Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  In hindsight, it was clear that Haing was under tremendous strain and anxiety during his initial return to Cambodia. He was caught in a crossfire of Cambodian relationships and expectations that were more important to him than his status as a spokesman to the west. Gradually, it has also become clear that even western journalists like me who ought to know better came to this story with unconscious expectations. Somehow the presence of television cameras made us expect that Haing and Pran would have cathartic encounters with the piles of skulls at mass grave sites, as if they were actors in a scripted docudrama and we journalists were there to record their tears, everybody playing their preassigned roles. Haing wasn’t buying into that, but he was too evasive to tell anybody whatever it was that he was going through. He was too busy being his own difficult self to be a bridge between Western and Cambodian cultures.

  After that trip, I only saw Haing a few times. Through mutual friends I heard that he returned to Cambodia more often as the Hun Sen regime opened its doors and a gold rush of crony capitalism began. Rumours about Haing’s business and personal life started circulating and they were not favourable. Cambodian gossip can be vicious, and political disagreements can be the hidden reason behind personal attacks. Haing supported the CPP because he felt it had the best chance of preventing the Khmer Rouge returning to power. Some of the most malicious gossip came from backers of the other political factions, the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC. For both political and personal reasons, Haing was becoming controversial among his countrymen. He was speaking his mind and not caring much what anybody thought.

  During this period he made good on some of his promises to Huoy. He held a Buddhist ceremony for her in Phnom Penh and he built a little memorial shrine to her in his home village, Samrong Yong. To the best of my knowledge, he did not make the pilgrimage to her burial site under the leaning sdao tree to recover her bones and then re-inter them in a stupa in the ruined wat on the hillside above. It may have been too dangerous for him to travel south-west of Battambang at that time.

  There were two bright spots in his life. The first was The Dr Haing S. Ngor Foundation, which he organized with the help of Jack Ong, a Chinese-American actor and minister he met in Sri Lanka, on the set of a film called The Iron Triangle. Under Jack Ong’s steady management, Haing started giving talks to Amnesty International chapters, and to schools in southern California. He always told young people to remember their heritage, to stay in school, and not to join gangs. In Cambodia, the foundation opened an orphanage in Phnom Penh, built a schoolhouse in Samrong Yong, and donated medical and humanitarian supplies. Haing found the charitable work deeply satisfying.

  The other bright spot in Haing Ngor’s life in the early and mid-1990s was his reunion with family members, especially his niece Ngim or Sophia. When Sophia left their shared apartment in LA she went to New York. She got herself into SUNY, the State University of New York. After eighteen months of not speaking to each other, they reconciled; and Haing was so glad to have Sophia back in his life that he gave her his Oscar award trophy, his most treasured possession after his gold locket with the picture of Huoy. Sophia continued with her college studies, graduated, and met a young lawyer named Adam Demetri. When Adam respectfully asked Haing for Sophia’s hand in marriage, Haing said yes. The Demetris were like a daughter and son-in-law to him, and his times with them were among the most calm, the most settled, he’d had since before the Khmer Rouge takeover.

  The rest of his family relations were more volatile. Haing was the third son in his family. The fourth son, Ngor Hong Srun, changed his name during the Khmer Rouge years, as many Cambodians did. Under his new name, Chan Sarun, he became chief of the forestry and wildlife department in Cambodia’s Hun Sen regime. Haing Ngor and Chan Sarun didn’t advertise their family connection, and many otherwise well-informed Cambodians were unaware of it.

  In about 1991, Haing Ngor and a friend bought a lumber mill. There was a lot of construction in Cambodia then, and the mill was a good investment, except that from the beginning it required payments of bonjour. For most Cambodians, of course, bonjour is just part of doing business, but Haing had always disliked making payments to corrupt officials or policemen and it was too late for him to change his beliefs. Inevitably, this brought him into conflict with his brother, the chief of the forestry department.

  The details of their disagreements are unclear to me, but in general political terms the deforestation of Cambodia under the Hun Sen regime has been dramatic. The disappearance of vast tracts of jungle, the smuggling of prime hardwoods abroad, the involvement of Thai and Indonesian criminal figures, and the enrichment of some (but not all) Cambodian officials became such a hot issue that the World Bank and other institutions threatened to cut off aid to the Hun Sen regime unless there were reforms in forest management. According to a London-based organization, Global Witness:

  In 1995 the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC), whilst involved in supposedly open discussions with various foreign aid donors regarding forestry issues, secretly awarded 32 forest concessions. These concessions covered 6,464,021 hectares, which amounts to 35 per cent of Cambodia’s total land area. The fact that the concessions were awarded contrary to Cambodia’s Constitution has been conveniently forgotten during the ensuing debate about the fate of these companies.

  All but two of the companies had no experience in running a forest concession, they were merely investors taking advantage of the political instability at the time and their connections to those in power. The companies have failed to make the promised investments and provide the government with significant revenues, whilst at the same time they, and their protectors, have become rich and the forests have been decimated.

  In response to the international pressure, Hun Sen himself promised forestry reforms. Chan Sarun lost his job, and Global Witness was appointed to monitor compliance. But the fundamental reforms were never made. In 2003, the letter cancelling Global Witness’ monitoring contract was signed by none other than Chan Sarun, who had reappeared with a promotion to the cabinet-level position of Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing.

  This brief sketch of Chan Sarun’s story may seem tangential to Haing Ngor’s story. The point is that Haing found himself in a politically as well as personally uncomfortable situation. He had returned to his country after helping reveal to the world the agony Cambodia had gone through during the Khmer Rouge regime. He had returned as a well-to-do celebrity, believing that he was part of the solution, part of the rebuilding effort, only to find that he and his family were part of the problem. In the new Cambodia, the violence and fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge had gone, but systematic bonjour had returned. Among the wealthy elite, almost everybody was complicit to one degree or another through their families or people they knew and loved.

  To many barangs, or foreigners, the clearest proof of Cambodia’s incomplete recovery was the failure to put the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for genocide. Haing Ngor was an outspoken supporter of war crimes trials. He gave time and money to Cambodian human rights groups, but he had supported the Hun Sen regime as the best way of preventing the Khmer Rouge return to power. However, Hun Sen, the former mid-level Khmer Rouge operative, never went all-out to crush his former bosses militarily, when the old Khmer Rouge leaders had been reduced to controlling a small western part of the country. Many of Hun Sen’s closest political allies and military commanders were former Khmer Rouge, too.

  From time to time Haing sat down with a journalist he knew in Phnom Penh, a young and gifted American freelancer named Nate Thayer, who spoke the Khmer language and who had assigned himself the difficult task of making contact with Khmer Rouge leaders in the forests. (Thayer’s later interview with Pol Pot was one of the great scoops in late 20th century journalism.) Haing questioned Thayer at length, never smiling, drilling for information about the Khmer Rouge that hadn’t been distorted by the gossip mill or by propaganda of one sort or another. But Haing wasn’t just worried about a possible Khmer Rouge return to
power by force. ‘He was struggling with a contradiction,’ Thayer told me later.

  What Haing was starting to fear, Thayer and I believe, was that he might have made a serious mistake throwing in his lot with the Hun Sen regime when he returned to Cambodia. So many cadre were defecting from the Khmer Rouge and quietly joining the infrastructure of the Hun Sen regime that the idea that the regime could prevent a Khmer Rouge return was, in Thayer’s view, ‘farcical.’ Furthermore, by declaring his support for Hun Sen’s CPP earlier, Haing had alienated the other political factions, the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC, ‘who hated him with a vitriolic passion’, as Thayer put it.

  ‘Toward the end, he had enemies everywhere, and nobody he could trust,’ says Thayer. ‘He got stepped on big-time and he turned inward. He became very low profile.’

  By early 1996, Haing’s movie roles had started drying up. The last major role he had had was as a North Vietnamese in Oliver Stone’s film, Heaven and Earth, released to cinemas in 1993.

  He had enough money, because of his investments in Cambodia, and he was often doing informal business deals with friends who wanted to get around one kind of government bureaucracy or another. But he wasn’t particularly adept at business, and there were people angry with him because of deals that fell through. He had his enemies, but he also had friends, and there were people who admired him for speaking out. Most importantly, he was good to Sophia, who didn’t want anything to do with the politics of any of her uncles, and who only wanted a happy, normal family life.

  In February, 1996, Sophia travelled to Cambodia with Haing to visit her younger brother and older sister, who had survived the Khmer Rouge years. (Ever the peacemaker, Sophia visited her uncle Chan Sarun, too.) Sophia’s younger brother (Haing’s father’s favourite grandson in Chapter 5) wanted to come to the US, and Haing helped arrange a visa by using his influence at the US embassy in Phnom Penh.

  The next day Haing returned to LA, with Sophia scheduled to follow a few days later. Sophia telephoned once and got him on his cell phone. When she called him again there was no answer. Worried, she telephoned a neighbour in the little apartment building and was told that Haing Ngor had been murdered.

  Sophia flew to LA, where she was joined by Adam, who flew in from New York. She went to the morgue and identified his body, and then to his apartment. There were policemen all over the place, regular LAPD cops who didn’t speak Khmer and who didn’t have the slightest idea how to gather information from Asian immigrants without scaring them into silence. The TV stations and newspapers theorized that Khmer Rouge hit men had assassinated Haing, which was unlikely; if Khmer Rouge loyalists had wanted to kill Haing Ngor, it would have been easy for them to do it in Phnom Penh, where there were political murders every few months. But the other Cambodian factions were angry at him, too. The most likely explanation for Haing Ngor’s murder seemed to be kum. Delayed revenge by a fellow Cambodian for a failed romance, or a business deal gone sour.

  There was a funeral ceremony for Haing at the Rose Hill cemetery in early March, 1996. Sam Waterston spoke; a good-sized crowd of Cambodians and Hollywood people were there. Haing Ngor was buried in the tuxedo he had worn when he won his Oscar award.

  The question of justice for Haing Ngor was not going to be simple.

  A myth had sprung up in the Cambodian community that Haing had a vast fortune, and Cambodians began coming out of the woodwork laying claims to his estate. There was even a Cambodian woman with a Las Vegas marriage certificate claiming to be Haing Ngor’s wife. Sophia had never heard of the woman before and asked her if she was Haing’s wife, why hadn’t she shown up for the funeral?

  The Cambodians hoping to get rich from Haing’s estate were disappointed. At the end of his life, most of Haing’s assets had been in Cambodia, and his brother Chan Sarun took them over. In the US, with the court’s consent, Haing’s American holdings went to pay lawyers for defending his estate against the frivolous claims.

  When the quarrelling was over, there was no money left in the estate, not a single cent.

  In Los Angeles, an investigation led to arrests in the killing of Haing Ngor. A trial got underway.

  According to the prosecutor, Haing had spent most of his last day, an unusually cold Sunday 25 February 1996, in Long Beach with a friend. They had lunch, went to the friend’s house, watched basketball on TV, laughed and joked with other friends, and had dinner. Snapshots taken then show a small bright spot on the inside of Haing’s shirt collar, perhaps a link of the gold chain that held the locket of Huoy, perhaps not. Haing left Long Beach around 7.40 p.m. and drove to his apartment building east of L.A.’s Chinatown. He was driving an older-model gold Mercedes. He pulled into the alleyway off Beaudry Street, parked the Mercedes in its space in the carport, shut the engine off and opened the door.

  The prosecutor said that Haing had driven right past three members of an Asian street gang, the Oriental LazyBoyz: Tak Sun Tan, also known as ‘Rambo’, Jason Chan, known as ‘Cloudy’, and Indra Lim, ‘Solo’. They were addicted to crack cocaine and they had just finished smoking the last of it in the alley as he drove past. They wanted more crack, and to buy more crack they needed money. As the prosecutor told the jurors:

  As Dr Ngor turns off his engine, the three defendants approach him. They are planning to rob him. To get money for more cocaine. And defendant Chan has a gun. A 9mm semi-automatic handgun. And he’s ready to use it.

  The defendants first demand Dr Ngor’s watch. He gives it to them. No problem. But then the defendants see Dr Ngor’s gold chain. The chain with the locket, and the picture of his wife. The picture that means everything to him. The defendants demand the chain. The gold would give them plenty of money to buy more cocaine. But Dr Ngor refuses. After all he had been through, Dr Ngor is not going to surrender his wife’s picture, the only thing he had left, to these three gangsters. He just isn’t gong to do it.

  So Jason Chan, Cloudy, high on cocaine, shoots him. He aims his gun at Dr Ngor and he pulls the trigger. The gun fires. The first bullet passes through Dr Ngor’s right leg. It misses the bone and comes out the other side of his leg. It is non-fatal. But the second bullet is much more lethal.

  Defendant Chan fires his second bullet directly into the side of Dr Ngor’s chest. The bullet passes through Dr Ngor’s left lung, then tears into his heart and severs his aorta, one of the main blood vessels of the heart. Blood pours into his chest. The bullet continues on, blasting a hole in Dr Ngor’s right lung. Dr Haing Ngor is dying.

  As Dr Ngor gasps for breath, the defendants snatch the chain from his neck. They then flee on foot, running down the alleyway from the murder scene. In their haste to escape, they overlook $2,900 in a jacket on the back seat of Dr Ngor’s car.

  Dr Ngor, although mortally wounded, tries to pursue the defendants. But he is too weak. He manages to get part way out of his car, then collapses on the pavement, alone.

  Sophia sat in the courtroom every day, along with Jack Ong, the executive director of the Dr Haing S. Ngor Foundation. The trial lasted five months, with separate juries for each defendant. The judge ruled that a statement Jason Chan made to the police was inadmissible evidence, but even so, the three defendants were found guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree robbery. Chan, the gunman, got life without parole and the other two got twenty-five years to life. They all had had previous convictions.

  When the verdicts were announced in the courtroom, the police detectives and the prosecution team were jubilant. Sophia and Jack Ong were relieved, and glad that it was over, but they had quiet doubts. Maybe it was true that the defendants were high on crack and had killed Haing as the prosecutor said. Maybe it was a bungled robbery, and the gang members had fled the scene without even searching Haing’s pockets. At least there had been due process and a trial, which usually happens in America, and hardly ever happens in Cambodia.

  But the unsettled feeling lingered.

  The doubt was partly due to another announcement from Cambodia the same day the Haing N
gor murder trial ended. Pol Pot had died in the forests near the Thai border. The old Khmer Rouge leader, responsible for the death of numberless Cambodians, drifted off peacefully, surrounded by a few followers.

  Was the timing coincidence or kama? It wasn’t easily explained, a mass murderer dying in peace while Haing Ngor died at a murderer’s hand. If it was kama, it was the complicated kind, to be resolved in future incarnations, as the souls of these men came into the world again, burdened by their deeds in previous lives.

  Few Cambodians believed that Haing Ngor was killed in a drug-related robbery.

  If the attack on Haing was a robbery, they asked, why had the gang members failed to go through his pockets? Did they miss the $2,900 in his coat pocket on the back seat of the car because they surprised themselves when they shot Haing, and decided to run away?

  And finally: How did the gang members know that Haing had a heavy gold chain? He always wore it next to his skin, under a T-shirt and a collared shirt. He never wore it as an ornament on the outside of his shirt. Normally the gold chain and locket weren’t in sight, so how had the killers known they were there?

  ‘There are some questions we don’t have answers to,’ the lead detective on the case for the Los Angeles police department admitted.

  The gold chain and locket were never recovered.

  For more survivor stories and information documenting

  Khmer Rouge atrocities, please visit the Digital Archive of

  Cambodian Holocaust Survivors at:

  http://www.cybercambodia.com/dachs

  and the Documentation Center of Cambodia at

  http://www.dccam.org