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.”

Sacrava's Political Cartoon: Seng Theary's Words

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Children of Trauma Face Their Own Struggles

Welfar of children By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
31 August 2009

According to studies, children of holocaust survivors have reported feeling lonely, confused and burdened by their parent’s trauma, due to communication that is often avoided in lieu of reliving horrific events. Studies also indicate that children of survivor families are more likely to develop depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.

Kara Uy is a domestic violence counselor at the Asian Woman’s Home, in Santa Clara county, California. She said recently that more than half of school-aged children in domestic violence shelters show clinical levels of anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Without treatment, these children are at significant risk for delinquency, substance abuse, school drop-out, and difficulties in their own relationships,” the Cambodian American social worker told VOA Khmer at her office in San Jose.

As a family counselor at a residential domestic violence shelter and an active volunteer in the community, Kara Uy has worked with many families from all walks of life, under many circumstances.

“The pattern that I see most prevalent among these families is the cycle of domestic violence that stems from psychological and environmental factors,’’ she said. “I think almost all survivors that I’ve worked with have expressed that their mother or primary guardian raised them in an environment where abuse was tolerated. And many have also conveyed the deep-rooted affects of impaired self-esteem, anxiety and also depression. With domestic violence victims that I work with, many have mentioned that they’ve noticed unhealthy patterns of behaviors in their own children.”

While many sons were emulating abusive behaviors of their fathers, daughters began to relate to them with alarming ease, she said. Studies show that 50 percent of boys raised in abusive homes become abusive themselves, but 60 percent of girls become victims themselves.

“Children may exhibit a wide range of reactions to exposure to violence in their home,” said Vinita Kylin, Cambodian liaison for Franklin McKinley School District in Santa Clara. “Younger children do not understand the meaning of the abuse they observe and tend to believe that they must have done something wrong.”

Self-blame can precipitate feelings of guilt, worry and anxiety. Children, especially younger children, typically do not have the ability to adequately express their feelings verbally. Consequently, the manifestation of their emotions is often behavioral. Children may become withdrawn and non-verbal and exhibit regressed behaviors, such as clinging and whining. Eating and sleeping difficulty, concentration problems, generalized anxiety, and physical complaints such as headaches are all common.

“The pre-adolescent child typically has a greater ability to externalize negative emotions,” Reaksmie Om, a case manager for domestic violence programs in Long Beach, Calif., said. “In addition to symptoms commonly seen with childhood anxiety, sleep problems, eating disturbances and nightmares, victims within this age group may show a loss of interest in social activities, low self-concept, rebelliousness and oppositional-defiant behavior in the school settings.”

It is also common to observe bad temper, irritability, frequent fighting at school or between siblings, lashing out at objects, threatening of siblings with violence, and attempts to gain attention through hitting and kicking.

Incidentally, girls are more likely to exhibit withdrawal and, unfortunately, run the risk of being missed as a child in need of support.

“Adolescents are at risk of academic failure, school drop-out, delinquency, and substance abuse,” said Sony Pream, a domestic violence program coordinator in Long Beach. “Some investigators have suggested that a history of family violence or abuse is the most significant difference between delinquent and non-delinquent youth.”

For some children questions about home life may be difficult to answer, especially if the individual has been warned or threatened by a family member to refrain from talking to teachers about events that have taken place in the family when there is suggestion of domestic violence with a student, consider involving the school psychologist, social worker, guidance counselor and/or a school administrator.

“Although the circumstances surrounding each case may vary, suspicion of child abuse is required to be reported to the local child protection agency by teachers and other school personnel,” Vinita added. “In some cases, a contact with the local police department may also be necessary. When in doubt, consult with school team members.”

Children exposed to domestic violence often suffer psychological and behavioral difficulties that if left untreated can severely impact their lives and may ultimately result in the perpetuating of an intergenerational cycle of violence. With help, many children can be saved from a downward spiral. Community leaders, particularly police chiefs and mental health service directors, must help.

Kara Uy said working with diverse groups and helping people rebuild lives free of violence has prepared her to be adaptive and versatile. And she said such appalling statistics have really stirred her interests in a possible doctoral dissertation focusing on disorders in children raised in unstable environments and in families with a history of trauma, which is very common in Cambodian community because many suffered from the Khmer Rouge period and the war.

Khmer Rouge horrors still haunt victims 30 years on

Sunday, July 12, 2009
Joel Brinkley
San Francisco Chronicle (USA)

Kampong Speu, Cambodia -- They started arriving before 8 a.m., middle-aged men and women, poor rice farmers mostly - damaged survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime.

The Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private research organization that collects evidence on the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, was bringing to this small provincial town a video projector and a DVD. It shows highlights of the testimony in a Khmer Rouge trial under way in Phnom Penh.

"I want to contribute to engaging the victims in the court process," explained Youk Chhang, the center's director. The founding agreements establishing the court opened the proceedings to victims of the Khmer Rouge. "Some Cambodians have moved on," he added. "But there are others who still suffer, and these are the ones we are targeting." That's just whom he got.

For an hour, about 75 people watched transfixed as Kaing Khek Lev, commander of S-21, the notorious prison-torture chamber where thousands of Cambodians died, described his crimes. He is better known as Duch, and he told how he supervised as his soldiers executed victims by whacking them on the back of the head with a hoe.

Duch is 66 now and looked directly at the judges with a calm and confident gaze, seeming to be the commander still, as he confessed to his terrible crimes, apologized and asked for forgiveness.

"I was given a directive to use a plastic bag to suffocate prisoners," he acknowledged.

When the video excerpts ended, the room sat silent - stunned, it seemed. A documentation center official asked audience members to talk about what they had seen.

The DVD was paused on a scene in which Duch seemed to be staring directly at the crowd with a stern, almost threatening, gaze.

The first woman who raised her hand took the microphone and promptly broke into tears.

"Forgiveness is not acceptable," she declared, wiping her eyes. "They killed my father and two older brothers."

Next a middle-aged man told of how six of his relatives died, and as he spoke his large brown eyes grew red and filled with tears. Still another man was choking up so that his words were hard to understand.

"I was a child, and I was starving," he stammered. "They gave us no food, and sometimes I would fall down and pass out and then wake up again." And so it went.

Cathartic? Perhaps. Injurious? Maybe.

The problem is, almost half the adult population of Cambodia, those older than 35 or 40, shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a severe psychological condition that typically afflicts soldiers, but also civilians who live through trauma - like the horror here 30 years ago.

And for them, psychiatric experts say, watching a video like the one these people saw is like poking a stick in a hornet's nest. It triggers all of the symptoms: pain, rage - even violence.

One medical study of Cambodian refugees in Long Beach - the largest concentration of Cambodians in the United States - found that 62 percent of the adults had PTSD.

That and other studies found a generally dysfunctional population with high levels of alcoholism, drug use - and terrible violence.

Daryn S. Reicherter, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, served as a consultant to the Documentation Center here in the spring and came back concerned. "There needs to be some medical follow-up with these people" after the show has ended, he insisted.

So far, the Documentation Center has trucked more than 10,000 villagers to Phnom Penh to see the trial - or brought DVD excerpts to show in their own villages.

Youk Chhang understands the doctors' concerns but points out that he is a researcher, not a treatment specialist. The government, he says, should provide any needed psychiatric services. But then, Cambodia has only about 26 psychiatrists in the entire nation.

Yim Choy, a 44-year-old farmer, shouted at the crowd, saying that he had been conscribed to a child-labor team. "I cannot forgive Duch," he declared, his voice laced with bitter anger. "How can I when I saw him throw little boys against a tree?"

Afterward, he told me that, even now, he cannot talk about those times without growing angry. And yet he has a hard time keeping the thoughts out of his mind.

He even dreams of the horrors - a hallmark of PTSD. "I see myself with my hands tied behind me." All of that makes him angrier still.

After watching scenes like this, Reicherter posed a rhetorical question: "Why is this important?"

"Children are growing up," he explained, "with violent, PTSD parents who are drunk and beat them. That's the generation that is coming."

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. To comment to him, e-mail brinkley@foreign-matters.com. Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com.

Cambodia Genocide Tribunal Reveals More Horrors

Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Digital Journal

A leading official in the former communist Khmer Rouge regime, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as ’Duch’ has testified to the murder of children. The children were killed to stop them seeking revenge for their parents’ deaths.

Media reports told how Eav, 66, in testimony before Cambodia’s genocide tribunal, explained how the executioners held the children’s legs or feet and swung them against tree trunks to smash their skulls.

When shown photos of the crimes, Eav at first failed to recall them, but on recognising the trees in questions, admitted to the crimes. He said:

I am criminally responsible for killing babies, young children and teenagers. My subordinates did it. I do not blame them because this was under my responsibility.

Eav was the head of Tuol Sleng prison, known as S21, in which up to 14,000 prisoners, most of them Khmer Rouge members accused of sedition were sent for torture and then execution. Many thousands were taken to an orchard near Choeung Ek on the southern edge of Phnom Penh, were they were forced to kneel in front of pre-dug graves before being struck on the back of the head by a steel bar or shaft.

A sign in Choeung Ek marks the place where the children were killed.

In previous interviews with journalists, Eav admitted to killing people himself, but has since claimed only his subordinates did the killing. He has confessed only to torture at the trial.

The joint U.N.-Cambodian tribunal is expected to try five senior members of the Khmer Rouge regime, of which Eav is the first.

Former Khmer Rouge leader ordered guards to kill babies

Monday, June 8, 2009
CBC News (Canada)

A former Khmer Rouge commander testified Monday that he was responsible for the brutal deaths of babies under an official policy aimed at ensuring children of the Cambodian regime's adult victims could never avenge their parents' deaths.

"I am criminally responsible for killing babies, young children and teenagers," Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, told a UN-assisted genocide tribunal in Phnom Penh.

"It was done by my subordinates. I do not blame them because this was under my responsibility."

Duch, 66, is being tried for crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture. He was the commander at the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh.

"There is no gain to keep them [children] and they might take revenge on you," Duch said, reciting the policy that he said he learned from the regime's former defence minister, Son Sen.

An estimated 16,000 men, women and children are thought to have been tortured at the prison before being executed. It's not known how many young children were killed at S-21 because few records were kept of them. But prison officials took meticulous records of the adults who were imprisoned and killed there.

Last year, Duch was taken to the former prison, now converted into a museum, and shown drawings of Khmer Rouge guards swinging babies by their legs and pounding their heads against tree trunks.

"The horrendous images of the babies being smashed against the trees, I didn't recognize it at first," said Duch. But after seeing photographs of some of the children, he recalled such things had happened, though he did not mention whether he carried out such killings himself.

About 1.7 million Cambodians died under the 1975-79 communist Khmer Rouge regime from forced labour, starvation, medical neglect and executions.

Duch is the first senior member of the regime to stand trial, and the only one to acknowledge responsibility for his actions. Other senior leaders who have been detained are Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Ieng Sary's wife, Ieng Thirith. They are likely to face trial in the next year or two.

With files from The Associated Press

Khmer Rouge prison chief: babies were 'smashed'

Monday, June 08, 2009

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — The former jail chief of the Khmer Rouge regime told Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes trial Monday that his staff had murdered babies by smashing them against trees at a "killing field".

Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his nom de guerre Duch, is on trial for overseeing the torture and extermination of 15,000 people who passed through the hardline communist movement's notorious Tuol Sleng prison.

"The horrendous images of those (babies) smashed against trees, yes, that was done my subordinates," Duch said, referring to paintings depicting the atrocities committed by members of the 1975 to 1979 Khmer Rouge regime.

"I myself do not blame my subordinates, because they worked under me. I am criminally responsible," the 66-year-old added.

The former maths teacher, wearing a grey short-sleeved shirt, was responding to prosecution questions about the regime's policies at Tuol Sleng, where prisoners were often accompanied by their children.

Duch apologised at his trial late March, saying he accepted blame for the extermination of thousands of people at the prison, which served as the centre of the 1975-1979 regime's security apparatus.

But he has denied prosecutors' claims that he played a central role in the Khmer Rouge's iron-fisted rule, and maintains he only tortured two people himself and never personally executed anyone.

Duch faces life in jail if convicted by the court, which does not have the power to impose the death penalty.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 and many believe the UN-sponsored tribunal is the last chance to find justice for victims of the regime, which killed up to two million people.

The tribunal was formed in 2006 after nearly a decade of wrangling between the United Nations and the Cambodian government, and is expected to next year to begin the trial of four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders also in detention.

Young Catholics learn of Khmer Rouge horror

May 28 2009
UCAN

PHNOM PENH : "Year Zero" is a blank for most Cambodians. For those born after the Khmer Rouge's 1975-1979 reign of terror, there are few visible signs of the period when communist leader Pol Pot tried to forcibly return the country to a pre-industrial age.

It was with this in mind that the Catholic Social Communications office in Phnom Penh decided to hold a workshop on May 23 for young Catholics to learn more about their country's painful past.

The office is also planning to take small groups of youths to the ongoing trial of Khmer Rouge cadre charged with involvement in what many have called genocide, including the trial of Tuol Sleng prison guard Kang Kek Iew, also known as Duch.

"It was a shocking period in Cambodia's history that I still find hard to come to terms with," said Oem Sokhorn, 23, during a discussion session.

"My parents said they did not have enough food then but were forced to do hard labor," said the undergraduate. "I was even more shocked when they said my grandfather was killed in front of them. I have tried to imagine what it was like to suffer during that period."

Sokhorn also said her parents told her of boys who were taught by Khmer Rouge soldiers to kill others, even their own parents.

Yim Sotheary, 26, a senior staff worker at the Center for Social Development, an NGO, said some social issues, such as domestic violence and drunkenness, could be a result of the mental suffering experienced by people under the Khmer Rouge.

"Based on my own experience, I think that the Khmer Rouge's atrocious behavior could have contributed at least in part to these social problems," she said.

Some children thought that their parents were uneducated or bad people because they were violent at home, or they drank, but sometimes this is not true, Sotheary said. Sometimes the root cause of such behavior lies in the dark days of the past, she said.

Children should learn about what their parents had gone through, she added.

During the workshop, people in their 50s and 60s also shared what life was like under the rule of Angkor, as the regime referred to itself.

Mary, a 23-year-old undergraduate, said the workshop gave her a better understanding about what life was like then.

"My parents talk so little about what happened then," she shared. "I rarely ask them about their life at that time, because they would cry. But this workshop provided me with more answers."

Ly Sovanna, director of the Catholic Social Communications office, said the main aim of the workshop was to help the younger generation have a better idea of the brutality that people endured under Pol Pot.

While young people can learn a certain amount from books, this workshop is a good opportunity for them to learn about the period from others, he said.

During its brutal reign, the Khmer Rouge outlawed all religions. Religious believers, including Catholics, were either executed or deported. Many churches were destroyed.

In 1977, Khmer Bishop Joseph Chhmar Salas, former apostolic vicar of Phnom Penh, died in a labor camp in Kampong Thom, a northwestern province.