Tortured souls

Footscray shop owner Kuan Pung miraculously survived the brutaility of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Pictures: Marco De Luca

08 Nov, 2011
Moonee Valley Weekly (Victoria, Australia)
Excerpt

As the ‘Arab spring’ ferments civic unrest, arrests have led to torture, reminding the world of recent conflicts where the dirty work of despots has been revealed by the survivors. Inevitably, many of them, as refugees or fare-paying migrants, have made their way to Melbourne’s western suburbs. Daily, they struggle to come to terms with their past. Anthony Loncaric met some of them. His story contains some graphic descriptions.

THE nightmares have finally stopped. Kuan Pung no longer dreams about anything.

It’s been 32 years since he was freed from the clutches of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, responsible for the deaths of about 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

The 60-year-old Avondale Heights resident remembers all of it, starting with being forced to leave his home in Phnom Penh to work in a village in the country’s north.

His job was to make fertiliser using human faeces, which he would collect from holes dug in the farmland’s soil where the captives did “their business” because there were no toilets.

Some days he was told to carry bodies of captives who had died from illness or starvation.

Those who were shot by soldiers for rebelling against the regime were forced to dig their own graves.

“We never felt lucky to be alive because you always thought you’d be next to die,” says Pung. “They [the soldiers] could do anything they wanted. They’d kill people, punish people.”

He says he’ll never forget the time a woman and her four-year-old son were brutally murdered.

It was at night when the mother and child were woken by the soldiers and called to go into a room with them. The mother and child never returned.

“The soldiers later told us how they finished the mother and the boy,” he says. “They said the woman was so easy to kill, just a hard knock on the back of the head and she was gone. But killing the boy was harder and they said they had to smash his body against a tree to kill him. They spoke to me like they were telling a nice children’s story. They were proud to say it.”

On another occasion he was caught by an officer speaking Chinese to a fellow captive.

The soldier approached Pung demanding to know why he was not speaking Cambodian.

“He pulled out his knife and said ‘put your tongue out’,’’ he recalls, adding that he kept his mouth shut.

“I prayed he wouldn’t do anything”.

The soldier eventually let him go. But thousands of others weren’t so lucky.

One time a man complained at lunch that the rice he was eating wasn’t cooked.

“A soldier heard him complain and the following day he had disappeared,” Pung says. “We were told he was tied to a tree at night and covered in palm sugar. In the morning there were big ants all over his body, but we weren’t sure if he died from the ants or the beatings.”