Our story in The Cambodia Daily

Cambodians in the US Converge To Tell KR Stories

Photo By Vanta El

By Julia Wallace
The Cambodia Daily October 13, 2009

 “My mother was killed, my brothers, my sisters were killed.”

“They said we all had to go to the rice fields, monks as well as ordinary people…. People were afraid.”

“I don’t trust anymore. Please, I know that you can help me. That’s why I came here.”

These are the voices of Cambodian-American victims of the Khmer Rouge regime who gathered in the US states of Maryland and Virginia this summer over bagels and coffee to tell their stories.

 The workshop was one in a series organized by the Cambodian Diaspora Victims Participation Project, an initiative to collect the stories of American survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime in the hopes of enabling them to file civil party applications with the ECCC. Since March, the CDVPP has been conducting one- to three-day workshops for survivors in the US states with the largest Cambodian communities.

The project is an outgrowth of the Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia, a nonprofit founded by sociologist Leakhena Nou. It had its genesis when Ms Nou looked into the mechanisms in place for victim participation at the tribunal and realized “that there was an enormous gap between the theory and the practibility by which an average genocide survivor could participate in the process,” Ken Long, the CDVPP’s community liaison, explained in an email this week.

“In our view,” he added, “another violation would be committed against the survivors if they were kept in darkness about these abstract legalities and were not provided with realistic means to understand and partake in the judicial procedures.”

Without assistance, Mr Long said, many of the survivors would struggle with the process of filing civil party applications due to language and literacy barriers. Even with help, filling out an application takes between two and eight hours per person.

With this in mind, each workshop begins with a discussion of the history and structure of the tribunal. Afterwards, volunteers collect testimonies from the survivors and help them fill out civil party applications. Legal advisors scrutinize the narratives for accuracy, then hand them on to a team of UCLA law students, who make sure the applications comply with ECCC requirements.

ECCC Victims Unit chief Helen Jarvis said yesterday that her team is working closely with CDVPP and “looks forward to receiving the applications that have been filled out at these meetings.” She acknowledged that civil party applications can be prohibitively complex, but said that was simply the nature of the beast.

“It’s not just a question of sending in a postcard,” she said. “If you wish to enter a judicial process, you have to go through the formalities that entails.

To complement the work of private groups such as CDVPP, the Victims Unit will launch a new print and television advertising campaign next week in Cambodia and several other nations with large expatriate communities, including the US, France and Belgium. The ads will encourage victims to file civil party applications and complaints by mid-November.

In the meantime, CDVPP is still crisscrossing the US to collect testimonies. Mardine Mao, the president of the Cambodian-American Community of Oregon wrote in an email that the three-day workshop she recently attended in Portland was “emotional and exhausting, but successful.” Mr Long concurred, saying that the workshops were “emotionally grueling,” but at the same time rewarding.

“I am struck when survivors thank the volunteers for helping with these workshops,” Mr Long wrote. “They somehow consider us the heroes, which is absolutely absurd. The survivors, for confronting evil, death, and despair to preserve the seed of life for my generation and future generations of Cambodians to come, have been and shall always remain the heroes.”