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Assault Cambodia’s Cham Muslim Minority
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
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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
Between 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.
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
survived. Grand Mufti Raja Thipadei Res Lah and his two deputies were also killed
Due to the destruction of Islamic schools, mosques, Quranic texts, name changes and the prohibition of the Cham language, the Cham have had a tough time restoring their identities. Part of this has involved compiling evidence and testifying against those Khmer Rouge leaders put on trial several times based on the almost three years of judicial investigations conducted by the UN-Backed Tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — informally known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal or the Cambodia Tribunal. This special Cambodian court receives international assistance through the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT).
According to the Chambers’ findings in the verdict announced on Nov.16, 2018, Case 002, about the crimes against humanity specific to a special group from April 17, 1975, to Jan. 6, 1979, Nuon Chea allegedly served as deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (hereinafter referred to as “CPK”), a full-rights member of the CPK Central and Standing committees, chairman of the People’s Representative Assembly and, on occasion, acting prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea. Khieu Samphan allegedly held various positions in the CPK and Democratic Kampuchea, including resident of the State Presidium, chairman of Political Office 870 and a member of the CPK Standing Committee.
In relation to the Cham, these two individuals were accused and charged with crimes against humanity (i.e., murder, extermination, imprisonment, torture and persecution on political and religious grounds); other inhumane acts through attacking human dignity, conduct characterized as forced transfer and conduct characterized as enforced disappearances; and genocide by killing. The Chambers sentenced them to life imprisonment. The case was then closed, a decision that many Cham have found very hard to understand and/or accept.
The now Phnom Penh-based Yar Rorsart, a young Cham from Spiu Village (Kampong Cham province), expressed his support for the Khmer Rouge tribunal, saying that its putting some of the former regime’s top leaders on trial provides justice because most of what had happened during their rule was recorded by the Cambodian and UN experts involved in the tribunal.
He added that all these stories represent the proof that the world needs to learn and remember what happened to his people. Moreover, he said that he learned that the tribunal collected and archived many formerly unknown stories about the Cham. He hopes that these stories will be published in the future for both learning and research purposes.
Ser Sayana, a Cham in her late 30s now working as the deputy director at the Peace Institute Cambodia (https://www.pic-cambodia.org/), argued that the trial was unfair to her personally, “because I lost my grandparents… My cousin was orphaned, and I never knew what they looked and sounded like. But socially and collectively, it’s proper/ fair in a way toward knowledge and proof that one must take responsibility. At least ethically or morally,” she added,” we’ve gained legal judgments, and the loss and pain are being acknowledged. Even though it is rather late, in the end it’s a lesson for the coming generations and future leaders to learn from. It hasn’t been in vain.”
Osman Ysa, aged 49, appeared at the trial as a witness to provide evidence accrued during his years spent as a DCCAM researcher. He is also an expert the period and author of “Oukoubah: Justice for the Cham Muslims Under the Democratic Kampuchea Regime” (DCCAM, 2002) and “The Cham Rebellion: Survivors’ Stories from the Villages” (DCCAM, 2006). He believes that the court was very unfair and that no justice was obtained for the Cham people.
Osman adds that the case against Commander Ta An, who killed thousands of Cham in Sector 41, to which the majority of our people from the east side of Mekong were deported, has also been closed. In general, he doesn’t feel that this is fair, for charging just a few people for killing thousands of people is just a little bit better than doing nothing at all.
Even though no proper research has been conducted on the Cham’s reaction to the verdict or to the genocide trail in general, our people remember their horrific experience under Pol Pot and his genocidal regime. We hope that a similar regime will never arise in the future, for now we are enjoying life under the peace and harmonization policy established by the Royal Government of Cambodia. ih
