Mey Mann was one of the fortunate young Cambodians to set sail on the SS Jamaique in 1949 on a month-long journey to France, where he had received a scholarship to study. Pol Pot, then known as Saloth Sar, was also on the steamship.
The two went on to become part of a select group of leftist intellectuals who discussed Marxist tests in Paris and later rose to prominence in the Khmer Rouge.
Fifty years later, Mey Mann is heading a new UN effort to teach human rights in the heart of former Khmer Rouge territory—Pailin and Phnom Malai.
“In Pailin now, they don’t use guns to solve problems,” 77-year-old Mey Mann said in a recent interview. “I want to educate them to know about human rights, about the rights of the people, so they can live in peace and freedom together.”
Mey Mann recently was named the human rights officer for the Pailin branch of the Cambodian office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Opened in late September, the Pailin and Malai offices aim to educate and train residents, including military and police, in the former rebel area. It’s the first time the UN rights office has ventured into former Khmer Rouge territory on a permanent basis.
The Khmer Rouge rebels are believed to have committed the worst human rights violations in recent history, as an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died during the 1975-78 Pol Pot-led regime from forced labor, disease, hunger and execution.
Mey Mann, who scholars say fell out with the movement’s leaders and should not be associated with the brutal nature of the regime, had previously done translating work for the UN, and, as a former educator of Khmer Rouge refugees in the 1980s, is familiar with many of the party’s former members.
“He was known and had a good reputation,” said David Hawk, chief of education, training and information for the UN rights office. “He’s a teacher from the old society.”
Historian David Chandler, in his book “Brother Number One,” says five of the students on the 1949 Jamaique—including Mey Mann and Saloth Sar—later rose to prominence in the Cambodian Communist movement.
Mey Mann was a founding member of the Khmer Student Marxist Circle, a group that met to discuss radical texts in a Paris apartment. It was at these meetings that young Khmer intellectuals likely formed their revolutionary views of Cambodia. And it made Mey Mann one of the dozen or so Cambodians who regularly saw Saloth Sar during this period.
According to Chandler, Saloth Sar, Mey Mann and others were anxious to return to Cambodia to “engage in the anticolonial struggle.”
When Mey Mann returned, he was active in the Democratic Party and taught mathematics from 1955 to 1968 at Kambuj’bot College in Phnom Penh, a school known for its leftist leanings. There, he rubbed elbows with many other radicals who went on to become major Khmer Rouge leaders. Among his fellow teachers, he said, were Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hu Nim. Khieu Samphan was the Khmer Rouge’s long-time political leader, Hou Youn was a top official for the government-in-exile formed by the Communists in the 1970s and Hu Nim was Minister of Information in the 1975-78 Democratic Kampuchea regime.
Lon Nol, then the prime minister, ordered the private Kambuj’bot taken over by the government in 1968. “He thought it was a Khmer Rouge school,” Mey Mann said.
It’s not clear how Mey Mann fell from grace from the top Khmer Rouge leaders.
“He told me he was suspended from the Communist Party in ‘73, but after the fall of the Pol Pot regime he went back with the Khmer Rouge,” said Cambodia analyst Raoul Jennar, who first met Mey Mann in the Site A camp for Khmer Rouge refugees in the 1980s.
Jennar speculated Mey Mann was labeled a reactionary by party leaders as they debated how to govern Cambodia if or when they took control.
After Mey Mann lost his teaching job, he says he went to work in a factory and in construction until 1975, when Khmer Rouge soldiers took control of the entire country.
“And then Pol Pot sent me to Prey Veng,” he said, where he worked as a farmer. In 1977, he was sent to Battambang.
“I worked very hard in Battambang. Also, Pol Pot killed my four sons,” he said. Mey Mann didn’t know exactly what happened to his children because he never saw them again.
After Vietnamese forces invaded in 1979, Mey Mann became vice president of the Red Cross of Democratic Kampuchea on the border in 1980. He lived in Phnom Malai for several years before going to the border camps, where he worked for the UN and was in charge of education efforts in the Khmer Rouge camp.
Mey Mann says he’s glad to be teaching again, “to make them have a habit of solving problems peacefully.” During a recent visit to Phnom Penh, he wore a blue suit, but had bandages on his wrist and hand from needles where he was receiving medical treatment for a liver condition.
“It’s difficult and also easy,” he said of the rights effort. “Difficult because they never knew about human rights, or the law. They always used the gun. But the people had discipline.”
Asked what he now thinks about fellow teacher Khieu Samphan, who has been singled out with Ta Mok and Nuon Chea as the most wanted Khmer Rouge leaders still alive, Mey Mann said, “Khieu Samphan is the best person, honest with his nation.”
And of Pol Pot, the man many hold most responsible for much of the misery of modern Cambodia, Mey Mann paused for a moment, then uttered a single word: “Ultranationalist.”
