|
|
Discovery
of Sre Lieu Mass Grave
Rasy
Pheng Pong
May 5, 2007 marked the discovery of a group of graves in
O Kambot Trapeang Sragne jungle in Sre Lieu village, Trapeang Pleang
sub-district, Chhuok district, Kampot province. The discovery of the
graves, which contain the bodies of approximately 9,000 people who
died during Democratic Kampuchea, began when a group of Vietnamese
delegates, Cambodian provincial and district authorities, and local
people excavated one of the graves. They were looking for the skulls
and bones of Vietnamese soldiers who lost their lives during the war
years in Cambodia. A day later, the number of people gathering at
the nearby pagoda increased. They came to help exhume the graves.
Authorities from Trapeang Pleang sub-district were also present;
they had come to measure and collect statistics on the mass graves.
According to Khoem Yukhoeun, 57, first assistant to the
chief of Trapeang Pleang sub-district, 10 villagers who joined the
excavation team were reported to have found gold necklaces and
earrings at the site. Together, they weighed about 1.5 1.5 tam loeung
(a tam loeng is equivalent to 37.5 grams).
Upon hearing this, hundreds of Sre-Lieu villagers
stopped their daily work and began to unearth the graves, looking
for gold. Even though most of them were not lucky enough to find
anything, they continued digging and searching. On May 9, a
torrential rain began to fall, and most of the villagers returned
home. They could do nothing besides wait and hope for the rain to
stop so they could carry on digging. A villager in his thirties
carrying hoe and walking to the graveyard said, “I try to dig and
look around, hoping that good luck will fall on me and bring me
gold.”
As a result of villagers removing earth, the graves
quickly filled with rainwater. Remnants of cloth floated up to the
surface of the water. Some of the bones that the villagers had
already unearthed and did not bury were piled close to the tlong
tree that grows in the middle of the grave area.
Fifty year-old Srey Neth said that she also joined the
other villagers, but became so exhausted that she had to stop
digging. During the Khmer Rouge regime, Srey Neth’s job was to bury
the members of her unit who died of malaria and cholera. She stated
that all of those who died were under the age of 30 and members of
the mobile units that were assigned to build a dam at Kos Sla. The
bodies of those who died at the Zone 35 hospital were carried to the
hill in which people were now digging for gold (this hospital was
located about 200 meters from Kos Sla dam; nowadays, there is no
trace of it).
Ngay Yong, 47, is a former member of a mobile unit that
built Kos Sla dam. He said, “I think that very few people died of
illness. Rather, most of them died as a result of the lethal
injections they were given at the Zone 35 hospital.” In the
hospital, people with curable illnesses were often injected with too
much liquid. The 53 year-old chief of Trapeang Pleang sub-district,
Suos Phorn, concurred on the matter of lethal injections. Most of
the hospital’s patients ended up in graves, he stated.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, Srey Neth and the other
grave diggers were not afraid of ghosts, so every night they were
told to carry dead bodies from the hospital to the graves. She said,
“I carried only the dead bodies of people in my unit. Like the
others, I was forbidden by Angkar from telling others about the
number of deaths.” Srey Neth cannot recall the number of bodies she
had buried during the Khmer Rouge regime. She said, “Sometimes, they
[the Khmer Rouge] woke me up in the middle of the night and ordered
me to take bodies to be buried. Sometimes, I started my job at 2
a.m. The number of bodies I buried ranged from two to six per
night.”
The discovery of mass graves caused many of the former
mobile unit members who built Kos Sla dam to think back thirty years
and recollect the time when they volunteered to work for the Khmer
Rouge. While Srey Neth was collecting the victims’ bones, she
remembered carrying the dead bodies of her colleagues to the graves.
She said, “I cannot recognize which bones belong to my colleagues,
whose bodies I buried. I would like to ask for forgiveness from the
victims if I was neglectful in burying their bodies.”
The local authorities put a ban on unearthing the graves
and told people to gather the bones in a safe place so they could
send them to Wat Stoeng memorial located at the Chhuok district
office. Sub-district chief Suon Phorn stated that he was against the
idea of digging for gold because unearthing the graves would disturb
the victims’ spirits. Khoem Yukhoeun, an assistant to the Trapeang
Pleang sub-district chief, also expressed his regret. He said, “The
villagers should not have unearthed the graves thoughtlessly. It is
not good if the villagers selfishly continue digging the graves for
gold.”
Because of poverty, however, most villagers ignored the
ban. A lot of graves were emptied as a result of the continuous
digging. Fifty year-old Svay Saroeun, a second assistant to the
Trapeang Pleang sub-district chief, had tried to stop people from
digging, but they would not obey him. He had first noticed the Khmer
Rouge’s grave area in September 1979 while he was walking to the Kos
Sla dam to fish. According to Svay Saroeun, the graves were laid out
in 70 rows and each row had 130 graves. Some graves had some sort of
names on them. After several years the graveyard became covered with
big trees, bushes, and shrubs, and it became unrecognizable. Srey
Boy, who owns a plot of farmland nearby, said he knew that his land
was a graveyard from the Khmer Rouge regime, and the land has not
been cleared for farming yet.
In 1998, people from such provinces as Takeo, Pailin and
Along Veng settled in Kos Sla, not knowing it was a Khmer Rouge
killing field. Only a few base people and former members of mobile
units working at Kos Sla knew about this place. Soa Son, 65, from
Takeo province had lived near the graveyard for more than ten years
before he realized that many bodies from the Pol Pot regime lay
underneath the ground. During his stay, he was suspicious because
ghosts usually haunted about a hectare of the area around the grave.
He said, “Sometimes I heard chattering voices in the forest.
Sometimes I heard the sound of a screeching ox-cart along the path
in front of my house toward the forest; then the sound died down. I
followed the sound of that ox-cart, but did not dare walk into the
forest because I knew it was haunted by ghosts.” Even after he
learned that the place was a former grave, he still tried to dig for
gold. He has not moved his house yet.
After the heavy rain fell, a villager who was busy
digging told other villagers a ghost story, which had occurred a few
days after people began looking for gold. At midnight, villagers
nearby heard the sounds of crying and mourning from the forest. On
hearing this story, some villagers no longer dug for gold. The
sub-district chief, his assistants, and members of sub-district
council thought that the crying and mourning of spirits showed that
the victims were hurt again. Srey Neth related another event that
happened around the same time. She said the villagers who found the
gold felt uneasy. Moreover, something unusual had happened in their
families. For instance, their family members suddenly felt ill.
On May 13, people who had found gold decided to share
the money by holding a religious ceremony at the gravesite. During
the ceremony, they prayed that the victims’ spirits will soon find
nirvana or reincarnation. They also prayed that the strange events
that had been occurring in the village would stop. The chief of
Trapeang Pleang sub-district said he was glad that there had been a
proper ceremony dedicated to the spirits, but there has not been
justice for the victims yet. He said, “If justice has not been
sought, the piled-up bones should not be cremated. Proper cremation
is not enough for the victims, for their spirits will not be in a
peaceful state unless justice is found.” The chief and his people
thought they might build a stupa and place the bones inside.
They felt this stupa could represent torture during the Khmer
Rouge regime. However, the Chhuok district base authority had
already planned that the bones should be taken to a memorial at Wat
Stoeng.
Suos Phorn, Ngay Yong, Srey Neth and others gave some
background on how people were mobilized to build Kos Sla dam. People
from Taken and L’beuk sub-districts in Chhuok district were the
first laborers to build the dam, starting from O Kambot Trapeang
Sragne. Because the dam was to be large in both width and length, in
1973 Angkar gathered people from other districts for additional
labor. Yet the dam still could not be completed on time. After the
Khmer Rouge’s day of triumph on April 17, 1975, they gathered labor
again. Most of their recruits were base people and the rest were
April 17 (new) people. Angkar had planned that the dam should be
finished by late 1976.
Sous Phorn described the hardship that fell on mobile
unit members, including malnutrition, malaria, cholera, injuries
during construction, and poisonous snakes. Most of the mobile units’
members became sick and died one after another. Because of the large
number of patients, the Zone 35 chief established the Zone 35
hospital to care for mobile unit patients. Many sick people were
carried into the hospital, but most of them never recovered and
returned to work at the Kos Sla dam site.
In late 1976, the dam was still incomplete, so Angkar
continued forcing people to work on it until 1977. The district
chief said that thousands of mobile unit members died of malaria and
cholera between 1973 and 1975. In 1977, the Zone 35 hospital was
demolished. Men who survived the epidemic were gathered and made to
work as border guards. The surviving women worked in the salt
fields. Later on, some of these women were sent to work in Phnom
Penh.
The Kos Sla dam is enormous, and it is difficult to
believe that it was built by people who did not have adequate food
or medical supplies. Sous Phorn said plainly that Kos Sla dam and
the approximately 200 graves that were recently unearthed nearby are
a historical lesson for the young generation to learn about how the
Khmer Rouge brutally killed Khmer people.
Since the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia was established in early 2006, this is the third discovery
of former mass graves left from the Khmer Rouge regime. The first
two were found in Kampong Speu and Kampot provinces. In early 2006 a
killing field at Phnom Sruoch called “Prey Chheu Neang” was
discovered after children who are cowherds and firewood collectors
found a pair of golden rings in the area of the mass grave while
they were playing. The Prey O Deibak killing field, located adjacent
to Phnom Vor in Keb town, was discovered in March 2007.
|
|
