EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week, Jay Nordlinger attended the Oslo Freedom Forum, the human-rights conference in the Norwegian capital. The conference is over, but the journal continues. Previous parts are at the following links: I, II, and III.
Sophal Ear, an American, is a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He was almost a casualty of the Cambodian holocaust. He tells us the story of his family, using photos: We see his mom and his dad, young and in love. Life in Cambodia was pretty good, envied and copied by others in Asia. Then the Khmer Rouge came to power, with their diplomas from Paris. They remade Cambodian society, killing a quarter of the population in the process. Ear’s father was one of the victims. The rest of the family managed to escape to Vietnam.
The Communists wanted to create an “agrarian utopia,” Ear says. “You know the John Lennon song ‘Imagine’? ‘Imagine no possessions, no religion’? That’s what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily pourridge. And that pourridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields.”
I don’t believe I have ever heard the John Lennon song cited negatively. It is thrilling.
Ear mentions that Pol Pot died untouched, in his bed, at an advanced age — which is slightly annoying.
He also talks about Tuol Sleng, the school that was turned into a torture center. Some 16,000 people were tortured to death; twelve are known to have survived. I find that a stunning statistic — twelve.
We see a sign listing the rules of Tuol Sleng: It says that, when you are tortured, you cannot cry out. We see photos of boys who are deemed enemies of the state. They have numbers pinned to their skin — that is, the pins go through their skin, as though it were a shirt. I cannot look at the photos.
But worse, possibly worse? Ear reminds us of all the Western intellectuals who loved — loved, loved, loved — the Khmer Rouge. Many of them were in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. Ear shows us pictures of the “Kampuchea Conference” that took place in Stockholm, in 1979. Stockholm is not very far from here. The purpose of the conference was to promote the restoration of the Khmer Rouge to power. Jan Myrdal was the keynote speaker — the famous intellectual who is the son of Gunnar and Alva. Ear also quotes Noam Chomsky, others. Chomsky is still making moral and political pronouncements, and so is Myrdal.
Being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry. They just glide on . . .
‐Earlier in this journal, I mentioned Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani women’s-rights activist. She was gang-raped, out of “honor.” As I understand it, her twelve-year-old brother had walked in the street with a woman of a higher caste. That qualified Mukhtar for gang-raping. She was supposed to kill herself; custom dictated that — but she didn’t.
She says, “I never worked to be well-known. It is by your love and the blessing of almighty Allah that you know me. You know me for my work and my mission.” And being well-known — hailed in the world’s capitals — “enhances one’s responsibilities.”
Her motto, she says, is “The end of oppression through knowledge.” She has set up a girls’ school, where 600 students get a free education, complete with free uniforms and transportation to and from school. Lucky girls, that Mukhtar Mai came along.
‐Ben Skinner is “a specialist in the antithesis of freedom,” as he says: slavery. Contemporary slavery. His book is A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.
There is a man at this conference whose family owns slaves, or recently did — I must find out. In any case, he is from Mauritania, an “Islamic republic” in the west of Africa.
‐You remember Gilbert Tuhabonye, from Burundi? I will quote his bio:
In October of 1993, members of the Hutu tribe invaded Tuhabonye’s high school and captured more than 100 Tutsi children and teachers. Most of the captives were killed with machetes; the rest were burned alive. After spending nearly nine hours hidden beneath the burning corpses of his classmates and suffering burns over much of his body, Tuhabonye managed to escape and seek medical attention. By 1996, his running skills took him to the United States as part of an Olympic training program. He obtained a track scholarship at Abilene Christian University and was a national champion runner. Tuhabonye is the award-winning coach of Gilbert’s Gazelles Training Group in Texas. In 2006, he cofounded the Gazelle Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve life for people in Burundi without regard to tribal affiliations.
In the Christiania Theater, Tuhabonye relates that, as he lay underneath the burning bodies, “a voice kept telling me I would be okay.” The Hutus were outside the school, “drunk, celebrating the massacre.” Tuhabonye sensed he could escape. He took a femur — a femur — from one of his classmates’ corpses and broke a window. Out he ran — and ran and ran. “I outran my enemies. I escaped into the night.”
Tuhabonye says, “God gave me the courage to run on, and to persevere.” Doctors told him that he would never run again. But he proved them wrong. And “I went on with my life. You cannot live a full life if your heart is heavy with hate and anger. Though it was very hard, I chose to forgive. Forgiveness allowed me to move forward, to open my heart to countless blessings and opportunities.”
As he tells us, he is “a coach, a husband, and the father of two beautiful girls, Grace and Emma. Through perseverance and forgiveness, you can accomplish anything.”
‐Kang Chol-hwan is the author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. He was imprisoned, with his family, at age nine. Through his teens, he did backbreaking work. He also suffered beatings and starvation. Almost 20, he fled to China, then to South Korea.
In the theater, he greets us with a dignified bow. In English, he says, “Good afternoon.” Then he proceeds with his remarks in Korean (translated for us).
He speaks of life in the gulag: torture, starvation, public executions; more torture, more starvation, more public executions. I am reminded of what Jeane Kirkpatrick called North Korea: “a psychotic state,” something “quite rare in history.” Kang and his fellow inmates ate snakes and frogs for meat, and some people ate grass. Many died from malnutrition. “I buried many hundreds of bodies of political prisoners,” says Kang.
He says that people understand natural disasters such as earthquakes — they see pictures from Haiti or from China. But they do not see pictures from the North Korean gulag. So they have no understanding of the situation, may not believe it if, by chance, they heard about it. Kang says, “I believe there is no one more desperate, or in more pain, than people dying in prison camps,” alone and unknown.
I am especially interested in a particular comment, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. Kang says, “I appear normal now, as I have been eating well for more than ten years in the Free World. But I was just skin and bones when I defected.”
I remember when Armando Valladares — who is present for the conference in Oslo — emerged from the Cuban gulag after 22 years. He was handsome and vibrant, and many people said that he could not be telling the truth, in his memoir Against All Hope. If he had been so brutalized, how could he look so good — so normal?
Valladares was telling nothing but the truth. People rebound, mercifully. Many of the participants in this conference — who endured years of torture, rape, and deprivation — look normal. Perfectly normal. They also appear cheerful. Some of the participants, to be sure, look like they’ve been through hell; and cheer does not come easily to them. But human resilience is a remarkable thing. And some people are, quite frankly, grateful to be alive. To be breathing free air, such as can be gulped in Oslo.
Incidentally, if you’d like to see a picture of Kang Chol-hwan — being welcomed by President George W. Bush in the Oval Office — go here.
‐Like Kang, Marina Nemat has written a book: Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman’s Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison. That prison was one of the most notorious in the world: Evin. A place of darkness and sadism — unrelenting sadism. Evin is the symbol of the Khomeinist revolution, really.
At the podium, Nemat says, “It is an emotional experience for me to be here. Hearing all these stories” — the testimonies of other former prisoners — “I feel energized.” Nemat is going on from Oslo to do a European speaking tour. “Thank you for reenergizing me.”
She was only a teenager when she was a political prisoner. And there have been thousands of teenage political prisoners since the revolution triumphed in 1979, she says. “This situation has been going on for 30 years. It is going on today.” She comments on the pictures of Cambodia that Sophal Ear has shown us. The torture chamber reminded her of what she saw in Evin. Chains tied to bed legs and so on. She says, in essence, “You’ve seen one torture chamber, you’ve seen them all.”
She also describes a visit to Auschwitz she had. During that visit, she saw a great pile of shoes, taken from the victims. “And that made me wonder, What did they do with our shoes?” She remembers the shoes she went in with: “They were Puma running shoes, white with red lines on the sides.” What did they do with our shoes?
She tells her story simply, plainly, matter-of-factly. She was “just a normal girl” who rode her bike in the streets and wanted to become a doctor. Her father was a ballroom-dancing instructor; her mother was a hairdresser. The family was Catholic. She was 13 when the calamity of the revolution struck.
At 16 — this took unbelievable nerve — she asked her calculus teacher to teach calculus instead of the Islamist propaganda of the regime.
She was arrested in the middle of the night, and blindfolded upon arrival at Evin. This is standard operating procedure. And then she was tortured. She does not go into details, here in the Christiania Theater. “They are in my book.” She was told that they would arrest her mother, father, and boyfriend if she didn’t “marry” her interrogator-torturer and convert to Islam. She submitted.
This was “legalized rape,” as she says. “I didn’t have a choice.” Interesting about her “husband”: He had been a prisoner himself, under the shah, and tortured — tortured for three years. Now he was the torturer. Three months after the “marriage,” he was killed — “assassinated,” Nemat says. Curiously enough, it was his family that pleaded for her release. They secured it.
She went home to her parents. At the dinner table, they talked about the weather. No one asked her what had happened inside the prison. “It would have been nice if someone had said, ‘When you’re ready to talk, we’re ready to listen.’” But no one said anything. The experience was just swept under the rug.
She married her boyfriend, who was the organist at church; she herself was in the choir. “The marriage was an act of defiance. I converted back to Catholicism when I married André. This put another death sentence on my head, because if you convert to Islam, and then convert out of Islam, you are automatically condemned to death.”
Years passed. Nemat was living in Canada. And it was in 2002 that “I lost the ability to sleep. The past caught up with me. I started having nightmares, flashbacks, and I had to do something about it: either go jump off a bridge or tell my story.” She took the latter course.
She stresses that what happened to her in Evin is going on every single day, with other girls. The only thing that has an effect, she says, is international pressure.
A colleague sitting next to me, here in the theater, leans over and says, “After hearing all these prison stories, I don’t want to hear a word about America’s alleged mistreatment of jihadists at Guantanamo Bay ever again.”
‐Well, that’s enough for one day — one installment. End with something light? A language item? Okay, will do. I’m talking with a Norwegian politico who speaks quite good English. (What Norwegian doesn’t speak quite good English?) He says, “Tell me, Jay: In English, you say ‘fat chance’ and ‘slim chance,’ and they mean the same thing. How can that be? How can ‘fat chance’ and ‘slim chance’ mean the same thing? Shouldn’t they mean opposite things?”
Ah, English. What can you say?
Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you tomorrow for Part V.
#JAYBOOK#