A voice calling holdouts home

IN THE uncertainty of the early 1980s, when armed groups hiding out in the jungles vied for control of the country and the fledgling Vietnamese-led People’s Republic of Kampuchea struggled to maintain stability, Ros Kandavy faced a choice. After suffering under the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Srok district in Battambang province, would she return to her home in Phnom Penh, or heed the ominous warnings emanating from her fellow villagers?

“After the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, people had told me not to come to Phnom Penh, or I would be killed,” she said. “I did not care if I would be killed by Cambodians or Vietnamese. I would rather die as long as I could be back in my hometown.”

A few days after Khmer New Year in 1979, Kandavy arrived in Phnom Penh after reuniting with her family, finding it bore little resemblance to the killing field she’d heard of in Battambang. The di re accounts, as it turned out, had been rumours circulated by the Khmer Rouge.

Unbeknownst to her at the time, Kandavy would devote much of the next decade to dispelling similar rumours, trying to persuade others to choose to leave as she once did.

With her brother’s help, she got a job at the National Radio of Kampuchea, where she became a newscaster. One day, a group of government CONTINUED

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