MUSLIMS UNDER SIEGE
Cambodia's Cham Muslim Minority and the Khmer Rouge Genocide Trial Living among people who have suffered no legal consequences for murdering your loved ones BY SLES NAZY
Mr. Ysa Osman appears before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Case 002/02 against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan on Feb. 9, 2016. Photo: ECCC/Nhet Sok Heng
B
etween 1975 and 1979, the communist-led Khmer Rouge regime unleashed an explosion of mass violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly one-quarter of all Cambodians. To this day, the exact figures on this genocide remain hotly disputed. After decades of French colonialism and the subsequent foreign involvement in the ensuing civil war that gradually became a brutal Cold War proxy war, the Khmer Rouge assumed power. Led by Prime Minister Pol Pot (d. 1998), at that time known to the outside world as “Brother Number One,” the Khmer Rouge instituted a radical reorganization of Cambodian society by forcibly sending the city people into the countryside to farm, dig canals and tend crops. This decision also split up family units, as did assigning people to labor brigades based on their age and gender. The regime’s subsequent gross mismanagement of the economy led to food and medicine shortages and widespread death from disease and starvation. While Christian, Buddhist and ethnic minorities were repressed, Cham Muslims were singled out — as many as 500,000 of
them — 70% — were exterminated. Because the Khmer Rouge emphasized rural peasant superiority, those classified as “intellectuals” — teachers, lawyers, doctors and clergy — were all at-risk populations. Some maintain that even people who wore eyeglasses were deliberately killed. The Khmer Rouge made several attempts to eliminate the Cham Muslims’ core identities. Among their “soft” approaches were prohibiting all outward manifestations of Islam, forcing them to eat pork, cutting women’s hair short, eliminating their traditional attire, burning the Quran, closing or destroying mosques, prohibiting the Cham language and changing Cham names to Khmer names. The Khmer Rouge also broke the Cham communities into small family units and put them in Khmer villages across Cambodia. Traditionally, the Cham had tended to live in concentrated communities in which they had erected a self-sufficient Islamic and cultural infrastructure. The “hard” approach consisted of executing prominent Cham figures, including religious teachers (hakims and tuons), hajjis, politicians and ordinary Cham people.
60 ISLAMIC HORIZONS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
The Cham protests and rebellions that broke out in Koh Phal and Svay Khleang (Kampong Cham province) in late September and early October 1975 had profound consequences for the Cham living in Kroch Chhmar district (Tboung Khmum province) as well as those in the entire Eastern Zone and beyond. In 1978, many survivors reported widespread racial killings directed at those who had Cham names or had been linked to the Cham ethnicity. Such racial killings also resulted from the unstoppable momentum of the purges that occurred in the Central and Eastern zones during the same period. On Nov. 30, 1975, a high-ranking Khmer Rouge cadre named Chhon wrote and addressed Telegram 15 to Pol Pot. It was subsequently copied to Nuon Chea and then to Doeun and Yem, two other Khmer Rouge officials. According to the telegram, Chhon was responding to a previous order(s) on evacuating the Cham from their villages along the east bank of the Mekong River and the entire Eastern Zone. The original message had come directly from the party center in Phnom Penh. Chhon specifically referred to this as the “dispersal strategy discussed in previous meetings” and estimated that 150,000 Cham in the Eastern Zone would be deported to the Northwest and Northern zones. Nearly one-fourth of all Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge. A conservative estimate places the Cham deaths at about one in three, a slightly higher rate than that of the Buddhists. The Khmer Rouge’s top-down approach decimated the Cham elite, and the destruction of one-third of their population is a serious challenge to their ability to maintain their core identity. A report by Eng Kok Thai of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCCAM; http://dccam.org/home) relates that only 45 of 339 hakems, 38 of 300 touns, 30 of approximately 1,000 hajjis and 2 of the known 26 overseas students who returned
