Around the National Museum and the Royal Palace, crippled and disabled ex-servicemen beg for alms. Human trunks with no arms, no legs, blind, crippled or paralysed: whether for a mine, a burst of sub-machine gun fire, an exceptionally fierce detention, or for a particularly ruthless torture.



These are the survivors from an army of dead, which in less than five years has come close to 2 million people; a frightful genocide, or rather a self-genocide: between 1975 and 1979 Cambodia devoured itself. Time washes everything away and memory is selective; it only recalls what it wants to recall and it forgets what it finds uncomfortable.

Pol pot

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge have not too distant origins, dating back to 20 years ago or slightly more, a past from which nobody really finds it convenient to retrieve them: they symbolise horror and that’s that; but how and why this manifested is something that falls into oblivion. It’s happened, that’s it; let us not mention it any more. I once used to think that understanding things may make it easier not to repeat mistakes, but now I have stopped deceiving myself.

“On fait toujours la même chose” says the Chinese in “The Human Condition” by Malraux; we always keep acting in the same way, in smaller things and in larger situations, in collective history as in the most miserable individual lives. We can only find comfort in the thought that, through the acquisition of understanding and knowledge, we shall prevent whoever from deceiving us again, or getting us to believe a false reconstruction rather than the true facts as they actually took place.
A palliative solution, of course, but we need to be content with little and somehow find a way out. Otherwise life really becomes a Shakespearian monologue, “a story told by a mad man, bloated with alcohol and rage” Today’s signs of war in the Middle East recall scenarios we have already been through, slogans we have already heard, geopolitical analyses we have already experienced. The reason why we have chosen to describe events taking place 25 years ago in Southeast Asia is that we have the feeling that we are now yet again watching the same old movie.
But we already know how it ends.
After becoming independent in 1953, Cambodia experienced its infancy in an increasingly unstable political and social environment, some kind of minefield, likely to blow up at the slightest mistake.
It borders on Vietnam, which had just won out of the first Indo-China war with the French, as Northern Vietnam, with a great power like China breathing down its neck, and knowing that the United States would have liked to impose a self-serving friendship and use it as a zone behind the lines or as an attacking spear, depending on their requirements, in the impending war against Ho-Chi-Min.

Prince Sihanouk

For over 15 years Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia’s head of state, has conducted miraculous tightrope walking. He chose the path of neutrality, knowing that taking sides would be a disastrous choice for himself and a fatal decision for his country. The western press described him as a stage sovereign, as one who likes to play-act, direct, court beautiful women, as a conceited ladies’ man: on the whole, a passive residue of a too hasty decolonisation process. The fact that after years of exile first and of forced residence in his homeland later, Sihanouk continues to be represented today as the symbol of Cambodia, proves not only that this interpretation had been a superficial one, but also his tactic and strategic skills, his deep identification with his people, as a sovereign who had always cared for the safety of an unfortunate and tormented country during those terribly harsh years.
In 1970 Sihanouk was got rid of through a coup d’état aided by the Americans. He was replaced by Lon Nol, who was in charge of repressing the internal communism of the Khmer Rouge, which till then had existed but had been kept under control, and above all of putting down the logistic exploitation that the Vietcong make of the Southern border of the Country in their guerrilla against Southern Vietnam.
This is how, between 1970 and 1975, the United States heavily bombed Cambodia with the idea of getting rid of the Viet, Lon Nol’s government stood out as a great example of corruption and inability, the popularity of the Khmer Rouge grew in the rural areas, which represented the majority of an 11 million inhabitant country, and prepared a further blow against the regime.
Phnom Penh, “the Mekong prostitute”, fell on 17 April 1975, and what happened after that, with Pol Pot’s dictatorship, is something which is difficult to describe: a flight from towns, with the capital becoming a dead city, deportations and re-education camps, the abolishment of money, the profanation and/or destruction of places of worship. Cambodia sunk into a dark nightmare which did not seem to offer a way out. 1975 was also the year during which the Americans withdrew from Vietnam, once Saigon had been conquered: a disaster from every possible point of view, a political as well as military failure.
Still, there was more to come. Pol Pot, backed by China, dreamed of “a great Cambodia”, the return to Kampuchea Krom, the old kingdom of the Angkor sovereigns, extending in Southern Vietnam. This was when plunders started, as well as slaughters of people living next to the border, assassinations and coup de main. Vietnam reacted, invaded the country and won. It was 1979: Pol Pot escaped to Thailand and continued his battle from there. He was supported by China (and this is even understandable), but he was also supported by the United States and by the West, starting from France, who guaranteed to the “Cambodian resistance”, as it was now described with a delicate euphemism, a seat in the United Nations, while “condemning” the Vietnamese invasion. At this time, the Cambodian genocide came into full light and it was becoming increasingly clear that, behind Long Nol’ coup d’état and behind the long guerrilla against Vietnam, was not a logical analysis of the general situation, of the Countries involved, of the feelings of individual peoples, but a scratchy twopenny pragmatism, a sound cynicism, just an exterior moralism.

Those who today read “The Gate” (published in Italian by Ponte alla Grazie editore, 277 pages, 15.49 Euros), the account of the detention and following escape from Phnom Pehn by François Bizot, a thirty-year-old French researcher who had settled in Cambodia in search of the most ancient Buddhist traditions, will not be surprised in finding in this book some sort of pity even for the most merciless indigenous torturers, but at the same time a clear rage towards the foreign actors in the Cambodian tragedy, that is the Westerns.
“But even more than by the wide-open eyes of the corpses piled up in the sandy rice-fields, I am oppressed by the thought of the approval with which the Westerns welcomed the victory of the Khmer Rouge against their brothers in 1975, so noisy and wild that it concealed the piercing cries causes by the slaughter of millions of people”.
At that time, Bizot was not a pro-communist nor an anti-American; on the other hand his love for the Khmer culture and for the ancestral agricultural world, placed him within a traditionalist line of thought, rather than among revolutionaries, he was mystic-esoteric thinker rather than materialist and progressive. Still, he soon realised that something did not quite add up. “Its seemed as if the peasants who surrounded me, whose monotonous life I had gone to share by settling in a remote village in the Angkor zone, had nothing to gain from the communists’ arrival. In my deep interest for past religions and traditions, which I would have liked to see continue, I would have more readily accepted the opposite of the ideologies that were fashionable at the time. But living there, tortured by uncertainties, and soon forced to face the most absurd contradictions, I started giving way to despair. Ever since 1970, when the Americans reached Cambodia, and up to 1975, the irresponsibility of those whom I had thought were my allies in this impossible search, their boundless awkwardness, their false and conscious naivety and their cynicism, caused me to feel rage and rejection. During those last years of war, I witnessed Americans’ imperviousness towards Cambodia”.


Bizot’s book has a fundamental value in helping the reader understand how an ideology can become criminal and how man can change into a ruthless and imperturbable torturer.
The book also describes the extraordinary survival instinct that existed even in the most desperate situations and the conflicts that may arise within the same soul between abjection and dignity … But in addition to all this, and also to the stylistic beauty of “The Gate”, which prompted the writer John Le Carré, who wrote the preface, to say this was a “classic” work, what most upsets the reader is realising how a world can be easily and foolishly devastated as soon as other cultures, other forms of development, or other interests enter its field of action.



Cambodia, as described by Bizot upon his arrival in 1965, “was rich, beautiful, dotted with rice-fields and temples. None of the great number of feasts, of services to worship divinities, of the most common everyday practices could have been conceived without art, poetry or mystery, because the spirit of the Mani was constantly present throughout the cycle of seasons. No peasant was too poor not to offer the most beautiful fruits of his garden to the guests from the monasteries, where the children of each family were called to offer their service. All children took the vow of adopting for a few years the austere lifestyle of begging monks, by entering the order during a sumptuous ceremony, for which relatives prepared gold, decorations, fabrics and jewels well in advance. Through the fields, echoed the vibration of the gongs and we knew that the joyful cries we heard belonged to those who were accompanying the deceased towards the place of their rebirth”.
Translated by interpres sas