In Singapore in summer 1978, they met an English teacher named John Dewhirst. New Zealander Kerry Hamill and Canadian Stuart Glass were two expatriate friends who enjoyed sailing on the waters of South Asia on their yacht, the Foxy Lady. Sadly, Yathay has never been able to find the boy, and it is unknown whether he is still alive. The second book’s title came from words he had spoken to his son before leaving Cambodia. Another book, Stay Alive, My Son, followed in 1987. In late 1979, he published an account of his experiences called Murderous Utopia. Yathay was one of the earliest people to bring attention to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. After a two-month journey, only Yathay was able to flee across the border. Leaving their only surviving son with a couple whose children had all died, Yathay and his wife joined a group of 10 other people to make a run for Thailand. One of them, a nine-year-old boy, was taken by Khmer Rouge leaders after they told Yathay that he still had “ strong individualistic tendencies.” The boy died only five days after he left home.īy early 1977, Yathay’s past had been exposed, and Yathay and his wife decided they would try to escape the country. He died shortly afterward, and Yathay’s mother and sisters didn’t last much longer.Īll three of Yathay’s children also died. When his father couldn’t work any longer, his already meager rations were cut in half. As a civil servant for the previous government, Yathay had to be careful that nobody learned about his “bourgeois” past.īefore he escaped from Cambodia in summer 1977, Yathay and his relatives were forced to do backbreaking labor. As horrendous as Chhang’s experience was, he told CNN that it was “a mere footnote to the millions of other Cambodians who suffered and died at the hands of this regime.”Īlong with 18 of his family members, Pin Yathay was one of the two million people evacuated from Phnom Penh and sent to live in the countryside. Chhang also lost his grandparents, three uncles, an aunt, and numerous other relatives. His pregnant sister’s husband had been beaten to death for stealing food, and his sister had died after having her stomach cut open for allegedly eating the food. Chhang was let go, but the older man was executed.īy the time the Khmer Rouge was driven out of power, Chhang’s family had been nearly wiped out. In jail, Chhang pleaded for his life for months until an older prisoner approached the prison chief and claimed that he was the real culprit. To take anything without the government’s permission was a crime against the revolution. It didn’t matter that the mushrooms were picked for Chhang’s starving, pregnant sister. When he was only 15 years old, Chhang was publicly tortured and then imprisoned for taking mushrooms from a rice field. He and his family were victims of the Cambodian genocide. The project is a personal mission for Chhang. Their extensive research has played a valuable role in providing evidence for the tribunals trying former Khmer leaders for their crimes. Youk Chhang is a Cambodian humanitarian who helps to run the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a nonprofit group that has collected hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs from the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. When the museum was opened to the Cambodian public in July 1980, it drew an estimated 300,000 Cambodian visitors by October of that year. Pictures of prisoners cover the museum’s walls, and prisoner confessions and government documents are also on display. Today, the prison is a museum dedicated to the people who died there. With prisoners sometimes having to eat insects for survival, conditions in the prison were so bad that some died before they could be executed. Once a prisoner admitted to the charge of which he was accused, he was forced to write out his confession, which could be up to several hundred pages long. Interrogators pulled out the prisoners’ toenails, waterboarded them, and even subjected them to medical experiments. Prisoners were relentlessly interrogated and beaten until they confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. Only a few prisoners are known to have survived the S-21, so much of what we know about the site comes from the meticulous documentation recorded by its leaders and workers during the 3.5 years the prison was used.Ī person transported to the prison first had his or her picture taken, thousands of which still exist. A secret to the world and even to Cambodia until it was discovered by two Vietnamese photojournalists in January 1979, the Security Prison 21 (“S-21”) was a former high school that was used to hold more than 15,000 people during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |