a shattered youth - sathavy kim

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A Shattered Youth

ShatteredYouth.indb 3 10/09/2010 16:48:38



Surviving the Khmer rouge

Sathavy kim

A ShAttered Youth


Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts have been unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publishers directly.

First published in French in 2008 as Jeunesse Brisée by Actes Sud.This edition published in 2010 by Maverick House Publishers.

Maverick House Publishers, Office 19, Dunboyne Business Park, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, [email protected]://www.maverickhouse.com

ISBN: 978-1-905379-70-5

French language © Sathavy Kim/Actes Sud, 2008.English language translation copyright © Mary Byrne, 2010.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of Ireland Literature Exchange (translation fund), Dublin, [email protected]

The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests. For every tree felled, at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing natural resources.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Irish Copyright libraries.


Photographs reproduced with kind permission of DCCam

(Documentation Centre of Cambodia)


Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Preface 15

1: Return to the Light 25

2: En route to a Shattered Youth 32

3: Deportation, 17 April 1975 42

4: The Exodus Over, the Tragedy Begins 67

5: Pooling Everything 80

6: The Angkar ploughs the Land and Reaps its Living Souls 92

7: Khmer Costume in this New Theatre 116

8: Rabbit Droppings Cure All 128

9: Neither Mothers nor Wives, Women don’t exist anymore 135

10: Union by Couple under the Angkar 146

11: The Education of Children 155

12: The Sombre destiny of Buddhism

and the Khmer-Islam or cham minorities 161

13: Angkar Festivals and the

Mutilation of the Khmer language 169

14: The Big Works Projects of Democratic Kampuchea 177

15: The Destruction of Human Dignity 190

16: The Joy of Seeing my Family and Being Free Again 195

17: Return to the Village 211

18: 28 Years later 225

Glossary of Vocabulary used by the Khmer Rouge,

and everyday words 243

Overview of the Administrative Organisation

of Democratic Kampuchea in the Provinces 251

Bibliography 257

Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea;

5 January 1976 259


11


11

Acknowledgements

A Shattered Youth is the result of a labour that

has been buried within me for almost thirty

years. Digging it up was made possible by the

encouragement of my close friends and relatives.

My first thoughts are for Vanny, korngchalat survivor,

for her friendly and constant availability to talk with me

about our memories. Without my fortuitous meeting

with her in 2000, this story would have remained a family

document only.

My thanks also go to Marie, my colleague and faithful

friend, who, eleven years ago, encouraged me to make my

first pilgrimage to Phum Thmey. That visit allowed me to

resume contact with the villagers of Phum Thmey, and by

means of dialogue, to rediscover the traces of my youth.

My gratitude and affection also go to Ta Chourp and

Yeay Pheap, who took me in, to their children, and to the

villagers of Phum Thmey. I owe them all my life; they

supported me and warmed my heart during those four

black years without my family.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Cambodian

Documentation Centre, which gave me access to the


archived documents from this period and allowed me to

reproduce them.

I especially thank my husband Borng Do, for his affection,

advice, and constant support. This book wouldn’t have seen the

light of day without his constant presence. I wrote A Shattered

Youth by projecting myself into his eyes: putting his soul beside

mine made writing this personal narrative easier.


15


15

Preface

Victory breeds hatredThe defeated live in painThe peaceful live happily

Giving up both victory and defeat.Buddha, Dhammapada, “Sukha Vagga”

My name is Sathavy and I am the eldest of seven

children. My father was a teacher but his real

passion was for the land, and from the time I

was small he taught me how to grow rice and traditional

crops, such as salad and tomatoes.

Ours was a very united family, and both my parents

were hard workers. They wanted to make sure my

siblings and I would one day go to college, in spite of

our provincial isolation. My mother was a seamstress

and worked ceaselessly because she couldn’t bear the

idea of any of us ever being in need. I spent much of

my childhood watching her work, and from an early age

it was clear to me that she dreamed of a better life for

my sisters and me. So, to prepare me for an improved

city life, I was sent to secondary school in Battambang,


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S at h av y K i m

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S h at t e r e d Yo u t h

the second largest town in the kingdom, and then on to

Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city.

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, took

control of Phnom Penh by force and my family and I,

along with every other citizen of the city, were forced

to evacuate. What followed was four years of genocide

and unimaginable horror, which left over 1.7 million

of my people dead. Although we were undoubtedly

relieved when the Khmer Rouge were overthrown in

1979, during the ten years of Vietnamese occupation

that followed, we continued to live in constant fear of

being suspected of treason. Danger was still all around

us, and the countryside was riddled with Khmer Rouge

soldiers trying to regain control of the country. But no

matter how much the threat of danger remained, it was

still more bearable than the four years of oppression and

genocide we had just lived through. It was as if the Khmer

Rouge had completely desensitised us, and we no longer

recognised how appalling our circumstances still were.

In 1997 Hun Sen, leader of the Cambodian People’s

Party, overthrew Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh

in a bloody coup. I was forced to live through the same

scenes all over again: smoke in the sky, panic in the streets,

people fleeing their homes with only a small bundle

over their shoulders. I began to have vivid nightmares,

and night after night they invaded my sleep: the bloody

arbitrariness of the Khmer Rouge regime; being brutally

awoken at three in the morning to go to work; the fear


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of going down into the water in the paddy fields; being

hungry and exhausted; being scared they would take me

away; seeing soldiers take other people away with their

hands tied behind their backs.

I had been working as a judge for almost fifteen years,

when, in 1997, I was given an opportunity to spend a year

working and studying at a law school in The University

of Michigan in the United States. The coup took place

just a couple of days before I was due to leave and the

administration where I worked had doubts about letting

me go. They were afraid that if I left I wouldn’t come

back, but I decided the opportunity was too good to miss,

and I was glad of the chance to distance myself from the

country. My family was happy to let me go; an important

lesson we had learned from the Khmer Rouge regime was

that it was better to be separate than to stay together in

one place; if something happened, at least some of us

would be safe.

Two months after my arrival in Michigan, however,

I still couldn’t sleep at night and continued to have

nightmares. At the law school, I was asked to give a

presentation on the post-conflict situation in Cambodia

after the withdrawal of the Khmer Rouge. I was so moved

to tears during the presentation that I lost my voice. It

took me a long time to regain my composure after that

and for months afterwards I felt unsettled.

I was very fortunate, however, to have a job which gave

me opportunities to meet people from non-governmental

and humanitarian organisations. I found I liked being

around others and I sometimes told parts of my story


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to friends and acquaintances. In my family too, we often

referred to our daily life under the Pol Pot regime. Talking

about the past in this way convinced me that things had

really changed, but it still wasn’t enough to free me of my

nightmares; they continued to rise to the top of my mind,

like fermenting bubbles in a glass of beer.

Some of my friends encouraged me to write about

my past, but I was so damaged by everything that

had happened that for a long time I couldn’t bear to

deliberately relive those experiences. I’d spent 20 years

trying to evade my past, but I began to realise that there

was a void in my life and I needed to fill it. I knew that

if I was ever to move on I would have to make a break

with those close friends who were now long dead, but

continued to haunt me. I began by filling in the blanks

in the history of my family, and in doing so I was able to

recollect my stolen life.

With the support and encouragement of my husband

Borng Do, I went back to the places where I had been

held. I made several trips to the village of Phum Thmey

to see the family who’d been my safe haven under the

Khmer Rouge regime, and I even met the leaders and

members of the labour camp where I was forced to work.

I visited places that still bear the scars of the atrocities

committed there, and by naming them I hope to help

heal the wounds that still remain.

My story is a genuine personal account, and one that

could have been told by thousands of other women who


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are no longer here to tell it for themselves. My intention,

therefore, in writing this book was to move beyond

the idea of a personal chronicle. Instead of merely

documenting my own life, I wanted to document the

daily reality experienced by so many women during those

three years, eight months and twenty days we lived under

the Khmer Rouge regime. I spent most of that time in the

korngchalat, a forced-labour camp in Kampong Cham,

the province most completely permeated by the influence

of the Khmer Rouge.

Working in the labour camp became our domestic

reality, and we spent each day in submission. We were

forced to work as prisoners, and to search each day for

water and food. We were obliged to sit through criticism

sessions each evening, and every minute of our lives was

spent in the repression of our identities, our religious

traditions, and all our cultural references.

In our daily life in this open air prison, the aspirations

of the Angkar, the political organisation behind the

Khmer Rouge, began to appear little by little. Although

a distant and removed institution, the korngchalat

acted as a constant reinforcement of the most radical

of the Angkar’s philosophies and procedures, and went

completely against everything human dignity demanded.

Later we learned that the final objective of the Angkar

was to create a “New” being, one who was totally subject

to the concentration-camp system and possessed no

sense of individuality.

My personal journey is, therefore, also a social

chronicle and a testimony to the substance of Khmer


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women, who, to their great honour, managed to retain

their humanity even throughout those dark years. This

book is a homage to the great majority of them, who

courageously defended their dignity, even to the death.

It is also a homage to those female survivors who, after

the fall of Pol Pot and his regime, were the first to give

back meaning to our existence by rebuilding the family

unit, and weaving a social network around our national

identity.

This book is organised according to the rhythms of the

universe of female korngchalat workers, furnishing their

labour to the Angkar without limit, and often without

purpose. It is also punctuated by chronological stages in

the concentration-camp system until it collapsed in early

1979. A glossary completes this account, with a translation

of all the words in the Khmer language which were used

frequently during that period, and their specific meaning

inside the system to which we were subjected. The Khmer

language, which is rich in ancient sources such as Pali

and Sanskrit, is a language of refined subtleties, of tales

and legends. But it had become an instrument of combat.

To support the domination to which we were subjected,

each word was carefully weighed up to best measure the

gravity of an order or situation. I felt it was useful to

give this permanent linguistic reference, not only as an

indication of the violence of the words themselves under

Khmer Rouge ideology, but also to highlight the Khmer

language of today, which still carries its traditions within

it—as well as the red brand of violence.


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This is the story of how I, and Cambodia’s women,

struggled to survive under the Khmer Rouge.


a shattered youth - sathavy kim

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