The discovery of a mass grave in Do Dontrei brings back terrible memories for a community

Khmer Rouge survivor Chea Nouen. Source: AP

Skulls and bones have been unearthed at a newly-discovered grave site in Do Dantrei village in Cambodia. Source: AP

August 26, 2012
AP

Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

IT was four gray skulls resting on a bed of jumbled bones that again triggered Chea Nouen's memories.

Breast-feeding her baby with her hands and feet shackled; her husband thrown into a pit to be turned into human fertilizer, her own marches to the killing fields - where she was saved three times by an executioner.

The past came hurtling back earlier this month when a new mass grave was discovered in a village in northwestern Cambodia, one of the bloodiest killing grounds in the country. Like most of Cambodia's 300 known mass grave clusters, it is not being investigated or exhumed to find out what happened.

More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge ultra-revolutionaries orchestrated the deaths of nearly 2 million people, or one out of every four Cambodians, the country has not laid its ghosts to rest.

Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

Dr Sam Keo Hopes To Shed Light Khmer Rouge Trauma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIaMgUYZwZo

Genocide Survivor Loung Ung Reclaims Life, and Light, in New Memoir

25 April 2012
By Mu Sochua

We are not victims but survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide regime.

The empowerment process for the individual survivor as well as for the nation requires the full recognition and protection of human rights, liberties and freedoms.

The current facade of democracy in Cambodia today is a very dangerous sign that Cambodia has not quite come out of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge.

Living in fear is the issue to be addressed. The solution is: democracy.

Interview: Genocide Survivor Loung Ung Reclaims Life, and Light, in New Memoir

----------

Interview: Genocide Survivor Loung Ung Reclaims Life, and Light, in New Memoir

April 18th, 2012

Cecily Kamps

Asia Society

Loung Ung, author of the memoir "Lulu in the Sky." (Mark Priemer)

"Whatever your situation, it is possible to reclaim your light, life and laughter." This is the conclusion of Loung Ung's latest book, Lulu in the Sky — one whose truth she knows better than most.

As a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, Ung has faced her share of pain and loss, the story she laid bare in the memoirs First They Killed My Father and Lucky Child: the deaths of her parents and two siblings, transitioning to life as a refugee in America, and her hard-fought path to quell the demons of her past. Through her story, readers have stood witness to the horror of war, the struggle to reclaim one's identity, and the power of family bonds.

Although the trauma she has faced may seem insurmountable, it should come as no surprise that Ung herself is much more than the pain of her past. Lulu in the Sky brings full circle the author's journey through loss, recovery and reconnection. She takes us from the hollowness of depression to the beauty of forgiveness and the oftentimes messy path to love — proving along the way that human beings are able to rise from the lowest depths and embark on a journey toward true love and happiness.

Killing Fields' legacy

Sath Om, top left, Arun Va, top right, Roth Prum, bottom left, and Sam Keo. (Jeff Gritchen / Press-Telegram)

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA -- Depressions in the ground show the locations of mass graves at Choeung Ek, about 17km south of Phonom Penh, Cambodia. The site, now a memorial, is the best-known of the sites known as The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime executed about 17,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of the dead were former political prisoners who were kept by the Khmer Rouge in their Tuol Sleng detention center. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

April 22, 2012
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram

LONG BEACH - The pain stitches across the face of 91-year-old Sath Um as she recalls the horrors she witnessed and her brushes with death.

Roth Prum fingers the leaves of a small plant she holds as she talks about how "I became the cow" when relating her work pulling a plow through rice fields.

Arun Va says his memory is burned with the faces of five women he watched have their throats slit and bodies weighed down with rocks and sunk near the Tonle Sap lake.

"That one thing is in my eye all the time," Va says.

For years, Sam Keo was wracked by survivor guilt and shame for not sharing food with a sibling who died from starvation.

"I would wake up every night sweating," Keo says.

If one walks through the Cambodia Town area of Long Beach and spots an elder, the chances are they have similar stories. They have witnessed and were subjected to horrors that are incomprehensible to most Americans.

Analysis: What ails Cambodia's mental health system?

Skulls on display at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where more than 12,000 prisoners were interrogated, tortured and killed (Photo: David Longstreath/IRIN)

PHNOM PENH, 12 March 2012 (IRIN) - In Cambodia, the psychological fallout from one of the world's heaviest bombing campaigns, genocide and two decades of conflict, coupled with chronic poverty, have left a heavy mental health burden that medical services are ill-equipped to handle, say experts.

Lack of funding, human resources, national vision and leadership, as well as poor coordination of groups working in mental health, are among the biggest challenges.

Sareth Mon, 58, takes anti-anxiety medication regularly, obtained from the public hospital Preah Kossomak in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Soon after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Sareth's one-month-old baby died in her arms as she was no longer able to breastfeed. Her three-year-old daughter died from illness. "There was just no medicine available then," she told IRIN. "I brought them into this world, but could not protect them long enough to keep them alive."

Survivors Sell Books at Prison That Once Held Them

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCHF5-9lHis

Khmer Rouge survivor Chum Mey, 81, right, talks to reporters as another survivor Bou Meng, 70, left, listens at Choeung Ek stupa, former Khmer Rouge killing field in the outskirt of Phnom Penh (AP file photo)

Thursday, 26 January 2012
Say Mony, VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh

“I saw a lot of depth in his face and his eyes, and from there I wanted to read more about his story.”

Bou Meng and Chhum Mey spend less time at the trial of Khmer Rouge leaders these days, and more time at the torture center they both survived.

The two men sit at the Tuol Sleng musuem, the former prison known the Khmer Rouge as S-21, selling the stories of their lives to tourists.

The men say they are not happy to do so, but they have no choice if they want to earn a living.

Bou Meng, who sells copies of his biography, “A Survivor From Khmer Rouge Prison S-21,” by Huy Vannak, said he earns a few dozen dollars a day. On good days, he might earn a few hundred.

Local Cambodians share survival stories in upcoming exhibit

Young girls perform a Khmer dance at the More Than a Party event at the Lynn Museum Friday. (Item Photo / Angela Owens)

By Amber Parcher
The Daily Item (Lynn, Massachusetts, USA)

LYNN - Sixteen-year-old Jimson Thach knew his parents came to America from their homeland of Cambodia in the 1980s. But beyond that, he said he didn't know much about their life before America.

"They don't really talk about it," he said.

An exhibit coming to the Lynn Museum next month detailing the stories of thousands of Cambodian refugees could change all of that.

Thach's parents, and most of the other middle-aged Cambodians living in Lynn, fled to America from a brutal genocide that killed an estimated 2 million people, said Kirirath Saing, the Southeast Asian Liason for Lynn's mayor.

Fortune Brings a Family Together, 36 Years Later

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVZlHQri_9o

The family celebrates their reunion with friends at a party in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.(Photo: by Pin Sisovann)

Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Say Mony, VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh

“I wept when I embraced him. I’ve never known my father.”

Never in her life did Chhea Vat imagine she would have such an occasion: meeting her husband again after 36 years.

The 73-year-old Cambodian-Canadian had always thought her husband, Peou Nam, was killed when soldiers of the regime took him away, so many years ago.

“I never imagined this meeting before, because I thought the Khmer Rouge never left their captives alive,” Chhea Vat said in a recent interview in Phnom Penh, where her family had found him at long last.

Peou Nam was a soldier in Lon Nol's government, a target for execution by the Khmer Rouge. He has seven children with Chhea Vat.

TV show reunites families torn apart by KRouge

Cambodian Sem Savoeun (2nd L) talking during an interview with her aunt (L) next to her at a studio of the commercial station Bayon TV in Phnom Penh. Photo courtesy: AFP

Cambodian Saing Va (R) crying and hugging his daughter Sem Savoeun (C) as Sem's aunt cries (L) at a studio of the commercial station Bayon TV in Phnom Penh. Photo courtesy: AFP

Cambodian Sem Savoeun (R) talking during an interview at a studio of the commercial station Bayon TV in Phnom Penh. Photo courtesy: AFP

Cambodian Sem Savoeun (R) talking during an interview at a studio of the commercial station Bayon TV in Phnom Penh. Photo courtesy: AFP

By Sor Chandara

PHNOM PENH, August 9, 2011 (AFP) - The cameras were rolling and a studio audience looked on but the emotional reunion of a daughter and her father, torn apart 30 years ago by Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime, was no act.

Sem Savoeun sobbed as she embraced the father she thought was lost forever on the new Cambodian hit reality show "It's Not a Dream". And she did not mind the intrusion -- in fact without the programme, she said they never would have met.

"I tried to find my dad but I never had much hope. I never expected this moment," Sem, 42, told the slick young host of the popular show, in an episode that aired on commercial station Bayon TV in July.

"I feel overjoyed to have a dad again."

The Mango Tree - By Peauladd Huy

Asia Literary Review
Vol. 17, Autumn 2010
Poetry | Cambodia
Before the Bones
Peauladd Huy

The Mango Tree

I know my time is near.

Outside, the mango tree has been empty

for quite some time now; newer leaves

are now budding with clustered flowers.

Not long now till the buds

mature, weighing down

the branches. Sometimes, the limb knows

how fragile the mind can be: too much, and it stops

redirecting – starts to believe

that harm comes from flaws

in former lives. Unredeemed sins.

This torture.

The pain is sharper now, the world more blurred –

bars lining the window, a gentler

smeary-grey. The shackles blend

metal into flesh. How is it possible

for other humans to devise these tortures,

to have the courage to stomp upon

already hollow bodies?

O unspeakable human facility

to harm one another.

The mangoes ripen; the birds, the flies

and squirrels will help themselves

to the ones high up; and those that fall

will be eaten by worms.

I think that those same worms

which have made me

and my grave-mates into soil and bones

will eat those sweet, fallen mangoes.

Prof reunites with father in Cambodia after 36 years

Prof. Sorpong Peou, who had long assumed his father had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge, appears on Canada AM, Thursday, July 14, 2011.

Thu Jul. 14 2011 08:47:13
CTV News.ca Staff

A Canadian professor born in Cambodia who had long assumed his father had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge says it was a recurring dream and the visions of a psychic that helped him find his father alive, after 36 years apart.

For decades, the last memory Prof. Sorpong Peou's had of his father, Nam, was from 1975, when Peou was 17. He had watched his dad being thrown into the back of a truck by the Khmer Rouge, assuming he would return in a few days.

But as the stories emerged of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, Peou realized something terrible must have happened.

Escape from the killing fields

Sorpong Peou in his Lindenwoods home. Peou is the chairman of the political department at the University of Winnipeg. (WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

Submitted photo Sorpong Peou's father, Nam Peou. The family thought Nam Peou had been killed. (SUBMITTED PHOTO)

Family reunited with dad they thought was dead

07/11/2011
By: Nick Martin
Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

Prof. Sorpong Peou's last memory of his father Nam had been watching the Khmer Rouge throw the elder man into a blue truck in 1975 to be taken to execution in the killing fields of Cambodia.

Sorpong Peou was 17 and terrified he would soon die just like his father. And seeing him hauled away was his last memory of Nam Peou until the two embraced in Phnom Penh last month.

For 36 despairing years, the father thought his wife and seven children had been murdered; the family believed their father and husband had died.

"It's a complicated story, a complicated life," Peou said quietly, sitting in his Lindenwoods home. For the past year, Peou has been the chairman of the political department at the University of Winnipeg.

Survivors of The Killing Fields Revisited

Click here to watch the streaming video

FOUR CORNERS
Investigative TV journalism at its best.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Program Transcript

Reporter: Marian Wilkinson Producer: Janine Cohen


Date: 27/06/2011


SURVIVORS OF THE KILLING FIELDS REVISITED


UNG BUN HEANG: I think the refugees should allow to live, if they are genuine refugee they should allow to live in this society. You know look back, you know we were refugee too. We came here, we worked so hard and we contribute everything what we have.

And right now I can - I don't want to say anyone else but my family - I have four kids, beautiful kids, good citizen, and I can guarantee they're going to be a good taxpayer for this country.

KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: One view on Australia's refugee policy from someone who knows what it's like to be one.

Ung Bun fled the Killing Fields of Cambodia nearly three decades ago.

Welcome to Four Corners.

From the mid-70s to the mid-80s after the Vietnam War, Australia accepted some 90,000 Indo-Chinese refugees. Some came by boat, many more were accepted from camps across South-East Asia and Hong Kong.

But at various points through that decade controversy raged over whether too many Asians were being settled here.

Local Cambodian-Americans play active role in trial of Khmer Rouge leaders

Khmer Rouge survivors (Eugene Morita)

Sophany Bay counsels Cambodian-Americans on mental health matters. (Eugene Morita)

May 13, 2011
Rob Strauss
KPCC

Click here to listen to the audio program (MP3)

Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge government fell more than 30 years ago. The power behind the infamous “Killing Fields” killed as many as 2 million Cambodians through executions, starvation and disease. Later this year, four Khmer Rouge leaders are set for trial before a United Nations-backed tribunal that’s charged them with genocide and crimes against humanity. Among those on trial is Nuon Chea. He was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who died more than a decade ago. The trial will take place in Cambodia. But some in Long Beach, home to the largest Cambodian-American population in this country, are trying to help the prosecution from half a world away.

On a recent Saturday in Long Beach, survivors of the Khmer Rouge stepped to a microphone to tell stories that are hard to hear.

Sophany Bay counsels Cambodian-Americans on mental health matters. In the 1970s, she was a teacher in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, until the Khmer Rouge sent her to a forced labor camp in the countryside.

Khmer Rouge victims in U.S. to get their day in court

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime and their supporters pray for victims of the regime during a buddhist blessing ceremony at an informational event sponsored by advocates from Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia (ASRIC) and The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) held at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Temple, in San Jose, Calif. on February 26, 2011. From the background left, Venerable Son Yeong Ratana and Venerable Pok Ngeth conduct the ceremony. (LiPo Ching/Mercury News)

At center, Kanphiry Keo, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, whose parents and two brothers were killed by the regime watches a video on the crimes investigated by the Khmer Rouge court with other survivors and supporters at an informational event sponsored by advocates from Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia (ASRIC) and The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) held at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Temple, in San Jose, Calif. on February 26, 2011. (LiPo Ching/Mercury News)

At left, Sophany Bay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, whose three children and other family members were killed by the regime speaks to survivors and supporters at an informational event sponsored by advocates from Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia (ASRIC) and The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) held at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Temple, in San Jose, Calif. on February 26, 2011. From the background left, CJA Attorney Nushin Sarkarati holds a photo of Bay's child and CJA Legal Director Andrea Evans holds a photo of other members of Bay's family. (LiPo Ching/Mercury News)

Khun Aun, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, holds a photo of her husband Keo Sophorn, who was killed by the regime at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Temple where survivors, supporters and advocates from Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia (ASRIC) and The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) held an informational event, in San Jose, Calif. on February 26, 2011. (LiPo Ching/Mercury News)

02/26/2011
By John Boudreau
Mercury News (San Jose, California)

Many Cambodians have lived the lives of ghosts in Silicon Valley, not seen or heard from much, quietly tormented every day and every night with unbearable memories of the genocide that wiped out entire families -- parents, spouses, children, extended relatives.

Now, finally, some of them will have their day in international court. When the second trial of alleged perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide begins in a few months, members of the Cambodian community in the United States will be represented by attorneys at the proceedings.

On Saturday, about 50 members of Silicon Valley's 10,000 strong sizable Cambodian community gathered at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Buddhist temple in East San Jose to hear about the upcoming trial of four senior Khmer Rouge leaders charged in connection with the deaths of 1.7 million people from execution, torture, starvation and disease from 1975 to 1979.

Forum "From Victims to Witness'' Offers Opportunity to Cambodian-Americans in Lowell, Massachusetts

US-Cambodians To Discuss Post-Khmer Rouge Healing

Khmer Rouge survivors in the US will meet on Saturday to discuss challenges they face and to seek ways for healing. (Photo: AP)

Men Kimseng, VOA Khmer
Washington, DC Friday, 13 August 2010

“But it will not completely heal the wounds of the trauma that survivors and their family have experienced..."

Khmer Rouge survivors in the US will meet on Saturday to discuss challenges they face and to seek ways for healing, as the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal moves toward its second trial.

The meeting in Lowell, Mass., will be an opportunity for the Cambodian community to get an update on complaints they filed to the court through the US-based Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia.

The US-Cambodians will also discuss on reparations for members of the Cambodian diaspora, according to a statement from the institute.

“Now the court is one mechanism that will help to ensure that the culture of impunity would be discouraged or stop in some way,” said Nou Leakhena, executive director of the institute. “But it will not completely heal the wounds of the trauma that survivors and their family have experienced. So we as the community need to move forward in a healthy and productive way that will ensure the legacy of the Khmer Rouge history beyond the killing fields for the next generation.”

Nou Leakhena, who will lead the discussion, said that it is important to have community meetings to understand more about what justice means for the victims and what they should do for healing.

The forum is also sponsored by Asian Pacific American Institute.

Khmer Rouge jailer verdict due

Bou Meng (Photo: AFP)
Theary Seng

July 22, 2010
ABC Radio Australia

The international war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, will hand down its verdict on its first defendant. Former khmer rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Euv, better known as Comrade Duch suprised court observors by changing his plea, then sacking his international legal counsel.

Presenter: Robert Carmichael
Speakers: Theary Seng, president of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation; Anne Heindel, legal adviser for the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam); Bou Meng, s21 prisoner

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

CARMICHAEL: The man whose voice you can hear is called Bou Meng. He is an artist who last year gave testimony against his former jailer, Comrade Duch. In this clip Bou Meng is telling the international war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh about appalling conditions at a Khmer Rouge prison called S-21. Bou Meng was lucky - he is one of perhaps a dozen survivors of S-21. At least 20,000 others who passed through the prison were executed.

It was the signature of Comrade Duch that appeared on many of those execution orders. Comrade Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, was one of the regime's most valuable implementers of its policy towards suspected traitors. As the head of S-21, his role was to oversee the torture of all who were brought there, extract confessions, and then sign off on their execution. The confessions - made under terrible torture - would see yet more people arrested, brought in, tortured and executed as the revolution began to consume the country. Duch was tried as one of those who are considered 'most responsible' for the crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 and left 1.7 million people dead from execution, starvation, overwork and disease. When the verdict is pronounced on Monday, Duch will be the only Khmer Rouge member to have been judged by an international war crimes tribunal.

Cambodian-American Theary Seng was the first person to file as a civil party at the tribunal. She spent much of last year observing Duch's 77-day trial. What were her impressions.

SENG: The Duch trial was a test run, and it went overall very well. It went very well in creating and generating the interest among the larger population and giving out information to the public about the Khmer Rouge era. It was interesting in hearing and seeing Duch himself speak in person. So overall it was a good test run for the core trial - and that's of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders in case.

CARMICHAEL: In the face of overwhelming evidence, Duch's defence strategy was one of mitigation: He would accept responsibility, express remorse, cooperate with the court, and hope for a reduced sentence.

The strategy was laid out over nine months of hearings by Duch's international defence lawyer Francois Roux. It is worth pointing out that the tribunal has a hybrid structure, which means Cambodians and international staff work in tandem in key roles. For that reason Duch has one international lawyer and one Cambodian lawyer, both with equal standing. In the final days of the trial, the defence team self-destructed. With Duch's blessing - and without Roux's knowledge - his Cambodian lawyer told the court that international law did not apply, that Duch had merely been following orders, and that the tribunal should release him.

It was a remarkable turnaround. The reasons behind that dramatic change remain unclear, not least since international law clearly does apply. Earlier this month Duch's capacity to surprise surfaced again when he fired Francois Roux as his international defence lawyer. Anne Heindel is a legal adviser at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an archive of papers on the Khmer Rouge period. She thinks firing Roux - who was widely seen as having done a good job - could be a way for Duch to prepare for an appeal.

HEINDEL: It could either be a strategy for claiming ineffective assistance of counsel on appeal, or it could be something totally different and personal. It's just really hard to say.

CARMICHAEL: As a seasoned observer of the court, what stood out for her during the trial?

HEINDEL: The interesting thing I think was at the end when Duch decided to have his last statement be a history of the Communist Party since the 1950s. It didn't seem like a statement of remorse - one would have thought he would have used the opportunity to again apologise to the victims. But instead he ran through a very academic piece that only experts in the topic would have found of interest. But that seemed to be what he wanted people to understand - that was his truth of why things happened.

CARMICHAEL: Monday will reveal what the judges think of Duch's version of the truth. He is now 68, so if he is found guilty - as most people expect - any sentence longer than 25 years will probably amount to life.

Survivors of Khmer Rouge torture centre await justice

Thu, Jul 22, 2010
Patrick Falby

PHNOM PENH, July 22, 2010 (AFP) - In January 1979, as the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed and its leaders fled Phnom Penh, invading Vietnamese troops stumbled upon an abandoned prison with fresh corpses chained to iron beds. It was Tuol Sleng, or "Hill of the Poisonous Trees", the most infamous of all of the jails run by Pol Pot's murderous regime.

Next week the prison's former chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, will hear the verdict in his trial at a UN-backed tribunal where witnesses have recounted the horrors of a place from which almost no one came out alive.

Norng Chan Phal, 40, is one of just a handful of survivors to emerge from the Khmer Rouge regime's main torture centre, liberated by the Vietnamese invasion.

He told the trial last year how, as a child, he saw Tuol Sleng guards threaten, beat and photograph his mother. Soon afterwards she disappeared and was never seen again.

"I want Duch to be locked in prison for the rest of his life and forced to work farming in a prison field," Norng Chan Phal told AFP ahead of Monday's verdict. "I want him to feel what he did to others."

Prosecutors have demanded Duch, 67, be sentenced to 40 years in jail on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, premeditated murder and torture for overseeing the execution of some 15,000 prisoners.

Most were forced to confess as foreign spies and taken to a nearby killing field where executioners delivered a blow to the base of the neck with a steel club, then sliced their bellies open, former prison staff testified.

Duch, a former mathematics teacher, has said his orders were for all those imprisoned at Tuol Sleng to be killed to ensure "secrecy and security".

"No one was entitled to release them, (not) even Pol Pot," Duch said.

Prisoners at the interrogation centre, a former high school, suffered beatings, electric shocks to their genitals and had plastic bags tied over their heads, witnesses said during the nine-month trial.

One former Tuol Sleng guard even testified that many prisoners were drained of their blood.

The staff dared not refuse to work. Investigators estimate 200 of them even became prisoners there, facing certain execution.

Led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities in a bid to forge a communist utopia. Up to two million people died of starvation, overwork and torture or were executed during the 1975-1979 regime.

Prosecutors assert Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, was the regime's main killing apparatus among 198 prisons throughout Cambodia.

Duch has apologised for his past but many Cambodians doubt his sincerity since he consistently rejected allegations that he held a central leadership role in the Khmer Rouge, and said he never personally killed anyone.

These days the prison is a dilapidated genocide museum that displays mug shots of doomed inmates.

"Some people come here and when they see their parents in photos, they're shocked and collapse," said Chum Mey, 79, another survivor who now works as a tour guide at the museum.

Chum Mey testified that interrogators beat him for 12 days and nights as he pleaded for his life. He shuddered in pain after they pulled out his toenails, he said, and was subjected to electric shocks.

The agony finally ended when he falsely confessed to being a CIA and KGB agent, Chum Mey said, and his life was then spared because he was put to use repairing sewing machines and a water pump.

During Duch's trial, his defence team mostly focused on getting a lighter sentence, by downplaying his position within the regime and by highlighting his remorse, his time already served and his cooperation with the court.

Duch made further apologies for his crimes in a statement on the final day of arguments in November, but enraged many victims when he unexpectedly asked to be acquitted on the grounds he was not a senior member of the Khmer Rouge.

Can Telling a Story Heal the Hurt?

Socheata Poeuv

By Soeung Sophat VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
02 March 2010

The simple act of telling a story could be one way of healing trauma. At least that’s what Poeuv Socheata, a Cambodian-American who is gathering the stories of many of her countrymen, thinks. And not just for an individual, but for an entire community.

Poeuv Socheata, who is 29, runs a program through Yale University to collect narratives from Cambodian survivors, and she said this has taught her the power of a story.

“I interviewed one older gentleman who was a survivor [and] who said the one thing that kept him going during the Khmer Rouge time was this idea that he would survive and then he would tell the world about what happened,” she told VOA Khmer in a recent interview. “That it was essential for him to tell the world. I think there are more and more people like him.”

Trauma-related illnesses are a major social problem for Cambodians, many of whom suffer from post-traumatic stress symptoms and depression as a result of Khmer Rouge traumas.

Poeuv Socheata, who wrote and directed a documentary, “New Year Baby,” following the effect of the Khmer Rouge on her own family, said a personal narrative can heal because it is empowering.

“What happens is you can become the controller of that story as opposed to being [a] victim that’s being acted upon,” she said. “And so by telling the story, you can actually regain some shred of control and power over your own narrative. And that’s a really important step in terms of healing, I think.”

However, the notion of personal narrative as a healing mechanism is a Western idea, she said, while other cultures, like Africa’s Burundi, may deal with trauma through silence.

“In the Burundian culture, there is this idea of gusimbura, which is to say that you cannot even speak the name of the person who died and you can only talk about them indirectly,” she said. “And it is very rude to bring up these tragedies.”

“I don’t know of a similar concept in Cambodian culture,” she said, “but there is certainly this idea in Cambodian culture that expressing your emotions at all in a way that’s strong is negative, and everyone should be very serene and placid and always be very neutral in their emotions, and that’s what is best for a person and that’s what is best for a society.”

Chhang Youk, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has interviewed thousands of former Khmer Rouge cadres and their victims, called storytelling an important source of healing, but he said the concept was not necessarily Western.

“Whether a person is Jewish, German, Rwandan, or Iraqi, we are all humans, and when we become victims, we maintain our humanity,” he said. “When a person loses a loved one, we all suffer, whether we have lighter or darker skin, or wherever we live.”

Survival stories are compatible with Cambodian culture, because oral history is an important part of the culture, he said. It is rare for Cambodians to downright refuse to talk about their pasts.

“There have been those refusing to be interviewed, but not in a negative way, but in the context that they they’ve already told their stories for 30 years but haven’t seen any results,” he said. “And we understand their feeling. And we consider this a method to healing if they can forget these tragic memories, which we respect and want them to utilize.”

Whether or not these narratives are compatible with Cambodian culture, Poeuv Socheata said she believes many people want to tell their stories.

So she is now recording survivor testimonies for Khmer Legacies, at Yale, to “provide a healing opportunity for survivors by witnessing their testimonies.”

The program is taking individual testimonies in the US, but she would like it to grow into community testimonies both here and in Cambodia.

Khmer Legacies expects to send two researchers to Cambodia this summer to record testimonies. Poeuv Socheata said she hopes Cambodian people, especially younger Cambodians, will become involved by interviewing survivors in their families or communities or through the group’s ongoing transcription process. She can be contacted at info@khmerlegacies.org.