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Extract from research interview for 'Denial: Why People Deny Genocide' by Jun’ya Onizuka, 11 March, 2033
Jun’ya Onizuka: “Hello, Konishi-san, and thank you for conducting this interview. You were a soldier in the Daitōjin army stationed in Paechon, is that correct?”
Goro Konishi: “Yes, that’d be correct. For the record, if I might ask, what exactly would you like to know?”
Onizuka: “We’ll get to that, but first, I’d like to ask a few other questions, provide some context if that’s alright.”
Konishi: “Very well.”
[...]
Onizuka: “It was dawn on the 22nd of October when you crossed the Channel, right?”
Konishi: “We got permission to move from Paechon into what was at the time western Kalasin. Pretty soon after that, we started landing near the coast, Songkhla, I believe the city was. As it happens, I was one of the first people to make it over, so we—Alpha Company—were tasked with securing the area before we could move on. The plan from there was to seize Songkhla, and from there we—Daitōjin forces, I mean; the Achkaerinese were tasked with heading north—were to push along Highway 3 towards Ranong, liberate the former capital of the ‘Union State’, though we’d hopefully link up with Kalasinese Union forces who’d be doing a lot of the heavy lifting with liberating their homeland.”
Onizuka: “Did you meet any resistance on the way?”
Konishi: “Oh, no. Well, I mean there was that ambush in Ko Samet on the first day, but generally speaking, as we pushed along Highway 3, we were met with… Well, an eerie calm. I want to say that from about the time we left Songkhla until we hit Kathu. People were just scared. I mean, we’d hit Kalasin hard in the weeks prior, don’t get me wrong, but that was almost exclusively against military targets. We hit things like power stations and telecommunications equipment, knocked out a couple oil refineries and destroyed the utility of most dams, yes, but we did our best to mitigate civilian casualties whenever possible. No, there was something terribly wrong. But you know, everything west of the Pa Sak river was at least relatively orderly. It was certainly more than anything we found from the east bank to Ranong. As the gods are my witness, there was just… nothing.
Onizuka: “How did people greet you?’
Konishi: “It depends, honestly. Many didn’t do anything, as it happens. I think they just went on about their day as though there was nothing that had happened. Old women complaining about the price of bread in stores, men playing shogi in the parks. I couldn’t believe it since we were all so unnerved by the silence, but I figured at the time that they just got used to the constant shelling. ‘What the hell, we might die, but we should at least enjoy what time we have left.’ I imagined they thought at the time. Now, however, I have reason to believe that what they’d seen, what they’d heard, what they knew had caused something in their minds to just break and they just switched off, because facing the horror of what had been going on was just something they couldn’t comprehend.”
[...]
Konishi: “Others greeted us as liberators, some genuine, others because the alternative was almost certainly worse. They were worried that they’d be next, that they’d be killed or worse. And of course, there were those who were loyal either to the government or to the old regime who either refused to greet us or actively hampered our efforts. Many of those just crumpled to the ground, realizing that their hope for independence had been crushed like a pile of refuse under a tank tread.”
Onizuka: “When you say worse, you’re referring to Aleywa, yes?”
Konishi: “Mhhm. ‘Holding Camp No. 5’, as the Kalasinese government called it.”
Onizuka: “What did you know about Aleywa before you arrived?”
Konishi: “We’d heard from the scant few locals who weren’t too scared to talk to us about the rape camp rumors, the brainwashing camp rumors, but to be honest, a lot of people, especially those who weren’t reading the broadsheets or even checking the news on their phones didn’t believe it. I don’t blame them, of course. The thought that camps like it had existed since before the war, and under the noses of practically every government was too hard to believe. A lot of people just assumed they were exaggerating in order to demonize the Kalasinese or to further justify the war despite the attacks on Awara and Pyrettania. I don’t really know what I believed back then, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t what we found.”
Onizuka: “I understand if it’s difficult for you to remember, but due to the rise of online denial culture about things like the rape camps and ‘Plan Khaw’, can you just say what you saw when you arrived?”
Konishi: “We arrived at ‘Holding Camp No.5’ pretty early in the morning on the 17th of November. The orders apparently came from pretty high up to confirm some of the rumors that were going on there. The guards had all left—ran before we came because they knew what we would find. We arrived at the gate and, you remember those images of some of the camps in the Amami islands and the Ardian POW camps during the Greater East Ardia War with the emaciated inmates waiting around the gate? It was like that, but they were all women and girls. Most, but not all of ‘em looked slightly different than the average Kalasinese, and our translator said that’s because they were related. Lanna, Vax, Antawsai, T’rung, those sorts of people. Others looked more Ardian, so I had to guess they were descendants from back when the old Empire ruled the place. Some were bald because they desperately tried to make themselves less attractive to get less attention. Almost all of them had bruises or black eyes, even bite marks. A lot of them actually ran in terror from us because after what they’d all been through they were terrified of the sight of a man, any man. So we already knew what had happened and were shocked—even though we’d heard all the rumors, they don’t prepare you for seeing what had happened.”
[...]
Konishi: “We went inside of a barracks in the camp and we all fell silent. We were met with a vile smell, something like decay mixed with waste and blood. Lines of women had been literally chained to the wall, some dead and many more wishing they were. Solely because it’s still too painful to think about, you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into more detail other than that we all knew what had happened there. The bruising, the rashes, it all told us what had happened. On that day, in that room, part of me died, the part that believed there was a god, because if there was, then either we were in hell or this wouldn’t’ve happened.
Onizuka: “I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything else that stuck with you from the camp?”
Konishi: “Yes, of course. I recall… I’m sorry, I just need a moment.”
Onizuka: “Take all the time you need.”
Konishi: “I recall, when we first entered that camp, I felt something tugging on one of the pockets on my pants. It was so weak, but I knew what it was. A little girl, no older than four or five I thought, so horribly emaciated that it had to hurt just to walk. And yet, there she was, her eyes watering, perhaps in fear or joy that she’d be free, that the torment she’d gone through was over, begging for me to give her a bite to eat. Anything to push back that horrible feeling when the body starts to break down its own muscles just to survive. So of course, I contacted our battalion over BCTNet and requested ‘immediate support’, specifically requesting medical personnel and additional rations.”
Onizuka: “Whatever happened to her?”
Konishi: “The girl? She died that day. Refeeding syndrome, one of the medics said. Essentially, we gave her too much to eat, which caused a ‘metabolic disturbance’ in her body. We didn’t know at the time, but we should’ve. Admittedly, I blame myself for that. She would’ve been fourteen last June, per the records we found in one of the administrative buildings in the camp.”
Onizuka: “Were there any guards left in or around the camp?”
Konishi: “Well, when we went to the camp headquarters, we expected that, like everywhere else in the area, it’d be completely empty. Instead, as we went inside, we saw a boy crawling across the floor. It was the first male we’d seen in the camp that whole day, and we later found out that he’d been transferred from the mens’ camp a few dozen kilometers up the road. He couldn’t’ve been more than ten at the time, very naturally innocent looking, and he was crawling across the floor, really cautiously, looking at us and then back to the room behind him in terror. His face looked okay but we could quickly realize he was in severe pain. It turned out that he’d had both of his legs broken and that he’d been ordered to walk around on them for the amusement of his abuser for months. Not just his legs, this boy had essentially been tortured daily by the man who was just behind him in that room.”
[...]
Konishi: “Now, the man who had done this, it turned out he was actually quite infamous among the Kalasinese. His name was Wittaya Sriroj, and he had the nickname of “Pisac”, or “Demon”. Now, I’m sure you can guess how I feel about him, but suffice to say, that was an apt nickname. He took particular delight in abusing and torturing the children in the camp, particularly but not exclusively the Lanna. We walked, guns at the ready, right into the room to see Sriroj at a desk just reeking of Raon khao. He’d apparently had a nervous breakdown—not because of what he’d done, but because he’d been abandoned by his men. When he woke up he saw three guns practically in his mouth. What blew my mind was how young he was—he would've been a university student back at home, but here he was, committing things that were beyond what we thought anyone was capable of.
Onizuka: “How hard was it not to kill him?”
Konishi: “Well, as I said, when I saw those women before, I told myself there could be no gods. So when I realized that I sort of had the choice of killing him right there, punishments be damned, I realized how stupid it would be to kill him. He dies, then nothing. That’s why I sorta never understood why so many people were in support of the death penalty. ‘Oh, if we don’t have the death penalty, then we’d force him to suffer’, among other arguments. Exactly. He’d die and then he wouldn’t get to suffer. If he was going to suffer, as I wanted him to, I wanted him to live as long as possible—in that sense, it was a good thing he was so young. We beat the shit out of him, obviously. I think we must have taken half his teeth out.”
Onizuka: “What did you do after liberating the camp?”
Konishi: “Well, we were ordered to stay in the area for a few days while our sister company went up the road to that other camp I told you about. During that time, our priority was to provide as much assistance to the survivors as was possible until more aid could arrive. Honestly, I think those days were some of the hardest of my life—maybe not physically but mentally and emotionally. But eventually, we had to move on. Ranong awaited us, after all, and from there, well, all roads lead to Pattani, I suppose. Every so often, as we continued on our way, we’d pass through villages which had been entirely emptied out. Some had no signs that anyone had lived there, since I figure the PAFK had done a good enough job clearing out the bodies, but far more often than not, the slain were left out in the open, some brutalized beyond recognition in some grizzly act of desecration against people who were, just a few months prior, their neighbors. And now, because of that, Kalasin as a single country just doesn’t exist anymore… And many of us, the boys who liberated that infernal country, well… We were never the same again.”
Onizuka: “What do you think about the denial of not just the rape camps, the idea that the camps were just holding camps that gets spread by some far-right and even sometimes far-left types on the internet?”
Konishi: “Well, it’s like the attacks in July, the idea that the bombings of Awara and Pyrettania were actually done by us in order to discredit the Rangsitpol regime and the PAFK. We can’t use facts and logic to untangle that mess because no adult in a society with access to information has ever been a genocide denier out of facts or logic. The only thing I can say to the people who say the rape camps didn’t exist, that it all was made up to justify the nuclear strike, I wish you were right, mate. I really wish you were right.”
Onizuka: “Thank you for your time.”
Konishi: “By all means, you’re welcome.”