Minorities Forced to ‘Hide Identity’ under Khmer Rouge

Minorities Forced to ‘Hide Identity’ under Khmer Rouge

Khmer Time / Jonathan Cox

Tuesday, 01 March 2016

Khouy Muoy testifies at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal yesterday. ECCC/Nhet Sok Heng

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School of Vice: More or less, everyone had had to hide their identity under the Khmer Rouge!

All of a sudden - it seems - everyone wants to be the Chams' new best friend, including the Vietnamese - the Chams' historical nemesis/predators; singularly responsible for one of the greatest mass genocides in history and the sole cause of their current statelessness.

If reports about Hun Sen's personal role in leading the violent suppression of the Chams' uprising [prior to his defection to Vietnam] during the DK regime is anything to go by, then he should be summoned to appear before the tribunal to clarify the exact extent and nature of that alleged involvement, and or refute such an allegation if that be his prerogative. In fact, Mr Hun Sen has been deliberately building up his own profile to fit in with this new best friend image for quite sometime. He once 'confided' to a visiting Muslim head of an NGO that he was saved by the Chams who provided him hiding refuge whilst on the run from pursuing Lon Nol soldiers. Over the years he had also been spotted at the Chams' religious and cultural functions - as if out of a concious or subconscious need either to conceal a dark, disturbing past; to work himself into his former victims' good graces - or both!

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Ethnically Chinese and Vietnamese people hid their accents, hid their political views, and hid their grief about murdered parents and siblings as they tried to avoid the suspicion of Khmer Rouge cadres in the late 1970s. Concealment was the only way to survive the regime, said several witnesses yesterday during hearings for Case 002/02 at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

One of the witnesses yesterday was Khouy Muoy, who had a Chinese father and a Vietnamese mother. After the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Ms. Khouy was assigned to a mobile unit and separated from her family, sometimes seeing them just once a year. “I could visit my house once every six or 12 months for a brief moment only,” she said.

During one of her rare visits home, Ms. Khouy could not find her family.

“One day I sought permission to visit home, but when I arrived I did not see my parents or my siblings,” she said. “I only saw an empty house…I was crying loudly in the street and asked everyone for help. I said I had lost my relatives. I had lost my siblings...I knew they had died.” She later learned that her family had been taken to the nearby Kuok Choung prison for execution.

Her friends and neighbors urged her to hide her grief over her dead loved ones. “My coworkers felt pity on me, and they told me I shouldn’t cry any longer, but I had to try and work hard...I did not dare to weep in public, so I wept quietly and kept working very hard so that I could survive.” 40 years later, the memory still caused Ms. Khouy to break down in tears.

Grief was not the only thing ethnic minorities had to conceal during the Khmer Rouge regime. A foreign accent could also draw the suspicion of the cadres, Ms. Khouy said. “I was encouraged [by neighbors] to speak more clearly, like a Khmer person,” she said.

She later learned that foreign ancestry might have been the regime’s reason for the murders of her family. “My aunt whispered to me that they [her family] spoke Khmer with an accent and were accused of having Chinese or Vietnamese blood. That’s why they were taken away and killed,” she said.

Also testifying yesterday was Outh Sounlay, who lived in Kratie with his wife. Mr. Outh said he lost 14 family members during the regime, including his wife, who was of mixed Khmer and Vietnamese heritage.

One day after working outside the village, he and other villagers returned to find their wives and children gone.

“We were told we had fulfilled a great task,” he said. “[The chief of the cooperative] said, ‘all your wives were taken away. I want all you comrades to cut away this rotting flesh...in order to build the revolutionary labor class.”

Mr. Outh received a painful reminder of his wife’s death after her disappearance. “What is even worse is that the Khmer Rouge distributed the clothes from the people they had killed to people in the cooperative. I saw the clothes of my children and wife...I suffered so much that I couldn’t eat, drink, or sleep.”

Many of those executed were buried in a mass grave on a riverbank. Mr. Outh said that the grave later collapsed during a flood, spilling the bodies into the river. “Despite the river water taking away their bones, I could never forget them,” he said.

Even though he was ethnically Khmer, Mr. Outh said his wife’s ethnicity made him a suspect too. “It was said I had a ‘Vietnamese mind,’” he said.  After the purges, he said he lived in terror of being arrested and executed. “I felt very frightened,” he said. “I would be awakened by the sound of a mouse running through the house. I knew there were military who patrolled the area at nighttime.”

After years of forced silence, Ms. Khouy said she takes every opportunity to remind younger generations about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. “I tell the story to my children and my grandchildren,” she said.

The court today is scheduled to begin hearings on the estimated 200 security centers constructed by the Khmer Rouge to reeducate, torture, and execute people suspected of disloyalty to the regime.