A New Nightmare: Cambodian American Deportation Carries History’s Weight

On Halloween, the Bay Area’s public television channel KQED aired “Cambodia: Pol Pot’s Shadow,” as a segment of the premier episode of Frontline World. It was a fitting day for the program, which related some of the most terrifying history of the 20th century.

The segment opens with a clip of the 1969 U.S. carpet-bombing in Cambodia: black smoke rises while orange flames incinerate the countryside. The four-year bombing campaign began a catastrophic time for Cambodia. But far from the lingering ghosts of the past, filmmaker Amanda Pike used that time as a launching period for her story and travelled to Cambodia to witness the present situation. The subject stirred her interest in 1997, when she watched television coverage about Pol Pot’s regime resurfacing in the middle of the jungle for the first time since 1979.

“It grabbed my curiosity and I decided to pursue it,” she told AsianWeek.

During the introduction, Pike narrates: “In the 1970s, nearly two million people were killed in the genocide. I came on a journey to Cambodia to find out why there’s been no reckoning here — no trial, no truth commission, no public acknowledgement of what happened and who was responsible.”

What Pike discovers is that key members of the Khmer Rouge regime are still in high-ranking positions and that national memory of the atrocities is fading fast.

But for the Cambodian American immigrants who escaped the killing fields and refugee camps of Thailand with just their lives — their families and psyches shattered — the memories of Cambodia are still fresh. Now, with stringent deportation laws targeting the Cambodian American community, many immigrant youths may be sent back to the land of their parent’s nightmares.

Left: Dan Diggity performs spoken word about immigrant hardships. Right: Spokesperson Michael Rubiano from Rep. Barbara Lee’s office.

In the 1960s, King Norodom Sihanouk tried to keep Cambodia neutral during conflicts in Laos and Vietnam. The United States believed that the North Vietnamese had stationed communist bases in Cambodia and wanted to stop them from using the country as a supply route. In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon approved bombing raids along the Cambodia-Vietnam border, killing approximately 600,000 people, according to figures from Khmer Health Advocates (KHA), a West Hartford, Conn.-based advocacy organization. Areas with large civilian populations were also often bombed.

In 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew King Sihanouk, but soon civil war raged between General Lon Nol’s government and the Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge won and instituted its plan to create a utopian, agrarian society, bringing Cambodia to “year zero.” The Khmer Rouge, “Red Cambodians,” wiped out almost a quarter of the population in Cambodia.

Prior to 1975, banking, finance and currency were abolished, all religions were outlawed, and traditional systems of social structure were destroyed. Pol Pot, originally named Saloth Sar, was the leader of the Khmer Rouge. He attempted to create a purely classless society by evacuating urban areas such as Phnom Penh and Battambang City. According to KHA, over 3 million people were force-marched out of cities and sent to concentration camps to be “re-educated.” During its reign from 1975 to 1978, the Khmer Rouge terrorized the Cambodian people.

Khmer Rouge soldiers herded people into labor camps in the countryside, where if the soldiers didn’t kill or torture them, disease and starvation would leave them barely alive. KHA reports that survivors were traumatized by sensory experiences such as hearing people, oftentimes family members, beaten to death, seeing bloody clothing and smelling dead bodies. Children were also punished or killed if they expressed emotion.

Today, the killing fields remain as testimonies to the unimaginable cruelties of the Khmer Rouge. KHA states that investigators mapped mass graves in seven of Cambodia’s 22 provinces, using satellites. They found approximately 10,000 to 20,000 pits, each holding an average of 100 to 250 people, while the largest might contain several thousand victims. The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University reports that at least 20 percent of the population — or 1.7 million — died during the Pol Pot regime.

Skirmishes along the border with Vietnam finally provoked the Vietnamese government to invade Cambodia in 1979. Death did not end there, however. Cambodians flooded refugee camps in Thailand. The Thai military guarding the camps could be just as cruel as the Khmer Rouge; survivors recount stories of soldiers rounding up survivors and pushing them off cliffs.

Though Pol Pot retired in 1985, the Khmer Rouge continued to wage a guerrilla war in western Cambodia until it collapsed from internal conflict. Pol Pot died in 1998, but the effects of his regime still haunt Cambodians today.

Nuon Chea. Photo courtesy of KQED.

For Pike, evidence of mass murder wasn’t hard to find. During a visit to Tuol Sleng — the Khmer Rouge’s infamous prison, which is now a museum — the face of hundreds of thousands of prisoners stared out from photographs taken just before their deaths.

The museum is crumbling and the caretaker laments the fading writing in the record books. He worries that people will forget what happened — even his own children couldn’t comprehend the atrocities when he brought them for a visit. They questioned why anyone would do those things.

“It is surreal,” says Pike, “like the bogeyman out to get you.”

Pike’s attempts to discover the truth brought her to the home of Nuon Chea. Chea was a high-ranking Khmer Rouge official who was in charge of approving every execution carried out, according to the Khmer Rouge’s meticulous prison records.

Pike says “he definitely wanted to reach an American audience and portray himself as a grandfatherly type.” In the interview, Chea places blame on outsiders rather than admitting guilt.

Other Pike interviewees also say that Khmer Rouge involvement in the killings is just a rumor. They insist that foreigners must have been at fault because as Buddhists, Cambodians would not kill.

This confusion about events is natural, says Pike, because the Khmer Rouge kept everything secret. “Only after the first two years did Pol Pot announce that he was the leader — until then people didn’t know the Khmer Rouge were communist.”

“Pol Pot’s Shadow” shows the denial of history both by those who were once in charge and by those who are in charge today. Some admit that the perpetrators of genocide now live freely among the populace because the Cambodian justice system is in a state of disrepair. In fact, an inadequate judiciary is one of the reasons the United Nations gave for dropping out of negotiations for a tribunal.

A 1999 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Impunity in Cambodia” states: “The problem of impunity — in which criminals escape justice — is so deeply entrenched in Cambodia that the phrase “culture of impunity” has become almost a cliché. The problem ranges from the failure to prosecute former Khmer Rouge leaders such as Ieng Sary and Ke Pauk — implicated in the killings of millions of Cambodians in the 1970s — to hundreds of more recent unpunished crimes committed by current government authorities.”

The current government asserts that bringing Ieng Sary to trial now would destabilize Cambodia. However, Pike thinks her findings — which she will showcase in an upcoming 90-minute feature — successfully debunk these ideas. Former Khmer Rouge members said they were finished with fighting and wanted to resume normal lives. One former foot soldier expressed disillusionment with former leaders who are rich, while people like him are poor. What Pike says was most clear about modern-day Cambodia was that the real danger does not come from a Khmer Rouge resurgence, but from widespread corruption, lack of human rights and poverty.

An Unbearable Action

For Cambodian Americans who fled as refugees from genocide — the collateral damage of U.S. wars — the idea that their children may be sent back to the place where they experienced hell, is unbearable. Cambodian Americans have increasingly been mobilizing to unite with other groups in a show of solidarity against INS efforts to exile Cambodian immigrants.

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, expanded the definition of an “aggravated felony” to include crimes such as DUIs and shoplifing. Effective retroactively, non-citizens can be deported if convicted of such crimes, even if they already served their sentence. Additionally, provisions for fairness hearings were eliminated, denying them the right of due process.

On Nov. 8, families gathered for a “Day of Action Against Deportation” around the country. Long Beach, Calif. and Lowell, Mass. — the cities with the largest Cambodian American communities — saw large turnouts. The Long Beach organizers see deportation as an issue that bridges across ethnic lines and enlisted support from Latino groups and broader civil rights organizations.

Asians and Pacific Islanders for Community Empowerment (API ForCE) organized a rally in front of Oakland’s Federal Building. Their aim — and that of others who are part of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network — is to stop the deportations. So far 27 Cambodian youths have been deported, 1,400 have received orders and 3,000 more are at risk.

Rep. Barbara Lee’s spokesperson Michael Rubiano was on hand to receive a petition from the Southeast Asian Student Coalition. “We in no way support blanket resolutions or edicts … because the victims tend to be the poor and those that don’t know their rights,” he read from a statement.

While a Haiti Action Committee spokesperson declared that it affects everyone: “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the evening.”

Above: Members of all generations voice their opinions.

Tia Hem was there with family members because her 29-year-old brother Bunhoeum could face deportation after being convicted of a felony. INS reviewers said he would receive a letter in a month with a decision. His family is afraid for his life and feels it is unjust punishment.

Hem says that growing up she didn’t believe her mother’s stories about torture — they seemed too insane to be true — but she has come to understand that they weren’t made-up tales. Seeing “Pol Pot’s Shadow” brought home to her that Cambodia offers no safety for her brother.

“People like Nuon Chea never get punished … But then the rest of the people are so poor there, they don’t have enough to eat,” she says, incredulous.

Her mother, who arrived 18 years ago, spoke through an interpreter and told the crowd that deportation was too cruel a punishment for her son. “How could a government have such a policy? Why did the INS come up with this law? My son grew up to have American ideals … my baby son — how is he going to feel?”

Keo and Molyka Chea also spoke up at the Oakland rally. In 1994, when their brother Borom was 17 years old, he was tried as an adult for a first offense and convicted of a felony charge. Because he had not been naturalized, he also picked up non-citizen status. He spent seven-and-a-half years in the state penitentiary but after serving his entire sentence, instead of being released he was immediately turned over to the INS, which was waiting to pick him up. He has been in INS detention awaiting deportation for the last one-and-a-half years.

Borom came to the United States when he was 3 years old and doesn’t speak any Cambodian languages. His family is trying to fight the deportation because to Borom, Cambodia is just as foreign as it would be to any other American.

Keo Chea said, “After escaping all that they’re sending us back and they’re not looking twice at what they’re doing to the families that are left here.”

According to Keo Chea, there are at least 50 deportable Cambodians in a Bakersfield penitentiary awaiting deportation, and the experience has “bonded them together like brothers because most of them have families that can’t afford to go visit them in Cambodia. Most of them are not citizens yet so if they leave they’re afraid that they can’t come back. They may never see their families again.”

Her sister, Molyka, took the mic next and said, “I know my brother — he’s a very ambitious person and he did learn from his mistake. The hardest thing to deal with is the fact that this deportation thing has taken away his hope. Because he’s always hoped from the beginning that once he gets out, he can finally go back to school. He can finally make my parents proud and make that struggle worth it for them, when they escaped the country and the war. He wanted that second chance … There’s no guarantee that me and my sister are going to have the opportunity to go to Cambodia and see him. The way he sees it is that he might as well be dead because he can’t see us anymore and he doesn’t see his life worth living.”

One of the fears of Cambodian Americans who are facing deportation is that they will be sent to a place where they are not going to be able to make a living and that they are not going to be accepted by “their own people,” or treated as equals, because there is a stigma attached to the people who escaped to the United States — Cambodians continue to feel a lot of resentment against them.

“[My brother] feels that there’s nowhere for him to go, and it’s extremely sad to see him go through this. That’s what people need to know most of all — how it affects the families,” Molyka Cheo says.

In response to stories that deportees are mistreated in Cambodia, Long Beach Press Telegram correspondent Bill Hillburg contacted Vunyaung Tan, political counselor for the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, D.C. He “denied that deportees were being mistreated.”

Tan said, “They are free to go when they arrive and have the same rights as all Cambodian citizens to live and work where they please … These human rights concerns are just rumors.”

Speaking to AsianWeek from a four-day Southeast Asian lobbying campaign and conference in D.C. this past weekend, Theary Seng of the Cambodian Task Force countered Tan’s statement.

“I went back and interviewed [deportees],” she said. “I can tell you there is an entrenched culture of impunity; the fact that Nuon Chea was not tried speaks to how entrenched that system is. People know they can get away with anything, so they do.”

As a former refugee who lost both parents, Seng testifies that extortion happens frequently. “Deportation is cruel and unusual punishment. Deportees will experience detention, extortion and torture.”

The Human Rights Watch report on impunity describes the torture: “Some detention centers are known to systematically use methods such as electric shock, near-asphyxiation with plastic bags and sham executions.”

It further quotes reports from the U.N. Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia as saying that “one prisoner out of five or six claims to have been tortured while in police custody, representing between 600 and 900 cases each year.”

Other conference organizers from the Southeast Asia Resource Center (SEARAC) brought up the issue that half of those potential deportees are the main income-earners for their families, which typically include members who are American citizens and children. After the conference, SEARAC’s KaYing Yang said they aim to overhaul the legislation, enlist support from local state legislators, naturalize Cambodian Americans and issue a statement to the new Congress.

Sophia Hanifah is a Bay Area-based freelance writer.