Cambodian Killing Fears Return in County’s Refugee Community

It is yet another anniversary steeped in agony.

Ten years ago this week, when Vietnamese occupation troops drove the murderous Khmer Rouge Communists from power, Oudam Roeung and Kheng Bou--like millions of other Cambodian survivors--wanted to hope.

When the Vietnamese tanks came to Kampong Thom province on Jan. 6, 1979, Roeung, then a boy of 17, was spending his fourth year in a forced labor camp, smashing boulders into rocks.

“We just throw our hammer, our material, away,” he said. “We thought we had our freedom. We think that anything that come up will be better than what we have now.”

And on Jan. 14, Bou, a prominent gynecologist in the capital of Phnom Penh forced to work in the rice fields, joined a desperate throng in Pursat province rushing toward the latest of Cambodia’s “saviors.”

“Someone say it was Russians,” he said. “Others say it was Americans. I don’t know what troop it was. When I run from the Khmer Rouge to the liberation camp, the so-called liberation camp, I say, ‘Oh, Vietnamese again.’ What can I do?”

For many among Southern California’s estimated 70,000 Cambodian refugees--the third-highest concentration of Cambodians in the world, behind Phnom Penh and the Thai refugee camps--the pain of surviving what millions of their countrymen did not is overbearing. It fades, sometimes, in the realization that they live, but more often it clutches at their hearts and seizes their souls.

The dates scorched in the memories of Bou and millions of other Cambodians mark shifts in the political strategies of the Chinese, the Soviets and the Americans. But the waves of human suffering that those policies produced seem to lap, one into the next, with no precise beginning and still no end.

This year may mark yet another political milestone in the tortured history of the Southeast Asian nation.

The Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge guerrillas are at an estimated strength of 35,000 fighters and are by far the most powerful of the nation’s domestic political factions. In a climate of warming Sino-Soviet relations, complicated and delicate strategies for a new coalition government in Cambodia--which would include the Khmer Rouge--have not been finalized.

At a time when the Vietnamese are planning to continue their withdrawal from the country, the strength of the Khmer Rouge stirs terror in the hearts of Cambodians who fear that their country will again be turned into the killing fields.

“I have a lot of memory, a foggy mind filled with so many things,” said Sovan Un, who was an elementary-school teacher before the revolutionary Khmer Rouge overpowered the U.S.-backed government on April 17, 1975.

“I saw a lot of family killed,” said Un, who now lives in Anaheim. “My father killed. My brother killed. . . . And not everybody was killed with a knife or with a gun. People were swollen, malnourished. I watched people die while they were trying to eat.”

“I am very depressed,” said Bou, a diminutive man of 56 who abandoned his medical career when he escaped to Thailand in May, 1981.

“Every Cambodian is depressed,” he said. “We were depressed under (Khmer Rouge leader) Pol Pot, the Vietnamese, then the (Thai refugee) camps and now, here. We have what we call the culture shock. We have a different way to live and here, everything is changed.”

Bou, who spent more than 2 years in a refugee camp before arriving in Long Beach in 1984, now lives in Paramount with his wife and six of his nine children. Two have been unable to leave Cambodia, and a third lives in France.

Bou works as a counselor at the Santa Ana office of United Cambodian Community Inc., a refugee service organization established in 1977 in Long Beach, where most of Southern California’s Cambodian population lives. About 12,000 to 15,000 Cambodians live in Orange County.

What the center aims to do, workers there said, is give Cambodian refugees guidance and hope in a nation so strikingly different from their own.

But what not even the most expert counseling can erase, they conceded, are the scars born of living through hell.

During a recent interview at the Santa Ana service office with a group of diverse Cambodian refugees, the survivors credited their faith, their guile or their fate with keeping them alive from the time of the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover to their arrival in the United States.

Each of them, they said, was “lucky.”

For the week preceding the takeover, San Tran recalled, she and other residents of Phnom Penh were forced to stay home from work because of the heavy bombing. At the time, Tran, who was born in Vietnam, worked as a telephone operator at the Finance Ministry and as a radio newscaster. She lived with her three daughters and other female relatives. Her husband was away at sea in the merchant marine.

But early in the morning of April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge marched on the capital, Tran and the other Phnom Penh residents allowed themselves to believe in yet another savior.

“I thought that peace had come to Cambodia,” said Tran, 45. “I put a white sheet in front of the house. I didn’t know they were killing us.”

Roeung, who was a 14-year-old high school student at the time, added that he, as the others, believed the Khmer Rouge when they said that everybody must temporarily evacuate their homes so that they could “clean out” the city.

“I was kind of happy,” he said, “because I thought (the fighting) was over. My brother and I got on a motorcycle and waved a white sheet. For a few days, we were having fun. It was like camping. We thought they would let us back into our homes.”

Instead, the entire population of Phnom Penh was marched into the countryside, and all other urban centers were evacuated. Most government employees, professionals and other educated people were killed. Those who were not killed either managed to escape in those early, confused days or successfully hid their upbringing.

Killing ‘Knowledgeable People’

“I had a problem,” Tran said. “I showed them that I worked at the finance ministry. But I escaped. I had some jewelry and a watch, and the Pol Pot (forces) exchanged it for some rice. I cry and cry. I just want to kill myself. I just walk and walk. We just like animals.”

Later, Tran said, she changed her name and erased her past.

“I forgot everything,” she said.

Un, at the time an unmarried, 25-year-old teacher in the western border town of Pailin, said he escaped the area after overhearing a group of Khmer Rouge commanders discussing their plans to kill “all the knowledgeable people.”

But months later, after arriving in Battambang province and lying about his identity, death again threatened to overtake Un when Khmer Rouge soldiers challenged him while he was out gathering wood for another group of soldiers.

“I was standing there in the hole that they made me dig,” he said of what was to have been his own grave. “But then the other soldiers arrived and told them that they knew me.”

Then on June 31, 1977, Un said, the Khmer Rouge accused him and a friend of talking against the Communist regime. Both were taken to an execution area, their arms tied over their heads to the trunk of a tree, and for eight hours, they were terrorized by soldiers brandishing a knife and hitting their heads with a rifle butt.

‘I Just Kept Praying’

“I weighed only about 60 pounds,” Un said. “I was swollen, malnourished. I keep praying. I told them I work hard. I just kept praying.”

Why the soldiers did not kill him, Un said, is something that he has no words to explain.

“What you would call it,” he said, “is a miracle.”

Un, who escaped to Thailand in November, 1979, with the woman who was to become his wife, now lives in Anaheim and has two children, ages 5 and 7, who were born in the United States.

His American children, he said, cannot yet understand the pain of survival that he and his wife carry with them. But he said they will learn to understand about the Khmer Rouge, about communism and about the lies of false saviors.

“The difference between the Vietnamese and Pol Pot,” Bou added, “is like the difference between cholera and the plague. Pol Pot, he kill, but quickly. The Vietnamese, they kill you slowly.”