The Tragedy of Cambodian History Revisited

THE TRAGEDY OF CAMBODIAN. HISTORY REVISITED DaviäCbanäler "Tragedies should properly be classed as the same or different mainly in virtue ofthe plot, that is to say those that have the same entanglement and denouement. Manywho entangle well are bad atthe denouement." Aristode, Poetics xvm.3 I have used diis tide, widiout die "revisited," diree times before: first for a talk I gave at the University of British Columbia in 1978, published as an article a year later. I used it again in 1991 for a book thatdealtwidi Cambodian political history since 1945. Earlier this year I used die tide for a talk I gave atsais. Since diat talk events in Cambodia have led me to alter the ending of die paper, swinging from cautious optimism to cautious pessimism about Cambodia's future. In these works I meant different things by the word "tragedy." The talk, the article, and die book were written atdifferenttimes in my life and atdifferent points in Cambodia's recent past Because I have spent the lastdiirty-fouryears as an observer of Cambodian history, my views have altered as history has altered course; my own ideas have changed in response to events in Cambodia or to other stimuli. On the earlier occasions the word "tragedy" seemed to describe the wastefulness and losses that so many Cambodians had suffered, pardy at die hands ofdieir political leaders and pardy from outside causes. And, aldiough David Chandler is professor of history at Monash University in Australia. For the past year he has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he studied documents from die S-21 interrogation center. His most recent book is Brother Number One: a Political Biography of Pol Pot (1 992). 79 80 SAIS Review SUMMER-FALL 1994 I wanted to evoke the sadness diat "tragedy" implies, I realized diat "tragedy" also describes a narrative pattern of Cambodian political history, in terms of such ingredients as leadership, social structure, and power relations. Inside diis tragic format it was easy to see the history of Cambodia's leaders in terms of changes offortune, tragic flaws, pride, and huge, unmanageable forces, as well as what the Greeks called moira, or "fete." Before revisiting the concept with all its literary associations, it is useful to dwell for a moment on my earlier work. The Tragedy of Post-1975 Cambodia In 1978 Cambodia's tragedy was not so much historical as itwas a case of ongoing suffering. As 1 spoke Cambodians were saddled with the Khmer Rouge, home-grown fanatics who were still in power at that time. It was the "home-grown" aspect that had attracted my attention and bewildered me. So did the apparendy limidess ferocity of the regime, which was at odds widi my sentimental and Orientalist recollections ofrhe country, where I had lived and worked for two years in the early 1960s. By the time I revised die paper for publication the Khmer Rouge had been overthrown. An untried, Vietnamese-sponsored regime had taken their place. The tragedy had progressed into another act—perhaps the last if "nation-state" were to be part ofthe tide. The Vietnamese occupation ofCambodia, after all, seemed to fit into long-standing Vietnamese notions whereby Cambodia and Laos would become federated widi Vietnam, reconstituting the hybrid "IndoChina " diat die French had invented a century before and reimposing Vietnamese imperial boundaries that had existed circa 1825. As the 1980s progressed and rhe Vietnamese occupation evolved into an open-ended, relatively peaceable protectorate I asked myself: did Cambodia's disappearance as a nation-state matter? Were protectorates and die loss of independence the worst that could befall a people? Was nationalism as virtuous as it had seemed when clodied in anticolonial or anti-American garb? What was more important in this case was diat Pol Pot and his apparatchiks had left the country. The massacres were over. Those who had survived were busy rebuilding dieir society and their lives. I probably wouldn't have given a talk or a paper with this tide in diose days. Nonetheless, watching Cambodia in die 1980s was a depressing avocation . I visited Phnom Penh very briefly in 1981 and was...