By Sebastian Strangio

Published by Asia Times Online, August 17, 2010

Motiur Rahman Nizami is among the accused.

DHAKA – A SPECIAL tribunal in Bangladesh has indicted four members of the country’s main Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, on suspicion of committing mass atrocities during the country’s 1971 Liberation War. Those arrested, including party president Motiur Rahman Nizami and his deputy Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, have been remanded in custody indefinitely and are likely to face charges of genocide, murder, rape and arson. Travel bans have been imposed on a few dozen more suspects.

The indictments, issued late last month, were the opening act of Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal, established in March, which is seeking to prosecute those responsible for atrocities during the bloody war that resulted in the country’s birth.

The 1971 conflagration, which erupted when the Pakistani military attempted to prevent the secession of the country’s eastern wing, led to the widespread massacre of unarmed civilians and the systematic execution of leading Bengali intellectuals. Some sources say 3 million people perished during the 10-month conflict, while as many as 200,000 women were raped.

Although attempts at justice began after the defeat of the Pakistani army by Indian and Bangladeshi forces in December 1971, the tribunal process was derailed after the assassination of independence icon Sheik Mujibur Rahman four years later. For the following three decades, a succession of military administrations has swept aside all attempts at justice, fearing it could implicate many within their own ranks.

For Bangladesh, the trials come four decades late, and many of those most responsible are either dead or living in the relative sanctuary of Pakistan. But Mahbub Alam, the general manager of Dhaka’s Liberation War Museum, which commemorates the 1971 atrocities, said that there was a widespread desire to see justice done. “In this country, if you go into each and every village you will find war victims,” said Alam, who lost his father in the Liberation War. “The people who did all these kinds of misdeeds are the beneficiaries of the creation of Bangladesh,” he said. “They are the beneficiaries of the country, of three million martyrs.”

But the government’s focus on razakars — internal collaborators who led, assisted and committed crimes in conjunction with the Pakistani administration then in control of the country – has whipped up controversy in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. The Awami League government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which was elected in a landslide in 2008 in part on promises of a trial, says it has evidence proving the involvement of senior Jamaat members in the 1971 atrocities. Critics, however, say the tribunal is being used to settle domestic political disputes and runs the risk of unleashing social chaos.

Don Beachler, an associate professor of political science at New York’s Ithaca College, said the government has set up the tribunal in part to tar Jamaat-e-Islami as allies of the Pakistani army and “enemies of the Bangladeshi people”. The fact that Jamaat ruled in coalition with the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party – a key rival of the Awami League – from 2001 to 2006 has only provided an “extra motive” to pursue the Islamist movement, he added.

To be sure, Nizami and other Jamaat leaders clearly have reason to be concerned. Nizami founded and led the Badr militia, which committed numerous acts of violence against civilians in support of the Pakistani army’s campaign to repress Bengali nationalism. “Nizami was active against independence and advocated violence against Hindus who were seen as the source of Bangladeshis’ alleged betrayal of Pakistan and Islam,” he said. “On the merits and the politics Nizami has much to fear.”

Given the politically charged nature of the process, however, the relatively open-and-shut case against Nizami and his deputies could be compromised by procedural inadequacies and a perception of government heavy handedness. Some observers fear the arrests of Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid on June 29 were the first sign that the process was compromised by political manipulation.

The pair, along with top preacher Delwar Hossain Saydee, were detained on the obscure charge of “offending religious sentiment” after they compared their persecution by the Awami League government to the sufferings of the Prophet Mohammed. Only once they were in custody did the government move ahead with questioning on war crimes-related charges.

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By May Titthara & Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 27, 2010

KAMPONG THOM PROVINCE–IN the cafes of Stoung district, yesterday’s verdict in the case of Kaing Guek Eev, alias Duch, proved a hard sell. At one cavernous establishment on National Road 6, a broadcast of the proceedings vied for attention with a cheaply made Chinese action film. As soon as the music swelled and the credits began to roll, the mostly young crowd thinned, leaving a handful of elderly patrons to watch the Khmer Rouge tribunal on a second small screen in the back. And by the time the wiry Tuol Sleng commandant stood to attention and the verdict was read out, the room was empty save for two waitresses, who ferried away empty plates and glasses.

Interest was greater, though, in nearby Chaoyot village, especially among those who knew the prison chief when he was a schoolboy. Although most village elders did not watch the verdict – choosing instead to attend ceremonies marking Buddhist lent at Svay Romeat pagoda, where Duch studied as a child – the outcome provoked spirited discussion. Among one group of old women, dressed in flowing black gowns and white blouses, reactions to the verdict ranged from cold anger to forgiveness to pity for the convicted jailer.

Hi Hor, 72, who has lived in Duch’s village since she was born, said she was livid at the length of the sentence, which she said did not match the crimes he committed. “I will kill him and eat his meat if I meet him,” she said as she sat on a woven mat in the pagoda’s flag-draped dining hall. “The court should have sentenced him to his whole life in prison.”

At Kdey Doeum pagoda, located close to Chaoyot, village elders also gathered to mark the three-month lenten period, sitting on the floor of a half-constructed dining hall on the temple grounds. Pich Doeun, a 73-year-old layman, described his own experience under Democratic Kampuchea, when he was sent to a remote part of Stoung district to toil in communal rice paddies and construct irrigation dams. When asked if the verdict against Duch was fair, Pich Doeun expressed ambivalence. On one hand, 30 years was a just sentence, he said, but part of him wanted to see Duch executed and cremated, his bones placed in a stupa and never again removed. “I survived until today because of fate,” he said. “From my point of view, the court should kill him and bring his bones back and lock them up.”

Others, however, were able to separate their anger with the Khmer Rouge from their positive memories of the young Duch. “Even though I was tortured and did not get enough food to eat during that time, I pardon him. Everything passed over 30 years ago,” said 71-year-old Chhum Oeun, sitting at Svay Romeat pagoda.

Despite the evidence presented against him at trial, she said she would always remember Duch as “good and intelligent”, not the cruel ideologue convicted of overseeing the deaths of as many as 16,000 people at Tuol Sleng. Some of Duch’s relatives, too, said they did not view Duch as a monster, and condemned the court for a sentence they said was too strict. “I really pity my nephew,” said one 71-year-old who claimed to be Duch’s aunt, and who gave her name only as Tob. “The court should have charged him for a shorter time because he is too old, and let him live together with his family in his old age. “I don’t know what happened to him to make him become a Khmer Rouge during that time because his parents were good people,” she added.

A few hundred metres down the muddy village road, Brak Chlam, 67, one of Duch’s cousins, said he hoped to see the prison chief again. “I don’t care about the court charging him. What I care about is his life – I want to see him survive,” he said. Brak Chlam said he planned to visit Duch in prison if he could find the money. “I always see his face on TV. I want to see his real face,” he said. “I was so happy when I got news that he survived, because I wanted him to survive. I don’t know what he did in Phnom Penh. I only know that he was a good and intelligent boy.”

While the verdict divided opinion among those old enough to have detailed memories of the regime, younger observers seemed more or less indifferent to the verdict handed down yesterday. At another roadside cafe, the patrons were focused instead on playing chequers and watching kickboxing. Meas Rith, 41, who sat among a group of men watching the fight, said he had not been following the tribunal closely, but that he did not think it fair that Duch could potentially die in prison.

“The court should have sentenced him to about 10 years to give him some chance to spend time in the pagoda in his old age,” he said, before turning his attention back to the television. A cry went up as the two combatants pummelled each other onscreen.

“The people in the rural areas are not as interested about what has happened in the past as people in the city,” said Chai Lign, the owner of the café. The sinewy 29-year-old said he had heard of Duch but knew little of life under the Khmer Rouge, and that many his age were the same way. “They don’t want to know about the pain,” he said. “Some people don’t even know Duch’s face, what he looks like.”

By Sebastian Strangio & May Titthara

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 26, 2010

KAMPONG THOM PROVINCE–THESE days, life in Chaoyot village, a collection of stilt houses nestled along the banks of the Stoung river, proceeds in much the same way it did 68 years ago, when Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, was born to parents of Khmer-Chinese extraction. It was here, in a small concrete home shaded by bamboo groves and mango trees, that Duch spent his childhood years, cycling each day the short distance to the local primary school.

The rustling palms and rutted village track are worlds away from Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the secret Khmer Rouge facility that Duch moulded into an efficient machine of interrogation, torture and death. As head of the prison, Duch is thought to have overseen the torture and killing of as many as 16,000 people, creating a nihilistic whirlwind from which only 14 or so emerged alive.

Kong Suon, 85, the oldest resident of Chaoyot village, was enraged when Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, asked to be set free. (Photo: Sebastian Strangio)

As the Khmer Rouge tribunal prepares to deliver its verdict against the 68-year old today – perhaps the only one it will ever issue – the proceedings have not gone unnoticed in Chaoyot. But the desire to see justice served means different things to different residents; whereas some are unsure how to relate Duch’s crimes to the abuses they personally endured during the regime, others seem to feel their effects acutely.

More than six decades since his birth, Duch has left only a faint trace in Chaoyot. His neat family home, currently occupied by his nephew Kim Luon, still stands, surrounded by a well-tended yard that abuts the road. Dy Thy, 63, one of Duch’s old neighbours, said she heard nothing from him during the 1975-1979 rule of the Khmer Rouge, and that she found it hard to square the quiet young student she remembers with the horrors of Tuol Sleng.

“I supposed that the Khmer Rouge were people from abroad,” she said. “I didn’t know they were Cambodian people – especially not a person born in this village.”

An exceptional student

Duch lived in Chaoyot until about the age of 14. Residents recall that from his earliest years, the boy who went by the nickname “Kiev” stood out as an exceptional student. Sem Thuon, now 69, regularly shared a table with Duch at Wat Svay Romeat primary school between the first and third grades. “I always copied from him during the exams, and he allowed me to copy,” she said. “I never thought that he would become a strong Khmer Rouge leader.”

In many ways, however, Duch’s intellectual journey epitomised that of the Cambodian communist movement. Like other regime leaders, he was a beneficiary of the sweeping educational reforms Prince Norodom Sihanouk introduced in the late 1950s. Intended to modernise the country and expand opportunities in the countryside, the reforms instead created a class of educated but underemployed young men and women who helped pry apart the country’s centuries-old system of patronage. As the 1960s wore on, Sihanouk – the God-King himself – came under stronger attack from the growing ranks of the left.

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Today marks 40 years since the Vietnamese communists rolled into Saigon, forcing the US to beat a hasy retreat from their embattled South Vietnamese client state. The occasion threw up its fair share of iconic images (see right), including the extraordinary sight of a North Vietnamese T-54 tank smashing open the gates of the city’s Presidential Palace, its tracks chewing up the ornamental lawn. Two weeks earlier, on the 17th, Phnom Penh also fell to a communist army, the Khmer Rouge, who unexpectedly beat their former Vietnamese comrades to the prize by an entire fortnight — evidence, they believed, 0f the inherent purity of the Cambodian revolution.

To coincide with the fateful anniversary of Phnom Penh’s fall, a group of reporters and photographers gathered in Cambodia this month for a long-awaited reunion organised by Chhang Song, the last Information Minister of the Lon Nol regime. (I spoke with him in February for my recent piece about the ill-fated Khmer Republic). My colleagues at the Phnom Penh Post have posted a series of video interviews with veteran correspondents Elizabeth Becker, Tim Page and Kurt Volkert, which are well worth checking out. The three speak about their experiences in Indochina in the early 1970s, Becker recalling her meeting with Pol Pot in 1978.

Click here to view the videos.

Forty years on, former participants reflect on the country’s star-crossed republican experiment

By Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, March 18, 2010

FORTY years ago today, the National Assembly convened in Phnom Penh and voted to replace then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk as head of state. The “coup” of March 18, 1970, though it involved no immediate shedding of blood, paved the way for the country’s first experiment with republican government.

The regime that came into being four decades ago was headed, and later personified, by two men: General Lon Nol, a close ally of Sihanouk who became prime minister in August 1969, and Sihanouk’s cousin Prince Sisowath Sirikmatak. During their five short years in power, which ended with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, the two men attempted a bold experiment in Khmer democracy. On October 9, with much pomp and ceremony, they presided over the founding of the Khmer Republic, bringing Cambodia’s centuries-old monarchy to an end and installing a US-style presidency.

Caught between the velvet-gloved authoritarianism of Sihanouk’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum regime and the horrors that came after under the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Republic remains a blind spot in many accounts of Cambodian history. But the event was in its own way a historical watershed, shattering Prince Sihanouk’s royalist consensus and opening up a political rift that led the country into civil war and the more muted political conflicts of the present day.

“One could say that the events of 1970 did polarise the Cambodian population more so than ever before, and transform the system of political accommodation that Sihanouk had practised so well during the late 1950s and early 1960s into one of confrontation,” said Justin Corfield, historian and author of Khmers Stand Up: A History of the Cambodian Government 1970-75.

The final tally of the vote on March 18 – 89 votes for and three against – was a surprising indictment of the Prince, who claimed (and was given) credit for leading Cambodia to independence and uniting the country under his Sangkum regime. Ros Chantraboth, the author of another history of the republican era, said that Sihanouk’s neutralist Cold War balancing act, performed so successfully since the mid-1950s, took a “suicidal” turn at the end of the following decade. By tacitly allowing Vietnamese communist troops to use Cambodia as a staging ground for their operations inside South Vietnam, Sihanouk inflamed local sentiment, something that was only worsened by the corruption and economic mismanagement that plagued the Sangkum regime.

Ros Chantraboth said that the faults of Sihanouk’s regime continued under the Khmer Republic. “For two years, the corruption and injustice were controlled, but started to reassert themselves in 1973 when old officials came to power,” he said last year. “The March coup just changed the image of the regime.”

Nearly from the moment of its inception, the republic started coming apart at the seams. Sihanouk, informed of his overthrow by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on the way to the airport in Moscow, raged against its “traitorous” architects and plotted his revenge. He found a comfortable exile in Beijing, where, on March 23, he broadcast a call to arms against the republican government and formed a broad-based alliance that included the Khmer Rouge, his erstwhile enemies in the maquis.

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By Sebastian Strangio

Published in Asia Times Online, October 20, 2009

PHNOM PENH – AT a ceremony last month marking the construction of the US$128 million Cambodia-China Prek Kdam Friendship Bridge in Kandal province, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said the growth in aid and investment from China was boosting economic development and strengthening his country’s “political independence”.

“China respects the political decisions of Cambodia,” he told his audience. “They are quiet, but at the same time they build bridges and roads and there are no complicated conditions.” It was a thinly veiled reference to the strings attached to Western aid, including calls for progress on anti-corruption reforms, and underscored China’s growing role in Cambodia’s developing economy.

With a still booming economy amid the global economic downturn, China has maintained the momentum behind its strong commercial diplomacy towards Southeast Asia. Cambodia – a small but important corner of Beijing’s emerging regional economic sphere of influence – has been one of the key beneficiaries of the loans, aid and investment largesse. Official “friendship” delegations between the Chinese Communist Party and Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party have proceeded apace throughout the crisis. During a three-day visit to China’s Sichuan province that concluded over the weekend, Hun Sen and Chinese officials announced $853 million worth of new Chinese loans and grants for various infrastructure projects in Cambodia.

The funds will be dedicated to hydropower projects, two bridges and the rehabilitation of the highway linking the country’s Kratie and Mondulkiri provinces. The announcement comes on top of the $880 million in loans and grants Cambodia has received from Beijing since 2006, including finance for the $280 million Kamchay hydropower dam in Kampot province and the recently completed $30 million Council of Ministers building in the capital Phnom Penh – presented as a gift from the government in Beijing.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Qian Hai said Chinese investments in Cambodia as of 2009 totalled $4.5 billion, a commercial success he credits in part to a policy of respecting Cambodia’s sovereignty. “We do not interfere in the internal affairs of Cambodia,” he said. Phnom Penh has traditionally reciprocated by recognizing Beijing’s One-China policy, advocating “peaceful reunification” between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, Qian Hai added.

China’s global sales pitch to developing countries, essentially aid and investment decoupled from prickly issues of human rights or democratic reforms, has in recent years scored diplomatic points in Phnom Penh. But like most Southeast Asian countries, Cambodia has had a complicated and sometimes stormy historical relationship with Beijing.

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This week brought the news that UNESCO has finally decided to list the country’s Preah Vihear temple as a world heritage site, implicitly recognising Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Angkor-era ruin. The announcement came amidst a wave of mewling and sabre-rattling from the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) party in neighbouring Thailand, where zealots from the radical nationalist group Dharmayutra has issued calls for the ‘return’ of Cambodia’s Battambang, Siem Reap and Banteay Meanchey provinces to Thai control. The struggle over Preah Vihear, which has been milked for political capital for more than half a century, is a telling demonstration of how legal disputes can be blown out into the most colourful historical fantasies.

Preah Vihear temple, as seen from the Thai side

The temple dispute, like many of the region’s problems, has its roots in the pre-independence era. 11th-century Prasat Preah Vihear, one of the most stylistically diverse Angkorean temple sites in Cambodia, sits on the northern side of the 525 metre-high Dangrek escarpment, easily reachable by road from Thailand but only accessible via a long and tortuous drive from the south. When the French began delineating the Siam-Indochina border in 1904, it did so with the agreement from both governments that the precipitous Dangrek watershed be used as the ‘natural’ frontier between the two countries, a plan that would have put the temple on Thai soil. However, maps produced after the French border expedition showed Preah Vihear as being in Cambodia, sparking off an international row over the temple’s ownership. It may have been simple oversight; but it was more likely a product of French cultural paternalism — the Gallic self-perception as the ‘protector’ of a ‘lost’ Khmer culture — leavened with a pinch or two of anti-Siamese animus. (For an example of this cloying sentimentalism see The Gate, by French ethnologist François Bizot). What started out as a crude piece of imperial slight-of-hand turned into a source of simmering Thai resentment, simultaneously underscoring Cambodia’s own nascent national identity.

In fact, the tensions between Paris and Bangkok that led to Preah Vihear’s initial contestation can be traced back the establishment of French Indo-China in the late-nineteenth century. After bringing Vietnam and Cambodia under its sway, the French drove their gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok in 1893, forcing the cession of Laos — then a fragmented, bandit-ridden vassal-state of the Siamese. Further unequal treaties in 1904 and 1907 forced Siam to give up additional Lao territories west of the Mekong, as well as the northwest Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, which had been under Thai control since 1769.

The coup d’état engineered in Bangkok in 1932 by Marshal Phibun Songkhram turned the tables a little, leading to the diminution of the Thai monarchy, the renaming of the country from Siam to Thailand (‘land of the Thai’), and a irredentist foreign policy geared towards to the unification of all ethnic Tai within a single state governed from Bangkok. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Songkhram — backed now by Japanese military muscle — reclaimed the disputed Indochinese territories in a short border war against the French in 1940-41, also gaining Muslim-majority states from British Malaya and the ethnically-Tai Shan States from Burma. As much as it inflated Thai prestige, however, piggy-backing on the successes of Japanese imperialism turned out to be a bad choice for Songkhram: after the Japanese surrender, Thailand was forced to cede the territories back to French Indochina, which soon solidified into the borders of the newly independent states of Laos and Cambodia as they are known today.

After the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the Thais immediately took the opportunity to extract symbolic revenge, sending troops to occupy Preah Vihear from the north, a move which set off a game of military cat-and-mouse, culminating in a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Despite what some in Cambodia might think, however, Cambodian ownership of the temple is no foregone conclusion. The Thai government could make a good argument that the French border delineation of 1904 ceded the temple to Thailand, but for the ‘variation’ in the subsequent maps, which was not taken into account by the 1962 ICJ ruling. The temple also sits on the Thai side of a significant natural frontier (the Dangrek escarpment), which forms the border between the two countries for the rest of its 320km length. The question of the temple’s history is also irrelevant. Claims that Preah Vihear should belong to Cambodia purely because it was ‘built by Khmers’ are meaningless, since they would also give Cambodians the right to seize large swathes of Thailand’s Surin, Sisaket and Burirom provinces, which contain other Angkorean ruins. This reasoning resonates emotionally, but is a recipe for dangerous irredentism: the Italian government, by this logic, would have the right to claim the Roman ruins in Bath or Alexandria or Volubilis.

The best argument that Cambodia can make is a purely legal one: that the 1962 ruling settled the question in their favour, and, pending a legal challenge by Thailand, represents the final word on the matter. Any appeals to ‘culture’ or ‘history’ seen through the distorting lens of Cambodian nationalism misrepresent the issue and threaten to trigger off more events like the 2003 anti-Thai riots, in which the Thai embassy and Thai-owned businesses were looted and burned after an air-headed Bangkok actress stated that Angkor Wat ‘belonged to Thailand.’

However, the Thai appeals to history are more vague and insubstantial. Calling for the return of Khmer-majority Cambodian provinces on the basis that they were once under the loose suzerainty of Bangkok is sheer fantasy: borders change, and Cambodia has an equal moral claim to the majority of mainland Southeast Asia on the grounds that the Angkorean empire once ruled it. As for protesting UNESCO’s listing of Preah Vihear, as some 100 Thais did at the temple site last month, this betrays the standard exceptionalist tendency to assert that international legal rulings are fine for everybody else, but inapplicable in the case of one’s own country. As a legal issue, Preah Vihear is done and dusted. Thai nationalists better get used to the idea.

I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My new 7000-đông copy of Kanye West’s Graduation grinds and scrapes in the disc drive, slowly trickling data into my iTunes library. The familiar smell — a blend of chlorine, cooking oil and motorbike exhaust — drifts up from the street outside my balcony and the sun sinks behind a thicket of television aerials and satellite dishes.

I set off this morning to find a small bookstore in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese district, which I discovered there in 2006. It was nothing more than a hole in the wall, piled high with dusty cast-offs from the post-’75 era, including volumes of Marx and Lenin, Russian textbooks, engineering manuals and a few dog-eared English paperbacks. It was here, strangely, that I first came across Gore Vidal’s Washington D.C. I also bought an old English-Russian map of Saigon from the early 1980s and a children’s story book entitled Bac Ho Kinh Yeu (‘Uncle Ho Respects and Loves’), describing Ho Chi Minh’s lifetime crusade against the imperialists and — judging by the watercolour on the cover — his enduring affection for preteens. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where the store was, except that it was across the road from the offices of the Saigon Cigarette Company, with a ten-foot concrete cigarette casting its monstrous phallic shadow over the parking lot.

After spending about two hours winding through the backstreets of Cholon trying to find the right street, I tried a different tack. Searching on Google.vn, I found the address to the cigarette company and gave it to a moto taxi, who had me there in about five minutes. To my satisfaction, the book store (Hieu Sach Minh, 23 Phan Nhan Ton, Q.5) was still there, a riot of paperbacks piled under a slumping awning. Inside, I was like a kid in a candy store. Old books were stacked from floor to ceiling, roughly ordered by language and subject. There was little in the way English fiction, except for a few third-rate Star Wars novels; but towards the back of the store I came across a treasure trove of antique non-fiction and ended up walking out with more than I could carry.

To start with, I bought a three-volume hardback series entitled Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam, compiled in 1966 by order of Harold K. Johnson, US Army Chief of Staff. As well as information on the ethnic minorities of the Central Highlands and the khmer krom of the Mekong Delta, the book has a detailed entry on the Binh Xuyen criminal syndicate, who operated the lion’s share of prostitution and gambling rackets in 1950s Saigon. A band of bandits and river pirates from the region south of Cholon, the Binh Xuyen rose to political and military prominence during the last years of French colonial rule. By the time of the French departure in June 1954, the group had gained control of Saigon’s police force and civil administration; it also controlled the opium trade, much of the city’s fish and charcoal commerce, and several hotels and rubber plantations around the capital. In the countryside, it maintained a string of semi-autonomous fiefs, exacting taxes from the local peasants and maintaining mutually-hostile relations with both the communist Viet Minh and the new government of president Ngo Dinh Diem. But for more than a year after coming to power, Diem waged a war against the Binh Xuyen, and, by the end of 1955, the syndicate had all but collapsed. From this point on, Saigon’s vice rackets were jointly controlled by freelance gangsters and, until his assassination in 1963, by Diem’s own extended family.

Fodor’s 1969 Guide to Japan and East Asia (stamped ‘Property U.S. Army’ on the inside cover) advises the prospective visitor to post-Diem Saigon: ‘This divided nation’, writes the author, ‘is the most dangerous country in the world for today’s visitor. Saigon is definitely not the place for a tourist’. Of course, if danger was your thing, there was plenty of fun to be had in wartime Saigon: One could spend a ‘nauseating’ night crawling the bars and ‘gaudy fleshpots’ of old Cholon, ‘notorious city of the demimonde‘; or, for a subtle change of scene, the nightclubs of District 1, where crones from the first Indochina War were ‘rehabilitated’ to handle the growing demand of American and other ‘Free World’ soldiers. There were also sites to be seen in Nha Trang and Hue, although the latter, ‘sometimes under shellfire’ and fresh from the ravages of the 1968 Tet Offensive, was ‘best avoided’.

An old Guide Historique Des Rues De Saigon, written in 1943 under the Vichy administration of French Indochina, gives a glimpse of the city in the somnolent age of high colonialism, when Graham Greene smoked opium in Rue Catinat and the tricolor fluttered over the wedding-cake Hôtel de Ville. André Baudrit, historian and committed imperialist, makes his dedication to the ‘Amiraux-Gouverneurs (1839-1879), les véritables fondateurs de SAIGON, ville Française’, and describes, in magniloquent passages, the glorious ‘conquet de Cochinchine’. Under a pile of engineering manuals, I also found a Vietnamese tabloid magazine (Doc Thay) from 1952, complete with news about the Hearst mansion, anti-communist propaganda, and photos of actress Jane Russell striking rakish poses against a backdrop of bougainvillea.

Before leaving with my stack of books, I asked the store owner for maps (ban do), unsure whether he would understand my pidgin Vietnamese. Apparently so: he disappeared upstairs only to appear five minutes later with an armful of dusty relics from the Diem era. For half an hour, we unfurled old road maps, US army aviation surveys and, most bizarrely, a briefing on Vietnam’s water resources from the Army Engineer Training School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Many of these maps were fraying and eaten away by damp, some literally coming apart in my hands as I unfolded them. Among other odds and ends, I came away with a French carte routière of Quang Ngai province, inscribed with blue biro; and, intriguingly, a military ‘joint operations graphic’ of Cambodia’s Kampot province, seemingly from the 1980s. I left the store reluctantly, my fingers blackened by dust and newsprint. The entire purchase — five maps, five hardbacks and a magazine — came to just US$40.

To my amusement, a link to my last post about Keith Windschuttle cropped up in an anti-left love-in on Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair’s weblog. In between I’m-not-sorry-cos-I-didn’t-do-it screeds, one Windschuttle admirer described me as:

…a left-leaning blogger who encountered [Windschuttle's] work at university and secretly holds respect for [him]. Thus proving that taking the war of words to your opponents is never futile, even if the gains made are modest, patchy or less than you would hope.

Zounds! Where do I turn in my pinko-leftie badge and gun? That my endorsement of Windschuttle’s views on historiography could be taken as support for his position on the Stolen Generation (which I perhaps-too-subtly withheld) only proves my point about the so-called History Wars — that there’s really no room for nuance of any kind, on right or left. Windschuttle’s work is interesting not because he confirms my preexisting prejudices — I have Robert Manne and David Marr for that — but because he forces me to pare back my political assumptions and approach the subject rationally. That was exactly the point of my last piece (which Yosh, for one, had no trouble picking up on): that we should try to stand above the crossfire of recrimination peppering the trenches of the culture wars, and make up our own minds. And this view — like the belief in free speech or a free press — is hardly reactionary, although the New Left radicalism of the academy, fearing human weakness and the unruly fluidity of words, may have retrospectively made it so. Not that I’m complaining — thanks to an unknown Windschuttle fan, my blog has been pushed over teh 1000 views!!!!1!!

And I had more reasons to be happy this evening. Geelong has started the NAB Cup just as it finished off last year: in devastating fashion, thrashing the Demons by 72 points at Skilled Stadium earlier today. With Tom Lonergan and the Tomahawk on the rise, the only thing standing between the Cats and another piece of silverware is Cam Mooney’s aggression, Steve Johnson’s need for speed and the ever-constant threat of injuries. Bring on September!

After another late night out at Myer’s Place with the lovely Mary K, I regrettably slept through the whole of Kevin Rudd’s historical (but unconscionably early) ‘sorry’ speech. Rudd’s formal parliamentary motion, penned by the cant-prone Jenny Macklin and her advisors, was straight to the point, if a little syntactically-challenged. But from all accounts, Rudd’s prime ministerial address was inspiring, deftly pinpointing the injustices of indigenous history and laying the groundwork for an era of positive and concrete policymaking. In Michelle Grattan‘s words, ‘Rudd has made an excellent and moving start in indigenous affairs’. It’s something of a truism that symbolism without substance is ultimately meaningless, but the Rudd government has made the best possible start.

But if Rudd owned the day, the same can’t be said for his political opponents. After barely three months in the wilderness of opposition, Brendan Nelson and the Liberals have hit rock bottom. While I would defend Nelson’s right to say whatever he wants in public — and live by the political consequences — I did find his speech a little tasteless given the nature of the occasion. This had less to do what he was saying than for the unalloyed political desperation of the act. Nelson clearly wants it both ways: he wants to be seen to support reconciliation, while also staying loyal to his party’s conservative base, who are still ambivalent about a formal apology. But, if anything, he has ticked off both sides of politics. Today’s speech only confirmed to the left that Nelson is heartless, while showing conservatives that, unlike John Howard, he is not a leader who sticks to his ideological guns. This flip-flopping will come back to haunt the Liberal Party.

Apart from Nelson’s gaffe, it has been interesting to see how conservative Australia is coming to grips with ‘sorry day’. In The Australian, historian Keith Windschuttle came out swinging, arguing that the idea of an apology to the Stolen Generation flew in the face of the historical ‘facts’. According to Windschuttle, most of the removals from indigenous communities were of teenagers (as opposed to toddlers or infants, as is commonly assumed), many of whom were given jobs, apprenticeships and other opportunities in the Australian community. He argues further: ‘there is another very good reason why it was not the policy of the government to remove Aboriginal children from their parents: it wanted them to go to school. It pursued this objective with both action and money’. From this evidence, Windschuttle disputes the idea that Australian government policy towards indigenous Australia was ‘genocidal’ in intent.

In the left-liberal circles in which I move, these are not popular views. But I’m not sure where I stand on Windschuttle. On the upside, he lacks the Albrechtsonite zeal and patriotic boosterism of so many of his conservative colleagues. He also argues his case rationally and presents hard evidence in support of his conclusions. And the downside? Probably his reputation: in ‘polite’, socially-conscious company, talking about Windschuttle is like handling social dynamite. I first learned this in 2003 or 2004 while studying in the history department at Melbourne University, where Windschuttle has long been persona non grata. Before I’d even read any of his work for myself, indigenous academics like Tony Birch had painted him as the devil incarnate, a right-wing bigot driven by intellectual mendacity and the racist imperative of his historical ‘denialism’. However, after reading some of Windschuttle’s views on historical methodology, I began to question his standard depiction as a ‘hate-figure’ of the left.

Windschuttle’s central view of history, put forward in his 1997 book The Killing of History, is that the fashionable posturing of literary postmodernism — ‘there are no facts’ — undermines history’s authority by removing the bedrock of factual evidence upon which all its claims are made. If, as some postmodernists and poststructuralists claim, history writing is an ‘inherently political’ process, and all historians are mere mouthpieces for a latent and unacknowledged political bias, little — other than ideology — remains to orient their conclusions. Similarly, if historians jettison the possibility of objective judgment, the evidential logic that leads a historian to their conclusions is less important than whether their conclusions serve a social or political ‘end’ — whether, in short, they express a ‘good’ bias or a ‘bad’ bias. What then is historical scholarship but a form of covert political activism, a bold declaration of ideological partisanship?

In Windschuttle’s view, history should never be the handmaiden of an ideological agenda. Instead, it should aim for objectivity and critical distance, in the noble tradition of Thucydides and the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke. As Windschuttle himself puts it:

In defending the ability of historians to get to the truth of the matter, or at least of some matters, I am referring to the traditional, empirically-grounded practice of historians rather than to those speculative works that claim to find some great underlying force — be it geography, ideology or the imperative of the class struggle — driving the historical process.

Certainly, many historical conclusions will have far-reaching political implications; but it is the historian’s duty to try and remain aloof from the political passions of his or her era. There will also be many instances where gaps in the historical record preclude a firm establishment of the facts; but in these cases debate and historical interpretation should flourish, always anchored by a shared belief in the possibility of reaching an objective version of events. Where uncertainties and ambiguities abound, weight of evidence and subtlety of argument exalt the good historian and doom the mediocre. ‘Conservative’ or not, I see no reason to disagree with Windschuttle on any of these points.

Where he wades into more uncertain waters is in his claim that much of the historical writing on which we base our assumptions of the ‘Stolen Generation’ and the massacres in Van Diemen’s Land — particularly the work of Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan — was ideologically motivated and empirically unsound. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2001) Windschuttle argues that much of the evidence in these works was bent, twisted or simply fabricated in order to support the claim that Australian policies towards indigenous peoples were ‘genocidal’ and that black resistance to white settlement in Van Diemen’s Land constituted a ‘war of liberation’ against European rule. I can’t make any judgment as to the veracity of these claims, since I don’t have a good enough knowledge of the historical texts and documents which are at the centre of these controversies. Whether Windschuttle’s argument truly applies in the case of the so-called ‘black armband’ historians — or whether Windschuttle himself practices what he preaches (and Robert Manne argues that he doesn’t) — is still unclear to me.

Whatever the truth — and I suspect it is buried somewhere in the heavily-mined no-man’s-land between the Bolts and the Birches — Windschuttle’s arguments should be weighed on their merits, not on any presumption of political guilt. University students should be encouraged to read Windschuttle critically for themselves and make up their own minds about his unfashionable views, rather than taking the word of tenured leftist academics who confuse teaching with dictating, education with activism.