The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

cambodian villagers 283
Khieu Samphan genocidal clique.” These formulaic and state-sanctioned expressions
were genuine and often expressed in conversations among ordinary folk.
Cambodians today have a second generalized fear about violence within their
midst. Although violent outbursts occurred periodically in pre-1970 Cambodia (for
example, a street crowd in Phnom Penh battering a thief ), acts of violence have become
much more commonplace. After nearly thirty years of war, there are now
many more armed men than in prewar times. Fear focuses in particular on soldiers
and former soldiers who still move through the countryside, and there is also
apprehension about police or even ordinary people with weapons who may engage
in robbery, extortion, or hostile confrontations that result in injury or death (see
also Ovesen et al. 1995:28; Boyden and Gibbs 1997:93–94, 127). Military units expropriate
land from peasants and sell it for themselves; forest areas are also taken
over by force and logged for the personal profit of officials. Abuse of military power
incurs no consequences in contemporary Cambodian society, and police often violate
laws with impunity. 25
Another kind of weapon, land mines, creates an extremely serious and frightening
problem in various regions of Cambodia that experienced fighting after DK. With
several contending forces laying down scores of land mines over more than a decade
of civil conflict, large portions of land remain uninhabitable or dangerous even to
cross. Despite demining efforts, great numbers of people are still wounded by mines
and suffer not only physical and psychological traumas but oftentimes problems of
economic survival and social marginalization as well (see also French 1994b). 26
Finally, domestic violence, especially wife abuse, is said to be a serious problem
in contemporary Cambodia (see Zimmerman, Men, and Sar 1994; Nelson and
Zimmerman 1996) that has developed because of the brutality to which people
were exposed in DK. 27 The precise extent of abuse, however, is uncertain, because
it is virtually impossible to know exactly how widespread domestic violence may be
at present or was in the past. So far as Svay is concerned, Ebihara saw no evidence
of wife or child abuse in her original fieldwork, and present-day villagers state that
domestic violence is not a problem within the community.
Our impression is that there was a general decline in fearfulness across the central
plains of Cambodia from the late 1980s through the U.N.-sponsored elections
of 1993. Aid workers report that in the early 1980s villagers hesitated to plant sugar
palm trees (daom tnaot) because they take so long to mature, and there was no way to
know whether one might have to flee the area again, or even if one would live long
enough to benefit from the effort. But when we visited Svay in the early 1990s, we
found that sugar palms as well as coconut, mango, and many other trees had indeed
been planted and were bearing fruit, and that living conditions gradually improved
for most (if not all) villagers. Around the time of the 1993 elections, people had high
hopes that there would finally be peace and with it increased prosperity.
This hopefulness, however, was muted by periodic political instability after
1993; Prime Minister Hun Sen’s coup in 1997, which ousted a co–prime minister
with whom he was supposed to share power; and brutal attacks on antigov