Then a soldier turned, ominously, toward the young Chhun. "Are you his son?" the soldier asked.
"No," Chhun responded. "I'm a visitor."
Chhun and his mother later carried Yem Kong's body, with his head, to the nearby forest, where they wrapped it in a cloth and buried it near a mango tree. As Chhun recounted the saga to Dr. Sacks three decades later, he wept profusely.
SURVIVING
After the execution of his father, Chhun was sent to a work camp, where he toiled day and night in rice fields as one of the millions of slaves of the Khmer Rouge's "people's revolution." Chhun supplemented his rice gruel by eating grasshoppers, termites, snakes and even rats. Still, he lost so much weight that he came to look like a skeleton wrapped in taut skin.
"I cried every night, getting only a few hours' sleep, and I kept asking myself why I had to be born in Cambodia, and not in the United States," he wrote to the judge. "I couldn't understand why I had to be punished and tortured as an innocent young man who was just growing up."
Later, the Khmer Rouge used him on suicide missions. They shackled him to a rocket launcher and forced him to crawl toward enemy lines to fire at Vietnamese enemies; strapped his body to a machine gun and tripod to hold it steady; and forced him to search murky forest soil for landmines. One time, Chhun told Dr. Sacks, he stepped on a mine. It blew him into the air. Somehow he was only slightly injured, but it killed a man who was with him.
As the Khmer Rouge regime weakened under the weight of its self-destructive nationalist paranoia, Chhun rediscovered his mother, alive. In memory of his father, they went to place a ceremonial rice cake at a Buddhist temple, but Chhun was so famished that he "stole" the offering, scraped the ants off and ate it, he told the psychiatrist.
By the start of 1979, as the Khmer Rouge crumbled in the face of a fast-moving assault by its former Communist patrons in Vietnam, Chhun fled like hundreds of thousands of others toward the Thai border region. He began to understand the true scale of the Khmer Rouge's terror. There were too many corpses to count. He witnessed executions by clubbing, suffocation in plastic bags and stabbing with bamboo sticks — none of which required the squandering of bullets better used to fend off the Vietnamese.
But it was only later that Chhun discovered the full impact of the Khmer Rouge's Talibanesque interpretation of Maoism. The regime's mismanagement, incompetence and cruelty — which included torturing improbable confessions out of "enemies of the people" and then doing the same to the people accused in those confessions — caused the deaths of more than one Cambodian in five, nearly 2 million people. During the nearly four-year Khmer Rouge reign of terror, two of Chhun's aunts and seven of his immediate cousins starved to death. Besides his father, his uncle and other close family members were executed.
While the Khmer Rouge was responsible for its many crimes — and Vietnam and the United States certainly prepared the terrain as they sucked neighboring Cambodia into their war — no one was held responsible in any credible courtroom. To Chhun, Cambodians were victims of the worst crimes imaginable, but decades passed with no sign of justice.
The Communist Vietnamese forces that ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were seen initially as liberators, at least until they installed a pliant regime and remained a highly visible foreign presence, when they graduated to "occupiers" whose ceremonious withdrawal only came in 1988.
The most enduring figure in the Vietnamese-friendly government was a former low-level Khmer Rouge commander who fled to Vietnam to avoid internal purges. The Vietnamese chose the young man, Hun Sen, as Cambodia's "foreign minister" and then promoted him in the mid-1980s to prime minister. He has retained that title for more than a quarter-century.
The result, for many middle-aged Cambodians, is that Hun Sen embodies the unresolved horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the national humiliation of the Vietnamese occupation and the stunningly corrupt political system that he oversees today.
For Chhun, Hun Sen became a natural stand-in for his personal tragedies and Cambodia's enduring suffering.
AMERICAN DREAMS
After the Khmer Rouge fell, Chhun reached a desperate, overcrowded Kao I Dang refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where he spent a year and a half. After a seven-month stint in a refugee center in the Philippines, he was granted refugee status by the United States. In 1982, he arrived in Georgia and eventually migrated to California, became an American citizen and went to college. But like so many of his exiled compatriots, he couldn't leave behind the instability and horrors that defined his adolescence and early adulthood.
Chhun became an accountant, dealing with the arithmetic of clients' incomes and calculating their civil responsibility to their government in the form of tax payments. The firm logic of numbers likely provided solidity to a young man who had little. He didn't just move to a world of strip malls and traffic jams; it was more basic than that. There was electricity and running water, private property and a government that tried to work for the people rather than enslaving them.
It appeared at the time of the attack that Chhun's story was so implausible that the whole thing had been a conspiracy hatched by Hun Sen to flush out his enemies, and Chhun was acting for him, either deliberately or as, Rainsy says, as his dupe. Do you now think there's any truth to that or is what you see what you get with Chhun. Was much new evidence brought out in the trial?
Interesting. I want to feel sympathy for Chhun, but the story is so one-sided that I'm not sure what to believe. I do believe U.S. foreign policy is fucked though.
By the way, The Prince of Egypt was made by DREAMWORKS ANIMATION and not Disney. It was one of their first productions.
This is the best cover article I've read in LA Weekly since you were taken over by corporate interests! Good work, fascinating story.
I gather from the tone of the article that we are supposed to feel that a miscarriage of justice took place. But the only problem I see is that the individual wasn't arrested once it became apparent that he was responsible for the attack that cost so many lives in Cambodia. The part about his growing up under the Khmer Rouge is indeed very sad, but it doesn't justify his vigilante tactics.
"cost so many lives"... are you kidding me. 3-10 deaths isn't much compared to the of deaths committed by the current political party in Cambodia. Ted Kane what do you know about suffering and oppression, its easy to judge someone thats lived a comfortable bourgeoisie life.
I gather from the tone of the article that we are supposed to feel that a miscarriage of justice took place. But the only problem I see is that the individual wasn't arrested once it became apparent that he was responsible for the attack that cost so many lives in Cambodia. The part about his growing up under the Khmer Rouge is indeed very sad, but it doesn't justify his vigilante tactics.
Educated Individuals will check the true history.The article fails to point out that without Vietnam the KR would have killed many more in Cambodia.The Journalist did not quote US State Dept facts about Hun Sen winning electionsand continued to chant Hun Sen opposition rhetoric propoganda. As far as Yasith making a million USD ,What idiot did not ck Yasith's tax returns?. Many of Yasith's clients according to reports from L.B. had problems with the tax returns reporting false/ incorrect information. Also the reporter should ask Chunn Yasith if he knew how to ballance his own business cking account.Any one asking who the real suckers are? Yasith had a few wives.His children and family lack a stable life style. Whacked out in the head good you pointed out he sees a shrink.Many in L.B. feel Yasith was betrayed by a major Republican Congressman that in the past has also praised or supported Sam Rainsy.Was he motivated a little by the guy who wants to get every Commie? A major Republican in the US Congress made the statement similar to "if Hun Sen wins the election there will be less US Aid to Cambodia"...
Many died because of Yasith.He not only could have ruined relations between the USA and Cambodia but he could have added to Cambodian poverty and hindered relations.With Hun Sen came thousands of schools, bridges, new roads, peace and development.What has Sam Rainsy, Chunn Yasith brought besides deceit and despair.? Does sam Rainsy pay tax on all the money he bleeds from the USA supporters?The Gernade attack 1997 was mis leading when many think Sam Rainsy staged the event to make Hun Sen look bad.1993 Hun Sen at the Paris Accords wanted the KR put on trial for Genocide. 1997&1998 Sam Rainsy joined with the KR to overthrow the faily elected Govt of Cambodia. Please check the US State Dept reports. Shame on you for not reporting all sides of the story.Yasith claims to favor democracy. Did he think of a vote vs using drunk terrorists?Gary Fultheim, UCC Plaza Long Beach Calif
Now that the strong message has been sent, hopefully the 9th Circuit will decide that the sentencing judge gave undue weight to improper criteria and Chhun will be free.
There is a lesson -- however. And people will not like to hear it, but Faith is dangerous. Without his irrational Faith that GOD called him to this mission, Chhun would probably assessed the situation in a more realistic light. Had Chhun assessed Facts rather than relied on Faith, many people would not have died and Hun Sen might not still be in power.
