Blue lady blog

Bou Meng, one of a handful of survivors in the former prison centre S-21 just launched his book today. From Kampong Cham province, Bou Meng joined the Khmer Rouge movement in the early 1970s until 1977 when his wife and he himself were arrested for allegedly being part of CIA agents in Cambodia.

I remember he said, “I’m delighted that my story can let everyone inside and outside Cambodia know the darkest year, so that this history chapter will not be repeated.” For Bou Meng, the book is a healing pill or a cure for his trauma that’s been with him ever since he’s released from S-21.

Mr. Huy Vannak who used to work for the DC-Cam, a documentary centre that works on and stores many documents about the Khmer Rouge regime and now works as an anchor for CTN, authors the story of Bou Meng. Something remarkable happened. He said that it’s his very first time to hear Bou Meng said that he’s now “free from the past.” As an audience, I was happy to hear that writing a book can somehow release all negative feelings within Bou Meng, whom I know had carried along many painful memories of the loss of his wife and children.

The book, as Huy Vannak said, is a combination of Bou Meng’s personal life in the regime that’s told in a plain language, a dramatic love story and first encounter with his wife and their honeymoon, historical facts, and cultural background of Cambodia (why did Cambodians who had this great smile kill?). On page 41 in the book, a common phrase mentioned by the Khmer Rouge soldiers goes: “Don’t hide your secrets, and your eyes will be removed.” The Khmer Rouge leaders brainwashed these young soldiers to hate their enemies or treat other people like less than animals, and it’s very easy to kill or harm when hatred happens.

Bou Meng is a man who has lived through four regimes in Cambodia: French colonial time (1863-1953), Sangkum Reastre Niyum (1953-1970s), Lon Nol (1970s-1975) and today’s regime (1979-present). He, like other countryside boy, was mobilized and later purged for his alleged relation with secret police like CIA or KGB.

I can’t wait to read this book! .

Photos by Yourn Sarath

7 things to stop doing now on Facebook

Using a Weak Password

Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!

Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile

It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls

For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Posting Your Child’s Name in a Caption

Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name

Mentioning That You’ll Be Away From Home

That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

Letting Search Engines Find You

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.

Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised

Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings

Copyrighted 2009, Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

It was very fortunate of me to get accepted into this Khmer Rouge Tribunal Fellowship Program where I have learnt from trauma to the history around the Democratic Kampuchea regime known as the Khmer Rouge regime, and how to provide justice and reconciliation in Cambodia. This is the third week I’ve been taking the course, and late this month, all the 22 fellowship participants will travel altogether to Germany and Netherlands for amazing study tours. I can’t wait to travel again.

Regarding to the KR regime, there have been very many questions posed about how Saloth Sar aka Pol Pot came into power, and how this guy could stir up the whole country between 1975-1979. It was not less known about his intention and motivation, though. Many books about the regime and people involved have been written up for the next generation to read on. As for me, I have now had nearly 20 books about the Khmer Rouge to read. Feel free to contact me and borrow the book. (Return is a must .)

One of the urgent issues to ponder about is how the Khmer Rouge leaders could indoctrinate and brainwash hundreds of thousands of people to be so cruel to city dwellers, torture and kill them. These young people were incited to hate the new people or city people… No doubt that young people are very easy to persuade to do anything against their conscience. Hundreds of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who entered the Phnom Penh city in April 17, 1975 were these young boys dressed in dark green, moving house-to-house. Four to five hours after they arrived, they started to mobilize around the city and told people to march toward the countryside, according to a recalling of a Cambodian survivor whom I talked to a week ago.

I had this fruitful talk with the fellowship program trainers. We went around topics such as the documentary called “S-21, the killing machine”, and “Enemies of the People”. In the latter, two perpetrators confessed their horrible crimes, killing people and drinking human gall bladders. Thirty years ago, they were of course young men who loyally followed Angkar (what the Khmer Rouge wanted to be addressed as.) Why were they so brutal? What was in their mind before and after they killed? I was overwhelmed about the situation, and was furious at those who killed blindly. Yet, my trainer gave me a food for thought. For young people, when they are isolated from their parents and relatives, from their communities, they start to feel detached with new people. Even more, Pol Pot incited them all to look over each other’s soldier (mistrust and paranoid). Their emotional attachment and personal communication were completely cut off. Therefore, they (tried to) felt numb while killing. They could not feel your pain considering survival of the fittest or “most cruel”. Most of the KR soldiers were children and young people. Children especially are like a blank sheet of paper which when a drop of black ink drops on, absorbs and does not wash away. Likewise, it was very easy for Pol Pot to indoctrinate these young to commit terrible crimes against humanity.

I was asking myself the same question. If I were an uneducated 12 or 13 year-old countryboy, if I were mobilized to other parts of the country, leaving my parents and relatives behind, and taught not to trust anyone but report on him or her about their mistakes, would I be able to resist death threat imposed upon me by Angkar? Would I dare to kill myself but spare hundreds of life in front of me? These children were taught to feel like a robot, and that was automatic to go on like that. I watched a 25-minute documentary about this Cambodian former child soldier who admitted to (getting involved in) killing people. It was a terrible inhumane mistake Pol Pot and his gang ever committed: killing people (to death) and kill people (alive).

I am not saying that those who were young and killed lives should not be held accountable. I am not sure if I would be different if I were in their shoes. Crimes are to be prosecuted of course; however, the ECCC has been so selective in their choices to try only the senior leaders or “most responsible” ones. For former child or young Khmer Rouge soldiers, there should be a legal system that spares them only partly because they were too young to resist. The most responsible people were educated but good-for-nothing like the former Khmer Rouge leaders