Sentences bring relief to Cambodia Town
The sentencing of two former Khmer Rouge officials in Cambodia was met with relief and renewed sadness this week in Long Beach’s Cambodia Town community, home to the largest Cambodian population in the United States.
Many of the residents here are refugees from Cambodia, where nearly 2 million people were killed during Pol Pot’s reign of terror from 1975 to 1979.
Khieu Samphan, 83, and Nuon Chea, 88, are the only two remaining Khmer Rouge leaders who survived long enough to stand trial.
A U.N. war crimes tribunal found both men guilty Thursday of “extermination encompassing murder, political persecution, and other inhuman acts,” the Associated Press reported. They were both sentenced to life in prison.
“I’m just happy to still be alive to see these two men brought to justice,” said Long Beach resident Sath Um, 94, whose husband and four sons were killed during the regime’s rule. Um, speaking through a translator, said the Khmer Rouge jailed her several times, and she feared she would be killed, too.
Um says she has been waiting for justice since 1980, when she fled the country.
“Now, when I die, I will close my eyes in peace.”
Samphan, the former head of state, and Chea, also known as Brother No. 2 and a close Pol Pot confidant, had denied responsibility.
“Without their orders, none of that could have happened,” said Steve Meng, 45, a Long Beach loan officer who spent 10 years in a refugee camp. “They should at least admit what they did was wrong — killing their own people.”
Meng says he was forced to work in the fields at age 7, on meager rations of food. “I don’t understand why it took them 30 years to bring them to justice,” he said.
Nancy Lee, director of Hope for Cambodian Seniors, a group serving the community’s elderly, says she was too young to remember the violence that took her father and grandfather, but she has seen the effects of generations of pain.
“These people are living the pain daily. They go to sleep seeing flashes of memories in front of them,” she said. “For me … sending an 88-year-old person to jail — that’s not really punishment for them. They have lived their whole life already.”