Abstract
‘Delve into the dark side of Cambodian history with a visit to Tuol Sleng Museum, essential to understanding the pain of the past’, Lonely Planet Cambodia claims. During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–9) the Tuol Svay Prey high school in Phnom Penh was used under the codename S21 as a torture-and-execution centre. In 1979, the government of the newly established People’s Republic of Kampuchea had it refurbished as memorial. Today, people from all over the world visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and shoot videos and photos they later on post on blogs, Facebook pages and other social media. This article explores how social networks affect the production, distribution, and consumption of Tuol Sleng as site of memory. It focuses on two digital platforms: Flickr and YouTube. The article is divided into three parts. First it examines how Flickr and YouTube can be used as inadvertent archives providing material for a visual history of Tuol Sleng. Second, it analyses the processes of remediation people resort to for communicating and sharing their experience in the museum. Finally, it explores the mechanisms of community building, and their limited effects, as users watch and comment on these accounts of Tuol Sleng.
In August 1979 journalist John Pilger, reporting for the Daily Mirror, traveled to the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, as Cambodia had been renamed after the collapse of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea earlier that year. There, he filmed with British director David Munro Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia. The documentary movie depicted the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime between April 1975 and January 1979 and the efforts of reconstruction undertaken by the newly established authorities with the support of Vietnam. Pilger and Munro were not the only ones covering news in Cambodia at that time. Filmmakers Jérôme Kanapa from France, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann from the GDR were also guests of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. All visitors were taken to the same spots. Unsurprisingly, their movies showed the same things: a makeshift hospital with starving children and desperate nurses, rice distribution by the ‘liberating’ Vietnamese army, Khmer Rouge troops who seemed completely lost now that their commanders had fled to the safety of jungle bases on the Thai border.
The apex of the ‘guided tour’ foreign visitors were given in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea was Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. It was the school the Khmer Rouge political police santebal had used as facility under the codename S21 to torture and kill thousands of purged Khmer Rouge cadres and military, with their families. The site was discovered on 7 January 1979, when the Vietnamese Army and the Front (a mix of Khmer Rouge defectors and Hanoi-trained veterans of the historical Communist Party of Kampuchea) victoriously entered the capital city. The last prisoners had just been slaughtered. Comrade Duch, the commander of S21, had fled in panic, leaving behind all the prison’s files. Once the documents were cleared, the new government had S21 refurbished as ‘Tuol Sleng Museum for Genocidal Crimes’. Although the museum opened formally in July 1980, foreigners could already visit it by March 1979. According to anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood, they were the initial targets of the country’s newly launched politics of memory. A report from the Ministry of Culture, Information and Propaganda dated October 1980 stated that the aim of the museum was ‘to show the international guests the cruel torture committed by the traitors to the Khmer people’. Upon returning to their countries, the visitors would tell what ‘really’ happened during Pol Pot’s reign of terror (Ledgerwood, 2002: 108,110).
In a context of tense relations between the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and the international community, those who travelled to Cambodia were primarily journalists and scholars sympathetic to Vietnam or coming from ‘brother countries’. The situation changed in the 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union (1989) deprived Vietnam of the economic support it needed to occupy Cambodia. Vietnamese advisers and troops had no choice but to withdraw back to Vietnam. Peace talks between warring factions (the Cambodian government, former king Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and anti-communist nationalists) led to the Paris Agreements in 1991. The United Nations monitored the political transition of Cambodia into multi-party constitutional monarchy (1992–3). The country opened its doors anew to westerners. The defection and arrest of the last Khmer Rouge guerrillas in 1996–9 made Cambodia a safer place. Within a few years, it became a trendy destination (2.4 million visitors in 2010). Tuol Sleng is now a tourist hotspot, ‘essential to understanding the pain of the past’ as Lonely Planet Cambodia claims. People from all over the world visit the site. What only a handful of leftist journalists could document in 1979 turned into a mass-mediated set of images circulated across borders.
The article explores how social networks affect the production, distribution and consumption of Tuol Sleng as site of memory. My analysis centres on two well-known digital platforms: Flickr and YouTube. The scope and diversity of the contents they feature make them complex objects of study. One finds more than 22,000 photos of Tuol Sleng on Flickr and about 4170 videos on YouTube (October 2013). The article is based on a sample of each application. Social media by definition blur boundaries between amateur and professional. It would be inaccurate, then, to say that I focus on amateur material. Nevertheless, my analysis involves photos and videos produced by individuals rather than media companies and international institutions. I look at the content and aesthetics of photos and videos, and the discursive frames, mostly captions and comments. The article centres on two aspects of the material found on Flickr and YouTube: its epistemological function – how it can be used to produce knowledge about Tuol Sleng and Khmer Rouge-related politics of memory; and its performative function – how it participates in the making of memory for both those who visited the museum and share their visual recordings on Flickr and YouTube, and users who watch and comment on these recordings.
Inadvertent archives for a visual history of Tuol Sleng
In 2009 there was a ‘graffiti attack’ in Tuol Sleng. Italian artist Fabrizio Cammisecra stencilled onto the walls of the museum a little boy holding a sign reading ‘stuDIED here 1975–1979’ and his tag name #codefc. This action caused a scandal in Cambodia and among Khmer communities abroad. Cammisecra removed all photos of the work from his website and Facebook page. The museum walls were cleaned. The event could easily have been forgotten but for dispersed photos on Flickr showing the graffiti in different parts of Tuol Sleng (Peter van Aller, Mark Roy
Mark Roy, Tuol Sleng Prison 1 (1 April 2009), Flickr/CC.
Visual reflections of Tuol Sleng’s transformation
From the start Tuol Sleng was conceived ‘to provoke outrage through a primarily sensory experience rather than to enlighten’ (Dunlop, 2005: 164). The site looked eerily untouched since the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea had fled Phnom Penh. This impression, however, was the outcome of a carefully crafted mediation. Khmer Rouge atrocities were translated into a language fitting the new ideological context and political agenda. Mai Lam, the Vietnamese officer and curator appointed in Tuol Sleng in 1979, travelled to Eastern Europe, in search of inspiration in former Nazi camps (Ledgerwood, 2002; Shawcross, 1984; Thion, 1993). He came back to Cambodia with a display tailored to attract international sympathy in a time of isolation and to legitimize the new authorities, depicted as good Marxist-Leninists who had saved the Khmer people from the ‘fascist’ clique of Democratic Kampuchea. What is left of this interpretation today? Now that Cambodia lives in the post-socialist era, what narratives mediate Khmer Rouge crimes in Tuol Sleng? To what extent does the visual history proposed here help to analyse the transformation of the museum? This section will focus on the period from the early 2000s onward, for which Flickr and YouTube provide a great amount of material.
At first sight, it seems things have not changed much since Pilger and others documented Tuol Sleng right after the fall of Pol Pot’s regime. These are the same barbed wire fences, individual cells in bricks, torture rooms with metallic bed frames on which inmates were tied for interrogation, black-and-white mug shots of prisoners, blood-stained floors, skulls and piles of discarded clothes. The repetition of these elements over years demonstrates the commodification of the museum, seen only through a selected set of iconic artifacts. This very repetition makes it possible to trace in detail changes in the display. The comparison of recent material to older photos and documentary footage (which one finds aplenty on YouTube) reveals the extent to which the museum has been altered since it opened. While the display remains emotionally powerful (Lim, 2010; Williams, 2007), the raw and brutal aesthetics hitherto prevalent in Tuol Sleng were clearly played down. Photos of the behind-the-scenes rooms, where discarded armchairs, old prints, shackles, even boxes containing human remains are stored, show how much was de-selected in the process (Jay Vidheecharoen, Dennis Staufer, Olga, Chris Huby).
A striking illustration of it is the ‘skull map’ of Cambodia Mai Lam created with skulls of victims dug out of mass graves. The Mekong River was painted in red over them. The map was dismantled in 2002. The decay of skulls and the wish expressed by many Cambodians that the remains of victims be cremated according to Buddhist beliefs in part explain the dismantling. There was also the idea that Mai Lam’s composition was too rough for a memorial institution. The Vietnamese officer’s conception of ‘educating’ visitors through shock and awe was no longer adapted to the museum’s objectives. The map has not been much documented. What replaces it now – the map’s picture in a light box, hanging in a room alongside a Buddhist shrine, photos of mass graves, and skulls arranged in cupboards – gives an approximate idea of the original artifact. Without the few photos available on Flickr (such as those Walt Jabsco took in 1996, Figure 2), it would be difficult to imagine what it actually looked like, and retrospectively to realize how much Tuol Sleng in the present departs from the ‘gory’ aesthetics of the beginning.
Walt Jabsco, Tuol Sleng (photo taken in 1996, uploaded 21 October 2006), Flickr/CC.
A second example is the series of paintings ‘Scenes of S21’ realized in 1980 by artist and S21 survivor Vann Nath. Nowadays, the works are displayed behind a glass, a necessary measure for preserving canvases in the Cambodian climate. Still, photos on Flickr show that, as late as 2003, the works were exhibited without any protection (Karen Murphy, Figure 3). The glass appears only in the documentation made around 2006. This is concurrent with Vann Nath becoming the iconic witness of Khmer Rouge atrocities, both in Cambodia and abroad. The establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), officially opened in 2006, produced a new environment for memories of Pol Pot’s regime. The Khmer Rouge tribunal, as it is also called, put Tuol Sleng on the map, as the first Khmer Rouge to be prosecuted was Comrade Duch in 2009–10. In this context, Vann Nath became a ‘spokesman’ for many victims, and a cultural figure whose works were exhibited at major art events. This in turn affected the perception of ‘Scenes of S21’. The paintings were no longer considered crude socialist-realist depictions commissioned by Vietnamese authorities to illustrate the cruelty of the prison staff. They gained status as evidence used in court and works of art known in international professional circles, which changed both their situation in the museum and their effect on surrounding artifacts.
Karen Murphy, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (16 October 2003), Flickr/CC.
A new role for Tuol Sleng in national and transnational politics of memory?
These examples demonstrate the reactivity of Tuol Sleng when it comes its public image. Called to play a more established international role, it must adjust to standards of worldwide memorial institutions. It must professionalize. This is a challenge the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the actual ‘patron’ of the museum, understands perfectly. Since the mid 2000s it has been working with national and international partners to preserve artifacts and archives, training staff and developing educational programmes. As a result, the ‘horror museum’ of the 1980s is becoming a ‘cultural heritage’ style institution. It is possible to track details of this process on Flickr and YouTube. One sees for instance new logos that appear in Tuol Sleng, such that of UNESCO, which financed the museum’s renovation in 2010 and the preservation of S21 historical documentation (photos: janoski006 [Figure 4], ManMan; video: Ad van Zeeland).
Janoski006, untitled (30 December 2012), Flickr/CC
Online documentation also shows the new curatorial policy in the making. In 2011, the prominent Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), a Yale University-founded and now independent institution, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry (So, 2012). This finalized the DC-Cam’s progressive involvement in Tuol Sleng. In the past years, it has organized several exhibitions in the museum: Stilled Lives. Photographs from the Cambodian Genocide (photo: simjeelee) in 2004–5; Gunnar in the Living Hell 2 (photo: Wilson Look Kok Wee) and Case 002: Who are the Khmer Rouge leaders to be judged? 3 in 2008 (photo: Elrentaplats). The latter case exemplifies the transformation of Tuol Sleng. The museum is a key site for the Tribunal’s outreach activities: villagers brought by bus to attend hearings at the ECCC are often taken to Tuol Sleng too. Old narratives must make place for the new ones to be conveyed to Cambodian visitors. Little by little, the DC-Cam exhibitions correct the overall museum display and align it with the discourse of transitional justice. The time of hatred, as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea promoted it (Hughes, 2003), gives way to the era of accountability and reconciliation. How are such narratives received among Cambodians? Not all accept this newly delineated version, as shown in photos on Flickr of defaced portraits of S21 guards and Khmer Rouge leaders, their eyes and mouths scribbled over (Jérémie Montessuis, Andrew Crump). For some Cambodians, Tuol Sleng is not a space of reconciliation, but a place where grief, frustration and anger are enacted.
Flickr and YouTube, as inadvertent archives, contribute to a better understanding of the museum’s function within the changing context of Khmer Rouge-related politics of memory. They can provide an alternative imagery that brings back narratives shifted ‘off-stage’ by the institutional discourse. This prompts the question of whether they may also play a more active role in shaping memories of Tuol Sleng, both for people who visit the site and produce visual accounts, and for users who watch and comment on these photos and videos.
Remediation of witnessing on Flickr and YouTube
The video ‘War museums of Cambodia’ (Drlawitts) was filmed in Tuol Sleng and the War Museum in Siem Reap (the latter is an open field where are displayed hardware and equipment used during the post-1979 civil war that opposed the new government of Cambodia to Khmer Rouge guerrillas). The work, made by an American, is not to all users’ liking:
brooklynmonh1: This is not a war museum, it is toul slang, s-21 prison. You can’t possibly know what it is to come from a culture plagued by genocide. You sit in your plush house in lake tahoe drinking champagne and wearing a top hat. You have no idea how the rest of the world lives.
Is there an appropriate way to film or photograph Tuol Sleng? Is it reserved only to those who know ‘what it is to come from a culture plagued by genocide’? This is a critical question, considering that a majority of visitors in the museum are non-Cambodians (from Euro-America, Australia, India, China and Japan). To what extent do these people create a sense of belonging with the painful history depicted in the museum?
Caught between postcolonial guilt and shame at being a voyeur, some find it impossible. This is the case of Lecercle. Captioning his photo (representing, quite symbolically, mug shots of prisoners seen from the outside through the bars of a window), he writes:
Here I was, a relatively wealthy individual visiting a third world country still suffering from the consequences of the very events whose notorious landmarks I was visiting as a tourist.
Many non-Cambodian visitors, however, feel differently about it. Tuol Sleng is, as Pete Stott writes commenting on his photo: ‘a harrowing but necessary start to our holiday’. The experience, anthropologist Rachel Hughes convincingly argues, is ‘no longer epistemological but testimonial, not I now know more but I visited’. She stresses that many visitors she interviewed in the museum expressed hope ‘that their “being there” was at least significant’ (2008: 326). Visiting Tuol Sleng becomes the opportunity to bear witness to Khmer Rouge atrocities. How is this visually conveyed on Flickr and YouTube? The concept of ‘remediation’ coined by Bolter and Grusin (1999) proves useful for answering the question. Many photos and videos made in Tuol Sleng manifest what the two media scholars call ‘the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real’. Their authors resort to the strategies at play in remediation: hypermedia, which multiplies the signs of mediation; and transparent media, which denies the act of mediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 53).
Hyper-mediating memory through survivors
Since Vann Nath passed away in 2011, Chhum Mey and Bou Meng are the only S21 survivors left. They come to the museum every day. They guide groups of tourists, talk about their ordeal in the hands of Duch and his guards, and sit at stalls where they sell their memoirs. Chhum Mey is shown re-enacting his detention in the individual cell he occupied as prisoner or holding his book Survivor (photos: Number Six, Heimkhemra Suy, William Johnson; video: Tim Bunn). The same goes for Bou Meng, photographed with his memoirs (Passenger32A, Figure 5) or filmed in the midst of a phone conversation (Kris Dhiradityakul). Visitors want to be portrayed with the two men (photos: Seyemon, Nikki, Mark Turner). The last image of a mixed video-slideshow a group of Australian high school students posted on YouTube represents the teenagers who stand around Chhum Mey and Bou Meng (Student Educational Adventures). The caption reads: ‘Living history and future generations side by side’.
Passenger32A, Mr. Bou Meng (5 March 2013), Flickr/CC.
In both academic and popular culture, the figure of the survivor is now central to understanding mass violence. In the context described here, this trope emerges in interaction with localized dynamics. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal created a new environment for survivors of Pol Pot’s terror. It introduced a groundbreaking scheme giving them, for the first time, the possibility to participate in proceedings as complainants, civil parties and volunteer witnesses (Ciorciari and Heindel, 2009: 232–3). This brought about an emphasis on Vann Nath, Chhum Mey and Bou Meng, who became familiar faces in media in Cambodia and – to some extent – abroad. As well, survivors were from the outset part of the representation of Tuol Sleng. For instance, Ung Pech, former S21 prisoner and first director of the museum, appears in Pilger’s movie Year Zero and the book by French journalist Françoise Corrèze (1980: 19–21). Since the museum based its ‘education’ on artifacts rather than text, explanations about what happened in S21 were needed. Survivors supplied them. They also individualized the mass suffering of Cambodians, thus providing the emotional touch the museum was lacking.
In this respect, Tuol Sleng has not changed much. In spite of the didactic DC-Cam exhibitions, the display still offers little historical and political contextualization. This absence of information makes the need for ‘authoritative narration’ all the more pressing (Hughes, 2008: 327). Some visitors provide it by filming museum guides as they lead groups of tourists through Tuol Sleng (ivytechnortheast, Goorney). Staff members have a close relation to Democratic Kampuchea since they and/or their parents are survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Their speech, thus, not only supplies first-hand information and mediates knowledge to viewers. It also ‘authenticates’ the images recorded in the museum and listening to gruesome stories. The notion of hypermediacy aptly describes this kind of representation. Multiple acts of mediation are made visible as visitors try to reproduce the sensory complexity of their experience. Visiting Tuol Sleng is not only about seeing the site, but also meeting victims in the flesh. Furthermore, the survivors’ presence on photos and videos is like a stamp of approval. It validates the visitor’s testimonial experience and integrates it into a chain of memory.
Categories of witnessing on YouTube
Some visitors look for a more direct participation in transmission, themselves becoming witnesses in the process. Witnessing implies being truthful when performing what media scholar John Durham Peters calls the ‘difficult juncture between experience and discourse’ (2009: 25). It manifests in the way videos (the favoured medium for witnessing in this context) articulate the notion of authenticity, resorting to different media templates.
For visitors endorsing the role of the ‘objective witness’ who gives facts about Tuol Sleng, the commonly chosen form is reportage, which draws on the form of news stories posted by traditional broadcasters such as BBC or Al-Jazeera. The video starts at the entrance or in the courtyard of Tuol Sleng. After a brief introduction, the visitor, either off-screen (Terry Hodgkinson) or filmed by a friend (Wayne Hazle), proceeds through the museum, providing historical information at each step. The resort to media templates of mainstream visual journalism ensures the video is received as reportage, not as leisurely images of a holiday trip. It warrants the seriousness of the recording. It intensifies the testimonial experience by encoding it into a familiar format. It is the promise of sharing it with as many viewers as possible. However, boundaries between ‘reportage’ and video diary are often porous. Comments, for instance, are not always of journalistic content. ‘I can feel my stomach turning’, says a girl (AsWeTravel). While some vloggers shoot themselves visiting the museum (Sam Cooke, Day 18 in Southeast Asia), others choose to be filmed standing in the courtyard and telling their story about Tuol Sleng. It often includes personal anecdotes such Lawrence Gundersen’s on the Cambodian taxi driver who tried to sell him an AK-47 gun for a few dollars. In such videos, viewers never see much of Tuol Sleng, the museum becoming only scenery for the vlogger’s story (misterz23).
Although they are not vloggers (or do not define their videos as diaries), some people turn away from ‘objective witnessing’ and favour a more subjective approach. The event that is witnessed then is no longer the museum and what it historically represents but the ‘being there’ since:
[It] avoids the ontological depreciation of being a copy. The copy, like hearsay, is indefinitely repeatable; the event is singular, and its witnesses are forever irreplaceable in their privileged relation to it. (Peters, 2009: 35)
The sensory experience is emphasized as body and emotion become criteria of truth. The ‘personal (and completely unprofessional) videos’ of naaemg offer a good example of this affect-based mediation. ‘It looks like a ghost house’, she whispers. She wonders ‘how does it look at night?’ ‘Oh my God I can’t believe it’s true’, Erin Moldes says. She refuses to enter the cells because ‘it’s scary’. Such comments sound like fake spontaneity. Emotions are stated theatrically and obviously with an audience in mind. This ‘inauthentic authenticity’ (Burgess and Green, 2009: 29) points to other media templates: on the one hand, popular culture, especially the ‘found footage’ style that horror movies such as Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield made so popular; on the other hand, the DIY style and ‘ideology of authenticity’, as Burgess and Green call it, that are part of the cultural repertoire of YouTube.
Short videos, snippets of Tuol Sleng centred on specific artifacts and rooms, push this even further. The shaky hand-held camera work replicates the visitor’s movements in the museum as if to allow the viewer to experience Tuol Sleng through the body of someone else (chaoticad, jino910). There is no comment or voiceover, but ambient sound: hubbub of tourists and guides, Khmer songs played on faraway radios in the street, or simply the silence that reigns in some parts of the museum. The recording becomes a form of live transmission, confused with real time. In the most radical interpretation of immediacy, it leaves the viewer ‘in the presence of the objects represented so that he could know the objects directly’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 70–1).
A last category, that stands apart in YouTube’s remediation of witnessing, is formed by memory pieces. It suggests a further conception of ‘authenticity’ as showing that what one felt in Tuol Sleng was genuine.
1flightaway: When I came home I went over all of the shots that I had and put together a video that I intended to show feeling rather than gore. This video I dedicate to all who lost their lives in Tuol Sleng (S-21) and The Killing Fields. Let your stories not be forgotten.
What defines the testimonial experience as ‘authentic’ here is that its effect lasts long after the visit is over. Memory pieces involve a different temporality in their making, content and reflection on transmission. The videos are carefully edited, barely following the chronology of the visit. They include a musical soundtrack: rock, pop music, classical music, movie soundtracks, traditional and modern Cambodian songs, depending on the mood the author wants to invoke. Made as tributes to S21 victims, the videos conflate witnessing and commemorative practices. Time and dedication, instead of a quick uploading, prove the depth of one’s engagement with the Cambodian tragedy.
What happens on the other side? Flickr and YouTube emphasize notions of sharing, collective experience, and community. Do users’ interactions around the shared photos and videos of Tuol Sleng generate any sense of community? If so, what is the community about? Is it about the museum, the traumatic memory of the Khmer Rouge regime, or a trip in Cambodia? My analysis of these issues is based on comments of users in a selected set of cases. I examine Flickr and YouTube separately, considering that comment culture greatly differs in the two systems.
Building communities around Tuol Sleng
The micro-communities of Flickr
My analysis of community building on Flickr centres on threads rather than groups. One finds a Tuol Sleng group on Flickr. Formed on 9 February 2006, it includes 106 members who altogether posted 924 photos. 4 But it is inactive: it offers no sustained discussion. If community there is, then it forms somewhere else. Usually, not much develops in threads. That people who comment on a photo of Tuol Sleng all visited the museum does not make them feel members of a same community. As cultural anthropologist Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues: ‘it is the meaning given to the event rather than the event itself which may create a community’ (1994: 49). This is exactly what happens in some threads when the construction of meanings and dynamics of bonding become interwoven. There is an ongoing articulation of community as the meaning assigned to the event keeps shifting. As a result, several micro-communities separated only by porous demarcations emerge within a same thread. In this section, I discuss two examples illustrating this process.
In December 2008, Mistifarang (a Dutchman living in Southeast Asia) posts a photo representing a small altar on which are placed sticks of incense and the black-and-white picture of a young woman with a label carrying the number 246 pinned on her chest. He photographed it in an empty house on Nimitmai Road, Bangkok. Intrigued by the label (‘a school, a summer-camp, a war-issue?’), he hopes other members will help him identify the woman. On the advice of hkkbs who thinks it looks ‘WWII or even pre-WWII’, Mistifarang returns to Nimitmai Road and checks the photo. The result is disappointing. This is only a print on normal paper, the back of which reads: ‘cable TV C.P.F.D.’ (local supplier for satellite TV systems). Still, Mistifarang does not give up. He shows the photo to a ‘local Thai [who] told me that her face isn’t a real Thai face but likely Chinese’. The girl could be a refugee, fleeing war or communism in China, or perhaps Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia.
User stygiangloom solves the mystery. The girl was a prisoner at S21. He adds a link to an online database of Tuol Sleng mug shots. Mistifarang is baffled. On the original photo, the girl shows up with a baby. Is it her child? Could it be that the baby survived and made this altar? A newcomer in the discussion, jdaoust75, expresses doubts. He visited Tuol Sleng the year before and was explained that even children were killed in S21. Mistifarang’s investigation ends up here:
I never be able to identify the next of kin. The people who used this print to remember/honor here were people who just used this house for living a while or who were laborers doing works… After the job has been finished, they move onto another site. Any administration doesn’t exist.
This thread shows how the community changes concurrently with the photo being assigned new contexts of interpretation, from urban derive to detective-like investigation to remembrance. The process goes over a rather long period. Several months after the initial exchanges, hbbks and Mistifarang resume communication. ‘I look at this photo almost every day’, hbbks writes. ‘To be honest, I have a print of the photo at my office, so same same!’ Mistifarang answers. This points to the effect on both of them of the lack of closure (not finding the identity of the woman or any living relative). As there is nobody left who can remember the girl of Nimitmai Road, they endorse the responsibility of memory – as a community of two, as a sort of family.
In November 2011 Mio Cade posts ‘Phnom Penh, The corridor that connect to the past’. The black-and-white picture shows a few Cambodian boys who pose along a corridor in Tuol Sleng. The boy in the foreground is so arresting that one hardly notices at first the other children in the background. Since it is an arty photo, many comments are about its aesthetic qualities: ‘great shot’, ‘lovely capture’, or ‘strong composition’. Some users stress the power of the image, which so strongly invokes their own memories of the museum. ‘Everyone of your shots from S21 remaind me to my visit a lot of years ago’, someone writes.
In the comments, Mio Cade inserts several mug shots of child victims of S21. It is the relation between the main photo and these headshots that shifts the discussion toward the significance rather than the aesthetics of ‘Phnom Penh, The corridor that connect to the past’. The boy in the picture, Mio Cade explains, is 14-year-old Som’ath. To a member pointing out, correctly so, that Som’ath looks like one of the boys on the mug shots, Mio Cade replies: ‘that was the reason I brought him to S21. Som’ath knew what it meant to him.’ This bridge between past and present is clearly understood by user Peter Denton:
You quite rightly highlight the child victims; what truly appalled me during my visit was that in many cases, the barbarity (including summary executions) was carried out by other children. Many of these child killers are in their 40s now. I sometimes wonder what they must think, and whether they can sleep peacefully.
Mio Cade does not aim only to remember Khmer Rouge atrocities. He seeks to connect the tragic past with the present situation, in this case the fate of children in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge regime is thus presented through its long-term effects on Cambodian society. Such a focus is not a surprise knowing that Mio Cade, as his profile reveals, is a consultant for NGOs who helped run a shelter for homeless children in Indonesia, and probably runs a similar programme in Cambodia. He tells (on another thread of the same set) that Som’ath is ‘a new sponsored boy of ours’. The connections between users develop at this level. Some demonstrate familiarity with Phnom Penh street children (‘Is it Tira or Som’ath?’ someone asks) or concern over the way to mobilize people for a cause through photography (by producing ‘images that punch you in the stomach and make you think’, as one user writes). The micro-communities emerging here mix people engaged in relief work and professional photojournalism, living in Cambodia or other poor countries, and people who just visited the museum or like to comment on the quality work of a fellow photographer. The interaction among these different groups places the photo at the interface of remembrance of Khmer Rouge crimes, humanitarian concern, and reflection on photojournalism.
‘Flickr is not a logical place to nurture interpretations of the past because the site is primed by the present’, media scholar José van Dijck argues (2011: 409, original emphasis). The two examples analysed here concur with this viewpoint. It is not so much interpreting the past (Khmer Rouge atrocities, role of S21 in Pol Pot’s regime of terror) that brings users together and makes them feel part of a community, as the possibility of extracting the photo from the rigid envelope of the past and giving it a new and fluid life, with possibly some impact on the present. This is a limited process, for which the term ‘micro-community’, not without relation to micro-history’s focus on small units, seems most adequate.
Tuol Sleng caught in YouTube ‘politics of platforms’
My approach to community building on YouTube draws on the notion of ‘politics of platforms’ coined by Tarleton Gillespie (2010). When a discussion develops in comments on a video of Tuol Sleng, it is often aggressively loaded with political and ideological content. Many people, as a user deplores, ‘make stupid, thoughtless and downright FUCKED up comments!’ (video: Skraggz). The ‘free speech’ environment of YouTube brings into confrontation a variety of actors, from individuals to political parties, who do not always clarify who they are and to what purpose they use the online ‘platform’. As Gillespie stresses, the versatility of the very term elides the tension between the different interpretations of ‘platform’, from a stage for empowering people and democratizing debates to adequate tool for marketing and diffusion of mainstream media content and hegemonic discourse (2010: 352, 358). How do these interpretations relate to the notion of community in the context of Tuol Sleng? To what extent do they reflect perceptions on the history attached to the museum among real-life communities?
The first example I examine is based on the discussion available on cppcanada’s YouTube channel (MSA Clips). The playlist includes several videos about Tuol Sleng, either filmed by cppcanada himself or remediated movie and television footage. The dedication of the channel to ‘the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide and any other war and barbarism’ and ‘against those who think the Vietnamese manipulate things and the Khmer Rouge are true nationalists’ already says a lot, as does the user’s name, ‘cpp’ obviously referring to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party. cppcanada (aka M.S.) does not hide his political affiliation: ‘I’m a cpp member’. What is unclear is the status of the channel – private initiative for the glory of the controversial Prime Minister 5 or supported by the party itself?
The discussion, spreading in a fragmented way over four years, is conducted in English, French and Vietnamese. The channel clearly serves as meeting ground. Some people thank cppcanada as through him (he posts daily video accounts of his trip in Vietnam) they travel to places they haven’t seen since they left Southeast Asia. ccpcanada himself gets in touch with someone who studied at the same school in Phnom Penh in 1970. Those interacting here are mainly boat people and Southeast Asian refugee communities. The biography of cppcanada confirms it: born in Cambodia, with a Chinese father and a Vietnamese mother, he survived the Khmer Rouge regime and the war between Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam in the border zones. He migrated to Canada from a refugee camp in Vietnam.
On several occasions, comments take a more political turn. Users celebrate the ‘whole Khmer nation’ that triumphed over the ‘Thai stupid coward nation’ in border zones conflict, or rant about the ‘clueless, uneducated and unable to think for themselves members’ of parties opposing Hun Sen. The discussion becomes the shorthand for Khmer Diaspora politics and intricate definitions of ‘Khmer identity’ in terms of ethnicity, culture, and ideology.
I’m just wondering, are you a Viet or a Viet-Khmer?
Have you some criteria about how to be a Khmer or how to be a Viet? (reply to another user): Please make sure that I never claim to be ‘Khmer’ … Pol Pot and a lot of Khmer Rouge claimed they are Khmers 100%, every know how they could do for this identity … The Khmer 100% you claimed for yourself, maybe, disappeared too long ago, or they lived in the jungle with monkeys.
Rather than creating communities online, YouTube as ‘platform for politics’ reflects the complexity of community building among those who have been directly (less directly for second-generation people) affected by the Khmer Rouge regime, forced to leave their home and resettle in another country – those who, as anthropologist Kathryn Poethig (2006) says, are ‘sitting between two chairs’ and try to re-capture, through the articulation of nationalism, nostalgia and ‘cultural purity’, the fixed position they no longer occupy.
In the second example, I turn to the ‘fucked up comments’ denounced earlier. In this case, users are not only from the Khmer Diaspora. Their opinionated statements raise the question of the relationship between dominant (at least in the West) discourses about the Khmer Rouge regime and personal interpretations of these discourses.
Cambodia was Mao tse tung playground
American is the direct role in everything. They knew everything. They bombed the place, then created bases on the Tie Cambodian borders that housed the KR’s bombs. Bombs created and sold by America, Germany and others. American supplied the amo, weapons and directions for O’l Pot Pot. God forgive us!
I live in Vietnam and visited Kampuchia 2 times. Both times I went to see the death camps of this cambodian monster Pol Pot. Guess what! The USA never asked his extradition for war crimes trial. NO communist madman ever was prosecuted by Yankees. Such a shame. But, we know communism was born in New York jewish ghetto in 1913.
This is a crap video. It makes America look as if they were colonials…these Chinese and Viet Cong employed, women, children and old people to kill US Soldiers. We had to protect ourselves and we did damn it!
This reads like a digest of ideological debates in the late 1960s–early 1980s, when intellectuals, journalists and artists (such as Noam Chomsky, William Shawcross, Roland Joffé) denounced the responsibility of the international community for the Cambodian tragedy. This included the massive bombing of Cambodia by the US Army (1969–73), the involvement of China in Democratic Kampuchea, the post-1979 support of the international community to Khmer Rouge guerrillas. While all the elements are here, this popular rephrasing of the Vietnam War era’s anti-imperialist rhetoric misses the many complexities of the older discussion. As Hess argues, YouTube is not ‘an environment for an engagement with in-depth political controversy’ (2009: 427). Serious arguments are lost here. More interesting is the way the discussion – Hess calls it ‘vernacular discourse’ (2009: 416) – recycles ‘scraps’ of older debates. It shows the persistence of an interpretive tension concerning the events in Cambodia, in which big powers, underdogs, patriots, traitors and exploiters still have a role to play. Announced from the YouTube platform, where all positions, however antagonistic, are equalized, this tension is more incantatory than anything else.
The United States of Cruelty. The same bastards that put us into Vietnam have us in Afghanistan and Iraq. For what? Halliburton and blood suckers like Dick Cheney who I hope dies soon. His karma is so bad. What have we become?
Even formulated as revisiting the liability of the international community in the 1970s through the prism of today’s global politics, this tension produces nothing. ‘What have we become?’ This sounds like an accurate description of an absent community: looking back at the past, but not actively engaged in the present.
In the context of Tuol Sleng, YouTube does not seem conducive to community building. The closest it comes to it is when offline communities use it, for its broad connotations as platform, as a battlefield in transnational politics, or a means to articulate issues of Khmer identity. Comment culture on YouTube, creating an aggressive and entertainment-oriented environment, makes it difficult for people to find a way to a more active outlet for their political opinions and historical interpretations. The repetition of older debates, which were effective in their time, shows the limits of the exercise: incantation, but no action.
Conclusion
The article discussed different perspectives on the idea of ‘mediated memory’ of Tuol Sleng on Flickr and YouTube. It stressed the possibility of using the material they provide, as inadvertent archives, for constructing much needed a visual history of the museum; the way visitors communicate about their experience in Tuol Sleng and remediate it as a form of witnessing; the complexity and limitations of building communities online around the ‘memory’ of Tuol Sleng. Social media and networks make visible interactions between state or institutional discourse on the past and individual interpretations, western and local (and bi-national) representations of the Khmer Rouge regime, older depictions of Tuol Sleng and Democratic Kampuchea terror and new media representations. In this respect, they contribute to a better understanding of the museum and shed a new light on Khmer Rouge-related politics of memory. This is a new kind of resource for the study of the cultural memory of Democratic Kampuchea at the interface of national and international contexts. Including this study in the realm of digital humanities, still an under-explored option, will require further elaboration in terms of methodology, interpretation, and preservation.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.