Joe MozingoFirst
Published : 16 Apr 2009
AT night, the old woman hears the voices of her children crying out for her. She knows they will never stop.
Um Sath is 89, and three decades have passed since the Khmer Rouge laid waste to Cambodia. But she shuts her eyes and taps her temples to show where the genocidal regime still rules with impunity. “We miss you, Mama,” the voices cry.
Sath spends much of her day sitting in silence. For years, she rarely left her old clapboard house in Long Beach, California. Although she now finds peace chatting with the other haunted figures at a seniors centre, she has kept the echoes of the ‘killing fields’ sealed tightly inside her head.
In March, she let them out — joining dozens of survivors at a recreation centre in Long Beach to face their memories. They longed to see a reckoning for perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Since February, a UN-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh has put on trial the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders charged with crimes against humanity, for the brutal experiment in communism that took at least 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979.
Activists in the US want refugees outside Cambodia to submit their testimonies to the tribunal in an effort to spur a judicial process beset by delays, limited funds and allegations of corruption. They hope, along the way, to relieve the emotional torture of survivors who rarely speak about what happened. “I’m hoping it will allow them to tell the world what happened 34 years ago,” said Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach who is leading the outreach effort in Southern California, home of the world’s largest Cambodian refugee community.
“The Khmer Rouge leaders are getting old; the victims are getting old.
This is their chance to have their voices be heard before it’s too late.” In the centre at a park, Nou explains to Sath and other victims the importance of submitting their written testimony to the tribunal.
Nou understands this tribunal has problems. She knows it won’t touch even a fraction of the era’s killers. She knows political forces in Cambodia want to limit the tribunal’s reach. She knows survivors’ memories are fragmented and muddled. Asking them to condense incomprehensible horrors of that time — the turning point in their lives — into a few lines on a government form borders on cruel farce. And Nou hasn’t even been assured that prosecutors will read the forms. But she still hopes this could be a starting point for Cambodians around the world to rally for justice. She asks the survivors if they want to tell their stories to the group first.
Sath stands up. Her eyes crinkle before she speaks. Sath and her husband were farmers and merchants in the rich land along the Mekong River, south of Phnom Penh. In the middle class, with enough money to own a modest brick house, they were targets when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, brutally turning the country into a collective society of farm peasants. Intellectuals, teachers, doctors, businessmen, government bureaucrats and army soldiers were executed en masse.
Khmer Rouge soldiers showed up at Sath’s home with rifles, took her husband and told her to walk with her eight children. They had nothing but their clothes. The countryside was crowded with people on rutted roads.
For days they wandered and anyone who complained or asked questions was dismissed by a bullet to the head.
They let Sath and her children return to where she had lived. The family reunited with her husband and stayed for a month. The soldiers forced them back on the road, this time to a work camp near Pursat, where they lived in a straw hut with a dirt floor.
The family worked to exhaustion in the rice fields day after day. One day, soldiers locked Sath in chains and took her husband. Days later, she overheard soldiers mention his execution.
The soldiers took her three sons — two teenagers and the 6-year-old. Some time later, Sath heard that other villagers had seen the boys’ clothes in the plowed-up field where bodies were routinely buried. Soldiers came for Sath next. They took her to the same field and beat her unconscious. She woke up naked, amid decaying bodies and the smell that, decades later, could bring the horror back to life.
Born Pach, takes the microphone next. The stories pour out. No one remembers dates. Places are vague. Only one victim names an alleged perpetrator.
The rest do not remember their tormentors’ names, never knew them or are still scared.
© The Washington Post
Published : 16 Apr 2009
AT night, the old woman hears the voices of her children crying out for her. She knows they will never stop.
Um Sath is 89, and three decades have passed since the Khmer Rouge laid waste to Cambodia. But she shuts her eyes and taps her temples to show where the genocidal regime still rules with impunity. “We miss you, Mama,” the voices cry.
Sath spends much of her day sitting in silence. For years, she rarely left her old clapboard house in Long Beach, California. Although she now finds peace chatting with the other haunted figures at a seniors centre, she has kept the echoes of the ‘killing fields’ sealed tightly inside her head.
In March, she let them out — joining dozens of survivors at a recreation centre in Long Beach to face their memories. They longed to see a reckoning for perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Since February, a UN-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh has put on trial the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders charged with crimes against humanity, for the brutal experiment in communism that took at least 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979.
Activists in the US want refugees outside Cambodia to submit their testimonies to the tribunal in an effort to spur a judicial process beset by delays, limited funds and allegations of corruption. They hope, along the way, to relieve the emotional torture of survivors who rarely speak about what happened. “I’m hoping it will allow them to tell the world what happened 34 years ago,” said Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach who is leading the outreach effort in Southern California, home of the world’s largest Cambodian refugee community.
“The Khmer Rouge leaders are getting old; the victims are getting old.
This is their chance to have their voices be heard before it’s too late.” In the centre at a park, Nou explains to Sath and other victims the importance of submitting their written testimony to the tribunal.
Nou understands this tribunal has problems. She knows it won’t touch even a fraction of the era’s killers. She knows political forces in Cambodia want to limit the tribunal’s reach. She knows survivors’ memories are fragmented and muddled. Asking them to condense incomprehensible horrors of that time — the turning point in their lives — into a few lines on a government form borders on cruel farce. And Nou hasn’t even been assured that prosecutors will read the forms. But she still hopes this could be a starting point for Cambodians around the world to rally for justice. She asks the survivors if they want to tell their stories to the group first.
Sath stands up. Her eyes crinkle before she speaks. Sath and her husband were farmers and merchants in the rich land along the Mekong River, south of Phnom Penh. In the middle class, with enough money to own a modest brick house, they were targets when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, brutally turning the country into a collective society of farm peasants. Intellectuals, teachers, doctors, businessmen, government bureaucrats and army soldiers were executed en masse.
Khmer Rouge soldiers showed up at Sath’s home with rifles, took her husband and told her to walk with her eight children. They had nothing but their clothes. The countryside was crowded with people on rutted roads.
For days they wandered and anyone who complained or asked questions was dismissed by a bullet to the head.
They let Sath and her children return to where she had lived. The family reunited with her husband and stayed for a month. The soldiers forced them back on the road, this time to a work camp near Pursat, where they lived in a straw hut with a dirt floor.
The family worked to exhaustion in the rice fields day after day. One day, soldiers locked Sath in chains and took her husband. Days later, she overheard soldiers mention his execution.
The soldiers took her three sons — two teenagers and the 6-year-old. Some time later, Sath heard that other villagers had seen the boys’ clothes in the plowed-up field where bodies were routinely buried. Soldiers came for Sath next. They took her to the same field and beat her unconscious. She woke up naked, amid decaying bodies and the smell that, decades later, could bring the horror back to life.
Born Pach, takes the microphone next. The stories pour out. No one remembers dates. Places are vague. Only one victim names an alleged perpetrator.
The rest do not remember their tormentors’ names, never knew them or are still scared.
© The Washington Post
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