At the ROM, photos document Cambodia’s record of horror

Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia Institute for Contemporary Culture’s Roloff Beny gallery Level 4, Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. On display September 22, 2012 to March 10, 2013
(/Courtesy of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Photo Archive Group)

Tuesday, Sep. 18 2012
JAMES ADAMS
The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

The camera, like the unblinking eye of God, has been a mute witness to happiness and horror, and everything in between since the invention of photography in the early 19th century. The 103 black-and-white pictures in the exhibition Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia weave their spell on the horror end of the experiential spectrum, but ever so quietly and sombrely.

The melancholy comes from the realization that soon after these photographs were taken, every single one of the subjects were beaten, mutilated, interrogated, forced to make false confessions, then killed and their bodies dumped into mass graves. These are shots before the shooting, so to speak, taken between 1975 and 1979 in the notorious S-21 prison camp that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge established in a converted high school near Phnom Penh. By the time S-21 was liberated, in late January, 1979, more than 14,000 persons had been imprisoned there. Only 23, including five children, were alive to greet their Vietnamese and non-Khmer Rouge liberators. (The camp is now a museum of genocide.)

The negatives – there are more than 6,000 in total – for these images were discovered in the early 1990s by two U.S. photojournalists who subsequently set up a team, the Photo Archive Group, to clean, catalogue and print them. The original prints used by the Khmer Rouge were about the size of passport photographs and attached to each prisoner’s dossier. However, by the time S-21 was closed, images and dossiers had largely been separated, with the result that the inmates pictured in the exhibition, opening Saturday at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, are, with only a handful of poignant exceptions, anonymous.

Victims Angered at Release of Senior Khmer Rouge Figure Ieng Thirith

Ieng Thirith, the former social affairs minister of Khmer Rouge regime during trial, file photo.

Victims at the court said Monday they did not believe she had a degenerative mental condition, which court medical experts say is likely Alzheimer’s.

17 September 2012

Heng Reaksmey, VOA Khmer

PHNOM PENH - Ieng Thirith, one of just five Khmer Rouge leaders to be detained by the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal, was freed to the custody of her family Sunday, after the court deemed her mentally unfit to stand trial for atrocity crimes.

Victims at the court said Monday they did not believe she had a degenerative mental condition, which court medical experts say is likely Alzheimer’s. But court monitors say the court issued a fair decision following intense medical examination that upholds international court precedents.

Ieng Thirith was released on condition she notify the court if she moves residence, and she was forced to hand over her passport and other travel documents. She is still charged with atrocity crimes, including genocide, and will have to answer any summons issued by the court, according to the release order.

Cambodian construction workers find remains of Khmer Rouge victims

Tuesday, September 11, 2012
By Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Workers building a house for a Buddhist monk in Cambodia have discovered the remains of 18 people believed to have been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Laborer Nhoung Snieng said Tuesday that they started finding the remains, some shackled, when they began digging last week at Kes Sararam temple in the northwestern province of Siem Reap.

Khmer Rouge photos solve decades old mysteries

Photo: Reaksa Chuon poses with a photograph of his father (Claire Slattery)

Youk Chhang, Documentation Centre of Cambodia Director (Claire Slattery)

Photographs of Khmer Rouge victims (Claire Slatterly)

31 August 2012
Claire Slattery Phnom Penh for Connect Asia
Australia Network News

For thousands of Cambodians, the fate of their loved ones under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s remains a mystery, and the focus sometimes of a life-long search for answers.

DC-Cam, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, is an organisation dedicated to collecting and researching documents from the Khmer Rouge period. From time-to-time, new documents and photographs emerge that provide people with information about how their friends and family members died but, a recent donation to DC-Cam has done just that.

Chuon Reaksa was eight-years-old when he last saw his father in 1976. For 36 years, Mr Reaksa has searched for answers about what happened to his father after he disappeared from Cambodia's Battambang Province during the Khmer Rouge Regime.

Now, he's has come face-to-face with his father again, in a photo.

"They sent him by train to Pronet Preah around my family, the whole family, only three days in Pronet Preah and he go, he leave family. So at that time, the information is finished until now I found him in picture. I'm very sorry," he said choking back tears.

Mysterious identity of two S-21 victims still pending

Monday, 20 August 2012
Joseph Freeman
The Phnom Penh Post

The Documentation Center of Cambodia is trying to confirm the identities of two unnamed Westerners who died at the torture and prison centre S-21 and whose visages surfaced in a collection of recently donated photographs.

The new photos are believed to be the first ever of Westerners to emerge from S-21, said Youk Chhang, head of the documentation center.

Beforehand, there were only confessions that lacked accompanying images. Some 14,000 people were tortured and executed at the Phnom Penh prison, though estimates vary and it’s virtually impossible to pinpoint an exact count, as many documents were destroyed.

Out of all the dead, however, there are seven known survivors. Only two of them are still living. Confirmation of the identities is still pending, but after an initial review that involved ruling out other victims, Chhang said the men in the photos could be Christopher Edward DeLance, who was seized while sailing off the Cambodian coast in 1978, and Andre Gaston Courtigne, a former employee of the French Embassy, arrested more than two years earlier in 1976.

Cambodia recovers photo cache of missing Khmer Rouge victims

10 August 2012
ABC Radio Australia

The story of the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia continues to unfold, with the discovery of more than 1,200 photographs of former prisoners at the notorious Tuol Sleng jail and torture centre.

Cambodia recovers photo cache of missing Khmer Rouge victims (Credit: ABC)

Hosted by kiwi6.com file hosting. Download mp3 - Free File Hosting.

The photos have been handed over to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia which researches the atrocities committed under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

The collection was donated by an unnamed former government worker.

It appears she had held on to them since 1992, when she feared they may be destroyed ahead of UN-backed elections in the name of peace and reconciliation.

Presenter: Richard Ewart

Speaker: Peter McGuire, author, Facing Death in Cambodia

Ksaem Ksan Press Release in Cases 003 & 004

PTSD from Cambodia's killing fields affects kids who were never there

Kunthea Sin, left, and Amanda Em (Jeff Gritchen / Press-Telegram)

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

LONG BEACH -- Wilson High student Kunthea "Meme" Sin often feels lonely. Amanda Em, a Poly High student, sometimes wondered what was wrong with her parents and why they acted as they did.

Sure, these could be the stories of almost any teenagers growing up through history.

The difference is that as Cambodian-Americans and children of refugees, Sin and Em carry a difficult legacy.

Many must deal with the fallout from a damaged generation of survivors who are now raising families, still struggling to fit into a new culture and inadvertently passing along much of the pain for their children to sift through.

Much of Long Beach's Cambodian population escaped from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that left about 2 million dead between 1975 and 1979. Virtually all of those survivors witnessed and suffered through unimaginable atrocities. They carry invisible scars and struggle with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

And their children have borne trauma passed on from parents. They experience symptoms that can range from extreme anxiety to emotional numbness, from violence to withdrawal, from hyper-arousal and activity to clinical depression.

"My parents gambled and drank," Em said. "I just thought they were being crazy Asians."

Em has since learned that her family displays many classic symptoms of PTSD.

At 92, she's still haunted by Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia

LONG BEACH, CALIF. USA -- Sath Om Photo by Jeff Gritchen / Press-Telegram (Jeff Gritchen)

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

LONG BEACH -- The face of Sath Om reveals even more than her chilling words. The pain seems so immediate and real, it is as if time has stopped. 

"It's still real," the 92-year-old survivor of the Cambodian genocide says through translation as the tears flow. "It's like a stick in your eyes when it's remembered."

Om has harrowing stories of life during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 when upward of 2 million Cambodians died from malnutrition, disease and murder in the country's notorious Killing Fields.

Om was burned out of her house and had to run for her life.

She was imprisoned for a time.

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.

ROTH PRUM: Genocide's horrors still haunt dreams

Roth Prum (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

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

LONG BEACH - For many refugees of the Cambodian genocide, the horrors didn't end when the shooting stopped. Nor did they end when the immigrants came to the United States in search of new lives. To this day, the conflicts pursue them.

"I still have dreams of someone shooting at me," says Roth Prum, as she rubs the leaves of a small plant between her fingers. "I scream until I wake myself up. I never have good dreams, only bad dreams."

Even 31 years after arriving in the United States, Prum expects she will always be affected by the 44 months of brutality she suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the hard times that followed.

Although Prum meets with counselors, takes medication and is active in her church, she struggles daily with the memories, the dreams, the anxiety.

SAM KEO: Soul-searching helps win battle in mind

Sam Keo (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)

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

LONG BEACH - Day or night Sam Keo would be visited by his late mother and dead baby brother. He would stare into her reproachful eyes, see the baby's wasted corpse. And he'd hear her words.

"If you had given him your portion, he would still be alive," she said.

Problem is, it was more than 15 years since Keo's brother had died at the age of 3 from malnutrition and eight years since his mom had died of ovarian cancer. And yet there they were in Keo's Long Beach home, the mother's reproach as bitter and harsh and real as the day she first uttered it.

That is how Keo's battle with post-traumatic stress disorder started. Now Keo, a licensed clinical psychologist with the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, is able to discuss his struggles. But it took years of therapy, medication and soul-searching.

SRP to commemorate victims of the KR regime on 17 April 2012

Ksaem Ksan request to Supreme Court with regards Duch Apologies

Dear Sir or Madame,
Dear Colleagues,

Please kindly inform you that on the day of March 2012, we have sent our Ksaem Ksan request to Judges of Supreme Court of Extraordinary Chambers in Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) with regards combined of convicted Duch's Apologies.

In our request letter, we wish Judges to add civil parties statement whose accept and/or reject these insincere apologies of during their testimonies before Trial Chamber in Case 001.

Until now without response to our suggestion, please kindly find our attached file in Khmer for your consideration.

For further information about Ksaem Ksan, please kindly visit our website: www.ksaemksan.info

Best regards,

CHUM Mey

President

CHUM Sirath

1st Vice President

BOU Meng

2nd Vice President

Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea "Ksaem Ksan"

"United in the quest of Justice, Social Harmony, Culture of Peace and Spiritual Healing"

www.ksaemksan.info / contact@ksaemksan.info

To the memory of many of my wonderful friends who died during the Khmer Rouge period

I have listened to these songs twice now and want to dedicate them to the memory of many of my wonderful friends who died during the Khmer Rouge period.

Pissed off

Unknown Group - Yuvachon Yuvatey Cheat Khmer

http://www.archive.org/download/Unknown-YuvachonYuvateyCheatKhmer/Unknown-YuvachonYuvateyCheatKhmer.mp3

Unknown Group - Sa'ek Bang Chol Thveu Yuth-chon

http://www.archive.org/download/Unknown-SaekBangCholThveuYuth-chon/Unknown-SaekBangCholThveuYuth-chon.mp3

Unknown Group - Neak Poar Krahorm

http://www.archive.org/download/Unknown-NeakPoarKrahorm/Unknown-NeakPoarKrahorm.mp3

Unknown Group - Korng Pol Thmeur Cheung Ti 12

http://www.archive.org/download/Unknown-KorngPolThmeurCheungTi12/Unknown-KorngPolThmeurCheungTi12.mp3

Unknown Group - Ayuk Min Oss Min Slab

http://www.archive.org/download/Unknown-AyukMinOssMinSlab/Unknown-AyukMinOssMinSlab.mp3

Thet Sambath and Pen Ram - Para Toap Khmer

http://www.archive.org/download/ThetSambathAndPenRam-ParaToapKhmer/ThetSambathAndPenRam-ParaToapKhmer.mp3

Pen Ran - Khnhom Phnheur Chamrieng

http://www.archive.org/download/PenRan-KhnhomPhnheurChamrieng/PenRan-KhnhomPhnheurChamrieng.mp3

Duch Kim Hak - Cheat Trov Kar Neak Heuy

http://www.archive.org/download/DuchKimHak-CheatTrovKarNeakHeuy/DuchKimHak-CheatTrovKarNeakHeuy.mp3

Former Khmer Rouge Prisoners Sell Story of Their Lives

http://www.voanews.com/templates/widgetDisplay.html?id=139008429&player=article

February 09, 2012
Say Mony | Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Voice of America

The United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Cambodia has ordered the Khmer Rouge’s main jailer to spend the rest of his life in prison for crimes it says were “among the worst in recorded history.”

The tribunal said Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch oversaw a “factory of death” in the 1970’s at the feared Tuol Sleng Prison, where an estimated 14,000 people died.

The prison itself, called “S-21” by the Khmer Rouge, is now a museum.

One of two former inmates, Bou Meng sits outside the Tuol Sleng Museum selling copies of his biography, "A Survivor From Khmer Rouge Prison S-21". He makes $70 to $80 per day. On a lucky day, he can earn up to $200 to $300.

“If I sell [the book] at $10 a copy, they give me $20. They say I can keep the change. They wave their hand like this and say ‘You can keep the change.’ I thank them by holding their hands and kiss them, to mean that it is these hands that work to buy my books and give me a livelihood,” Bou Meng said.

Exploitation and Disempowerment of Victims at the KRT, Issues of Reparations - Commentary

http://www.box.com/s/9rlpuyuqa350f59bp3k6

Exploitation and Disempowerment of Victims at the KRT

Issues of Reparations
_____________________

COMMENTARY
____________________

Phnom Penh, 6 February 2012

On the advent of the Duch verdict on 23 July 2010, we, the Civil Parties of Orphans Class—a sub-group of the Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia (www.akrvictims.org)—launched a public campaign for the “ECCC Inventory and Provincial Learning Centers as Part of [our] Right to Reparations for All KR Victims”.

By way of reminder, we have periodically re-released the public statement. Excerpt:

“After initial review of the ECCC website and communications with ECCC officials, it is our understanding that the ECCC has at minimum these basic items of inventory for its 500 personnel (350 of these Cambodian):

·        24 vehicles

·        200 desktop and laptop computers

·        25 photocopy machines

·        50 printers and scanners

·        Telecommunications and communications systems (property of UN, according to Art. 1.3 of Supplementary Agreement Re Utilities, Facilities and Services)

·        Air conditioners

·        Televisions, screens, LCD projectors, video-conferencing equipments

·        Transcription equipments

·        Video cameras

·        Office desks, chairs, tables, cabinets, bookshelves”

On 26 July 2010, the ECCC Trial Chamber’s verdict offered in full this reparation: “to compile and post on the ECCC’s official website all statements of apology and acknowledgements of responsibility made by [Duch]” (our emphasis).  Unsurprisingly, the hollowness and insensitivity of this reparation triggered a public outrage!   (It raised the rhetorical questions of: How many victims own a computer?  And of those who own a computer, how many have access to the internet?)

On 26 June 2011, we issued a similar demand with an open letter to the Lead Co-Lawyers and the 40 intermediary lawyers representing the civil parties to advocate at the ECCC hearings on reparations.  We acknowledged the scope of our demands (excerpt):

“It is also our understanding that (i) the Chambers may award only “collective and moral reparations to Civil Parties”, (ii) Article 39 of the ECCC Law [promulgated 27 Oct. 2004] to “be awarded against, and be borne by convicted persons” not to exclude the Cambodian government and the United Nations, parties to the laws and agreements establishing the ECCC in the provision of this collective and moral reparation as owners of the inventory (see ECCC Law Art. 44.1, 44.2, 44.4 New; Internal Rules 9.3 New), and (iii) any sensitive materials and data can be easily removed and protected before the handing over of the inventory.

In addition, we demand that provincial Learning Centers-Memorials be established in each of the 24 provinces of Cambodia as part of our right to reparation and the legacy of memorializing and education. With all due respect, Phnom Penh was not the only crime scene; memorializing and resources need to include and respect the 85% of Cambodian victims who reside in the provinces.”

A few days after this open letter of 26 June 2011, the Elite Club of ECCC officials (civil party lawyers, administrators, judges) exclusively met—as presidents and representatives of victims associations do not matter in this high-minded discussion on reparations as we can’t possible know what we want (sic!), thus we were not invited—and decided to seal shut any possible interpretation of government and UN responsibility.

This Elite Club amended the above Article 39 of the ECCC Law, stripping it of the above quoted language, with the document falsely stating that it was last amended on 26 August 2007 (which opened up the possibility that I made up the above quoted language).  As it stands now, the full Article 39 reads:

“Those who have committed any crime as provided in Articles 3 new, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 shall be sentenced to a prison term from five years to life imprisonment.

In addition to imprisonment, the Extraordinary Chamber of the trial court may order the confiscation of personal property, money, and real property acquired unlawfully or by criminal conduct.

The confiscated property shall be returned to the State.”

The vacuity of past discussions of the ECCC Elite Club on victims’ reparations was given the final seal of approval with the ECCC Supreme Court Chamber’s summary decision of 3 February 2012, in para. 67: “that awards are borne exclusively by convicted persons”, shielding the government and the UN of any responsibility.

Here, I will not go into the other serious concerns raised by the 3 Feb. 2012 final decision on Duch, except to say that: We the victims and we the larger Cambodian society have to pay an extremely high price for the life sentence given to Duch.  The life sentence fits with the gravity of the crimes and should have been given at the first instance without the high drama for such a simple case as this one where the defendant confessed and cooperated, mounds of culpable documents existed and Tuol Sleng survivors testified; that’s not the point. 

The price we have to pay comes in the serious consequences in the: (i) Supreme Court Chamber’s 

erasure of the illegality of Duch’s pre-trial detention at the Cambodian Military Court; (ii) SCC’s uneasy language on personal jurisdiction in light of the imbroglio of Cases 003/4, stating that “[w]hether an accused is a senior leader or one of the most responsible are exclusively policy decisions for which the Co-Investigating Judges and Co-Prosecutors, and not the Chambers, are accountable” where history, resources and power are not on our side; and (iii) making Duch the sole scapegoat of the Khmer Rouge regime and crimes. 

By any interpretation, this is manipulation of victims.  This is exploitation of our suffering.  This is disempowerment whereby the tools of “justice” are used to perpetrate injustice. 

The danger now is that it comes with UN insignia.  It comes with Japanese Yens and high-minded rhetoric of western ambassadors for the vacuity.  It doesn’t matter how many billions the western donors and Japan continue to spend on “rule of law” via the various aid agencies, because what they are embracing now at the KRT will undo any benefits they may have produced.  We are talking about the embedding of dark mentalities by the KRT with UN insignia which will awash the larger society for years and decades to come, long after the KRT has closed its gates on its military-situated compound and the UN has left for another genocide-chasing mission.

__________________
Theary C. Seng
Founding President
Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia

References:

Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia:  www.arkvictims.org

ECCC Law (Oct. 2004):  http://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/legal-documents/KR_Law_as_amended_27_Oct_2004_Eng.pdf

Public Demand for ECCC Inventory, Provincial Learning Centers:  http://www.thearyseng.com/component/content/article/104-campaign-for-eccc-inventory-provincial-learning-centers/242-campaign-for-closing-order-booklets-eccc-inventory-24-provincial-learning-centers-memorials

CAMBODIA: The impact of truth-seeking on mental health

Hong Sarath pictured outside Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, which judges in the on-going Khmer Rouge tribunal referred to as a "factory of death" (Photo: Alan M.Thornton for TPO Cambodia)

Nyrola Ung is confronting her grief outside the courts (Photo: Phuong Tran/IRIN)

PHNOM PENH, 3 February 2012 (IRIN) - On 3 February, judges in the Extraordinary Chamber of the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC) – more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge trials – sentenced Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), the former chairman of the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng security prison, to life in prison.

This ruling overturned a 2010 sentence of 35 years, which civil party lawyers had appealed.

Mental health experts are monitoring the impact of such rulings and the entire judicial process on survivors due to the particularities of this tribunal; its rules grant them a larger role than in any previous international criminal tribunal, prompting longstanding questions about whether truth-seeking hurts or heals war wounds.

Invitation to a Public Conference of KSAEM KSAN Associatio​n on February 04, 2011 at CJCC

Dear Sir or Madame,

On the occasion of our General Assembly dated on February 04,2012 we request the honor of your participation to our public conference from 9:30am to 11:30 am at Room 9Cambodia-Japan Cooperation Center (CJCC) at Institute for Foreign Languages located Russian Federation Blvd in Phnom Penh (as here attached agenda).

Your presence will be a great encouragement to our members.

For further information, please kindly contact Mr. KIM Mengkhy via 017 338 155 and contact@ksaemksan.info.

Faithfully yours

KIM Mengkhy

Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea "Ksaem Ksan"

"United in the quest of Justice, Social Harmony, Culture of Peace and Spiritual Healing"

www.ksaemksan.info / contact@ksaemksan.info

CAMBODIA: Women victims of Khmer Rouge demand transparency

Phnom Penh, Cambodian women cry with memory of Khmer Roughe atrocities during prayer ceremony. Image: Guardian News Global Development

Hanna Hindstrom – WNN MDG Stories

(WNN) Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA: Net Saveoun was 18 when she was gang raped by Khmer Rouge soldiers. She was one of 30 women selected to “carry salt” and taken to the forest in Pursat province, western Cambodia in 1978. Each of them was beaten, brutalised and had their throat slit before being tossed into an open grave.

“I was the last one,” said Saveoun. “I was hit with an axe and my clothes were torn off and then they raped me. They hit me three times with an axe. Then I was thrown into that hole full of blood. Everyone else was already dead.”

But Saveoun is not a witness in the proceedings that began last week in the extraordinary chambers of the courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Instead she addressed a separate hearing last Thursday, held on the other side of the city as part of the Cambodian 16 days of action on violence against women to highlight sexual crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.