Survival in the Killing Fields
Page 55
For more information on Dr Haing S. Ngor,
and to learn how to make donations to schools
and other worthwhile causes in his memory,
please visit the website of the Haing S. Ngor Foundation,
a charity based in Los Angeles, California:
www.haingngorfoundation.org
Endnotes
1. In Cambodia, as in most Asian Countries, the family name goes first, followed by the individual’s name. So I am Ngor Haing in Asia but Haing Ngor in the West.
2. In Cambodia, if we feel close to older people we call them ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt,’ whether or not they are actually related. If I felt close to a male my own age, I would call him ‘brother.’
3. Below Phnom Penh, the continuation of the Tonle Sap River is known as the Bassac.
4. Note that two unrelated words have a similar sound: Angkor was the great Cambodian empire of centuries ago, but Angka was the name of the Khmer Rouge ruling organization.
5. Long afterward I learned that the army officers were driven away into the countryside. In a ‘rest’ break they climbed down from the trucks, but the trucks suddenly drove away, and Khmer Rouge in concealment opened fire. Almost all the Lon Nol officers died.
6. As I later learned, the UNHCR had a few good people in Thailand. My favourite was Mark Brown, an energetic, capable Englishman who was at Sakeo and later at Khao-I-Dang. But my first impression was basically right. As a whole the UNHCR was extremely disappointing – a timid, incompetent bureaucracy that didn’t do its job. It paid retail prices for huge truckloads of food and allowed corruption to flourish. It didn’t protect the safety of refugees on the border or even in the refugee camps inside Thailand. When the UNHCR won the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize, I couldn’t believe it. I thought it had to be a mistake. So did most people who had seen the UNHCR’s performance in Thailand. Since then, many of its functions have been taken over by the UN Border Relief Organization, or UNBRO, which does a much better job.
7. Since then, I have attempted to get the US government to start an investigation. It is a delicate business. On one hand, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) presumably wants to catch people who lied to it and who are war criminals. On the other hand, INS officials could use an investigation as an excuse for stopping all Cambodian refugees from coming to the United States. As this is written, about twenty thousand innocent people who want to come to the United States are stuck in Khao-I-Dang because the INS has falsely accused them of Khmer Rouge associations. The INS has tightened its rules so much that Dith Pran himself could not come to the United States if he were a refugee today.
8. The Cambodia Documentation Commission, headed by David Hawk, a former executive director of Amnesty International USA, is a group of Cambodian refugees, legal scholars and human-rights specialists that has documented human-rights violations under Khmer Rouge rule. It is seeking to bring those responsible to justice in the World Court, under the terms of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.