Khmer Krom survivors find relief in visit to Khmer Rouge tribunal

WHEN Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav began to cry Tuesday morning while testifying about torture methods used at the detention centre, Uth Em, a farmer who lost both parents, five siblings and 20 other relatives to the Khmer Rouge felt something he was not expecting: pity. "I pitied him. It made me feel a bit of a release and reduced my anger," Uth Em, 53, said in an interview on the grounds of the Khmer Rouge tribunal, which he was visiting for the first time. As a member of the Khmer Krom community, Uth Em belongs to a minority group that some historians have argued was singled out for abuses by the regime. This week, he travelled from his home in Pursat to Phnom Penh as part of a group of 20 Khmer Krom, the largest such group yet to have visited the court, said several people involved in outreach efforts. Terith Chy, head of the Victims Participation Project at the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), said the number of Khmer Krom who have watched court proceedings in person was "still quite low" compared with other minority groups, particularly Cham Muslims. Ang Chanrith, executive director of the Khmer Kampuchea Krom Human Rights Association (KKKHRA), which works with Khmer Krom in five provinces, said outreach efforts had been limited, adding that even those Khmer Krom who wanted to visit the tribunal required financial assistance to do so. "They are poor," he said. "They don't have the ability to visit." Mahdev Mohan, a lawyer who provides pro bono legal representation to civil parties at the tribunal, said via email: "To the best of my knowledge, there are few ethnic Khmer Krom survivors who have attended the hearings so far, and only a handful have applied to directly participate in the proceedings" as complainants, witnesses or civil parties. Court spokesman Reach Sambath said the court does not track how many minorities have registered as civil parties. Ang Chanrith said that, for the Duch trial, only one Khmer Krom applying with the help of the KKKHRA had been recognised by the court as a civil party. It's probably safe to say that the khmer krom were among the groups that suffered a particularly high proportion of killing. The number of Khmer Krom who perished at the hands of the Khmer Rouge is difficult to determine, experts said. Mohan said some Khmer Krom survivors "believe that hundreds of thousands were singled out and killed, particularly along the Vietnamese border" in Takeo, Prey Veng and Svay Rieng provinces. However, as DC-Cam senior legal adviser John Ciorciari noted in an email, "The fact that many [Khmer Krom] have Khmer names makes it tough to distinguish them on many documents and petitions". Ciorciari added: "It's probably safe to say that the Khmer Krom were among the groups that suffered a particularly high proportion of killing, but I'm not sure whether anyone has a good estimate." Source : The Phnom Penh Post