Home » A smile on the faces of the Khmer Rouge victims, the artist’s provocation infuriates Cambodia

A smile on the faces of the Khmer Rouge victims, the artist’s provocation infuriates Cambodia

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BANGKOK – With the number 00721 ​​a young victim of the ferocious Khmer Rouge is identified in the Cambodian Holocaust archives. The boy in the black and white photo of the historical archive of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh looks at the executioners’ target with foreboding sadness of his fate. He’s already been tortured repeatedly, and that portrait is the only one he’s ever posed for in his life, after a summary death trial and visual cataloging to meet the rules of the Communist bureaucracy in the years of Pol Pot’s ultramaoist regime between ’75 and ’79.

Prisoner 00721 ​​reappeared two days ago on many sites and media around the world with the same face, but he is colorful and has the jaunty look of any of his contemporaries today, laughing eyes, lips stretched in a broad smile. It was the idea of ​​a professional retouching old and vintage photos, the Irishman Matt Loughrey, not a very famous one but certainly determined to make his way with a provocation that left millions of Cambodians and others stunned or indignant. alone, to read the sequence of global insults via social media. There were so many that they forced the online news magazine Vice to remove the sequence to avoid further bleeding of readers.

The second image of the series – prisoner 03656, nearly three thousand victims after the previous boy – is even more impressive if possible. Perhaps because it is a teenager with short hair, mandatory at the time, and a cute hairstyle that contrasts with her dark, desperate gaze. In the retouching of the Irish manipulator – defended by few followers of the right of expression – the haircut is the same, but the eyes and mouth seem to belong to another, radiant, optimistic about the future.

“Bridging a gap between history and art” is the motto that accompanies all the images in the Loughrey gallery. But the only merit, albeit insufficient to appease the wave of indignation it has raised, is having brought public attention back to the horrors of that former school renamed “S21” on the outskirts of the capital. There died between 14 and 17 thousand prisoners of all ages numbered – as 00721 ​​- at the height of unprecedented deprivation and torture with sophisticated death machinery.

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“There are gulfs of pain that are difficult to fill with commercial gimmicks,” wrote the enraged netizens. Especially if “the real goal of the author – one of them suspects – is to sell more retouched photos of grandparents and family homes, which can be purchased via Paypal at prices between 45 and 99 US dollars”.

Altering an intimate or friend memory is not the same as embellishing a symbol of the cruelties that fanatical men are capable of. Everyone perceived in the images with the fake smiles of the victims a lack of respect not even comparable to that of a crazy artist who goes to repaint photos in cemeteries. Men, women and children portrayed in Tuol Sleng – we have very rare live snapshots of the others – were all victims of an ideology that wanted them to work in the fields without schools, books and social classes. Pol Pot and his comrades thus exterminated in less than 5 years a quarter of the Khmer population of the former “Democratic Kampuchea” as they called it, including real and presumed dissidents, victims of hunger and disease.

Making the noise accompanying this media operation following the publication of the retouched images even more embarrassing is the coincidence with another dramatic and turbulent historical period in a neighboring country, Myanmar. If not analogous in form, the despotism of the military regime is essentially full of similarities given the level of cruelty already shown by the Burmese soldiers against anyone who rebels.

The population of Myanmar defenseless against half a million regular soldiers, cannot get the external military help they need, as the Cambodian people of the 1970s did not get before the liberation brought by the Vietnamese soldiers. In both cases, it was China that prevented an international response that went beyond trade sanctions, and after Pol Pot’s Maoists, Beijing is now defending – as long as it can – even the generals of coup leader Min Aung Hlaing.

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In the controversy over Tuol Sleng’s inmates’ images lies another small but significant visual analogy with the Burmese facts, a photo that hit the web like lightning. It is the selfie of a girl from Mandalay who, shortly before being fatally hit in the head, showed on her friends’ chats the shirt with the words: Everything will be all right, everything will be all right. The victim, just turned 19, smiled on his own, confident or unconscious, a hope stronger than fear in his eyes.

Exactly the opposite of her peer number 03656 immortalized by the torturers of the S21 center of Tuol Sleng. As his and other portraits of skeletal human beings show, all of them had clearly lost all expectations of the future in their gaze. And so it is – say the critics of the publication of Vice – that those faces should remain etched in everyone’s memory so as not to forget. Beautifying them is not only an ethically questionable operation – others have written – but a possible source of suffering for the many family members still alive.

It was also painful for children, grandchildren and friends to wait for the verdict of human justice against the handful of surviving Communist leaders, subjected to a slow and interminable trial with a life sentence for the few years they had left to live. Among the defendants was Tuol Sleng’s former director of hell himself, who died last year at 77 and known by the infamous nickname of Duch, a meticulous man who ordered his victims to dig their own grave and collected every detail. of the operations to show to his superiors, including photos before the execution.

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Cambodia, “Comrade Duch” dies. He was the chief torturer of the Khmer Rouge


Two of Duch’s leaders witnessed the sentence in life: Nuon Chea, second in command after Brother number one Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, head of state and public face of the regime. But after initially admitting only a role of simple executor of orders, Duch was the only one to take the burden of his actions upon himself and declared himself repentant asking forgiveness from his family for what he had done – in all awareness – in the prison. butcher he runs.

Among the papers of the trial, many similarities emerge with the cruelties suffered in history by other peoples such as the Jews in Europe. But if German laws and international public opinion have been able to seriously monitor the respect for the high symbolic value of the images of inmates in the camps of the SS, there have been no few attempts to commercialize the pain suffered by Cambodians thanks to a lack of attention. media.

Various areas of the famous killing fields, the extermination camps, have become like Choeung Ek a tourist destination and – up to the block of the entrances to Covid – all travel agencies offered the “attraction” of the skulls piled up in the pagodas together with the tour of the temples of Angkor Wat and Sihanouk Ville beaches. But no one had ever managed to make those poor bones smile with a touch of photoshop.

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