Guilty keep vigil after gold rush in killing fields

30-Jun-07
SETH MYDANS
IN SRE LEAV, CAMBODIA

"I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer ... There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone." - Youk Chhang

THE killing fields of Cambodia, containing the graves of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge from the 1970s, are being ripped open by impoverished villagers scavenging for jewellery.

Researchers documenting the atrocities have found that at one site alone hundreds of graves have been dug up. Bones have been scattered through woodland by locals looking for trinkets to pay for basics such as rice and cooking oil.

"Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too," said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized the poor and isolated village of Sre Leav. "If they can dig for gold, why can't I?"

"People said, 'This goose has no owner,' " said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror between 1975 to 1979, from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

The invasion of what has been almost sacred ground suggests that past traumas are starting to fade even as Cambodia prepares to begin a long-delayed trial of some Khmer Rouge leaders, said Youk Chhang, a leading expert on the period.

"I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer," he said, speaking of the pain of the past. "There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone."

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, "It's just a dead person."

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which has researched the killing fields and amassed a huge archive on the Khmer Rouge years. Two of his investigators said there could be as many as 9,000 bodies buried in the woods behind Sre Leav, 100 miles south of Phnom Penh.

Although the pain of the past may have faded, the bones and the ghosts of Khmer Rouge victims still terrify many rural people. After the assault on the burial ground, this little village seemed filled with remorse and dread.

The digging has stopped and several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

"People heard voices calling out, 'Help me! Help me!'" said Svay Saroeun, 50, a deputy village chief. "Maybe they are angry at the villagers for digging up their graves. Or maybe they were tortured to death, and now they are being tortured again by people who are disturbing their sleep."

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small gold earrings out of a grave.

"I'm afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them," she said. "She'll say, 'Please give them back. They are all I had.'"

Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

"We never have enough rice," she said. "Normally we can't afford to buy pork."

The buried treasure seemed paltry after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it represented a fortune to those who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.

The luckiest villager was Pen Chia, 27, who recovered the necklace and sold it to buy a cow. Most people found nothing but shattered skulls, bits of bone that looked like broken sticks and scraps of mouldy clothing.

"I dug all day without eating," said Pron Sythoeun, 36, a farmer. "I dug for four days. And I got nothing."

He has gone back to poke through the scraps with a stick, but few other villagers have returned except to light incense and pray for forgiveness from the restless souls.

The killing field sits empty now in the pouring rain, cratered with shallow pits and mounds of freshly turned red mud, silent under the trees except for the lowing of thin white cattle in a nearby field.

Some villagers said they had not known it was there, although its existence had not been a secret. It was beside them through the decades, like the suppressed traumas of the past, a blank spot in their minds.

They rediscovered it by chance, when Vietnamese soldiers came by searching for the remains of their own missing men. The Vietnamese Army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, then occupied Cambodia for a decade.

Helping the soldiers dig, Pon Khlaut, a farmer, saw the glint of an earring in a pit. When he showed it to his neighbours, they abandoned their homes and fields and rushed to the woods to dig.

Among them was Srey Net, who knew the graveyard well. As a teenager, she said, she had been enlisted to bury the bodies of people who had died in labour gangs building one of the huge irrigation dikes that were a particular folly of the Khmer Rouge.

Nearly 20,000 killing fields, holding anywhere from a few bodies to hundreds, served as burial grounds for Khmer Rouge victims as well as execution sites.

Like many of the victims, Srey Net said, the people here died from accidents, exhaustion and starvation as well as fevers, malaria and an epidemic of diarrhoea. Many of them were sent to a small, crude clinic nearby from which few emerged alive.

"Whenever a patient died, they would ring a gong or blow a whistle," she said. "Even in the middle of the night, I had to run up there to help carry away the bodies."

Last week she was among the graves again, hacking at the ground with a hoe, unearthing what may have been some of the same bodies she had buried years ago. And then, finding no gold, she reverted to her former role, retrieving and re-burying some of the bones.

"I felt pity for them, that's why I collected the bones," she said. "They were scattered all over the place."

Srey Noeun, the farmer who sold two earrings to buy food, also had a connection with the bodies in the graves. Like many of them, she had been a member of a work brigade here, but unlike them she had survived.

"I went to see what was happening but I didn't have a hoe," she said of the raid on the burial ground. "I said to someone, 'Give me your hoe, I want to dig too.'"

The first thing she found was clothing, then bones, and then gold.

"I dug downwards to the feet, and then I started upwards," she said. "I found the teeth and the skull. I moved them down around the feet and I cleared the ground around them with my hands. I saw the earrings, first on the left and then on the right."

She said they were exactly like the small gold rings she had worn in her ears as a girl until they were taken from her when she was forced to join a work brigade.

Srey Noeun said she had no idea whether she had ever met the woman whose grave she raided, and she said she did not know why the Khmer Rouge had let the woman keep her earrings.

Death and delay thwarts the quest for justice

Cambodian leader Hun Sen has pledged a quick start to genocide trials for former Khmer Rouge leaders.

After repeated failures over the past six months, Cambodian and foreign judges announced the rules for the tribunal on Wednesday, paving the way for it to begin investigating the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders over the deaths of 1.7 million during their 1975-79 communist rule.

However, observers said efforts to prosecute the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders face further hurdles.

"The hardest part has yet to come, and that is who and how many [suspects] should be or should not be" indicted, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, an independent group collecting evidence of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

There is also a growing concern that ageing defendants could die before the trials begin.

"Cambodia can embrace ... a bright future only after this matter has been settled, the trials have been held and punishment will be given," Hun Sen said last month.

He himself was a junior Khmer Rouge member who defected from the group before the regime was toppled from power in 1979.

The top Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot died in 1998. Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge army chief, died last July while in detention pending trial by the special tribunal. He was believed to be 80.

The only potential defendant now in custody is Kaing Khek Iev, also known as Duch, who headed the notorious S-21 torture centre in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Nuon Chea, the movement's chief strategist; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state - live freely in Cambodia but are in declining health.

Cambodia and the United Nations created the genocide tribunal last year under an agreement they reached in 2003. The 17 Cambodian and 12 foreign judges and prosecutors have spent the past six months in sometimes rancorous disagreement on guidelines. The tribunal is an unprecedented hybrid. It will operate under the Cambodian judicial system, which is often criticised as weak and corrupt. Decisions require support from a majority of the Cambodian judges, backed by at least one UN-appointed judge.

Neither the Cambodian nor the foreign judicial officials have given details about their cases or revealed names and the number of potential suspects.