Moreover, both victims and perpetrators often belonged to the same social classes: Khmer Rouge leaders were urban and foreign educated who exterminated the urban intelligentsia the rank-and-file soldiers were uneducated, peasant children who exterminated other peasants in their hundreds of thousands. People who say this mean that the Khmer Rouge killed their ethnic kin, other Khmer. In Cambodia I often heard that the particularity of the Cambodian genocide is the fact that “they killed their own people”. All the kids of this country are born either from victims or perpetrators” of the genocide, he concludes. “Everyone in this country has been affected by genocide. “Genocide has become the identity of Cambodia,” Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, tells me. Are we as a human civilisation capable of learning “lessons” from history? And consequently, can we immunise the next generation from human violence and self-destruction? How difficult should it be for those parents to tell their traumatic stories? And how painful is it to be faced with disbelief? The idea that it might be impossibile to pass the story of mass violence even to one’s own children poses further, existential questions. “My parents tell me their stories, but I did not believe them,” says Uon Silot, a fiction writer and farmer, who adds: “They said to me – the reason we are telling you is so that the same does not happen again, this time to you.” Image: Vicken CheterianMany Cambodians born after the short but violent period of the Khmer Rouge, which lasted from mid-April 1975 to December-January 1978, cannot believe the horror stories of the previous generation.
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