Be part of A multimedia series On four members of the FRG staff who look at life under the Red Khmer fifty years later
People sank into the streets while the Red Khmer soldiers entered Phnom Penh. For months, an implacable bombing campaign had the capital on board. The war was getting closer.
While soldiers dressed in black uniforms were walking in the city, thousands of people came out to encourage them.
The soldiers of the Pro-American regime of Cambodia Lon Nol agitated white flags and laid their weapons. Officials looked at their offices and store owners and market merchants cautiously opened.
This is how the day started. In the afternoon, Phnom Penh, a city of 2 million people, was forced to threaten a firearm from.
It was the first step in the implementation of Pol Pot’s vision, the new head of the country, to transform the country into an agrarian utopia.
Sum Sok Ry remembers that morning. Dressed in short pants and a short sleeve shirt, he stood in front of the door of his family home, waving while the soldiers passed.
There was a feeling that the country’s civil war, which had raged for more than eight years and in which the United States had taken on the side of the Red Khmer with a massive bombing campaign, was finally finished.
“I remember that it was one of the hottest days of the year, and it was the New Year Khme,” said Sok Ry.
A few hours later, they received the order from the city.
“It was so hot, burning. And the walk – I was crying so much because we were so confused.”
“They lied to the people that the Americans were going to bomb the whole city, the whole capital,” he said.
Between 1975 and 1979, between 1.5 million and 2 million Cambodians died by execution, forced work and famine.
“I had a hard time,” said Sok Ry. “I almost died so many times, but I refused to die.”
Ten years in a refugee camp
Sok Ry tells the day her mother begged him to let her sneak into the corn field that he had been ordered to protect to choose food to eat. He first said no, fearing that she was taken.
“I was not the only goalkeeper,” he said. “There were many other boys, all seated in trees looking at the field. I was so afraid.”
He told her that she had to crawl on the ground on her belly and “when you see the corn, choose it and eat it, with your body flat.”
The first member of his family to die was his nephew, who was also just a young boy. His father was the following, then later his mother.
After the Red Khmer was chased from power in 1979, Sok Ry lived for a decade in a refugee camp on the Thai Cargodian border. He obtained his secondary school diploma and was trained as a doctor.
He worked in the camp under an American doctor and finally found a new house in the United States. A scholarship earned him a law diploma and a master’s degree in international studies followed. Now he is editor -in -chief of the Khmer service of RFA.
When he was asked how he now felt what he experienced, Sok Ry says he always has a clear memory of the slow and painful deaths suffered by his parents.
“Normally, you give forgiveness to someone who admits his error or his reprehensible acts and asks for forgiveness,” he said. “But none of the Red Khmer leaders did this.”
Published by Matt Reed