Chhuk district, Kampot province – Standing in the shade of a tree in Sre Leav village, Ou Klaut watched in quiet anticipation on Saturday morning as a group of Vietnamese soldiers scanned the ground with metal detectors and began to dig.
At the fifth gravesite excavated by the Vietnamese mission searching for their soldiers missing in Cambodia, Ou Klaut spotted a pair of gold earrings glinting in the sunshine amidst bone fragments and decayed scraps of clothing.
He kept his mouth shut as the Vietnamese soldiers refilled the grave.
But within minutes of the Vietnamese team finally leaving the 1-hectare plot of land where victims of the Khmer Rouge regime were dumped anonymously decades ago, Ou Klaut began his own search.
Hoe in hand, the 35-year-old farmer dug into the earth himself, turning up his prized pair of earrings.
Word traveled fast through the commune and in a matter of hours, over 50 villagers had joined Ou Klaut in a macabre killing field treasure hunt.
“I’ve never had gold or money before,” said Ou Klaut, a father of three.
“I sold [the earrings] at the market and bought rice for my family.”
By Monday, around 400 villagers had joined the hunt and were knee deep in dirt, digging for gold in 1-meter holes amid the bones of Khmer Rouge victims.
During a visit by a reporter on Tuesday morning, 30 villagers were still hard at work hacking into the earthen graves as even more people stood nearby, chatting and gawking.
Local farmer Hem Met, 46, said that about 40 gravesites had been unearthed in his field.
He said, at first, that he thought it was inappropriate to unearth the dead, but ultimately he didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to find gold.
“I tried to stop people from digging all over my land because it is my rice field and I saw it as inappropriate,” he said.
“But they still dug so I joined them to see if I could get anything too,” he said, adding that he didn’t turn up anything of value.
Duk Veth, 42, said he felt fortunate to have also found a pair of earrings among the skulls, bones and tattered pieces of the clothes that the people died in.
“I cannot make money, so if there is gold like this, I have to dig for it,” he said.
“It is luck that I got gold so I can sell it and buy rice for my family. Everyone dug so I dig also,” he added.
Nget Phea, 31, also pointed to poverty in defense of his decision to loot the graves.
“Everybody started digging, so I also joined them in case I got anything. But I did not get any gold,” he said.
Pok Kimsan, 43, a mother of seven, did not share her neighbors thirst for treasure.
“If people here got an education, they would not dig the grave for gold…. I feel ashamed that people are digging like this, but I watched them doing it.”
Peter Foster, UN public affairs officer for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which could one day prosecute the former leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, said the grave digging in Chhuk is unfortunate.
“There is no way to know now if the area will play a part in the work of the Extraordinary Chambers,” he wrote in an e-mail.
“[H]owever it is obviously not ideal for either the ECCC or Cambodia to have such an important site contaminated or destroyed,” he wrote.
ECCC Chief Investigating Judge Marcel Lemonde said tribunal officials warned police in Phnom Penh on Wednesday that the gravesites in Sre Veal could be important for future investigations.
Tampering with evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities could be a crime, Lemonde said by telephone.
Kampot Governor Thach Khorn said he sent officials to stop the digging, but they were powerless to do anything.
“Local authorities could do nothing to stop the villagers from coming,” he said.
Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, said people should be legally prohibited from plundering Khmer Rouge-era graves.
A Buddhist ceremony should be held to honor the people whose graves were disturbed, he said, adding that his researchers have gone to Kampot to investigate the situation further.
(Additional Reporting by Emily Lodish)
