Pain of Khmer Rouge Era Lost on Cambodian Youth

I once took my Cambodian fiance and his buddies to the Tuol Sleng (S-21 Prison) Museum because I felt it was important that they see and experience their history, despite how disturbing it might be. They were all born after the Pol Pot regime existed in Phnom Penh, though they may have seen some of the activities of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, as they were still active up until the mid-1990's until Pol Pot died.


I have heard and read some of my former students' stories about their experiences from that time while they were growing up-listening to bomb blasts and ammunition fire.
I have tried to encourage my fiance to talk to his parents and grandparents about that time period, but he won't, insisting that if they wanted to talk about it then they would. I did get to experience a great ceremony one year that they grandfather organized as a thank you to the man who saved him from being taken by the Khmer Rouge. Grandfather still experienced the atrocities as he lost his arm in the attempt to save his wife from a grenade thrown by drunken soldiers.


Facing an ugly history is not easy, especially since young Cambodians don't seem to make the connection to their history and why they have so much available to them today.

Arantxa Cedillo for The New York Times

So Mei, 5, and So Sei, 12, at the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh. A survey found that few Cambodians under 30 were aware of the current Khmer Rouge trials.

Article by SETH MYDANS

Published: April 7, 2009

TRAPAENG SVA, Cambodia — Sum Touch has stopped trying to tell her grandchildren about the killings, starvation and terror she lived through when a Communist Khmer Rouge regime ravaged Cambodia 30 years ago.

Seth Mydans/The International Herald Tribune

Visitors looked at skulls displayed in a memorial at Choeung Ek, one of Cambodia's killing fields during the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, during which 1.7 million people were killed.

“It seems that even if I tell them they don’t believe what I say,” said Mrs. Sum Touch, 71, who lost many members of her family. “It hurts my heart that they don’t know what happened.”

There is a former killing field nearby and a shed filled with the skulls and bones of some of the victims. But many of the young people here, it seems, have no idea why or how they got there.

As it struggles to leave its past behind, Cambodia today suffers from a particularly painful generation gap: those who survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and their children and grandchildren, who know very little about it.

“I don’t like it, but what can you do?” said Ty Leap, 52, who sells noodles and fruit drinks from a roadside stall. “It really is unbelievable that those things happened.”

For nearly four years, from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution as they tried to construct a harsh peasant utopia.

Almost everyone here of a certain age has stories to tell of terror, abuse, hunger and the loss of family members. But those stories often fall on the deaf ears of a new generation that either cannot conceive of such brutality or seems unwilling to learn about it.

“Some older people get so upset at their children for not believing that they say, ‘I wish the Khmer Rouge time would happen again; then you’d believe it,’ ” Mr. Ty Leap said.

As much as 70 percent of Cambodia’s population is under the age of 30, and four out of five members of this young generation know little or nothing about the Khmer Rouge years, according to a survey last fall by the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

That ignorance — among both young and older — seems also to embrace the trials of five major Khmer Rouge figures that began last month, a process that is meant, in part, to begin a process of healing and closure.

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