Vannary Imam: When Elephants Fight

(Allen & Unwin $35)

Review: John McCrystal*

One of the greater but lesser-known tragedies of the 20th century - undoubtedly a contender for the period most characterised by man's large-scale inhumanity to man - was the reign of terror of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Beginning in 1975, which they christened Year Zero to signify a new start in Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge set about trying to transform Cambodia into a rural, agrarian society.

Any people not fitted for the peasant lifestyle, such as intellectuals, were slaughtered, and the remainder of the population was forced to abandon the cities and work in the fields where they were ill-treated and starved.

In all, upwards of two million people had died by the time the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and toppled the Khmer Rouge from power.

The Cambodian holocaust was all but ignored by the rest of the world, for reasons which had a lot to do with the United States' domination of international affairs and the aversion to South-east Asia which Americans acquired following their defeat at the hands of the Vietcong.

It took the 1984 film The Killing Fields to draw widespread attention to the catastrophe.

Vannary Imam managed to escape the killing fields by a scholarship which took her to Australia on the eve of the evil season. Her family, however, did not escape, although with the exception of a few members they survived.

Because her account of the Khmer Rouge years is second-hand, it doesn't have the power of, say, the biography of Haing Ngor (upon which The Killing Fields was based).

But Imam has wisely shifted the focus of her narrative to the years before Pol Pot. She tells the story of her family through the generations preceding hers, and we get to know them - the noble and ignoble, the wise, generous, petty, avaricious, malicious, foolish and generally human motives that drove her forebears and drive her contemporaries.

A portrait of Cambodian society emerges, complete with the distortions introduced by French colonialism and with the racist mistrust of neighbouring Vietnam which ensured that even in times of peace, Imam's family, with Vietnamese blood, was on the receiving end of discrimination.

The intimacy of her description has two consequences. First, the book is not as horrific as it might have been, and there is plenty to chuckle about in what is, for all the foreignness of the culture, a conventionally dysfunctional family.

Second, by the time the terror begins, we feel we know the victims personally. They are the ants which, according to the Cambodian proverb from which the book takes its name, are killed when elephants fight.

The text has been lightly and rather unevenly edited, and is therefore creaky in patches but Imam's honesty is compelling. She has put a human face on a tragedy which otherwise exceeds the human capacity to comprehend.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.