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ASRIC needs your support to complete testimony collection in the remaining US cities.  Please donate or help us to raise funds.  Donations can be made on our website through Paypal or by emailing klong@renewkhmer.org for more information. 

Your contribution is tax-deductible and is very important to the success of this project.  Thank you for helping to move Cambodia forward [...]]]>

Photo: Cindy Yamanaka, OC Register

Photo: Stephane Janin

ASRIC needs your support to complete testimony collection in the remaining US cities.  Please donate or help us to raise funds.  Donations can be made on our website through Paypal or by emailing klong@renewkhmer.org for more information. 

Your contribution is tax-deductible and is very important to the success of this project.  Thank you for helping to move Cambodia forward into a new, more promising era of peace, health, and well-being.

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 [...]]]> 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.”

Friday and Saturday, November 13-14, 2009, 10:00 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Pro-Act, 444 North 3rd St. Suite 307, Philadelphia, Pa 19123 

Friday and Saturday, November 13-14, 2009, 10:00 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Khmer Rouge victim from San Jose was saved by her children By Joe Rodriguez Mercury News October 23, 2009

The most surprising thing about Sophany Bay is how much at peace she looks. The nightmares haven’t tortured her delicate face or turned her hands shaky. Dressed in a purple blazer and [...]]]>

Sophany Bay (Photo by Patrick Tehan/Mercury News)

Khmer Rouge victim from San Jose was saved by her children
By Joe Rodriguez
Mercury News October 23, 2009

The most surprising thing about Sophany Bay is how much at peace she looks. The nightmares haven’t tortured her delicate face or turned her hands shaky. Dressed in a purple blazer and silk scarf, she looks every bit a professional and educated woman, the kind who were not supposed to survive the killing fields of Cambodia.

“The only reason I am here today is because my children saved me,” Bay said at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Buddhist temple in East San Jose. She tapped her shoulders for emphasis and added, “My children, they would not tell the Khmer Rouge who their father was, who their grandfather was. I would have been executed immediately.”

On Saturday, the 63-year-old will join dozens of local Cambodians invited to the temple to tell their stories of surviving one of the 20th century’s worst genocides. Human rights activists and university researchers will collect their testimony and, as part of a national effort, send their accounts to an international tribunal judging the acts of four Khmer Rouge leaders. The tribunal hasn’t yet decided if it will use these testimonials in its deliberations. .

“This is a fitting time for their stories to be heard, whether or not the tribunal will accept the testimony,” says Leakhena Nou, a medical sociologist at California State University-Long Beach and one of the key organizers of the testimonial campaign.

In studying the lingering emotional damage of the murderous social engineering inflicted on Cambodian immigrants in the 1970s, she has found that even their American-born children can feel stigmatized, isolated, depressed and suspicious of government and police.

“They’re not getting healthier,” Nou said. “They’re getting sicker. Why is this happening with all the health services here?” The answer to that question won’t come any time soon, but it never will if the mass murder is forgotten, or worse, denied by tyrants today and in the future.

Brutal regime
Bay grew up in Kompong Chuang, a small fishing village, with her five siblings, policeman father and stay-at-home mom. Growing up, she dreamed of becoming a judge.

“Even as a little girl in a village, I saw there was no justice at all in society,” she remembered. “But for some reason, God changed my plan.” Instead, she became a schoolteacher after college and moved to the capital, Phnom Penh. There she met and fell for a young Cambodian army officer, whom she married in 1966. They started a family.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged next door and would soon spill into Cambodia, giving the fanatical ultra-communist Khmer Rouge an opening. They toppled the government in 1975 intent on building a communist utopia from scratch. To do this they would purge the population of intellectuals, former government officials, policemen, lawyers, journalists and anyone else deemed a threat to their revolution.

Bay was lucky in one way — her husband had been sent to the United States for training one year earlier.

He was safe, but he would not know what horrors awaited his wife and their three young kids.

What Bay remembers from the day the Khmer Rouge took control were the gunshots in the morning.

“They kept firing into the air, telling everyone, ‘Go, go, go!’ into the forest, that the Americans were going to bomb the city.”

She grabbed her 6-year-old son, Paul; her 5-year-old daughter, Pine; and 2-month-old baby girl, Pom. Escorted by Khmer Rouge soldiers, they marched until exhausted, and again for days, deeper into the country.

One day, she lifted her emaciated, sick baby to a soldier and pleaded for help.

“The soldier, he injected something into her head,” Bay remembered. “She died immediately. She was so happy and beautiful before, my baby.” She buried Pom that night. But her two older children kept leaving the camp to visit Pom’s grave. Fearing this would anger the soldiers, Bay escaped with them but was caught and sent to a forced-labor camp.

To root out their enemies, soldiers often interrogated children while their parents worked in the fields, irrigation ditches or rock quarries.

At night, Bay would whisper instructions to Paul and Pine.

“When the soldiers ask you about your father,” Bay urged, “tell them he was a teacher like me. Do not tell them he is in the army.”

Roughly 2 million Cambodians were starved, executed or worked to death by the Khmer Rouge. Bay isn’t sure how her son and daughter died, from starvation, beatings, torture, or some combination.

“They tied my son’s hands and made him stand in water up to his waist,” Bay said. “They asked him questions. ‘Who is your mother? Who is your father?”

Paul died at age 7. Bay’s daughter, Pine, died soon after. She had been caught scavenging for food left by soldiers and then beaten. Bay can still hear her final words:

“Mom, take me to the clinic. When does father come home? You have to look for him, Mom!”

Life struggles
Vietnam, itself a communist state, finally invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Bay didn’t think life under the Vietnamese would be any better, so she fled through the jungle to Thailand, eating tree leaves and remembering a friend’s advice in camp.

“Life is a struggle,” Bay quoted her. “I kept thinking that life is always going to be a struggle, and that’s what kept me alive.”

After 10 months in a refugee camp, where she used her French to become a relief worker, she was reunited with her husband.

By then blood clots in his brain had left him partially paralyzed. Everyone in their immediate families had died. After all these years, Bay still suffers from occasional nightmares.

Today she’s a mental health counselor with the Gardner Family Health Network in San Jose, a nonprofit clinic where she helps low-income Cambodians. Her husband is a medical technician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a public hospital. They had no more children.

Three decades later, many Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge will not testify out of fear or the pain of memory.

“I am not scared,” Bay said. “If I don’t see justice done, I will not be able to close my eyes when I die. I try to be courageous about it, to talk about it, to let the world know the story of the Cambodian killing fields.”

The teacher, mother and survivor who once wanted to become a judge still wants her day in court.

A Time for justice
Testimonies from Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge will be taken from 1 to 6 p.m. Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at Wat Khemara Rangsey temple, 1594 Cunningham Ave., San Jose. For more information go to www.apa.nyu.edu/. Click on “research,” then “special projects.” 

To download the new message from the Victims Unit, please [...]]]> The Victims Unit has informed us of a change in the filing deadline.  The new deadline is 15 days after the judicial investigation concludes, which is now expected to be at the end of 2009, not mid-November.  ASRIC will continue to help survivors interested in filing through this period.

To download the new message from the Victims Unit, please click on the links below:

English

Khmer

LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — The tiny Cambodian woman trembled slightly and stared blankly ahead as she told the story that has haunted her for half a lifetime: her parents and brother died in Khmer Rouge labor camps. Her baby perished in a [...]]]>

Photo: Damian Dovarganes AP News

LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — The tiny Cambodian woman trembled slightly and stared blankly ahead as she told the story that has haunted her for half a lifetime: her parents and brother died in Khmer Rouge labor camps. Her baby perished in a refugee camp.

Roth Prom has wanted to die every day since and had never spoken those words so publicly until last week, when five minutes became the chance for justice she has longed for silently for so many years.

“I’m depressed in my head, I’m depressed in my stomach and in my heart. I have no hope in my body, I have nothing to live for,” she said quietly. “All I have is just my bare hands.”

As the tiny woman in the polka dot blouse slipped back to her seat, many of the nearly two dozen other Cambodian refugees in the room began to weep. They know Prom’s pain. They were all there to tell stories just like hers.

Prom, 63, is one of dozens of Cambodian refugees speaking publicly — many for the first time — about Khmer Rouge atrocities so a legal team can use their testimony in an international war crimes tribunal underway in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

From Virginia to California, refugees have spent the past few months pouring out long-suppressed memories to volunteers who fill notebooks with reports of gang rapes, execution, starvation, forced labor and brutal beatings. They attach names of dead relatives, sometimes a half-dozen per person, and scrawl out names of labor camps and far-flung villages where they lived for years on the edge of starvation.

The Khmer Rouge is implicated in wiping out an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population, during their rule from 1975-79 under Pol Pot. People died from disease, overwork, starvation and execution in the notorious “killing fields.”

Cambodians who fled their homeland decades ago relish the chance to participate in the war crimes trials unfolding thousands of miles away. The tribunal, a joint court created by the Cambodian government and the United Nations, allows Khmer Rouge victims to participate as witnesses, complainants and civil parties.

Depending on the stories, the accuracy of their memories and their own willingness to participate, survivors could be called to testify for the prosecution or defense and those filing as civil parties could be entitled to reparations. At a minimum, all filings will be archived and reviewed by those collecting testimony from survivors.

“They have a sense of powerlessness, but they have a lot more power than they realize,” said Nou, founder of the Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia. “Most of them have not even talked about it for 30 years. They’ve been silent for so long.”

Last week, testimony in Phnom Penh concluded in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, who commanded the S-21 prison where up to 16,000 people were tortured and killed. Eav, also known as Duch, was the first to go before the tribunal and is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture. More than 23,000 visitors attended his trial, which continues in November with closing arguments.

Four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody awaiting trial set for January. Any testimony submitted by the end of the year can be used by prosecutors to bolster those cases.

The U.N. and Cambodian branches of the tribunal did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

Grassroots organizers with backing from the Asian Pacific American Institute at New York Univesity have been building trust within the Cambodian-American communities for nearly two years but still expected many to shun the process out of fear and suspicion. Some victims believe the tribunal is run by the Khmer Rouge, while others fear if they speak out they could endanger relatives still living in Cambodia.

But Nou said turnout has been high, with some people even traveling from Arizona to share stories at the Southern California workshops held at a Cambodian community center.

“Before, they assumed that no one wanted to listen to them,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘We thought that no one cared, that no one wanted to listen. But now that I know people want to listen, I have nothing else to lose. I’ve lost everything else already.’”

So far, the team has collected more than 100 statements from Cambodian expatriates at workshops in Virginia, Maryland, Orange County and Long Beach — home to the largest Cambodian ex-pat population. Future sessions are planned this fall in Oregon, Northern California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

They’ve uncovered chilling stories along the way.

One woman in Long Beach told of being gang-raped from dawn to dusk by Khmer Rouge cadres while 6½ months pregnant. She never told her husband and only came forward last week because he had passed away.

Another recalled being held at gunpoint with her brother and being forced to watch as her father was executed and then disemboweled, his heart, liver and stomach ripped out by soldiers. The woman, now in her 50s, told the story to a volunteer in three distinct “spirit voices,” as if to detach herself from the painful memories.

For Prom, the recent workshop in Little Cambodia was a chance to honor the memory of her loved ones — and to get justice for the brutal crimes that ruined her life and so many others. The Khmer Rouge split up her family, she was forced to pull a plow through rice paddies like an ox and her child died later in a refugee camp.

Prom harbors thoughts of killing herself and suffers from memory loss. She’s terrified of the night — the time when Khmer Rouge soldiers would take neighbors away without explanation, never to be seen again.

“I try to forget, but it’s hard to forget,” Prom told a translator who dictated it to a volunteer law student. Prom had already penciled her story on paper in the rolling script of her native Khmer.

“I want to find justice for myself and for the Cambodian people,” she said. “I’m here to teach history to the next generation, so this horrific crime will never happen again.”