Enemies of the People.

• Author: Ear, Sophal
• Position: Movie review

Enemies of the People. Directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath. Old Street Films, 2009, 94 minutes.

Enemies of the People is a documentary film extraordinary in the scope of its investigation. Indeed when art becomes evidence at a tribunal, you know this is not your average documentary.

The film's title, Enemies of the People, comes from a phrase coined by Nuon Chea, the Khmer Ronge's Brother Number Two (Pol Pot, who died while under house arrest in 1998, was Brother Number One), who now stands trial in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. However, the context in which this phrase appears is muddied. Who are the Enemies? Who are the People?

Through the magic of editing, it is not entirely clear to whom Nuon Chea refers to as enemies of the people. While it is frequently assumed that the reference is to whomever the regime killed or whose death it caused, it is probably more likely that he was referring to those people he saw as traitors to the regime--Vietnamese saboteurs, American spies, etc.--which then begs the question: were the 1.7 million people who died during the Khmer Rouge's rule all traitors or only the ones executed at Khmer Rouge torture centres like S-21 (Tuol Sleng)? The distinction seems pedantic, but places like S-21 were for the regime's elite or special cases needing interrogation and torture in the eyes of Angkar (the Organization).

Indeed, it is not clear to whom Nuon Chea refers to necessarily as "them" and later as "criminals" when he says the following in an exchange with filmmaker Thet Sambath:

Nuon Chea: Our policy was first to re-educate them to stop ...

Then we gave them two or three warnings to stop their treacherous activities.

Next we required them to present their revolutionary personal history ... and make a self-criticism. If that didn't work ... they would be expelled from the party. If they still could not be corrected ... they had to be solved. These people were categorized as criminals.

Criminals.

Sambath: What did you do with these "criminals"?

Nuon Chea: They were killed and destroyed. If we had let them live, the party line would have been hijacked. They were enemies of the people.

But nevermind Nuon Chea, whom we can safely assume will be found guilty by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal sooner or later (if the Tribunal itself does not collapse from the sheer weight of its own incompetence) and who will spend the rest of his life behind bars...