Finding peace in her heart

August 01, 2010
By Sean Gonsalves
sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
Cape Cod Times (USA)

"I find peace in my heart because I found forgiveness and mercy in Christ. I don't carry hate in me anymore... I learned to free myself from revenge and hate. I forgive but never forget" - Bopha Samms

I pushed a picture of Comrade Duch across the table as if it were a rook in a game of chess, then leaned back in my chair to gauge the reaction of Bopha Samms.

I'm not sure what I expected. An expression of anguish, perhaps. Or maybe she would crumple up the photo accompanying the BBC news article and throw it at me, spurred by vivid memories of being too weak to crawl to the communal cafeteria, just up the road from the agrarian nightmare she called home.

Either of those reactions would certainly be understandable. Duch was one of Pol Pot's murderous minions — chief of Cambodia's infamous Tuol Sleng prison, also ominously known as S-21, where men, women and even children were tortured and massacred.

Those lucky enough to avoid detention were forced to work in rice fields or farms, while many others were left to die of starvation — like Bopha's mother, father, and several of her 11 siblings; treated as if they were mere pawns in a cruel game of Maoist chess.

When the Khmer Rouge was finally driven from power by Vietnamese forces in January 1979 after four years of genocide, an estimated 2.5 million Cambodians were dead.

"If I were sitting face-to-face with him, right now, I wouldn't feel anger," Bopha says, holding Duch's picture closer to her face now to get a better look in the glaring sunlight beaming through the window of her Bourne restaurant, Stir Crazy.

"I find peace in my heart because I found forgiveness and mercy in Christ. I don't carry hate in me anymore."

She is looking at me now and appears to me as a picture of sun-bathed serenity. She reads the astonishment on my face.

"I learned to free myself from revenge and hate. I forgive but never forget," she says, explaining that, though she considers herself a Christian now, she has also drawn deeply from the Buddhism learned in her youth.

Earlier this week, Duch was sentenced to 19 years in prison by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in conjunction with a panel of international judges working on behalf of the United Nations. And while the 55-year-old restaurateur has come a long way — both geographically and spiritually — since she first came to Bourne in 1981, don't misunderstand. Forgiveness, in this case, emphatically does not mean to turn the other cheek and forsake this-world justice.

"He got a slap on the wrist. They do this to please international opinion. I don't see the real leaders being brought to justice."

Not only that, she says, unlike the tribunals that prosecuted high-level Nazi war criminals, the Cambodian people will never have the satisfaction of seeing Duch's puppet-masters in the dock. Pol Pot is dead, as are many of the Chinese communists he mimicked and whom Bopha ultimately blames, along with the former Soviet Union.

"There's no way these people (like Pol Pot and Duch) had the mind to do this on their own. They were brainwashed."

Bopha is convinced of foreign meddling — the only way she can make even a sliver of sense out of Cambodian military leaders killing so many of their own people.

But Bopha survived as an embodiment of America's promise, having come from "the killing fields" to a kitchen of her own choosing. She adores her adopted home, though she thinks Americans sometimes complain too much — about taxes, the government and each other. Still, like many of us, she is concerned about the future of this country for her children — the deficit, our relationship with China, even immigration.

"America has changed so much," she says, which leads to a discussion about a painting that now hangs in the S-21 prison-turned-memorial-museum. It's a painting that depicts detainees being waterboarded. I ask her what she thinks about the Bush administration authorizing such practices and that there are still many U.S. politicians and citizens who don't think of waterboarding as torture.

"I lived through it. It is torture. I ran from that to come here. ... This country gave me opportunity to be successful, to try to move on. ... Now I see all of this happening. I do not understand why these things still happen. All over the world."

It's like the whole planet has gone stir crazy.

"I don't know what the answers are." Bopha shrugs. She pauses, as if to take in the complexity of it all, before sharing with me a simple belief her mother expressed before she died: "It won't always be like this. Don't give up. I promise you, one day it will change."

In chess, if a pawn makes it all the way to the other side of the board, it is promoted to be a queen — the most powerful piece on the board. On the chessboard of life, Bopha is a queen. No doubt about it.

Sean Gonsalves' column runs on Sundays and Wednesdays. Comment on this column or read past columns at www.capecodonline.com/gonsalves. Sean can be reached at
sgonsalves@capecodonline.com