Content #022

Tuol Sleng Museum. Phnom Penh, Cambodja. 2008
‘In August 1978, the Swede Gunnar Bergström, who was then president of the SKFA (Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association) as well as one of the Khmer Rouge’s most ardent supporters, was the only Westerner allowed to visit Democratic Kampuchea together with three other Swedes. They also had dinner with Pol Pot. At that time, Gunnar Bergström was just 27 years old and he was an idealist and a leftist, believing that the reports about overwork, starvation and mass killings in Cambodia were just “Western propaganda”. They saw “smiling peasants”, a society on its way to become “an ideal society, …with no oppressors”. When they came back to Sweden, they “undertook a speaking tour and wrote articles in support of the Democratic Kampuchea regime”. Evidence that emerged after the fall of the regime shocked Bergström, forcing him to change his views. He said that it was “like falling off the branch of the tree” and that he had to re-identify everything he had believed in. In later interviews, he acknowledged that he had been wrong, that it was a “propaganda tour” and that they were brought to see what they wanted them to see. After this, Gunnar Bergström went back to Cambodia for a “big forgiveness tour”. In a speech with high school students in Phnom Penh on 12 September 2016, he recommended that everybody should learn history and he stated that a peaceful communist revolution is not possible.’ Bron: Wikipedia.