Another guest post by Mo.So, back in Berlin, I’m at a brunch gathering hosted by a couple I’ve been friends with for a long time, and afterwards, I’m left thinking what it would be like to call up Khieu Samphan. Who is awaiting trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Phnom Penh, as the former head of state of Democratic Kampuchea.
But yes, brunch. My friends are a German-American couple, intellectual types with Green party sympathies, who write about the Balkans and German politics. I hang out in the kitchen where the food is. The hosts are serving bread and cheese, yoghurt and vegetarian borscht, and fifteen or so other guests have brought cake, hummus, quiche, and meringues. I only brought sugar cane candy from Siem Reap. It’s a cornucopia of slightly discordant international foods, as usual in such circles, my circles. It’s good, but there’s a serious shortage of papaya salad, and I think there’s mayonnaise in the hummus.
"So, you were in Cambodia, how was it?", my friend asks, opening the conversation up to an older couple standing next to me, and then moving on to greet the newest arrivals to the party. The couple I’m talking to is well into their sixties and I gather he used to work as a writer for an alternative daily newspaper in town, though I’m not catching his name. We talk about Siem Reap, where they’d been during a six-week trip through Southeast Asia three years ago. They explain the privatization of Angkor to me which I hadn’t known about. And we start talking about the mutually familiar weirdness of being offered a trip to the Killing Fields, some action at the shooting range, or a pretty girl, in the same breath, by Phnom Penh’s tuk-tuk drivers. The conversation moves on to Cambodia’s sudden economic development and the deals made by its political leadership. It looks like primary accumulation to me, I say, citing Marx: the strongest and most well-connected take over communal property, because they can, and now have money to "invest". And it’s capitalism ever after. They nod, obviously familiar with the terminology. He talks about the absence of a welfare system even in a supposedly socialist country like neighboring Vietnam, and the corrupt dealings of "the party" there. Vietnam is where they spent most of their time in Southeast Asia, and he feels somewhat close to it, having protested against the war so much in the 1960s and 70s. She doesn’t talk very much. Many of the people in power enriching themselves in Cambodia were originally put there by the Vietnamese, after they had liberated the country. Former Khmer Rouge cadres, I echo my Cambodian History 101 knowledge.
"Oh yes, the Khmer Rouge", the white-haired, soft-spoken guy says. "Before I left Berlin, an old friend said I should call up Khieu Samphan while I’m there. He’s got his number and Khieu, or Samphan, is really friendly and approachable, my friend had said. Well, he was, before he was jailed. But I didn’t. What do you ask a guy like that."
He smiles, uncomfortably, I think. I don’t really know what to say. Yes, what do you ask someone with that much blood on his hands.
To cut it short, I later figured out the soft-spoken, white-haired guy with the mustache and black horn-rim-glasses was a leader of the May 1968 uprising in Germany (one of the better things to happen to this country, in my opinion) who, after the collapse of that movement, became a committed Maoist and headed one of the more vocal and extreme pro-Beijing sects, let’s call it KPD/XY, one of the
K-Gruppen, K-groups, as they’re known here. He turned away from Maoism in 1980. Many of his friends got involved in the Green party right after. Before that, like many of his comrades, he had vocally supported the revolutionary struggle of Kampuchea’s peasants and workers. At least, that’s what they called it. We know it was something less benign, and they probably could have known, too.
The conversation sort of fizzles and the couple gets ready to head home. As they leave, another guest, a lady with long red hair who had introduced herself as the grandma of the party earlier, and whom I recognized as that weird hippieish dancer from my friends’ last party, turns to him and asks: "Hey, did you read the article I had in the newspaper last week? About the 30-year-anniversary of the Green party?" He shakes his head. "I didn’t give the KPD/XY such a bad rap as you guys usually get, she smiles, you end up looking quite good."
"Better than we deserve, I’m sure", he grumbles, and leaves.
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