Relatives killed “for nothing,” survivors doomed to living with ghosts

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 18/08/2009: Photograph of Tioulong Raingsy shown on a screen in the ECCC press room (Photo: John Vink/ Magnum)

20-08-2009
By Stéphanie Gée
Ka-set

Relatives of victims whose lives ended brutally in S-21’s hell evoked with courage, before the Chamber and the accused, a beloved face gone forever, a broken family bliss, an unspeakable distress and the anguish sprung from the ignorance about the fate of those persecuted and imagining the most inhumane torture they must have endured. They stressed the powerlessness in the face of these individual tragedies that unfolded without them. Mrs Antonya Tioulong, sister of opposition party leader Sam Rainsy’s wife, shared on Tuesday August 18th a testimony filled with restraint that struck the right chord. By late afternoon, farmer Neth Phaly paid an impassioned tribute to his brother, “smashed” at S-21, and whose only remains consisted in a portrait he presented to the court, firmly holding it in his hands, to bring the latter’s soul back to his side while he testified in his memory.

Finding the disappeared relatives at any cost

Antonya Tioulong, chief of the documentation service at the French weekly L’Express, came as her family’s spokesperson – first, the two daughters of her older sister Raingsy who was assassinated, but also her mother, “who found the courage to come and stand in the same room as the accused,” and her five other sisters. She also presented herself as a voice for Raingsy, “no longer here to speak,” to defend her and to “say who she really was and how much her family desperately misses her.”

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