Living Hell: Democratic Kampuchea, August 1978 by Gunnar Bergstrom Khmer Rouge 

$

50

Rare book on a rare visit by a westerner during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia. Back cover has a crease otherwise in VG condition.

"Bergstrom went to Cambodia in August 1978 to visit the country on a delegation tour with three other Swedes, Hedvig Ekerwald the author Jan Myrdal and Marita Wilander.
Two cadres escorted the three others and Bergstrom to hospitals, schools, factories, and cooperatives. They even were wined and dined by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in the Royal Palace and slept for two nights in the Royal Palace in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The young European leftists, members of an official friendship delegation, shared Pol Pot’s view, seeing the struggle as a revolution to transform Cambodia into a fairer society benefiting the poor.
“I was active in the movement against the war in Vietnam when I was 19,” he remembers. “The first demonstration I went to was about Cambodia. We were young and many of us were recruited after a while into the Maoist movement. People did not want Soviet communism, but we young people thought China was different, that it was an ideal society where there were no oppressors.” “When the Khmer Rouge won in April 1975, we celebrated.”

According to Bergstrom, he witnessed no torture; saw no killings; and heard of no starvation while he was there. Armed with textbooks, songs, magazines, and hundreds of photographs and film footage, Bergstrom went back home to Sweden with visual, physical, and experiential proof that the newly revealed Communist Party of Kampuchea was in the beginning stages, although imperfect stages, towards utopia for the Cambodian society. It was not until he saw thousands of refugees flood into Thailand that he realized he made a grave misjudgment.
“Now I think the whole trip was propaganda and we should never have made it,’’ said Begstrom. “It is still a mystery about how you can delude oneself so much. We were fooled by smiles but what fooled us the most was our own Maoist glasses we wore.” The delegation returned to Sweden where they undertook a speaking tour and wrote articles in support of the Democratic Kampuchea regime.
The Swedes were sympathetic. Gunnar Bergstrom says it was the smiles that fooled him the most — the krama-clad boys and girls beaming in the rice fields of newly communist Cambodia. Although he had some doubts about what he saw during a fourteen-day trip through the country in 1978, the smiling peasants helped him push those nagging thoughts from his mind. Bergstrom thought Cambodia could become “a very special model for the third world … an ideal society with no oppressors.” After the trip articles and talks were published: Both Gunnar Bergström and Hedvig Ekerwald published numerous articles on the delegation’s trip in the journal Kampuchea, including a book Kampuchea between the two wars (in 1979).
“Pol Pot was maybe wrong but he wasn’t that bad,” Bergstrom said, recalling his thoughts at the time. “We came home with a belief that we have found the truth somehow that this (story about killings) is Western propaganda. Our excuse was that ‘The (Cambodian) revolution is young, immature, you will never have a perfect revolution, and that these killings … are now (occurring) in the beginning and will stop later.'”
But evidence that emerged after the regime’s fall forced Bergstrom to change his views. “It’s like falling off the branch of the tree,” said Bergstrom, who now works as a counsellor for drug addicts. “You have to re-identify everything you have believed in. After six months I left that movement because I realized I had been wrong about the Khmer Rouge,” recalled Bergstrom. To make amends, he wrote articles for the Swedish press renouncing his support for Democratic Kampuchea. Bergstrom admits that he was young — 27 years old — and idealistic when he undertook what he now considers a “propaganda tour” of the country.
“For my part in supporting the Khmer Rouge and what they did, I am very sorry,” he told those gathered to hear Bergstrom publically speak to Cambodian audiences. “I cannot undo the trip. I can only try to make things right now.” Thirty years later, Gunnar Bergstrom returned to Cambodia for the first time since 1978 to tell about the things he saw, and ignored, and he is donating his photo and movie archive from the 1978 trip to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an non-government organization (NGO) dedicated to archiving the history of the period. It offers viewers an unfamiliar glimpse into what is regarded as a genocidal regime. In addition to overt propaganda shots of cultural performances are pictures of smiling children, factory workers, men and women eating in communal halls, and people planting rice against the backdrop of the lush Cambodian countryside.

The photos, all of which are colour, offer a rare “candy-eyed view” of a regime determined to deceive Western visitors. Bergstrom’s collection includes no photos of the torture, starvation, death, and despair. The exhibition, titled “Gunnar in the Living Hell“, will find a permanent home at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum."
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