Cambodians will gather today to pray for the
souls of some 1.7 million of their countrymen brutally killed by the Khmer
Rouge on the 37th anniversary of the day that the regime seized power and began
forcibly evacuating Phnom Penh.
At the
Choeung Ek killing fields, the mass grave in Phnom Penh’s Dangkor district
where thousands of skulls are stacked as a reminder of the scale of the
regime’s atrocities, 50 monks will be joined by some 500 members of the
opposition Sam Rainsy Party.
Ke
Sovannorth, secretary general of the SRP, said yesterday it was a time to
remember the awful three years, eight months and 20 days the regime ruled the
country.
“It is
a historic day. We will remember and never want it to happen again, because
this regime made women widows and separated children from their parents,” he
said.
Svay
Thida, now 50, remembered yesterday that she was 11 years old on the day when
the Khmer Rouge ordered her family and about two and a half million others who
were mostly refugees to leave their homes in Phnom Penh. “We were asked to
leave our home in only three days, but never returned for more than 3 years,”
she said.
Though
many were unaware of the horrors to come, Svay Thida said she had heard that
some of her wealthy neighbours were so frightened of the advancing Khmer Rouge
that they had elected to poison themselves in their own homes rather than face
certain death.
The
Khmer Rouge systematically targeted intellectuals and people with “bourgeois”
backgrounds, forcing everyone to write personal biographies and extracting
“confessions” through torture.
They
sought to purify the population through an agrarian revolution under which
perhaps one quarter of the population was killed through starvation, overwork
and murder.
Photojournalist
Al Rockoff said he had seen first-hand the type of brutality the Khmer Rouge
regime was willing to exact on civilians as early as 1974, when troops fighting
for then president Lon Nol retook the town of Oudong from the insurgents.
“There
were thousands of civilian and military massacred there. It was pretty obvious
of what they capable of doing to civilians – not on the battlefield, not in
combat, just the summary execution of many people,” he said.
But
Rockoff, who remained in Phnom Penh after April 17 for several weeks and took
some of the most enduring photos of the violence that was engulfing the
country, said most of the Western media was simply not interested.
More
than three decades after Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge, Western
interest in the former regime is now high as the Khmer Rouge tribunal tries the
regime’s three most senior surviving leaders.
Chum
Mey, a survivor of the notrious S-21 prison who testified against the prison’s
director, the first man convicted by the court – Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch –
said he resented the excuses being made in the present trial by the
highest-profile suspect, Brother No 2 Nuon Chea.
The
82-year-old questioned how Nuon Chea could testify that Phnom Penh was
evacuated “to find enemies”.
“Were
all of the evictees from Phnom Penh enemies? We felt pain, but now we just want
a confession to make national reconciliation,” he said.
Chhay
Channyda
The
Phnom Penh Post
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