Familiar Scenes from Cambodia
The television has recently been showing programs about Cambodia, the distant Far Eastern country. The film scenes are of the prosecution of a number of Pol Pot members. These are the last remnants of the extremists who sent thousands of innocent Cambodians to prisons, who were in turn forced under torture to make public “confessions” of some act or another. Confessions such as being engaged in espionage for the West, or of acting against the security of the state… These “confessions” were then followed by executions. Group executions.
What familiar scenes these are. I have seen them before. In fact they are marked in my mind.
One of the survivors of this Cambodian national tragedy is a painter. He is shown to remain faithful to the promise he made to himself in prison. He displays the Pol Pot days on a canvas at an exhibition. As he shows his work, he says till today he does not know the reason for being arrested.
The camera spans on each of the displayed works. In one of them, a woman has been thrown on the floor while being pounded by some men around her. As these scenes appear on television, I see Zahra Kazemi (the Canadian-Iranian journalist who was killed in prison in Iran). And I see so much resemblance between the striker in the film clip and Saeed Mortezavi [a prominent yet notorious Iranian judge at the revolutionary court].
The television screen shows another painting and the narrator says, “They would tie us to our chairs and then beat us.” And with these words Rahman Hatafi (the editor of Keyhan newspaper in 1979 who was later killed in a prison in the Islamic Republic of Iran) comes before my eyes, who could not even move his seat as they had tied his feet together too. Was the person who struck Hatafi not the same person who just last week threatened to kill presidential candidate and former president Mohammad Khatami? Who knows!
The next scene on TV is a woman hanging from something while people around her are hitting her naked body. I look at this scene and wonder: Is this not Zahra Bani Yaqub (a young Iranian woman doctor who was killed in the moral police detention center in the town of Hamedan)?
Another film clip shows a group of men writing their “confessions”. Each one is a “criminal”: an agent of cultural invasion, an agent of immorality, etc. I see a line of young men who are broken in themselves and who continue to write. Names pass by me: Omid, Ali, Shahram, Ramin, Sina, Hushang, etc.
The women portrayed in these Cambodian paintings and clips come to life as prison agents forcefully take their infants away from them. The women scream, and the children cry. And through these I see Iranians children behind bars with their parents. Soon, the children are separated and released into a city where they no longer have their aunts or uncle. One of them writes to me: “My life is full of corpses, that of my mother, father, the terror of corpses does not leave me.”
The film continues, and scenes of corpses arrive. Group executions. Mass graves. I look at these and see the Khavaran graveyard and the fingers that jot out of the ground.
But this television film does not end in the paintings. The camera moves into the city, which is now again full of hustle and bustle. Life has returned to Cambodia after those years of terror. The Pol Pot prison is still standing, but only with a few prisoners inside. These are the remaining Khmer Rouge.
And now it is the time of trial, the court. A court with thousands of witnesses and judges who are destined to portray justice. History always breeds s artists. Artists who have always a story to tell and a message to send: This is the fate of those who do not believe in history. This is for those who look at the world through broken spectacles of power. This is for those whose with every strike at Zahra creates a line in the canvas of history speaking of his own eventual elimination. Just like those who remain in the Cambodian cells all alone, and who have no visitors to expect. Their relatives are full of shame, so shameful that they have even changed their family name.