{"id":6095,"date":"2026-06-01T17:01:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelgkarnavas.net\/blog\/?p=6095"},"modified":"2026-06-01T17:01:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:01:49","slug":"cambodia-reflections-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelgkarnavas.net\/blog\/2026\/06\/01\/cambodia-reflections-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"REFLECTIONS ON MASS ATROCITIES, HISTORICAL MEMORY, AND THE ECCC LEGACY: Cambodia \u2013 Past, Present, Future – Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

CAMBODIA: An Ongoing Love Affair<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.<\/p>
\n

\u2013 William Faulkner<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote><\/p>\n

There are places that enter your life quietly.<\/p>\n

And then there are places that take hold of you completely.<\/p>\n

Cambodia belongs firmly to the second category.<\/p>\n

My attachment to the country did not arrive all at once. It emerged gradually \u2013 through late afternoons along the Tonl\u00e9 Sap as light settled over Phnom Penh in muted gold; through monsoon rain gathering over the Mekong before finally breaking against corrugated roofs; through the strange stillness of roads that had once carried armies, refugees, and evacuation columns and now carried schoolchildren, market vendors, and motorbikes balancing entire families.<\/p>\n

Long before I became involved with The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia<\/a> (\u201cECCC\u201d), long before court filings, witness statements, and legal arguments came to define much of my professional life in Cambodia, the country had already begun its quiet work on me in ways I only came to understand years later.<\/p>\n

I have often tried to explain to friends why Cambodia affects people so deeply. Some arrive intending to stay a few weeks and end up staying for years. Others leave physically but never fully depart psychologically. It is difficult to explain unless one has lived there, not merely passed through temples, hotels, or conference rooms, but lived within the country\u2019s rhythms long enough for its contradictions to become familiar.<\/p>\n

Cambodia has a way of collapsing time. The past never feels entirely past.<\/p>\n

You see it in the faces of elderly survivors sitting in silence outside roadside shops in the late-afternoon heat. You hear it in conversations that circle history without fully naming it. You feel it in stretches of countryside where rice fields now grow over former killing grounds, with almost unbearable normalcy. And yet life continues everywhere with astonishing vitality \u2013 children racing through alleyways at dusk, monks laughing behind pagoda walls, wedding music spilling into the streets late into the night, families gathered on tiny plastic stools before sunrise, sharing bowls of kuy teav<\/em><\/a> (Cambodia\u2019s answer to its widely regarded Vietnamese cousin, ph<\/em>\u1edf<\/em> <\/a>) and iced coffee.<\/p>\n

That coexistence \u2013 an unbearable historical rupture alongside extraordinary gentleness and resilience \u2013 was perhaps what first drew me in. But it is only part of the story. Cambodia is not simply a place defined by memory. It is a place where memory continues to inhabit the present. And that, I think, is where this story properly begins.<\/p>\n

I first arrived in Cambodia in 1994.<\/p>\n

Since then, I have often thought of it as a third home \u2013 after Greece and the United States. What began as temporary professional work gradually evolved into something far more enduring: a relationship not only with a country but also with its people, its silences, its layered historical consciousness, and its uneasy relationship with remembrance and forgetting.<\/p>\n

During the mid-to-late 1990s, I was fortunate to participate in legal training programs for Cambodian judges, prosecutors, and defense advocates, many of whom would later join the newly emerging Cambodian Bar. It was a period of transition unlike anything I had previously encountered.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cambodia was still recovering from decades of conflict, political turmoil, institutional breakdown, foreign domination, and social disruption. The first democratic elections had taken place a couple of years before I arrived. King Norodom Sihanouk had resumed the throne amid significantly changed constitutional circumstances. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia\u00a0<\/a>(UNTAC) had left, leaving the country in a state of cautious transition, balancing hope with fragility, reconstruction with ongoing uncertainty.<\/span><\/p>\n

The atmosphere of Phnom Penh in those years is diff<\/span>icult to convey fully to those who did not experience it. The city had a strange mix of exhaustion and improvisation. Entire neighborhoods stayed dark after nightfall. Power failures were routine. Roads flooded easily during the rainy season and turned to dust in the dry months. The riverfront, now crowded with caf\u00e9s, tourists, and redevelopment, was quiet in a way that seems almost unimaginable today. Many buildings still bore visible traces of abandonment, neglect, or war. Bullet marks and decay had not yet been erased behind glass towers and condominium projects.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there was unmistakable energy \u2013 a sense that the country itself remained unfinished, still searching for what it might become.<\/p>\n

NGOs arrived in waves. Phnom Penh briefly became a chaotic ecosystem of diplomats, aid workers, journalists, consultants, academics, idealists, opportunists, intelligence officers, development experts, election monitors, and professional do-gooders, all orbiting in different ways around the idea of rebuilding a society that had endured one of the twentieth century\u2019s great catastrophes. Armored Land Cruisers passed street vendors selling noodles beneath faded colonial balconies. Journalists traded rumors in caf\u00e9s late into the evening, while aid agencies drafted proposals for institutional reform that often seemed both ambitious and impossible.<\/p>\n

There was a pervasive sense \u2013 sometimes sincere, sometimes na\u00efve \u2013 that Cambodia was beginning anew.<\/p>\n

Yet beneath the optimism, instability lingered. Political violence had not vanished. Security anxieties remained real. The country still felt fragile in ways outsiders sometimes underestimated. Reconstruction often appeared improvised rather than planned, less dependent on coherent institutional continuity than on improvisation, personality, exhaustion, and momentum.<\/p>\n

During those years, daily life for many of us revolved around a small constellation of places, people, and rituals \u2013 above all, two newspapers: The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post.<\/p>\n

This was before social media, before smartphones, and before permanent digital distraction fragmented attention into endless noise. People still waited for newspapers.<\/p>\n

The Cambodia Daily arrived each morning with disciplined investigative reporting and a seriousness that gave the paper influence far beyond its circulation. The Phnom Penh Post, particularly under the urbane \u2013 and, in the political atmosphere of that period, distinctly courageous \u2013 Michael Hayes, appeared every other Friday and became something more than a newspaper. It functioned almost as a long-form intellectual salon in print: a gathering place for journalists, historians, diplomats, aid workers, and longtime Cambodia observers who argued constantly about a country none of them fully understood, except perhaps through their shared fascination with it.<\/p>\n

Hayes encouraged argument as much as reporting. Ideas were meant to be debated, not merely presented. The paper regularly carried deeply reported stories, provocative commentary, unexpected scoops, and richly photographed features that gave the country a texture and immediacy often missing from more conventional foreign coverage. I occasionally contributed pieces myself, some of them hardly less provocative than the material already filling its pages.<\/p>\n

\"\"I can still remember vividly the peculiar anticipation surrounding the paper\u2019s arrival every second Friday afternoon. Before long, copies of the newly delivered Phnom Penh Post would begin appearing across tables at the Foreign Correspondents\u2019 Club \u2013 one of the principal watering holes for Phnom Penh\u2019s expatriate community at the time \u2013 where patrons often sat absorbed in its pages before conversations gradually gave way to reactions, disagreements, speculation, and, not infrequently, intense argument. One sensed, during those afternoons, a city actively thinking aloud about itself.<\/p>\n

It was not merely journalism. It was atmosphere.<\/p>\n

And atmosphere mattered because Cambodia\u2019s modern history was never neatly confined to archives, textbooks, or memorial ceremonies. It remained present everywhere \u2013 in politics, in silence, in caution, in social hierarchy, in conversations cut short, in the uneasy relationship between public narrative and private memory.<\/p>\n

Years later, I found myself more directly drawn into that history when I became involved with the ECCC, first representing Ieng Sary <\/a>and later Meas Muth<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ECCC had been established to prose<\/span>c<\/span><\/strong>ute senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea<\/a> and those most responsible for crimes committed between 17 April 1975 and 6 January 1979 \u2013 the period of Khmer Rouge<\/a> rule under Pol Pot<\/u>. My involvement with the tribunal ultimately lasted for the better part of thirteen years.<\/p>\n

Over time, Cambodia ceased to be merely a place where I worked. It became deeply interwoven with my professional life and, increasingly, with my reflections on ideology, violence, law, historical narrative, and the limits of legal accountability.<\/p>\n

Like many people who come to Cambodia from afar, I arrived knowing its history before I knew the country. The Cambodia I thought I understood was assembled from books, documentaries, the film The Killing Fields<\/em><\/a>, and the haunting images preserved at Tuol Sleng<\/a> (then notorious S-21 prison). It was a Cambodia viewed through the prism of Democratic Kampuchea, where the enormity of the tragedy often eclipsed everything that came before and everything that followed. In much of the Western imagination, Cambodia remains inseparable from that catastrophe, as though an entire nation had become compressed into a single chapter of its history.<\/p>\n

Years later, one of the more unexpected turns in that journey was meeting renowned war photographer Al Rockoff<\/a>, whose experiences during the fall of Phnom Penh helped inspire portions of The Killing Fields<\/em> and whose character was portrayed in the film by John Malkovich. By then, I had already spent years working in Cambodia, before the ECCC. Speaking with someone who had witnessed those events firsthand brought a different perspective entirely.<\/p>\n

When Rockoff later appeared before the ECCC, I found his testimony among the most compelling I heard during my years at the Tribunal. Perhaps that is unsurprising. He recounted the events surrounding the fall of Phnom Penh not as a politician, soldier, historian, or lawyer, but through the eyes of a photographer. His account possessed both breadth and precision: a cinematic awareness of the larger historical moment, coupled with acute attention to detail, composition, and human experience. What struck me most, however, was its restraint. The testimony was neither sentimental nor overtly emotional. Instead, it reflected the detached observational discipline of someone whose profession required him first to see and only then to interpret. In many respects, that very restraint made the account so powerful.<\/p>\n

The Cambodia one comes to know through living there is a country of seeming contradictions:<\/p>\n