocrisy that's haunting the Cambodian transitional justice process or at least the legal side of it, which is around sort of strategies of rupture that the accused actually mobilized. And this is ultimately sort of where those senior leaders, whether it be Q Sampon, Morafan, actually Nuan Chia, who is a very senior commirates leader, essentially asked the question who are you to judge, where they can point the finger back at the courtroom and say, you're trying the crimes, the Camarruj committed, but who are you to judge when you are not trying at the same time, for example, the US bombing or what happened afterwards or it's very different from human rights violations that either preceded or followed the Camarruj regime. So that's sort of sense of questioning the actual integrity of the jurisdiction, questioning the integrity of the process. I think it's fascinating, you know, just in terms of the way that it It makes it asks questions of memory and about, there's supposed universality of these processes. They're all perpetrators of human rights violations. Apparently have to be punished when quite easily accused can say in the courtroom while they're not being. - And again, you're just revealing that the hypocrisy or the reality of this whole process is supposed to be what objective and driven by the facts and inspired by these sciences of healing and but in reality it's constrained, constrained, narrowly focused, and you have efforts to challenge and to reveal what narratives are allowed, what aren't, and those that aren't often get silenced in some cases. I think you make a point too that the process allows for victims to have a voice and even that gets constrained in certain ways. - Yeah, that's absolutely right. So one of the innovations of the Cambodian Tribunal process was a quite a central role for victim participation. So you had in the second set of trials, case zero zero to the opportunity for some victims to testify about their experiences. And on the one hand, this is really important for the development within the wild landscape of international criminal justice. It's reflective of the increased sort of centrality of tropes about victimhood within transitional justice processes. But on the other, you know, we've always got to ask that some set of more critical cautionary questions, I think, and certainly on the way that those forms of participation were enabled or invited, they were constrained around what could and could not be said. So I mean, the first instance, the fact that it's only a small number of victims that are given this platform, out of a much broader universe of experiences, you know, is it immediately going to limit the kinds of experience and testimony that are heard within the courtroom? But then beyond that, the actual sort of stories themselves had to conform to certain scripts, you know, these victims had to demonstrate their suffering against the sort of almost the map of the evidence base and the investigation at hand. And they had to do so in certain ways. They had to sort of demonstrate their suffering in particular therapeutic terms, right? In particular therapeutic sort of the idioms. And that sort of sense of sort of grievance where it has to be articulating on those terms, I think is also in turn quite limited and limited. - Okay, and one of your points was that if you focus on the trials and you think about transitional justice just in terms of this court that set up, that you miss out on how much broader the process is. And there are all kinds of non-governmental organizations that are supporting of the work of transitional justice. And they're part of the way in which this past is getting framed and understood and constrained. And you point out a couple entities in particular, the documentation center of Cambodia and one individual who's a driving force behind that, the transcultural, psychosocial organization. What's the role of these non-governmental organizations in the work of transitional justice and shaping memory? How does that work? - Yeah, so I think there's two things going on here. The first of which is that these organizations really pushed and advocated for the transitional justice process. And they had a big bearing on the shape and terms the transitional justice in Cambodia, even within the courtroom sort of ended up looking like. These groups were very influential in supporting and sort of almost mobilizing victims, collective sort of victims groups to advocate for and push for sort of reparations, for example. But really ultimately what I'm trying to do with this argument is show the courtroom itself is only one quite small space within which the transitional justice process I suppose was playing out in Cambodia at least. And it's quite telling because the tribunal process got a lot of public attention I suppose in the media, on TV and on radio at certain points. But lots of people didn't necessarily pay a great deal of attention to it. And ultimately sort of public awareness of the tribunal process remained fairly limited throughout. And in that respect, you can look at these sorts of organizations doing more sort of continuous work I suppose in terms of sort of public outreach and public education around the margins, they're not marginal but they were working on the margins to stretch and augment the transitional justice processing in Cambodia. So there's two organizations that you mentioned there that I talk about in the book, the documentation center of Cambodia. And firstly, it's a hugely important organization in terms of advocacy for and about memory in Cambodia. DC Cam was set up in the early '90s. It really is an offshoot of Yale's Cambodian genocide program. And its initial sort of mandate was really around preserving archival materials and trying to sort of pre-figure what was become the tribunal process by essentially collecting evidence. But they're working expanded beyond that. And that's partly down to the role of their executive director, the Chang, who is a very charismatic guy. He's very, this is not a sort of cynical take. He's very good at sort of mobilising and leveraging the organizational support, for example, for secure sort of donor funding. He's very good at working with sort of international partners and other academics and researchers. And so DC Cam have really shifted beyond just that initial mandate of doing what sort of collect an evidence base, I suppose, to a much broader suite of initiatives and interventions that intended sort of promote memory. So for example, they were very influential in the initiation of a new public school history textbook that was introduced in 2007. That's the history of democratic Cambodia. Now they do these things working within an environment that isn't necessarily always particularly welcoming. And so there's a politics there as well. So DC Cam, what they were doing and authoring this new textbook, obviously had to follow certain parameters in terms of what could and could not be talked about. And so that question of sort of politics and memory is really opposite in these cases, too. The same goes for TPO. This is again where I pay attention to this example because I want to show how that relationship between memory and politics is messy but also quite implicit in the work of some of these organizations. So TPO do a lot of psychosocial work where they will go out to the provinces and try and raise awareness about trauma, for example. And there's been real efforts to try and vernacularize that and express or try to raise awareness about sort of mental health and mental wellbeing in and through idioms that are more immediately sort of accessible to a Cambodian audience. And even as they're doing this, I would suggest there's still a sort of politics at work there. And that's partly because when you frame these memories of these experiences again through these therapeutic and trauma for capuaries and idioms, you displace other ways of thinking about the past. And you mobilize forms of memory claim that have their own effects. When you talk about groups of people as traumatized, you pathologize, then they tend to be sort of quite disempowered in their relationship to their experiences and their survivorship. And one of the effects of trauma, a trauma framing in that respect as well as to wish away questions of sort of retributive justice. So questions of sort of retribution and revenge, potentially sort of get located as pathologies themselves or unhealthy dispositions in regard to memory. And that fits that wide politics of national reconciliation that I was talking about previously where lower level commemorage are sort of depicted as these co-victims, I suppose, of the regime. So that there's this sort of set of alignment and affidities there between the sort of the politics of memory and the framing of these sorts of interventions. - So I think in the common theme is whether you're looking at this international court or you're looking at these NGOs, there's a simplification and a flattening of that past, how it's framed, how it's understood. And then if you look at the actual memory sites, especially the most prominent ones, you briefly mentioned this S21, two-all slang museum of genocide crimes and the killing field memorial that you see the same. and even want them, you see the same kind of flattening and simplification of that past that it's fit into like a neat black and white structure. And it supports the way, especially the way the government wants to shape that narrative. How does memory work in a flattening way at these different sites, prominent sites of memory? Yeah, so there's some interesting work that goes on around representation at those, you know, principle memorial sites. And it's changed a lot and S21, the museum staff in particular, done a lot of good work in sort of complicating and adding a bit more sort of a new one, I suppose, to that, that representational work and the sort of histories that are communicated at those spaces. But you know, they can never cry, sort of escape, escape, the history of that site itself, which is, exactly as you say, is quite flattening and it is quite binary, it's depiction of Camarage violence. Again, it's this insistence that only the sort of Camarage leadership were to blame and a broad sort of ellipsis and a broad sort of absence really of explanatory content around the role of lower level Camarage. That has changed slightly where, as I said previously, the lower level Camarage are increasingly sort of argued to be co-victims of the regime. But ultimately, within these parameters that does tend to more, more, you know, mannequin oppositions between the sort of evil of the leadership and the suffering of the Cambodian people more broadly. I mean, these spaces, you know, I worked, I was quite keen during my fieldwork for the book to get away from Penonpan and get away from those more more high-profile commemorative sites. And you know, that was why I did a little bit of work, coupled in CMRE. Now there's this, you know, provincial memorials across the country. But the CMRE, what's my memorial, I think, was quite interesting and quite illuminating in what it told us, because, you know, it reveals, I think, some of the pragmatisms that I think that, you know, are work in other Cambodian relationships to these histories that tend not to be recognised, you know, within the transitional justice process, I suppose, you know. And, you know, what's my site in particular is quite novel, because it picks up on lots of the iconography and the imagery, takes them sort of wholesale from S21, and then displays the azifits sort of in situ authentic to that space and it's not, you know. So, you know, in the representation of what is going on at that particular site, you know, they have to borrow from that broad and sort of landscape of national imagery to sort of authenticate and present, you know, the work that's going on in that sort of local space. And within these local spaces, you know, that you've got other, other sort of challenges of representations, they're still sort of display of human remains, and lots of Cambodian audiences find that quite problematic, because it's a sort of violation of Buddhist funerary practice, you know, where an inauspicious death should, should oblige a really urgent cremation. So, the idea of having human remains still on display actually is sort of is quite upsetting for some Cambodian audiences and lots of the kids think that there are ghosts still at the site, right, because, you know, where there's human remains, there will be spirits. So, you know, there's sort of assumed relationships that people have to these memorial spaces or ostentively memorial spaces, you know, don't really necessarily work in the way that we, or Western audiences or human rights audiences more broadly might assume and expect. So, you know, you have to ask other questions about how these sites are made meaningful, and and ultimately, you know, its bases like, you know, what to my, you know, the space serves other purposes, you know, it has become a site that attracts tourists. You know, there's, there's bust loads of people that visit the ankle famous ankle temples that have to stop off or they tend to stop off and do a quick tour of that space on their way up to the temples and, you know, they will put donations in a box, and those donations are used to maintain a pagoda, and the pagoda, you know, has its own sort of functions in terms of the support and the role that it provides for for the local community, whether that be in terms of sort of food or accommodation or schooling. And so, you know, ultimately, it's just a different set of, set of relationships that, that, you know, might not be visible, I suppose, to the way that we would, you know, assume a memorial tethers or anchors a set of memories about past violence. And like, you know, in my argument, the book is that that demonstrates a sort of a pragmatism, I think, that we should pay more attention to. So, you have an effort on the one hand to use these sites to flatten the past, to present a certain memory of what happened, but in the end, you can't really control how people relate to them, and they're going to understand them in their own way, right? Whether it's monks who are okay with tourists coming because they have the revenues important or people who just use it as a, as a stopping off point or recreational space. So, I think that's one of the contrasts that you were trying to try to point out. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, ultimately, you know, the argument, if there was a, you know, one key argument that to come through in the book, I would want to sort of stress to read as it's that sense of sort of variability in the relationships that people have to these experiences of past violence. And, you know, that there's a problem at work within transitional justice, intervention, research and practice that assumes people, people have quite uniform relationships to these, these experiences. And actually, it's okay to be, you know, to be quite ambivalent or to be pragmatic or to be, you know, even opportunist, right? And in the way that these, these histories are made meaningful and that really comes through in the relationship that people adopted or were adopting in relation to those, those commemorative sites. But it's really, I had an episode on the genocide in Rwanda and I interviewed Tim Longman and there's just so many parallels here that you frame that past. You really want to accentuate the horror so you can cast the government in a savior role. And that you've got to, you've got to cast it in terms of a black and white past. And you erase a lot of the complexity in the process. So in Rwanda, you go to these mass graves site, mass memorials and you have who knows whose bodies are there. They're basically collecting bodies from all sides and just burying them and everybody gets labeled as victims of the genocide. To me, it seems like the very same thing is happening at places like S21 or Watthemey, I don't know, mispronouncing that, but where who knows whose skulls are there? Those pictures that become emblematic of the genocide, they're all victims of the regime, but when you look more closely, really, they could have been participants. That this flattening of the past doesn't allow for the true complexity of the victims one day could have been the perpetrators one other day. That's absolutely right. There's a very interesting history about the politics of anonymity and the politics of flattening in all of that sort of representational work. So in, I suppose, what you describe as an international iconography of the Cambodian genocide, those portrait photographs, those black and white photographs that were taken as people were interred at the S21 site. Exactly as you say, quite often images of women and children victims of the regime, but they're quite often also include members of the Cameroos, lower level Cameroos too. In that period after the removal of the regime from 1979 onwards, lots of people went to go and look for missing relatives in those images. The state throughout that period was always quite resistant to naming those faces. That is partly because there was a resistance, I suppose, to recognizing that the lower level Cameroos then were made up a significant number of those people. Just the use of bodies too, there's this hypocrisy on the one hand, you're trying to be sensitive to the horrific past and help people to move on. And yet there's this complete lack of sensitivity, but putting these bodies on display, these bones on display, and the exact same thing happens in Rwanda that's completely at odds with traditional practices and values and customs, but it's the political imperatives that override everything else. So throughout the 1980s, there were commemorative activities around sites of mass graves. In that period after the Cameroos were removed from power, all of those graves were exhumed and the remains were chemically treated and they were displayed in boxes and later. the 1980s sometimes moved into stupas. In a way, to communicate a message that could be not in any sense sort of equivocal about the past, it was a sort of brutalism. In one dimensionality in this central claim that was legitimating the Cambodian state in the 1980s, that essentially they were the saviors. They prevented and ended a genocide. And what more proof do you need than to see these masses of bones and bone fragments, skulls, human remains, on public display in these boxes across the country. So that was a key part of the state's self-legitimization strategy throughout that period in the 1980s and 1990s. And people still ask questions about why the bones have not, to this day, have not been appropriately cremated. And that question, I think, what, as and when it is returned to, I think will be quite an interesting point of central resolution around how this case is remembered and thought about. But it seems to be almost like a market, international marketing ploy that's pretty successful. Because when you think about the genocide in Cambodia, those black and white photos and that S21 camp, that does come to represent everything that happened. So it does become a powerful visual. It does. And it's also a key feature in the tourist economy, in Panampan and in other places, visiting S21 and visiting the Trong Act killing fields. It's part of the itinerary. If you spend time in Panampan, you'll be held by various different tick-tock drivers throughout the day. And they will almost always ask you if you want to go visit these two sites in particular. And so that sort of question of ownership and the role and function of these spaces, I think, is still quite vexed. There was a controversy a decade ago where the ticket concession to Trong Act, the killing field site in Panampan, was actually sold to-- I believe it was the Japanese Korean concession-- a company who would essentially act as a steward of this space and promised to reinvest some money in the redevelopment of a visitor center. But the idea of privatizing or commercializing or selling off a space that's ostensibly meant to be dignifying these histories and these experiences, raises interesting questions, I suppose, about ownership and about sovereignty and about the ethics of memory that are at work around those spaces. So you can juxtapose that expose on the one hand, with that sense of pragmatism, I suppose, that I was outlining previously about what to my. Because I think there's slightly different stories, I suppose, on the one hand about how a community is really negotiated, its relationship to those sorts of memorial sites on its own terms, and then on the other hand, we've probably got to be slightly cautious about the wholesale commercialization and privatization of these kinds of spaces elsewhere in Panampan. And the sorts of ethics and politics attempt at that. I think another example of this that you offer is this commemorative event that may 20th day of remembrance. And so what the performance that takes place or performances that take place across the country, where they take place, it's a type of unusual reenactment you point out, a new invented tradition. How is this another example of this tension between memory and kind of an uncomfortable manipulation of these spaces? Yeah. So the main 20th commemoration is really interesting. It's changed quite a lot since it was first introduced in the 1980s. I mean, back in those initial sort of instantiation, it was groups, community groups were essentially sort of invited by local authorities to go and testify there and perform their anger. Towards the Commemoration at the burial sites, at the memorial sites, at the sites of mass graves. And it was an invented tradition. It was top down. It was very much directed by the state. But then I think at the same time, when you-- Rachel Hughes' work is very interesting to read on this. She's written about it more extensively than I have. One of the points she stresses is that this still have some residence, I suppose, for the kinds of popular public sentiment that were at play in the 1980s. So even though it was very much an invented tradition, it still charmed through a little bit with the way that people were feeling in that period in the 1980s. And it was a public acknowledgment of the harms that had been suffered. So in that sense, it still tallied, I suppose, or clicked with the way people in that time were remembering what the Cameroos should perpetrate it against them. Now, I can trust that slightly with what's happened more recently. So in Plon Pernant, the two very high profile spaces at S21, but then at the Killingfields as well, you've had much more carefully curated, let's say, performative and commemorative events at the extent that in recent years, they'd even included almost like a battlefield reenactment of moments within the genocide, which is slightly odd, because we'd normally understand a battlefield reenactment is something that would happen around a conflict, a war rather than something that you could possibly do in relation to a genocide. And so that was at the Chowang Exide, where young students from the Royal University of Plon Pernant and the arts had to dress up essentially in black and then reenact mass killings essentially, on a lawn in front of the stupor and in front of all these human remains. And then the narrative arc of the ceremony is culminates with the Vietnamese and the government sort of intervention in 1979, where the state is portrayed as this liberating and savior force that ends that genocidal violence. But the point I'm making is that it's an odd sort of aesthetic. It's an odd sort of catch, the idea that you could even think to demonstrate or display or reenact that kind of violence, as if it has any sort of-- any valuables I suppose are. In the context of a site where human remains are still on display, it sort of-- it great, it sits perhaps slightly un-easily I suppose, with the way that we would assume people engage with those sorts of spaces and sites. So if you look at the limitations of this international court, these performances, these sites of memory, the work of these NGOs, all trying to deal with this particular horrific past, I mean, is there any kind of corrective? I mean, is there any right way of doing this? Or is this just an impossible mission? So I think part of the problem is a set of inflated expectations about what these processes can deliver. That is then necessarily always going to be disappointed. Now, I say that going back to the point I made previously, which was that you had a big push amongst transitional justice organizations, human rights organizations, to initiate the tribunal process. And to do that, big promises were made. The scope, the scale, the kind of justice that was promised, was probably invariably always never going to be delivered on that basis. Now, I say that. And I think ultimately, I want to recognize at the same time the tribunal engaged communities in quite uneven ways. Some people really have bought into this process. They've really taken a lot from it. And they value the verdicts and the findings. Other people have been hugely disappointed. And other people just haven't paid any attention to it. So it's always where this sort of ends up as either a success or a failure is always going to be, I think, quite messy. Now, what I would point to, I suppose, as successes or victories within all of this, is probably around some of that work that has gone on and been led by civil society groups. And it's not innocent. There's lots of interesting politics and problems that attend to that practice, too. But they've made great strides in pushing and augmenting the shape of what transition for justice looks like now. So for example, you know, there's a big push among those groups now to engage in questions around intergenerational dialogue. And by that, what we're getting at is, you know, in Cambodia, you know, this is violence that happened in the 1970s. Lots of, you know, lots of elderly Cambodians that experienced this first hand, you know, have children or grandchildren who don't necessarily believe them when they talk about this, you know, so that sort of absence or questions around the authenticity of these, these sorts of histories, the veracity of these sorts of histories, that's something that, you know, these non-governmental organisations are really trying to pick up on now, you know, really trying to engage young people in conversations and debates about the value of learning, learning about this past and the value of, um, value of sort of remembering the experiences of their relatives. And, you know, I think in that respect, that's, you know, that's work that's going on, not just in the public school curriculum, but in other educational spaces, and in lots of other, um, more creative fields, you know, in, in, um, film, in, you know, art, artwork, art-led advocacy. And, you know, it's addressing these questions with more nuance than I think, you know, the, the, the, the courtroom could perhaps allow for. Pete Manning, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me today, really appreciate your perspective. Thank you so much. Pete Manning is senior lecturer in sociology in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. I've been talking with him today about his book, Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia, Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers. After traveling the globe for the past two years, I'll return home next month for the first of several episodes on the United States. I'll start by talking with the University of Oklahoma professor Carlos K. Hill about his book, Beyond the Rope, the impact of lynching on black memory and culture. Carlos argues that representations of lynched black bodies were never static. It was the framing of black bodies and threatening and demeaning ways that fueled the lynching epidemic that claimed thousands of African-American lives beginning in the late 19th century. But it was also the efforts of African-American cultural and political actors to offer their own more humanized and even heroic representations of lynched black bodies that were instrumental in challenging this American reign of terror. If you find value in the work featured in Realms of Memory, you can support us by telling a friend or posting a review on your favorite podcast platform. I'm Rick D'Adrien. Thanks for listening and see you soon.