Haunted by the 'killing fields'

Survivors of Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia speak out about the ghosts that still torment them

Joe Mozingo
LOS ANGELES TIMES

LONG BEACH, Calif. – At night, the old woman hears the voices of her children crying out for her. She knows they will never stop.

Um Sath is 89, and three decades have passed since the Khmer Rouge laid waste to Cambodia. She shuts her eyes and taps her temples to show where the genocidal regime still rules with impunity. "We miss you, Mama," the voices cry.

Sath spends much of her day in silence. For years, she rarely left her clapboard house in Long Beach. Although she now finds peace chatting with the other haunted figures at a seniors centre, she has kept the echoes of the "killing fields" sealed tightly inside her head.

Recently, she joined dozens of survivors at a recreation centre in Long Beach to face their memories. They longed to see a reckoning for perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Since February, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh has put on trial 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 want refugees outside Cambodia to submit 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, to 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 California State University, Long Beach who is leading the outreach effort in Southern California, home of the world's largest Cambodian refugee community. "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."

Sath stands up. Her eyes crinkle before she speaks.

Sath and her husband were farmers and merchants in the rich land along the Mekong River, south of Phnom Penh. In the middle class, with enough money to own a modest brick house, they were targets when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, brutally turning the country into a collective society of farm peasants. Intellectuals, teachers, doctors, businessmen, government bureaucrats and army soldiers were executed en masse.

Khmer Rouge soldiers showed up at Sath's home with rifles, took her husband and told her to walk with her eight children.

For days they wandered, following orders. Anyone who complained or asked questions was dismissed with a bullet to the head.

The soldiers barked questions about her husband: Why did he travel to Phnom Penh so often? Did he work for the national police?

Sath told them they were just poor people, doing nothing.

They let Sath and her children return to where she had lived. The family reunited with her husband and stayed for a month. Their house had been burned to the ground – just a pile of bricks and the skeleton of a stairway. They slept on the ground. There was no food, and they nearly starved, eating only watery rice soup.

The soldiers forced them back on the road, this time to a work camp near Pursat, where they lived in a straw hut with a dirt floor. The family worked to exhaustion in the rice fields day after day.

One day, soldiers locked Sath in chains and took her husband. Days later, she overheard soldiers mention his execution.

Soldiers came again to the rice paddy. This time they took her three sons.

Some time later, Sath heard that other villagers had seen the boys' clothes in the plowed-up field where bodies were routinely buried. Soldiers came for Sath next. They took her to the same field and beat her unconscious. She woke up naked, amid decaying bodies and the smell that, decades later, could bring the horror back to life.

She made it back to her hut, surviving several more near-death moments before Vietnamese soldiers ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

"I lost my sons, my grandson. They took my husband away right in front of me. They killed my husband. They took my brothers and sisters away. They were all killed by the Khmer Rouge," she said.

The anguish in Sath's face reveals the loss. Women choke back sobs. Sath thanks everyone for listening.

Born Pach takes the microphone next. Now 40, Pach was a child when the black-clad soldiers came for her parents to be "re-educated."

They sent Pach to a camp in the province of Battambang to cut rice. She begged to see her parents. But she would not see them again.

One day, the guards accused her of stealing a rooster and beat her. Another time, when she was ill, they accused her of being lazy and sliced the top and side of her head with a knife, then stuck a burning piece of metal in her rectum.

She saw other children have their throats cut or get clubbed to death.

Pach, who survived the Khmer Rouge and made it to Long Beach in 1989, has nightmares that she is being burned alive. She wants her torturers to go to prison.

The stories pour out. One woman gets paper towels to hand around to wipe the tears. When they get to the government forms, 21 people fill them out. No one remembers dates. Only one victim names an alleged perpetrator. The rest do not remember their tormentors' names, never knew them or are still scared.