In 1984, Ny Vorak came across a story on Cambodia in a US publication and decided that if events in his home country were of interest to an international audience, then he should write about his family’s life during the Khmer Rouge regime.
By then, Ny Vorak was a 21-year-old who had arrived in the US four years earlier as a refugee from Cambodia.
He had managed to complete high school while working at minimum-wage jobs in his new home, and was now thinking of university.
At first, piecing together the story of his family was not particularly painful. He had been 12 years old in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge relocated his family from Battambang town to the province’s Mong Russei district but he had very little recollection of that period.
But that soon changed.
“When I started writing, it seemed to flow, one memory leading to another,” he said.
“I saw images…people dying, people getting killed, and me kind of standing there, looking at them. I had not recalled any of this until I started writing, some years later—and then I could see it all.”
With those memories came the pain and sadness, Ny Vorak said, but also the need to learn more. He moved back to Cambodia in 2003 and hopes to finish and publish his book while his 78-year-old mother is still alive.
What happened to Ny Vorak as he delved into his almost forgotten life under Pol Pot could well happen to others now that Khmer Rouge leaders are about to stand trial, said Dr Sotheara Chhim, a psychiatrist and managing director of the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization.
“People may become panicked, people may think, ‘something is wrong with me again, I’ve started dreaming about the Khmer Rouge, and I feel fearful,’” Sotheara Chhim said.
“They may have nightmares, they may have flashbacks, and that is normal—it’s normal reactions,” he said.
Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge years need to know that this may well happen and know what to do if it happens, he added.
TPO has developed a public information program ahead of the Khmer Rouge tribunal and set up a free counseling hotline at 023-350-888 for people who feel they need help and who cannot come directly to TPO or who just want to ask questions.
Due to funding shortfalls, the information campaign is limited and the hotline can only operate during office hours, Sotheara Chhim said.
Plans are for TPO to have witness support staff at the Khmer Rouge tribunal to meet with witnesses before and after their appearance in court and to watch over their well-being. The support staff can also give judicial and police staff basic information on dealing with traumatized witnesses, he said.
The tribunal’s Victims’ Unit, with which the TPO team might eventually work, still has to be funded and set up.
“Our hope is to have the unit up and fully functional early in the new year,” said Peter Foster, the tribunal’s UN Public Affairs officer.
TPO have also run into difficulty trying to find suitable staff for its witness support team, Sotheara Chhim said.
People who agreed to work in the program, he said, “asked me to make sure this is not involved with politics, involved with the Khmer Rouge: They fear the Khmer Rouge, they fear that the connection around the Khmer Rouge can be dangerous for them and their families.”
If one could sum up in a word the consequences of the Khmer Rouge era that still plague the country today, it would be “fear,” said Ellen Minotti, director of the NGO Social Services of Cambodia.
This fear has silenced people, Minotti said.
And when they cannot suppress their memories, they end up going to medical doctors a great deal for issues unrelated to physical health, such as unexplained shortness of breath, cold feet and cold hands, which are, in fact, symptoms of anxiety, she said.
“The trauma [due to the Khmer Rouge regime] is very, very deep, very profound and very much hidden in part because people had to create many layers of disconnection from it while it was happening in order to survive,” said Dr Wendy Freed, a trauma psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Southern California.
One reaction has been avoiding the regime as a subject, not even mentioning it to their children, she said.
In this regard, Cambodians are not different from the survivors of Nazi Germany’s extermination camps after World War II who, Freed said, “were not able to talk about what had happened to them for 30 years, 40 years.”
But a person’s pain and injury does not go away because it is ignored, she said. “If the trauma never gets worked through, it’s still in there and it comes out in more indirect ways,” such as bouts of anger and violence, she said.
Trauma affects people on different levels and to different degrees, Sotheara Chhim said. In extreme cases, this leads to psychiatric conditions which—in a way—are simpler to handle with a diagnosis and set treatment, he said.
But in most cases in Cambodia, trauma has taken a less extreme form, more difficult to address, Sotheara Chhim said. The Khmer Rouge period, he said, “has affected the way people think, the way they communicate, the way they trust, the way they relate to each other, the way they deal with problems—and that is really complicated.”
Such trauma, he said, has led to people becoming more passive in society, to their profound lack of trust borne out of the Khmer Rouge urging and torturing people into denouncing each other, and has aggravated tendencies towards alcoholism and domestic violence, he said.
When asked about their lives under the Khmer Rouge, this lack of trust often leads people to tell the story they believe others want to hear or the story they feel they are supposed to tell, Freed said.
“It’s a good story, but it may not be their story,” she said.
In some cases, people may not be aware of changing their story, said Peg LeVine, a trauma psychologist and researcher based at the Monash Asia Institute in Melbourne.
A few years ago when LeVine was researching forced weddings during the Khmer Rouge regime, the people she interviewed kept changing their stories, she said. She eventually realized that, since their psychological growth had been interrupted because of the Khmer Rouge, people unconsciously filled gaps with normal development episodes that had never taken place, such as adolescence or courtship, LeVine said.
What people lived through, she said, “was like the biggest earthquake we’ve ever had…. It’s as if the Khmer Rouge had created a fault line in people’s bodies,” LeVine said. And upheaval did not stop when the Khmer Rouge was toppled in 1979, LeVine said. Afterwards, people in the country as well as those who relocated overseas had to adapt to constant changes, she said.
“Traumatism as a rule affects many generations,” said Chantal Dorf, a clinical psychologist and adviser to TPO who also worked in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide.
“In other countries, they speak of traumatism affecting the second and the third generation—and here is no different,” Dorf said.
If nothing is done to address the trauma, today’s children and young people will also inherit it 10 or 20 years from now, Sotheara Chhim said, “It could be a disaster for the Cambodian society.”
However, some Cambodians still refuse to face facts of the Pol Pot era either out of fear, out of ideology or even nationalism, wanting to ignore that chapter of Cambodia’s history, said Ong Thong Hoeung, author of the book “I Believed in the Khmer Rouges”.
Based on his life in Khmer Rouge camps and initially published in French for Cambodians who had lived abroad, the book was not welcomed by all, he said.
One Cambodian woman criticized him for putting the name of her husband in his list of people believed dead.
“I later figured out that people prefer to live in doubt,” even for more than two decades rather than giving up hope of a loved one returning, Ong Thong Hoeung said.
One Cambodian woman denied his account that her husband had committed suicide in a camp while she was busy adhering to camp rules, and former camp inmates were unhappy he had mentioned that their behavior was not always commendable, Ong Thong Hoeung said.
“It is easier to tell a story, to complain, but it is a thousand times more difficult to display one’s humanity in view of the breakdown of one’s points of reference,” he said.
Cambodians have found ways to deal with the pain and loss they experienced, such as during the annual Pchum Ben celebrations to honor their ancestors, Dorf said.
“Although people don’t openly talk about [the ones who died], with those ceremonies they are not forgotten,” she said.
The Buddhist belief in having to answer for one’s actions in future lives has also helped people move on, Sotheara Chhim said.
“They believe that the Khmer Rouge will have to pay because, no matter what you do in this life, you will have to pay in your next life. Or later in this life,” he said.
“Like the Khmer Rouge now: They are powerless, those leaders, they were arrested, they were put in jail,” Sotheara Chhim added.
The Khmer Rouge tribunal and the fact that stability has been restored in the country may help people finally open up, Dorf, the clinical psychologist, said.
“Even if people don’t fully trust the [tribunal] process or feel that justice was not fully served, to have the tribunal held and with international acknowledgement [of the events]…. I really have hopes that this will trigger something,” she said.
“Maybe this is a process that will take 10 years-it cannot happen overnight.”
