Survivours Of The Killing Fields Talk

[cdnvic]

Khmer Rouge survivors share stories

There was no hope in the killing fields of Cambodia, no protein to eat and — to Patrick Keo — certainly no God. But there was killing and dying all around and the constant fear that anyone could be next. "You would lie awake at night and wonder when you would be killed," said Keo, who is now a 49-year-old accountant in Kane'ohe. "No way there was a God." The nightmares and flashbacks have long passed for survivors from the bloody, four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.

Cambo Khem, a 63-year-old truck driver who lives in Kunia, is willing to remember those years of fear and hopelessness in the rice fields of Cambodia if it means educating a new generation. "We want to talk about what happened," Khem said. "I lost 59 relatives in all: father, mother, sister, brother, uncles, nephews. They were all killed." Hongly Khuy, now 54, was in business school in Phnom Penh in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge surrounded the city and began shelling it, forcing the evacuation of U.S. interests. "All morning until noon, I saw American helicopters coming in and out," Khuy said. "Then they never come back.

"We were poor, typical Cambodians. We were surrounded and couldn't go back to the country. You don't know what's going to happen next. We were like a fish caught in the net." Khuy hopped on a scooter looking for a way out of the city and followed another scooter rider, who ignored directions from soldiers and was shot dead on the spot.

On the forced evacuation to a work camp in Battambang Province in northwest Cambodia, Khuy saw two prisoners arguing by the side of the road. Khmer Rouge soldiers picked out the loudest one and beat him to death with a hoe in front of everyone.

"They don't even want to waste one bullet," Khuy said. "Everybody got silent after that. No more complaining."

Eventually, families were separated and sent to different parts of Cambodia according to gender and age.

People with glasses, fair skin or soft hands were suspected of being intellectuals and often were taken away, never to be seen again, Neuov said. Prisoners with previous military experience were a particular threat.

Khuy was working in a muddy rice field when a prisoner dug up a live grenade and threw it safely away, where it exploded. That night, Khuy was lined up with about 400 other men, including the one who found the grenade. For safely detonating the grenade, the man was taken away and shot.

"They suspected he was a former soldier," Khuy said.

Khuy suffered from malaria and was working in a field when he saw thousands of Vietnamese soldiers suddenly appear and begin shooting at the Khmer Rouge.

"The Vietnamese moved in a line right past us and just let us go," Khuy said. "They wanted to fight the Khmer Rouge. So I just walked away."

He headed west toward Thailand and it would take him two months to make it to the border, where thousands of Cambodian refugees were being detained before makeshift camps could be set up by Western aid workers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extracted from:

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbc...D=2007710210363

The full article is a very compelling read.

Edited October 23, 2007 by cdnvic

[sutnyod]

http://www.dccam.org/

It is asked here why Ieng Sary and two other high-ranking Khmer rouge are still not arrested...

It is also sad that most of my (Cambodian) colleagues tell me their children don't believe the stories their parents have about that time.

[LaoPo]

Khmer Rouge survivors share stories

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extracted from:

<a href="http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbc...D=2007710210363" target="_blank">http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbc...D=2007710210363</a>

The full article is a very compelling read.

Unfortunately your link doesn't work, cdnvic...

Note: it worked, once I previewed my own message; thanks !

This is The Photo Gallery: Cambodia's Trials:

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/...n/cambodia.html

********************************************************************************

**********

And, isn't it always about money, once the Tribunal is about to begin...... ? :

Cambodia requests more funds for genocide tribunal

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Cambodia appealed Thursday for more money to fund a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal, saying the trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders would likely drag on longer than originally expected.

The appeal follows international pressure for greater transparency at the tribunal, a hybrid court jointly run by Cambodian and United Nations staff, amid accusations of mismanagement and kickbacks.

The trials, which have been plagued by delays, are expected to start next year.

The tribunal was originally projected to complete its work by 2009.

"There is a budget shortage for the operation of the tribunal, which could extend into 2010," Cambodia's Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told reporters Thursday.

The tribunal's head of public affairs, Helen Jarvis, said the US$56.3 million (€39.5 million) originally budgeted for the tribunal would not be enough, mainly because of delays in adopting rules at the tribunal.

"The original budget was just for three years until mid-2009 and we need to envisage going a bit longer than that," Jarvis said. "The extra funding and time we will need ... will be fully justified in our budget appeal."

She said fundraising meetings would take place in Cambodia and New York by the end of the year.

Of the US$56.3 million budgeted for the tribunal, there was still a US$7.5 million shortfall, she said. She declined to say how much more money would be needed, over and above the amount already budgeted.

She said the Cambodian tribunal funds will last until the first quarter of 2008 while the U.N.'s portion will last until later that year.

The radical policies of the Khmer Rouge, when in power from 1975 to 1979, led to the deaths of 1.7 million people from hunger, disease, overwork and execution.

The tribunal has so far detained only two senior former Khmer Rouge officials on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

U.S. Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli said Washington was mulling over whether to donate funds for the tribunal but that no decision would be made until the tribunal has properly addressed the "serious" allegations of mismanagement and corruption in its administration.

"No one is going to want to spend American taxpayer money on an administrative process which is not transparent," he said, adding the tribunal's "administrative problem is so huge and so obvious."

A U.N.-commissioned audit last month slammed the Cambodian side of the tribunal for mismanagement, including hiring unqualified staffers.

Earlier this year, the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative alleged that Cambodian judges and other court personnel had paid off government officials for their positions at the tribunal — claims the Cambodians dismissed as groundless.

"The bottom line is that the Khmer Rouge tribunal needs more money," Mussomeli said. But "even those donors who have been most generous in the past will have a difficult time giving more funding to the Khmer Rouge tribunal unless the administrative issues are fixed.

From:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/25/...Khmer-Rouge.php

LaoPo

Edited October 26, 2007 by LaoPo

[Tilokarat]

Anyone interested in the Cambodian genocide should read Hang S. Ngor's book - Survival in the Killing Fields. An utterly compelling novel about his own experiences under the Khmer Rouge brutality.

Hang later won an Oscar playing Dith Pran in the Killing Fields.

Unfortunately, he survived the killing fields of Cambodia, but not the United States of America. He died at the hands of Chinese triads, I think, while leaving a restaurant in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

[cdnvic]

On February 25, 1996, Ngor was shot to death outside his home in Chinatown, which is located in downtown Los Angeles, California. Ngor was buried at the Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, Los Angeles.

Charged with the murder were three reputed members of the "Oriental Lazy Boyz" street gang who had a prior history of snatching purses and jewelry. They were tried together in the Superior Court of Los Angeles, though their cases were heard by three separate juries.[5] Prosecutors argued that they killed Ngor because, after handing over his gold Rolex watch willingly he refused to give them a locket that contained a photo of his deceased wife, My-Huoy. Defense attorneys suggested the murder was a politically motivated killing carried out by sympathizers of the Khmer Rouge but offered no evidence to support this theory.

All three were found guilty. Tak Sun Tan was sentenced to 56 years to life; Indra Lim to 26 years to life; Jason Chan to life without parole. In 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted Tak Sun Tan's habeas corpus petition, finding that prosecutors had manipulated the jury's sympathy by presenting false evidence. This decision was reversed and the conviction was ultimately upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in July 2005.

Ngor survived incredible dangers during his life in Cambodia only to die violently in his adopted homeland. But he told a New York Times reporter after the release of The Killing Fields, "If I die from now on, OK! This film will go on for a hundred years."

Dith Pran, whom Ngor portrayed in The Killing Fields, said of Ngor's death, "He is like a twin with me...He is like a co-messenger and right now I am alone."

-Wikipedia

[cdnvic]

Decided to grab the DVD and re-watch this movie tonight. I've learned a lot since the last time.

[Thanyaburi Mac]

Khmer Rouge survivors share stories

There was no hope in the killing fields of Cambodia, no protein to eat and — to Patrick Keo — certainly no God. But there was killing and dying all around and the constant fear that anyone could be next. "You would lie awake at night and wonder when you would be killed," said Keo, who is now a 49-year-old accountant in Kane'ohe. "No way there was a God." The nightmares and flashbacks have long passed for survivors from the bloody, four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.

He headed west toward Thailand and it would take him two months to make it to the border, where thousands of Cambodian refugees were being detained before makeshift camps could be set up by Western aid workers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By early June 1979 there were close to 50,000 Khmer refugees packed up on the border in the Aranyaprathet area.  8-12 June 1979, some 42,000 of them were buses by the Thai up to the Preah Viharn area, Sisaket, and forced back over the border to Cambodia.  In the late afternoon, night time, rains, mines, a very steep, almost a cliff, slope down to the flatland, women, kids, old folks, everyone.  Not a pretty sight.

By August survivors of this forced repatriation began to show up back in the Aran area.  They were treated somewhat better this time, this became the large refugee camps along the border that were around for the next 10 years.

Mac

[sutnyod]

Decided to grab the DVD and re-watch this movie tonight. I've learned a lot since the last time.

Enjoy the music, too! Mike Oldfield

[LaoPo]

Decided to grab the DVD and re-watch this movie tonight. I've learned a lot since the last time.

Enjoy the music, too! Mike Oldfield

LaoPo

[sutnyod]

<h3 class="post-title"> Witness to Khmer Rouge brutality to testify at trial </h3> Nhem En, right, former chief photographer at a torture center run by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, poses for photograph with two Buddhist monks at Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (Heng Sinith/The Associated Press)

Friday, October 26, 2007

By Seth Mydans

Posted by The International Herald Tribune

PHNOM PENH: He had a job to do and he did it supremely well, under threat of death, within earshot of screams of torture: methodically photographing Khmer Rouge prisoners and producing a haunting collection of mug shots that has become the visual symbol of Cambodia's mass killings.

"I'm just a photographer; I don't know anything," he said he told the newly arrived prisoners as he removed their blindfolds and adjusted the angles of their heads. But he knew, as they did not, that every one of them would be killed.

"I had my job, and I had to take care of my job," he said in a recent interview. "Each of us had our own responsibilities. I wasn't allowed to speak with prisoners."

That was three decades ago, when the photographer, Nhem En, now 47, was on the staff of Tuol Sleng prison, the most notorious torture house of the Khmer Rouge regime, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979.

This week he was called to be a witness at an upcoming trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, one of whom was his commandant at the prison, Kaing Geuk Eav, known as Duch, who has been arrested and charged with crimes against humanity.

The trial is months away, but prosecutors are interviewing witnesses, reviewing tens of thousands of pages of documents and making arrests.

As a lower-ranking cadre, Nhem En is not in jeopardy of arrest. But he is in a position to offer some of the most personal testimony at the trial, about the man he worked under for three years.

In the interview, Nhem En spoke with pride of living up to the exacting standards of a boss who was a master of negative reinforcement.

"It was really hard, my job," he said. "I had to clean, develop and dry the pictures on my own and take them to Duch by my own hand. I couldn't make a mistake. If one of the pictures was lost I would be killed."

But he said: "Duch liked me because I'm clean and I'm organized. He gave me a Rolex watch."

Fleeing with other Khmer Rouge cadre when the regime was ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, Nhem En said he traded that watch for 20 tins of milled rice.

Since then he has adapted and prospered and is now a deputy mayor of the former Khmer Rouge stronghold Anlong Veng. He has switched from an opposition party to the party of Prime Minister Hun Sen and today he wears a wristwatch that bears twin portraits of the prime minister and his wife, Bun Rany.

Last month an international tribunal arrested and charged a second Khmer Rouge figure, who is now being held side by side with Duch in a detention center. He is Nuon Chea, 82, the movement's chief ideologue and a right-hand man to the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

Three more leaders were expected to be arrested in the coming weeks: the urbane former Khmer Rouge head of state, Khieu Samphan, along with the former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and his wife and fellow central committee member, Ieng Thirith.

All will benefit from the caprice of Nuon Chea, who complained that the squat toilet in his cell was hurting his ailing knees and was given a proper sit-down toilet in its place.

Similar toilets are being installed in the other cells, said a tribunal spokesman, Reach Sambath, "So they will all enjoy high-standard toilets when they come."

It is not clear whether any of the cases will be combined. But even if the defendants do not see each other, their testimony, harmonious or discordant, will put on display the relationships of some of the people who once ran the country's killing machine.

Already in a 1999 interview, Duch implicated his fellow prisoner, Nuon Chea, in the killings, citing among other things a directive that said: "Kill them all."

Nhem En's career in the Khmer Rouge began in 1970 at the age of 9 when he was recruited as a village boy to be a drummer in a touring revolutionary band. When he was 16, he said, he was sent to China for a seven-month course in photography.

He became the chief of six photographers at Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 people were tortured to death or sent to killing fields. Only a half dozen inmates were known to have survived.

He was a craftsman and some of his portraits, carefully posed and lighted, have found their way into art galleries in the United States.

Hundreds of them hang in rows on the walls of Tuol Sleng, which is now a museum, the faces frightened, bewildered, but mostly blank and enigmatic. They are staring at Nhem En.

The job was a daily grind, he said: up at 6:30 a.m., a quick communal meal of bread or rice and something sweet, and at his post by 7 a.m. to wait for prisoners to arrive. His telephone would ring to announce them: sometimes one, sometimes a group, sometimes truckloads of them, he said.

"They came in blindfolded and I had to untie the cloth," he said.

"I was alone in the room, so I am the one they saw. They would say, 'Why was I brought here? What am I accused of? What did I do wrong?' "

But Nhem En ignored them.

" 'Look straight ahead. Don't lean your head to the left or the right.' That's all I said," he recalled. "I had to say that so the picture would turn out well. Then they were taken to the interrogation center. The duty of the photographer was just to take the picture."