The Statue of Sinn Sisamouth: the Triumph of the “Golden Voice” over the Khmer Rouge

On this year marking the 50th anniversary of the start of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror on April 17, 1975, erecting a statue of more than three meters of Sinn Sisamouth, Cambodia’s “Golden Voice” assassinated by the Pol Potists in 1976, amounts to much more than a tourist-oriented homage to the man who was the singer idol of the 1960s.   

Funded by the Kinal Foundation, which was established by the PPM-Confirel Group, and unveiled last month by the governor of Stung Treng, this monument symbolizes the absolute defeat of the ideas that led to the killing of more than 2 million people, including nearly all the intellectuals and artists.

Because the assassination of this adulated singer has not muffled his voice. Today, it keeps on lighting up the hearts of the Cambodians of all ages.

For the Khmer Rouge, that voice was expressing the decadence of the hated bourgeoisie. Singing about love or heartache as Sinn Sisamouth was doing so wonderfully was glorifying petits-bourgeois feelings that were rotting the soul of the people, contributing to keeping people in submission to the ruling class.   

What people wanted, the Pol Pot followers kept proclaiming, was martial songs that were glorifying work in the fields and denouncing “petit-bourgeois” deviances, that were stating in every possible way revolutionary morality in which love had no place, and especially that were covering with praise and glory Angkar so-called infallible.

But history has spoken its truth. And Sinn Sisamouth still sings, will always sing while the leaders of the Pol Pot era will forever bear the stamp of infamy. 

Today, from the top of this statue that features him with a microphone in his hand, the smile of Sin Sisamouth will light up the heart of people in love who will come to walk by his statue. 

On its pedestal will be engraved the names of all the other singers eliminated during the genocide.    

And finally, it is a whole choir whose voices will be heard rising into the sky of Stung Treng to state that any effort to destroy for any reason artistic creation and those creating, whether in the name of a policy or religion, is doomed to fail, and the artists will always return to the Light while the obscurantists will rot for all eternity in an endless night.