The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (58 page)

All the prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng were destined to be executed (of the 15,000 inmates that were successively processed in the prison during its three years of activity, there were only fourteen survivors). The task of the centre was to extract from these people confessions that would retrospectively justify their arrest and provide evidence and names for further arrests. They were not arrested because they were guilty: they were guilty because they were arrested. Guilty of what? Their confessions would tell. Quite often, their transfer was accompanied with instructions regarding the sort of crime to which they should confess, and then torture ensured that an adequate confession was obtained. For the accused person, the final outcome was already decided; only one thing still depended upon his own choice:
the length of his suffering under torture. The only way of shortening this was to produce a confession with names of accomplices, as suggested by the interrogator. All this senseless rubbish was minutely collected and stored in files—with some confessions being 100 pages long!

At the very beginning, Tuol Sleng still dealt with genuine enemies: former collaborators of the inept pro-American regime of Lon Nol. Very soon, however, such customers became scarce and, by the second year (1976), inner purges of the Khmer Rouge movement began to occupy all the attention and energy of interrogators and executioners. Eventually, during its last months of activity, the prison began to devour its own jailers!

When Phnom Penh fell into the hands of the Vietnamese, Duch, who had organised and supervised with tireless and scrupulous zeal the whole enterprise of interrogation, torture and death, vanished in the chaos of the rout. Twenty years later, someone recognised him by accident: he was employed in a remote town by a Christian association for humanitarian relief—he himself (he said) had converted to Christianity. Right now, he is being tried by the tribunal of Phnom Penh, a court jointly appointed by Cambodia and the United Nations to judge the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. He has already confessed: “I am profoundly sorry for all the murders, for the past.
My only desire was to be a good Communist
.”

Tuol Sleng was merely the highest organ of a vast repressive system whose tentacles embraced the entire country. In the south-west area
alone
, thirty-eight small Tuol Sleng centres for interrogation and torture have been counted, at a level immediately subordinate to that of Phnom Penh; furthermore, seventy-eight “killing fields” have been identified, as well as 6,000 charnel-houses. The slaughtering of condemned people was a dreary task, done by hand: the victims had their skulls smashed with a heavy club (their children were disposed of with less effort: they were thrown from the upper floors of buildings). In the conclusion of his book, Deron quotes the testimony of an American officer, Rick Arrant, who, attached to an information service, had to collect reports from Cambodian refugees at the Thai border; he remained haunted by what a woman had told him of the
sound
of those clubs smashing the skulls of prisoners kneeling on the edge of a freshly dug pit: “just like the sound of fallen coconuts hitting the ground.” In 2003, this same officer was to take part in the American invasion of Iraq, where he was sent to . . . the prison of Abu Ghraib! (He has since changed his occupation: back in the Far East, he is pursuing field research for a work on the martyrdom of Cambodia.)

* * *

One mistake must be avoided. Descriptions of the Cambodian genocide strike our imaginations and shock our feelings—the horror is unbearable, and precisely because it is unbearable, we instinctively attempt to dismiss it from consciousness by supposing that these events, in their exotic remoteness, are so foreign to us that they might as well belong to another planet.

In fact, they concern us directly.

When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, several Cambodians took refuge in the French embassy. The Khmer Rouge soon came to the embassy and demanded that these people be handed back to them, with the only exception being those who were carrying French passports. They threatened the
chargé d’affaires
: if their demand was not met within twenty-four hours, the embassy would be invaded and
all
its occupants would be arrested. In order to protect at least the 200-odd French and other foreign nationals who were sheltering in the embassy, the
chargé d’affaires
surrendered all his Cambodian guests into the hands of the Khmer Rouge—thus sending them to their deaths. He made a dreadful decision; but what was the alternative? Who would dare to judge him? A French journalist, however, in order to save one Cambodian woman (whom he did not know; he merely saw her despair) suggested that he marry the woman on the spot. The
chargé d’affaires
still had some 200 blank passports in his office—but he refused to proceed; he knew the journalist was already married, therefore this would be bigamy—which the law prohibits.

The Khmer Rouge perpetrated some two million murders. However, one of these at least should be put on the account of a Western diplomat, a man unable to perceive that, under a criminal authority,
respect for the rules also becomes a crime. This conscientious bureaucrat was truly one of us.

* * *

Coincidence: as I was finishing my reading of Deron’s book, I received a letter from an old Parisian friend—a faithful correspondent who, from time to time, keeps me informed of the latest happenings on the French literary and intellectual scene. He was commenting upon the return to fashion of a certain form of trendy Maoism:

It is probably wrong of me to quote here this illustrious philosopher, whose works I never read (and I do not forget the old Chinese proverb—in fact, invented by Jacques Maritain—“Never take stupidity too seriously”). Yet I am shocked: what an injustice!
The name of Pol Pot has been omitted from Badiou’s little pantheon
. He fully deserves a place there, especially at this precise moment: the “outlandish anecdotes” collected in Deron’s book and “the context of criminalisation” now created by the Phnom Penh trial might otherwise “neutralise and negate” his glorious memory.

2009

The Essays of Liu Xiaobo on China Today

T
HE ECONOMIC
rise of China now dominates the entire landscape of international affairs. In the eyes of political analysts and statesmen, China is seen as potentially “the world’s largest economic power by 2019.” Experts from financial institutions suggest an even earlier date for such a prognosis: “China,” one has said, “will become the largest economy in the world by 2016.” This fast transformation is rightly called “the Chinese miracle.” The general consensus, in China as well as abroad, is that the twenty-first century will be “China’s century.” International statesmen fly to Peking, while businessmen from all parts of the developed world are rushing to Shanghai and other provincial metropolises in the hope of securing deals. Europe is begging China to come to the rescue of its ailing currency.

All thinking people wish now to obtain at least some basic understanding of the deeper dynamics that underlie this sudden and stupendous metamorphosis: What are its true nature and significance? To
what extent is it viable and real? Where is it heading? Bookshops are now submerged by a tidal wave of new publications attempting to provide information about China, and yet there is (it seems to me) one new book whose reading should be of urgent and essential importance, both for the specialist and for the general reader alike—the new collection of essays by Liu Xiaobo, judiciously selected, translated, and presented by very competent scholars, whose work greatly benefited from their personal acquaintance with the author.[
1
]

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 brought the name of Liu Xiaobo to the attention of the entire world. Yet well before that, he had already achieved considerable fame within China, as a fearless and clearsighted public intellectual and the author of some seventeen books, including collections of poetry and literary criticism as well as political essays. The Communist authorities unwittingly vouched for the uncompromising accuracy of his comments. They kept arresting him for his views—four times since the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. Now he is again in jail, since December 2008; though in poor health, he is subjected to an especially severe regime. As Pascal said, “Trust witnesses willing to sacrifice their lives,” and this particular witness happens to be exceptionally well qualified in other ways as well, both by the depth of his information and experience, and by his qualities of intelligence and moral fortitude.

* * *

Born in 1955 in northeastern China, Liu truly belongs to the generation of “Mao’s children,” which, by an interesting paradox, eventually produced the boldest dissenters and most articulate activists in favour of democracy—for example, Wei Jingsheng, hero of the Democracy Wall episode in Peking between 1978 and 1979, who spent eighteen harsh years in prison before being exiled to the West. Liu Xiaobo pays frequent homage to these early pioneers. He was too young to participate in the Cultural Revolution, but this movement—ironically—had a positive impact upon his life.

Like most intellectuals, his parents, who were teachers, were deported to a collective farm in the countryside; having followed them
there, Liu was mercifully deprived for several years of all conventional schooling. He was to appreciate it in retrospect: these years of lost schooling “allowed me freedom.” Escaping the indoctrination of Maoist pedagogy, he read at random a huge variety of books—all the printed matter he could lay his hands on—and thus discovered the principle that was to guide him from then on: one must think for oneself.

After Mao’s death, universities were at long last allowed to reopen; in 1977 Liu joined the first group of students admitted again into higher education, first in his home province, later on at Peking Normal University. He pursued studies in Chinese literature with great success; finally, eleven years later, after obtaining his doctorate, he was appointed to a teaching post in the same university. His original mind, vast intellectual curiosity, and gifts for expression ensured a brilliant academic career; quite early, he reached a large audience extending far beyond the classroom, and acquired the reputation of an enfant terrible in the Chinese cultural world.

In the debates over literature and ideas, his views were refreshingly free from dogmatic convention; yet at this early stage, he did not get involved in political issues. The turning point of his development took place in 1989, with the Tiananmen massacre on June 4 and its aftermath. Shortly before, Liu’s reputation as an original critic of ideas had brought him invitations abroad. Meanwhile, in Peking, the movement of political protest and demands for democratic reform were gathering momentum: a huge crowd of students together with their enthusiastic supporters and sympathizers had gathered and camped on Tiananmen Square, the very heart of the capital.

At that moment, Liu Xiaobo was in New York, having accepted an invitation to teach political science at Columbia’s Barnard College. Like many Chinese intellectuals before him, Liu had first idealized the West; however, his experiences, first in Europe and then in the United States, soon shattered his illusions. During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, he experienced a sort of epiphany that crystallized the turmoil of his latest self-questioning: he realized the shallowness of his own learning in the light of the fabulous riches of the diverse civilizations of the past, and simultaneously perceived the inadequacy
of contemporary Western answers to mankind’s modern predicament. His own dream that Westernization could be used to reform China suddenly appeared to him as pathetic as the attitude of “a paraplegic laughing at a quadriplegic,” he confessed at the time:

While Liu was still in New York, the student movement in Peking continued to develop, not realizing that it was now set on a collision course with the hard-line faction of the Communist leadership—the faction to which Deng Xiaoping was finally to give free rein. But Liu sensed that a crisis would soon be reached, and he made a grave and generous decision: he gave up the safety and comfort of his New York academic appointment and rushed back to Peking. He did not leave the square during the last dramatic days of the students’ demonstration; he desperately tried to persuade them that democratic politics
must be “politics without hatred and without enemies,” and simultaneously, after martial law was imposed, he negotiated with the army in the hope of obtaining a peaceful evacuation of the square.