Escaping the killing fields:
Cambodian refugees recount harrowing pilgrimage to freedom
- by Brett Dalton, Lee's Summit Journal, Missouri, USA
The following article is the first in a series about a Lee's Summit couple who survived the murder and genocide by the Khmer Rouge in their native country of Cambodia in the mid 1970s.
On Wednesday, Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge Communist group that terrorized Cambodia in the 1970s, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. While more than 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, many survived, fleeing to Thailand, the country's neighbor to the west. At least two of those refugees now make their home in Lee's Summit, surviving one of the worst cases of genocide in the 20th century.
To read the rest of part 1 of this story, click here or go to Comments.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Escaping the killing fields
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I also wanted to direct you to the website of another survivor of Cambodia's tragic past. His name is Kilong Ung and he's already posted some of his writings about his life in the Khmer Rouge period onto his blog. Click here to read more from Kilong and use the links to visit his website too.
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Escaping the killing fields:
Cambodian refugees recount harrowing pilgrimage to freedom
- by Brett Dalton
The Journal Staff, Lee's Summit Journal
Editor's note: The following article is the first in a series about a Lee's Summit couple who survived the murder and genocide by the Khmer Rouge in their native country of Cambodia in the mid 1970s.
On Wednesday, Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge Communist group that terrorized Cambodia in the 1970s, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While more than 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, many survived, fleeing to Thailand, the country's neighbor to the west. At least two of those refugees now make their home in Lee's Summit, surviving one of the worst cases of genocide in the 20th century.
The nightmare begins
In 1975, Choeun and Mary Dean - Mary's first name was Rim at the time - were living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city, with their three children. Choeun drove a taxicab for a living.
Nine years earlier, the United States' escalation of the war in Vietnam - Cambodia's neighbor to the east - began to have a destabilizing effect in Cambodia, according to the online encyclopedia, www.encarta.com.
The chaos that ensued eventually led to the take over of Phnom Penh and the Cambodian government by a Communist group led by Pol Pot. This murderous group was given the name Khmer Rouge by Sihanouk, the country's toppled monarch. During the next four years, the Khmer Rouge would be responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million people who were either murdered, worked to death or starved to death.
The goal of the Khmer Rouge was to turn Cambodia, which the group renamed as Democratic Kampuchea, into the ultimate classless agrarian society. To do this, the group isolated the country from foreign influence, closed schools, hospitals and factories, abolished banking, outlawed all religions, and murdered anyone who may have a resemblance of an education, according to www.encarta.com.
The Khmer Rouge cleared the urban populations of their residents and forced the people they didn't kill, including Choeun, into agricultural areas where they would slave away in the fields for more than 12 hours a day. Once Choeun was taken, he would not see Mary for another three years. He would never see his kids again.
Not knowing her husband's fate, Mary decided to flee to see how far she could get. After initially leaving her three children with her mother, she eventually took them, too. All three died along the way, either of starvation, illness or a bomb, which may have killed the youngest child after Mary sat him near a tree to rest.
"I had hard time carrying him, so I sat him down under a tree," Mary said. "He said, 'Mom, you can go. It's okay. I need water.' So I went and when I turned back, the bomb hit. But I couldn't go back. I don't know if he died then or not."
Mary was eventually caught by the Khmer Rouge and forced into a field to work. Many workers in those fields would die of exhaustion or starvation, as adequate rest and food were not a luxury they enjoyed, Mary said.
In fact, Choeun said one scoop of rice was often all that was offered to the workers in the field. He added that the one scoop of rice was to be shared by sometimes as many of 25 people.
After a while, Mary's hunger got the best of her. In what was usually considered a capital offense by the Khmer Rouge, Mary picked a potato for herself and began to eat it. She was quickly hit several times on the head and sent to a small hut serving as a prison.
And while life in the prison was as grim and gruesome as anywhere else in the country, her sentence may have saved her life.
Divine intervention
There were 73 inmates at the jail. Often, she said, the prison guards would put a gun in the back of the inmates' heads and tell them they were going to die later that day or night. Killing an innocent person meant nothing to the Khmer Rouge. In fact, one of their mottos, according to the online encyclopedia, was "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."
As many did during that time, Mary said she knew she would probably die. Her desire to live, however, led to a plea to the heavens that shocked not only herself, but the inmates who heard her speak.
"I was sitting down one night with three other people," Mary said, "and I just said, 'Oh God, I don't want to die. I want to see my mom, my husband, my family.'"
While the prayer may not seem unusual to many in the United States, for Mary, a native of a Buddhist country, it was unbelievable.
"I never heard of God before," she said. "I don't know God. When I say that, two girls by me said, 'Why do you say God? Why do you say that?'"
Whether or not she knew at the time to whom or what she was praying, Mary said her words fell on some divine spirit's ears.
Not long after Mary's shocking appeal to God, large, heavy storms hit the area where she was being held. So much rain fell, in fact, that nearly the entire region flooded, giving Mary the opportunity she needed.
"I don't want to die in there," she said. "I die, but I don't want to die in there."
Naked, starved and extremely thin, Mary submerged herself in the flood waters and crawled through standing water and mud right out the prison door, and eventually to safety. Some of her friends in the prison, however, were not so lucky. Upon noticing Mary's absence, some women in the prison started screaming that she had left, Mary said. Those women were shot and killed instantly.
At one point, Mary said, the prison guards, while looking for her, were standing directly on top of her chest, her mouth barely staying above water to breathe.
"They (were) standing right on me, right here," she said, pointing at her chest, "but they didn't know."
Mary said she crawled for miles on end through the mud and water. Just to stay alive on her trek west to neighboring Thailand, Mary said she ate anything she could, including grass, snakes, frogs and bugs.
"I eat, I run. I eat, I run," she said, "for about 10 or 15 days."
At one point, she said, fatigue got to her and her willingness to fight for survival. One night, while laying in the grass, Mary saw a tiger not too far away. She began talking to it.
"I say to tiger, 'Come on and kill me. I don't want to stay,'' she said.
The tiger declined, however, because Mary didn't have enough meat left on her bones to appeal to his appetite, she said.
Mary eventually made it to the Thailand border, where several refugee camps were set up to care for the many fleeing Cambodians. Once there, she changed her first name from Rim to Mao in an attempt to hide from the Khmer Rouge. The year was 1978.
Khmer Rouge
On the run
While Mary was making her arduous journey toward Thailand, the Vietnamese army was regaining strength. On Dec. 25, 1978, 100,000 Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge fled.
With the ousting of the Khmer Rouge, all the people who had been mercilessly forced into unthinkable working conditions were left to decide their fate. After three years of slavery, which included lack of food and rest, and frequent physical punishment, the workers had to decide what to do next. Many, including Choeun, returned to Phnom Penh. The capital city was virtually empty.
"I went to go home, but nobody (was) there," he said.
Many Cambodians had either fled to the Thai-Cambodian border or were preparing to do so. Choeun, having no better ideas, went along.
"All the people," he said, "they just say, 'Go, go, go. Go to Thailand.' I didn't know what (was happening), but I just go with them."
Once he made it to Thailand, Choeun found help at one of the many refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. He had only been at the refugee camp one day when a frail, starving, naked woman caught his eye.
"You Rim?" he said.
As fate would have it, the woman Choeun approached while she was waiting for something to eat was indeed his wife, Rim Dean, although she went by Mao at the time.
"I couldn't believe it was him," Mary said. "I don't know how he ended up here."
As the spouses stood there, not fully believing the circumstances that brought them back together, tears slid down Choeun's face.
"He cried," Mary said. "He (was) just so happy."
Emotion overwhelmed both spouses upon their reunion. Mary said she was happy, but also sad because she had to tell the father of their children that all three had perished. It wasn't long after their reunion, however, that another child was conceived.
The tears Choeun could not fight back were tears of joy, he said, but also tears of disbelief. How could these two people not only survive one of the worst cases of genocide in the 20th century, but also stumble upon each other at the same refugee camp after three years of separation?
The answers to those questions are ones that Choeun and his wife, now Mary Dean, say they may never understand.
After three years of hell on earth, the spouses who knew not whether the other was still alive, were together again. Their life from that point, which would eventually lead them to Lee's Summit, would resemble in no way the atrocities they lived through for the previous three years in Cambodia.
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