The Editor
Managing Editor
Cambodian Online

 Information

24-Aug-2005
Last Edited

By Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff  |  October 14, 2004

A quarter century after he was starved, beaten, and chased through the Cambodian jungle by the soldiers of a murderous regime, Sovann Doung will return to his native country next month to face down the ghosts that continue to haunt him in his dreams.

Doung is 43 now, a muscular mental health counselor in Lowell with a diamond wedding ring on his finger and two children in his home. But 25 years ago, as a teenager with steel shackles around his ankles, he was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. Last week, sitting in an office where he counsels survivors of the Cambodian horror, he acknowledged that in some ways he still suffers from his time of torment and fear.

''I know I will cry when I see the palm trees and the rice fields from the plane window," Doung said. ''But I am finally ready to go home. I will cry, but it will be a good cry."

As final preparations are made for a long-awaited tribunal that could finally bring some of the now-elderly former leaders of the Khmer Rouge to justice for murdering an estimated 1.7 million people, Doung and thousands of other survivors of Cambodia's ''killing fields" are coming of age halfway around the world in the United States. Many are returning to their homeland for the first time since the war. And here, in the United States, their adopted country, the process of memorializing the dead has finally begun.

''A turning point is being reached," said Dary Mien, associate director of the Cambodian Association in Illinois, which last week in Chicago dedicated the first US memorial for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. ''To build this memorial helps the community acknowledge that, yes, a horrific tragedy happened and now we have to move on with our lives."

The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and turned the country into a massive concentration camp. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the regime systematically slaughtered Cambodia's intellectual and professional classes. Those marked for death included anyone who had more than a seventh-grade education, a foreign heritage, or spoke a foreign language. Anyone who wore eyeglasses was marked for death because the regime believed it meant they were literate.

By the time Pol Pot was overthrown in 1979, nearly a quarter of the country's population had been executed, starved to death, worked to death, or died of disease, said Ben Kiernan, a Yale University professor of history and director of the school's Genocide Studies Program.

In the chaotic months that followed the overthrow, families who had been separated into work camps desperately tried to find each other. More than 300,000 people fled the country. Many were held in refugee camps in Thailand for years before they straggled to the shores of Australia, Belgium, France, and Canada. About 160,000 made it to the United States and were resettled by the federal government in communities across the country. Lowell absorbed about 25,000, and today, only Long Beach, Calif., with its Cambodian-American population of about 50,000, has a greater concentration.

Ripped from their homeland, robbed of their leaders, and traumatized by years of torture, the adjustment to a new country has been exceptionally difficult for Cambodians, said Sucheng Chan, a retired professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of ''Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States," which was published this year.

The vast majority of the refugees who arrived here through the mid-'80s were illiterate farmers and fishermen with few transferable skills, Chan said. And because far more men than women were executed, many of the families that emigrated were headed by widows, who -- because of cultural norms -- were unable to successfully discipline their sons.

The result was a generation of traumatized Cambodian adults, who struggled to put food on the table, and their children, some of whom ended up in gangs and prisons. Only in the last few years has the community begun to turn an economic corner. Cambodian-owned businesses are popping up in Lowell and Long Beach. And Cambodian college graduates and professionals are now taking their place in the community.

With this modicum of stability finally in place, the survivors of the killing fields have begun to reflect on what they have endured.

''The memorial is about hope and renewal for the relatives who survived," said Mien. ''But it is also about death."

The memorial is a stark expression of the loss Cambodia suffered: 80 glass walls of staggered heights stand in four rows. Each row represents 25,000 lives. Water flows from a stone column in the center. Names are being etched into the walls and Cambodians who have lost family members are encouraged to send in the names of the dead. So far only 5,000 names have been cut into the glass. The yards of blank space is indicative of the history that has yet to be written and the questions that have yet to be answered.

The process of writing that history and coming to grips with what the community has endured is an excruciating process, said Vong Ros, executive director of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association. Alcoholism is a growing problem among older Cambodians who suffer from depression, insomnia, and anxiety.

Doung, who sees five or six patients a day through the Lowell Community Health Center, said these are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The community's mental health facilities are stretched to breaking, mostly with women, Doung said. ''The men won't talk about it," he said. The women come in saying they are having heart palpitations, he said.

If you listen closely to conversations across the community, the subject almost always returns to the holocaust -- as the killing fields have come to be known, Doung said.

''People want to talk about how they survived and what's happened," Doung said. Work is Doung's primary therapy. By trying to help his community heal, he said, he himself has grown stronger.

Still, the 43-year-old's dreams are filled with the terror that invaded his youth. As a teenager in the work camps in northwestern Cambodia, he was shackled to other prisoners and forced to dig mass graves 15 feet deep and long enough for scores of men, he said. They were told the graves may be for them. Then, in a gruesome form of psychological torture he and his fellow prisoners would be ordered to fill the empty holes. He helped dig four mass graves before deciding if he didn't escape he would eventually be killed.

Fearful of getting caught, Doung said, his fellow prisoners refused to join him. Acting alone, he overpowered a guard, stole his gun, shot him dead, shot off his shackles and fled into the jungle. Later, he learned all 40 of the prisoners to whom he had been tied were executed.

Wearing nothing but his prison clothes and eating only the vegetation he could find, Doung traveled though the jungle at night to avoid capture and slept in the trees during the day to avoid tigers and wild boar.

After a month on the run, he was caught in another part of the country, but because the Khmer Rouge didn't know who he was, he was able to survive until he escaped a second time a few months later. He ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand. There he endured tuberculosis and after failing to find his father -- who he believes was executed -- he joined his sister in Pittsfield. He learned English in two years and tried to move on with his life, eventually finding a niche in the mental health profession.

But even now, 25 years since he wore shackles and dug graves in Cambodia, he runs through the jungle in his nightmares, chased by armed guards intent on taking his life.

''This will never leave me," Doung said slowly. ''It is part of me."

In Lowell, Doung estimates, well over half of the Cambodians who immigrated here have coped with similar experiences.

''Conversations always return to the holocaust," he said.

There has long been talk of building a memorial for the victims in Lowell, but the community has more pressing needs, Ros said. Chicago, with its relatively small population of just 5,000 Cambodians, does not seem at first glance to be the logical place to build a memorial. But organizers there said the confluence of a particularly skillful leader named Kompha Seth -- a Buddhist monk who arrived in the United States in 1975 -- and the aid and interest of a large community of Jewish Holocaust survivors, has proven to be the difference.

Dien said she expects memorials in other communities to eventually follow.

''This will not be the last," she predicted.

Doung, meanwhile, will pursue his healing in a more personal way. It was the tradition in his family for the young men to spend their 16th year as a monk at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

With the Khmer Rouge in power, that was not possible for Doung to do when he was a young man. But when he returns next month he plans on donning a monk's robes and living there for a week.

''It's a rite of passage I couldn't do when I was a teenager," he said last week. ''But it is still important that I do what I can." 

Why advertise with Cambodian Online?
1. Most up to date news and information source about Cambodia in the world.
2. Monthly hits exceeding 70,000 hits!
3. No additional fees or commissions!
4. ...and much, much more! Click here to find out today!!!