Published on September 29, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. / Modified on September 29, 2024 at 12:01.
“Until you have tasted a roast rat, you know nothing about life.” In the countryside, people fell back on this rodent but also on locusts, grasshoppers, maggots, lizards or snakes, moles, birds, once decimated the last freshwater dolphins which populated the rivers from Asia. This is one of the testimonies collected by the author of How to feed a dictator (Editions Noir sur Blanc) during his stays in Cambodia, in the wake of survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime of terror.
Hunger haunted everyone’s thoughts, says a survivor, hunger used by the Khmers as a political instrument. A weapon. Does this remind you of anything? But what did the decision-makers themselves, the autocrats, the starving tyrants eat? Were they torn by remorse over their plate, prey to doubt, sometimes, at breakfast time or evening soup? There are five of them who deliver posthumous Memoirs here through those who had to cook for them.
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