Youk Chhang: A Cambodian National Treasure

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Leading by example, he taught a nation how to forgive without forgetting

By Peter Maguire

 

Youk Chhang, the executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia will receive the Center For Justice and Accountability’s Judith Lee Stronach Human Rights Award on May 4, 2017 in San Francisco.

 

It is no coincidence that Youk Chhang is Cambodia’s most trusted civic leader. Leading by example, he taught a nation how to forgive without forgetting. Like Angkor Wat and Tonle Sap Lake, Chhang is nothing less than a Cambodian national treasure.

 

The youngest son of a Phnom Penh gem merchant’s nine children, Youk Chhang was 14 years old when the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975, and forced him from his home at gunpoint. The teenager walked in the direction of what he believed to be his mother’s village, four months later was reunited with his family at one of Democratic Kampuchea’s newly established “compulsory communes.” There, he worked like a slave and death became as common as life.

 

“Innocence itself was a crime,” wrote Chhang, who learned this firsthand when he snuck into a rice field to pick watergrass and mushrooms for his starving sister. The Khmer Rouge cadres caught and then tortured him in front of the entire village for several hours, “I will never forget this, they tortured me in front of my mother and she was too afraid to cry because even crying was a crime.”

 

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