Cambodia Genocide Story

Cambodian children in Thai refugee camp

Friday, August 20, 2010
Story by Ms. Thary Ung

Good evening, My Name is Thary Ung and I would like to tell you a little about myself, I was born in 1965 in the Pursat Province in Western Cambodia. My father was successful businessman and I led what I thought was a normal life. Then in 1975, when I was 10 years old, the Khmer Rouge or Red Khmer came to power. The Khmer Rouge refers to a succession of communist parties that evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Communist Party and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.

One of the Khmer Rouge’s first acts was to move most of the urban population to the country side. They told the residents that they would only move about 2 to 3 kilometers outside the city and would return in 2 to 3 days. The population was told to evacuate Phnom Penh due to an imminent bombing raid by the United States. Nearly 2.5 million people were soon evacuated. Similar evacuations occurred in the cities of Battambang, Kampong Cham, Siem Reip and Kampong Thom.

The 800 foreigners in the capitol were initially quarantined in the French embassy and later transported to the Thai border. Cambodian women were able to accompany their foreign born husbands but the Cambodian men were not able to leave with their foreign wives.

The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone connected with: the former government; or foreign governments. They also targeted professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks, Christians and Muslims as well as those of Thai and Vietnamese ancestry.

Under the Khmer Rouge justice system, persons alleged to have committed minor or political crimes received a warning from the government. Persons receiving more than two warnings were sent for “re-education which was almost always a death sentence.

Persons were encouraged to confess to their “pre-revolutionary lifestyles such as: engaging in a free market activity, having contact with a foreign source such as in international relief organization, or having contact with any foreigner or anyone outside of Cambodia. Those who confessed were promised that their slate would be wiped clean and all would be forgiven. What it really meant was that they would be taken to places such as Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek to be tortured or executed.

After the Khmer Rouge had taken power in Cambodia, I was assigned to a Youth Team in Region 2, as part of Pol Pot’s social engineering program experiment ofr Cambodian Society. Under this program, the entire population was required to work in collective farms or forced labor projects.

The civilian population from the cities was sent to rural areas. They were the politically suspect “new people”. This included refugees from the War that moved from the county to the cities. Those that came from the countryside were considered to be the reliable “old people”.

At the beginning there were 2.5 million “new people”. Since they were considered to be unsympathetic to the Khmer Rouge, they were treated as slave laborers. They were constantly moved and forced to do the hardest physical labor. They worked in the most inhospitable parts of the country like the forests, upland areas and swamps. New people were separated from the old people. They had little or no privacy and received the smallest rice rations. The medical care for the new people was virtually non-existent. Even though party members and the military had access to Western medicine the new people were required to rely on plant and herbal remedies.

I was one of the new people. I was separated from my family, divided into work brigades and sent to work on farms in different parts of the country. I was assigned to a Youth Team in Region 2. The days were long, with little time to rest and even less to eat. We were treated very poorly. One of the sayings for the “new people” within the regime was: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.

During the rule of the Khmer Rouge many people died because of execution, starvation and forced labor. While the exact number of deaths that resulted from Pol Pot’s policies is not known, accepted estimates range from 1.4 million to 2.2 million. Recently, a better accounting of the dead and missing placed the number of victims closer to 3 million. In 1975 was the population of Cambodia was only 7.5 million. As a result the rule of the Khmer Rouge ranks as one of the most deadly in the 20th century.

Of those that died, estimated 200,000 were buried in mass graves, referred to as the “Killing Fields”. To use the word execution for those buried in the Killing Fields may be too neat of a term as the victims were often beaten to death with hammers, axe handles, shovels or even sharpened bamboo sticks, in order to save the cost of ammunition. If you visit the Killing Fields you will see a number of shallow graves. This is because the victims had to dig their own graves but were too weak to dig to the proper depth.

This was a very difficult time for me as there was much suffering. There were times when I did not know if I was going to survive and I saw many people die many people that I cared about. Before Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese, I had lost my father, my mother, 2 brothers and 3 sisters.

Eventually, I was able to make a new life for myself, first staying in the refugee camps in Thailand and later being sponsored to immigrate to the United States in May 1981.

Even though the Khmer Rouge’s control over the entire county ended in 1979, they continued to exist as an insurgent force in West Cambodia and Thailand into the 1990s. It was not until the death of Pol Pot in 1998 that I truly believed that the Khmer Rouge was gone for good.

Now, during my frequent trips to the country of my birth. I often experience a conflict of emotions, the happiness of my early days with my family and friends, contrasted with the anger and sadness for those that were taken away from me never to be seen again. I see a poor country (per capita GDP of under $1,800 a year) and think about how Cambodia would be a different place if not for the four years of terror that began nearly 36 years ago.

While it is important to remember the past, it is also important to look to the future. My life now is much different that I imagined it would be while I was working in the fields far away from my family and friends.

Today, I am happy to say that I have a busy life. I have a home in the greater Los Angeles Area. I am married and have two wonderful children. I am fortunate to have my surviving sister live with me.

I have many friends that I am able to visit frequently. I am involved in a number of organizations that support the Cambodian and Asian Pacific Islander communities both in the US and in Cambodia. I am very grateful to be alive and to be living in the United States. My life is good. I would like to thank all of those that have supported me through the years and believe that I was destined for better things.

Thary Ung
thary_ung@yahoo.com