Khmer Rouge survivors, 35 years later:
Since February, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh has been trying the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders charged with crimes against humanity, for the brutal experiment in communism that took at least 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979.
Activists in the United States are trying to get refugees outside Cambodia to submit their testimonies to the tribunal, in an effort to spur a judicial process beset by delays, limited funds and allegations of corruption. They hope, along the way, that they can relieve the emotional torture of survivors who rarely speak about what happened.
“I’m hoping it will allow them to tell the world what happened 34 years ago,” said Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach, who is leading the outreach effort in Southern California, home of the largest Cambodian refugee community in the world. “The Khmer Rouge leaders are getting old, the victims are getting old. This is their chance to have their voices be heard before it’s too late.”
Nou has found that survivors of the Khmer Rouge era living in Cambodia and the U.S. have endured what she calls a prolonged “silent suffering.”
“What we’re seeing with Cambodians is anomie — a state of hopelessness and helplessness and this feeling of being disconnected from society.”
In a children’s day-care room at the rec center in McBride Park, Nou explains to Sath and other victims the importance of submitting their written testimony to the tribunal.
Nou understands this tribunal has huge problems. She knows it won’t touch even a small fraction of the era’s killers. She knows political forces in Cambodia are trying to limit the tribunal’s reach. She knows survivors’ memories are fragmented and muddled by trauma and time. And she knows that asking them to condense incomprehensible horrors of that time — the irrevocable turning point in all of their lives — into a few quotidian lines in tiny boxes on a government form borders on cruel farce.
I will let TMV readers decide if they want to read what these survivors must remember every day of their lives. I read it, and it was hard. But not as hard as remembering.
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