Buddhist monks and Pol Pot genocide: Cristina Trenas at TEDxMadrid

Cristina Trenas, a young film director and a member of the audience, went to Cambodia thanks to a National Geographic scholarship, and recorded the stories of the old buddhist monks that still remember the oppression and their suffering during the Pol Pot dictatorship.

Buddhism has been,
through the centuries,

the basis of Cambodian culture.

On April 17th, 1975,

Pol Pot took power

and one of the first things he did

was to prohibit and persecute religion.

We know very little about the horror

that buddhist monks went though

during the three years, eight months

and twenty days that
Democratic Kampuchea lasted.

And we risk

their stories being lost forever.

In November, my friend
Raquel Vasquez and I

got a scholarship

to investigate about the persecutions

of buddhist monks throughout that period.

We didn´t think twice:

we left everything and,
along with this team,

we went and stayed in Cambodia.

Our base camp was in Phnom Penh,

from where we closely followed

the Khmer Rouge trials.

We also investigated to find

buddhist monks of the Pol Pot era

that were still alive
and wouldn't be scared

to share their stories and talk

about such a delicate subject.

They were very elderly

and confused dates and places.

Their accounts

were like a puzzle

that we needed to put together.

That's how we went
all through Cambodia

and parts of Vietnam, visiting villages,

pagodas and tracking the roads

through which these monks were forced

to emigrate.

We have learnt from buddhist monks

that they went from
being spiritual leaders

to leeches in their own society.

They were forced to get married

and consumate these marriages;

they were forced to join the army;

to work as forced labour;

to abandon their beliefs

or keep them internally.

Their family and friends were killed

just for knowing how to read

or just because
they were wearing glasses.

The tranquility and
even the sense of humour

that they told their story with

never ceased to amaze us.

It's because when you believe that death

is the beginning rather than the end,

you can't allow yourself to feel rage

or revenge because
it might be perpetuated

for eternity.

We learnt that buddhism is

the central axis around which

the Cambodian lifestyle revolves.

Everyday Nom PePhnom Penh
is died in orange

with all the monks

that move around the city

going from home to home.

Cambodians, who live in a humble way,

share their money and food with them

every day.

It's been a long time:

too long to make justice

and too short to forget.

Now we see, with this perspective,

that violence

against people's identities

is still a tragic reality.

That is why we want
to make a contribution

to this public space: the testimonies

of these monks that
we have gathered in Cambodia.

(Applause).