As quest for justice and healing continues, Cal State to air accounts of Khmer Rouge brutality

Cambodian Americans to talk about atrocities
As quest for justice and healing continues, Cal State to air accounts
of Khmer Rouge brutality
By Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press
Article Created: 03/30/2008 02:41:28 AM PDT


LONG BEACH -- As a child in Cambodia, Sara Pol-Lim lost her father,
three brothers and a cousin to the Khmer Rouge and spent four years in
a youth concentration camp.
Pol-Lim was finally able to deal with her past when her mother wrote a
book, but the community organizer works daily with refugees who
repress their own horrific memories.

Now, those exiles will have a chance to reveal those tales -- and
participate, in their own small way, in an international quest for
justice.

A workshop at California State University, Long Beach on Saturday is
one of the first U.S. events to target Cambodian-Americans and solicit
their participation in an international war crimes tribunal for the
Khmer Rouge that's under way in their homeland.

The daylong event will feature a panel of experts on the Cambodian
genocide who will discuss the Khmer Rouge's physical and psychological
effects on survivors, as well as a second panel of younger Cambodians,
many of whom were born in the U.S. or fled with their families as
young children. The speakers will include doctors, immigration
attorneys, economists and artists.

Organizers hope exiles will share their memories and plan to review
the stories for possible submission to the joint United Nations and
Cambodian court that was established two years ago.

They also will urge attendees to apply for formal victim and civil
party status and volunteer as translators or witnesses. A
representative from the State Department, as well as international
experts on the Cambodian genocide and members of a watchdog group
that's been monitoring the tribunal, will attend.
Many Cambodian exiles don't understand the tribunal process or see the
need to get involved -- even though almost everyone lost loved ones to
the Khmer Rouge, said Leakhena Nou, a Cambodian-American and sociology
professor at Cal State Long Beach. Buddhist beliefs about karma also
create a cultural resistance toward confronting the past, she said.

"There's still a lot of fear involved and there's no incentive for the
survivors to talk about their past," Nou said.

The Khmer Rouge ruled from 1975-79 under Pol Pot and have been
implicated in the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a
quarter of the population. They died from disease, overwork,
starvation and execution in the notorious "killing fields."

If the session goes well, similar events could be held in other states
with large Cambodian refugee populations, including Massachusetts,
Oregon and Virginia, as well as Washington, D.C., Nou said.

Community leaders acknowledge, however, that the biggest challenge may
be getting Cambodian refugees to show up at all, let alone tell their
stories. Cambodians make up about 10 percent of the population in Long
Beach, a city of about a half-million south of Los Angeles, but they
remain isolated within a few gritty city blocks known as Little Phnom
Penh.

There, rumors fly about the true nature of the U.N. tribunal and
suspicions that it's been infiltrated by Khmer Rouge supporters. Many
don't trust the court simply because of the current government's
involvement.

A series of delays hasn't helped, even though the first trials are now
slated as early as this fall, said Chhang Song, an adviser to the
Cambodian government who splits his time between Long Beach and Phnom
Penh.

"The court has become abstract to these people. It's very difficult to
get information," he said. "I know how difficult it is to get this
going, but people in general are not aware of that. They want to know
what's taking so long."

Others worry that even those with an interest in the court may not
show up because it's too traumatic. Most older Cambodians rarely talk
about Pol Pot's killing fields -- even with their American-born
children or fellow victims.

"They're still afraid to share their stories with their kids, so how
do you think they're going to come out and say, 'Yes, I'll sign up for
victim status?'" said Pol-Lim, executive director of United Cambodian
Community. "You have to get them to trust that what you do is for the
benefit of the closure of that wound."

Still, Pol-Lim and others believe the workshop is an important first
step toward the ultimate goal: allowing exiled victims to heal.

"They need to get beyond this mind-set of suffering, that the world
owes them something," said Nou, the professor. "They have to show the
world that it owes them something."
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