Survivor recounts genocide

Woman says it’s too important to forget horrors

July 19, 2010
VENICE BUHAIN; Staff writer
The Olympian (Olympia, Washington State, USA)

LACEY - For Lacey resident Rokaih Vansot, who fled at age 4 with her family from the killing fields of Cambodia, the history of what happened to her relatives under the Khmer Rouge is too important to forget.

But those memories are painful for both her mother, who lost 33 members of her family to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, and for her father, who lost 39 members of his family to that regime. Those numbers do not include extended family members, she said.

“For my family, it is still very fresh – all the violence and the punishments,” said Vansot, a human resources consultant with the state Department of Transportation. Vansot spoke to a group organized at Pleasant Glade Elementary School by the Olympia Jewish-Muslim Listening Group, an organization formed to encourage conversation and understanding after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Vansot and Tacoma author Daran Kravanh, a Khmer Rouge survivor who authored a survival memoir of the regime, “Music Through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia,” were invited to speak about the Cambodian genocide under the rule of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, known commonly as the Khmer Rouge.

In 1975, Cambodia was taken over by the Khmer Rouge, and the Communist party’s reforms, including seizing control of agriculture, education and local government, led to the deaths of about 21 percent of Cambodia’s population. At least 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, disease or by torture and execution by the Khmer Rouge.

Kravanh recounted how police officers, students, city officials, doctors and other educated people would disappear, or be “reassigned” under the paranoid eyes of the Khmer Rouge.

He said children were brainwashed into spying on their parents for the government.

“If the children found one – that his mom or her mom was a policeman or something – then your mom disappeared,” Kravanh said.

Kravanh and his wife and co-author, Bree Lafreniere, alternated between reading from his memoir of how his talent and love for playing the accordion brought out his will to survive and the help of unlikely supporters, and talking about his experiences and playing songs that he wrote or performed during that time.

Many of the Cambodians refugees now living in Lacey are Cham, a Muslim ethnic minority that was targeted by the Khmer Rouge.

Vansot, who is Cham, said that the Khmer Rouge would persecute the Cambodian populace with their meal rations.

“They served pork to Muslims, and did not give any to people who ate it,” she said.

Her sisters, both under age 10, were forced to do agricultural work and taught to love the Communist party, which provided their food and other needs, instead of their parents, Vansot said.

Vansot said she has few vivid memories of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Her older sisters and her parents, until recently, have avoided discussing it.

“It’s been difficult for them to share that information,” she said.

Her parents get upset when discussing her grandparents, uncles, aunts and their families who all died under the Khmer Rouge.

“I want to find out as much history and data, so it’s not lost,” Vansot said. “My mother says, ‘I don’t want to remember. Just leave it.’ That’s her way of healing. She’s lost so many family members.”

Anise Ahmed, an organizer with the Olympia Jewish-Muslim Listening Group, said that the young people in the Cham community want to know their family histories, but their older family members still are too traumatized to talk about the Cambodian genocide.

Vansot “had the courage to ask her parents,” he said. “A lot of young people want to know.”