Revisiting the genocide

For immigrants, Cambodian tribunal awakens painful memories

September 13, 2007
By Russell Contreras, Globe Staff
Boston Globe (Mass., USA)

ACTON - Mention the Khmer Rouge and Thida Loeung stops speaking. The 42-year-old Cambodian-American looks away and takes deep breaths before she can talk about the dark abyss in her motherland's history when an estimated 1.7 million people were killed by mass execution and starvation under the extreme regime of tyrant Pol Pot.

Her father, Houry Loeung, was one of them. After he starved to death, Thida Loeung, then a teenager, and her family were forced to flee their decimated homeland, ending up eventually as refugees in Lowell. And although it's been a quarter of a century, Loeung, who now lives in Acton, still has trouble revisiting that experience.

"It's hard for me to talk about it, even today," she said.

But for Cambodians everywhere, including the thousands who have settled in this area, the past has come back. A genocide tribunal in Cambodia is now targeting former Khmer Rouge leaders accused of crimes against humanity during Pol Pot's reign from 1975 to 1979. So far, the judges have indicted one of five suspects, "Duch," or Kaing Guek Eav. He was the head of the communist Khmer Rouge's S-21 prison and torture center, investigators allege. The others have not been named publicly and remain free.

The prosecution of the five former leaders - Pol Pot died in 1998 - has grabbed international headlines and the attention of human rights advocates as the United Nations-based tribunal attempts to bring to justice those who may have been involved in an investigation that already has seen many delays and turns.

For many Cambodians in this area, though, the subject of the trial is painful and rarely discussed, said Vong Ros, executive director of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, a city with an estimated Cambodian population of 30,000.

"Cambodians don't get excited about it because they'll have to relive it," Ros said. "We're not celebrating to find out who is responsible for our displacement."

Loeung, for one, isn't following the case closely. But her husband is. George Chigas, a visiting political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a scholar of Cambodian literature, reads news out of Phnom Penh, sends out updates via e-mail, and lectures about the day-to-day happenings of the court proceedings 10,000 miles away and decades in the making.

The 49-year-old professor and poet, who grew up in a Lowell Greek-American family, said that the prosecution of Pol Pot's lieutenants is being met with skepticism and distrust by Cambodians because they are occurring some 30 years after the start of the Khmer Rouge regime. That's very different from the South African and Rwandan reconciliation trials that occurred soon after the end of the brutal regimes in those nations.

"There's a huge gap in time," Chigas said. "That really complicates the response to these trials. People have become cynical about there being some sort of real legal response. People are a little wary about getting personally invested."

Still, Chigas said that there is hope among Cambodians that the trials might bring to light some acknowledgement by the world of what happened.

A study published two years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly all Cambodian immigrants had suffered trauma before reaching the United States. The study also found that 99 percent came close to death from starvation and 90 percent reported knowing a family member or friend who was killed.

During the Khmer Rouge's reign, around a quarter of the population died, with most buried in mass graves.

"There were no formal funerals," Chigas said. "There was no public display of acknowledgement that this person died for this reason and is buried in this place. Having that unfinished business of the funeral hanging on for 30 years makes it something that people feel needs to be done."

Chigas said the closest analogy would be like not having the many memorials and funerals held to remember and honor the victims of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the public memorials allowed families to put the event in context and place.

"That place doesn't exist for the family members of people who died in these mass graves," Chigas said. "The trials will almost function as a kind of state- and international-sponsored funeral. It will put a name and place to those who died."

Chhan D. Touch, a nurse practitioner at the Lowell Community Health Center-Metta Health Center, agreed.

"It's a history of Cambodia that needs to be closed," said Touch, who is on Chigas's e-mail list and follows the tribunal's proceedings daily. "This has to take place so we can stop hurting each other."

Touch said his center treats many Cambodians who still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or have a mental health issue. He said some have come in recently asking for general information about the tribunal while others just don't want to talk about it.

"It's something we have to come to terms with," Touch said. "Many of us are still angry, and don't even know why."

Russell Contreras can be reached at rcontreras@globe.com.

Their marriage blazed a trail

Cambodian refugee Thida Loeung and her husband, George Chigas, visited a Philippines Refugee Processing Center.

September 13, 2007
RUSSELL CONTRERAS
Boston Globe (Mass., USA)

ACTON - A pioneer wasn't something George Chigas sought to become. He just wanted to be a travel writer, in the same vein as his Lowell hometown literary hero, Jack Kerouac.

Pioneer wasn't what Thida Loeung had in mind, either. She and her family were more concerned about survival after escaping the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

But pioneers the two were when they met in Lowell 22 years ago and married, becoming one of the first American-Cambodian couples in America following the great Cambodian refugee influx of the early 1980s. And immediately the couple was transformed into local icons of two worlds encountering and trying to make sense of each other.

"We had a lot of support from the Cambodian community," Loeung said, remembering those early, trail-blazing years.

The couple's first meeting occurred not long after Chigas returned to Lowell following a three-year stint in San Francisco. Entering his hometown for the first time since he went away, Chigas remembers feeling as if he were "walking into a movie set": There were Cambodians roaming the streets of the old mill town.

Mesmerized, Chigas, then 27, began volunteering at a resettlement agency and teaching English to a Cambodian monk, who in return taught Chigas the Khmer language.

"It was a fateful decision," Chigas said. "My future wife was working there."

Loeung, then 20, had only been in the United States a few years and had come across few Americans familiar with Cambodians. But here was a Greek-American who not only knew about her culture but was someone who was quickly learning her language.

"He was a nice man," she said. "I was impressed that he had learned so much on his own."

In October 1985, they began dating. By December, they were married.

A photo of their wedding, with both in traditional Cambodian attire, has been copied a number of times and made the rounds all over Lowell ever since.

Those early days, though, were far from blissful for the couple as Chigas learned the extent of his new bride's pain. She'd cry in the middle of the night. She was distrustful of people. Sometimes she was just scared.

"In those first few months of getting to know my wife, I was also getting to know her story, " said Chigas, 49, a visiting political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a former associate director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.

He learned about her father, Houry Loeung, who starved to death under the Khmer Rouge.

Some of the stories Loeung shared. Others she kept to herself.

"It's very hard to forget," said Loeung, 42, a kindergarten teacher in Lowell.

Chigas said the world should never forget the Cambodians' pain under Pol Pot and has dedicated his life to learning and teaching about Cambodian culture and sharing stories of refugees. The scholar of Southeast Asian literature has published poems by Cambodian-Americans who use writing as a way of healing. He also published his own collection of short pieces about his wife, titled "Chanthy's Garden." (Chanthy was her name when she arrived in the United States.)

Today, the couple live comfortably in Acton with their two sons - Yianni, 9, and Arthur, 5. They have a tennis court in the back, and their nights in the suburb northwest of Boston are quiet.

Both say they want their boys to understand Cambodian culture and the dark history that led to her - and her people - coming to America.

"The question is," said Loeung, "will they understand the pain I went through?"