BY COURTNEY PERKES
The Orange County Register
SANTA ANA Rosan Ang never saw her husband or four oldest children again after the Khmer Rouge seized them more than 30 years ago. But on Saturday she finally caught a glimpse of justice.
Ang, 67, wiped tears as she recounted the horror of losing her family at The Cambodian Family, part of a national effort to collect information from survivors for the upcoming international justice tribunal trial of four Khmer Rouge leaders.
Audrey Redmond, a Washington, D.C., attorney, gently asked Ang what happened after the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975. Under dictator Pol Pot, roughly 2 million Cambodians were starved, murdered or worked to death.
"They sent us to live in the forest," said Ang, who lives in Santa Ana. "They separated my children. Only my youngest daughter survived because she was too young (to work) and she stayed with me."
Her husband went back and forth from a work camp. One day, he was tied up and taken away. She never saw him again.
As Ang spoke, Redmond patted her arm and took notes for the court's victim information form. She said the Cambodia-based tribunal is not obligated to use the information in the trial, but may choose to. The tribunal, which is currently trying one leader, is comprised of Cambodian legal officials as well as an international group from the United Nations.
More than a dozen survivors of the Khmer Rouge's brutal four-year reign attended the first day of a two-day workshop put on by the nonprofit Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia. They came to tell their stories for the legal system in their native country and also for the archives at New York University.
"They've been silent for 34 years," said Leakhena Nou, founder of the research institute and a sociology professor at Cal State Long Beach. "Now is the time to break the silence."
Volunteer Kenneth Long, a 30-year-old chemical engineer from Long Beach, thanked the group for having the courage to share their experience so that his generation would not forget. During a lunch break, he described hearing his father recount the pain he lived through for submission to the tribunal.
"It was the first time I'd ever seen him break down," Long said. "All his friends were wiped out. He was studying to be a lawyer. They killed his professors, his classmates."
Collecting the stories and filling out the official paperwork for submission to the court can take anywhere from two to eight hours.
"I had an interview with a woman the day before yesterday and she was systematically gang raped by three Khmer Rouge soldiers from morning to nightfall while she was six-and-a-half months pregnant," Nou said. "She was left to die at the rice paddy."
Nou also gave the survivors a presentation on post traumatic stress disorder. She showed photos of victims who were put to death and asked the group how they felt seeing them.
"My name was on the list of people targeted for execution but I escaped," responded 72-year-old Samien Thong of Arizona.
The testimonies will continue at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at The Cambodian Family in Santa Ana.
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