A Forum on Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later

Y-Dang Troeung: The following forum essay derives from the exhibition Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later, which took place from July 1, 2021 to September 31, 2021 between Vancouver, Phnom Penh, Paris, London, and Lowell. A collaboration between myself and Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh (founded by critically acclaimed Cambodian director Rithy Panh), the exhibition emerged in response to what has been heralded as “Cambodia’s artistic renaissance” or the “Khmer Renaissance.” A rebirth, revival, and regeneration of Cambodian arts and culture in the afterlife of war, the Khmer renaissance movement has sought to grapple with the ongoing legacies of the US bombing of Cambodia (1970-1973) and the ensuing Cambodian genocide (1975-1979). Over forty years later, these events continue to reverberate with vivid intensity in the lives of Cambodian people today.

Only more recently have artists and scholars begun to reflect more on the meaning of Cambodian history after 1979, when hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees fled overland to the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. The largest of these camps was Khao-I-Dang Holding Center (KID), a refugee camp that expanded to the size of a small city of over 130,000 people in 1980. Here, and in other refugee camps along the border, Cambodian people lived out their lives as intervals of excruciating loss and relative joy, awaiting resettlement in Western asylum countries or repatriation back to Cambodia. Many refugees who sought asylum in these camps, like my family, came to Canada between 1979 and 1980 as a part of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Indochinese Refugee Operation. In Canada, there has been little public discourse about this chapter of Canadian history, and even less about the circumstances that displaced these refugees to Canada in the first place. In Canadian literature, moreover, there has been an almost complete silence about what happened in Cambodia. Part of what I wanted to do with this exhibition is to insist that Cambodian history is Canadian history, as well as the history of the world in the twentieth century.

The seeds of this exhibition were first planted in 2014. It was at a film screening event at Meta House Art Cafe in Phnom Penh that I met Colin Grafton and realized our mutual connection to KID. I was born in KID, and Colin worked there as a relief worker in 1980. Since that first meeting in 2014, Colin and his partner Keiko Kitamura have become two of my dearest friends and collaborators, seeing me through countless personal and professional crises as I have sought to navigate the fraught and delicate terrain of conducting research about Cambodia’s Cold War legacies. The work is exhausting and, at times, more emotionally excruciating than I could ever have predicted. With Colin, Keiko, and Sopheap Chea from Bophana Center by my virtual side throughout 2020 and 2021, this exhibition brought together the voices of artists, activists, and community members for a collective conversation focused on Cambodia’s artistic renaissance today. These events included a three-month photography exhibition at Bophana Center, a screening of Rithy Panh’s film Site 2, a recorded interview with Rithy Panh, gallery talks, embassy visits, countless conversations (as well as disagreements), and a concluding Zoom roundtable that gathered voices from across the Cambodian diaspora.

One panellist, Davi Hyder (formerly Davy Heder), was originally scheduled to participate in the roundtable but had to withdraw at the last minute due to illness. We later found out that Davi had tragically passed away after suffering from complications due to COVID-19. I was stunned and deeply saddened by this news. I know Colin was devastated by this loss, as the exhibition had provided the occasion for him and Davi to reconnect as friends after many years of being out of contact. Like Davi, so many in Cambodia had suffered immensely when the fourth wave of the Delta variant began to take hold in the country. The situation in Cambodia was characterized by the lack of a safe vaccine availability (especially in the rural countryside where people like Davi lived), an inequitable medical care system, prolonged lockdowns, quarantine zones, heightened surveillance, security checkpoints, empty city streets, military patrols, and the sound of police megaphones blaring curfew orders throughout the streets. The geopolitics of the pandemic had laid bare the reality that in places such as Cambodia, the thin layer of scab holding back the unhealed wounds of the past could easily come undone.

Even though I had known Davi for only a short time, I will never forget the vibrant energy, enthusiasm, and wisdom that she exuded, even across a computer screen over a spotty Internet connection, during our last conversation in June 2021. During this conversation, Davi shared her experience with me about the last months before the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, about building a bomb shelter under her house during the Cambodian Civil War. She talked about how the apocalyptic storm of violence that engulfed Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over was something that caught so many Cambodian people, like herself, completely by surprise. She told me about how she managed to escape from Cambodia before the fall of Phnom Penh, but had lived in anguish for those four years not knowing the fate of her family members that she had left behind. Finally, she told me about her travels to the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand when the border finally opened up in 1979—how she had learned the Thai language, enlisted as a relief worker, and did what she could as one of the few Cambodian women relief workers in the camp who could help translate between Thai and Khmer. She wanted me to know that refugee women and girls had suffered the most in this camp. What she had witnessed in the camps—the pain Cambodian women and girls had endured, as well as the care and love they had showed each other—had shaped her entire life’s path from that point onward. I was humbled by the intensity and compassion with which she spoke about her memories of the refugee camp. This forum is dedicated to Davi Hyder.

 

Rithy Panh: Between 1988 and 1989, the refugee camp Site 2 on the Thai-Cambodian border had a population of about 180,000 people. The camp covered 5.2 to 5.5 square kilometres, and it was considered the second largest Cambodian city after Phnom Penh. In 1989, it had been ten years since Cambodian refugees started coming over the border. If children were born there, they would be ten years old. It was important for us (as Cambodian people) to document the lives of the refugees there. That was one of my thoughts. At that time, no Cambodian person had filmed this topic yet. There were only films made by foreign film crews and there was no participation from our side. Therefore, it was necessary for Cambodians to reconstruct the memory of the camp and to collect testimonials in order to preserve a historical record for the present.

When I went to film in Site 2, the Thai border guards didn’t want to grant me access to the camp because I spoke Khmer and I was also a former Cambodian refugee who had immigrated to France. I waited for a long time. A few months later, I went to the Thai army headquarters based in Bangkok to get a permit to enter the camp. I told them they didn’t need to let me in, but I also told them, “We are neighbours. You let other nationalities make films here, why not Cambodians themselves? It doesn’t make sense.” They finally gave me three days to film. I didn’t enter the camp immediately. I took a taxi and waited very close to the camp gate. When I closed my eyes, I could hear voices from inside the camp. When I got there, I didn’t know how to start filming because I had only three days to make the film! My time was too short, but back then, I was young and daring. On the first day, I didn’t film anything. I just walked around the camp, looking for someone we were destined to talk to. I didn’t film at first. On the evening of the first day, I met the family of refugees Yim Om and Vong Poeuv. They were sleeping in their hut. They asked me why I wanted to make the film. I replied, “I want to know what your life is like today.” They said, “In the past, we had rice fields, freedom to travel, water, fish, a lot of things. But now we have to live in a small area of land, even a place to dig a toilet is hard to find.” I also asked them about the Tuek-dey (water-land). For Cambodians, Tuek-dey is not a simple word. For those who live in rural areas, the word Tuek-dey means something essential. If we have no land, we will wander. Like Cambodian people say, as a refugee, “I’m like a floating weed carried off by the current, with no roots.” I listened to them talk like they had been waiting for us for a long time. They finally had a chance to tell me their story.

The story was that Site 2 was a remarkable place. Everything came in from the outside, including rice, water (for sanitation), and so on. Without water, everything is nothing. The refugees’ lives were so difficult, depending totally on outside help. I listened to the refugees talk about why they came to this camp, the gunfire they had dodged while they were fleeing. For them, living in a camp was not easy. During the day, there was not as much danger, but at night, it was a different situation. Some women were raped. Some were abused and kidnapped. They needed to be protected. They were vulnerable and had nothing to rely on.

If we live in our land, no matter what our problems are, we have relatives and friends who can help us. We still have hope. But when it comes to living in a refugee camp, the only hope is to go to a third country, and it is still difficult after that. When refugees migrate to a new country, the children born in these lands are disconnected from their identities. Some Cambodian refugees who went to Thailand were abused. Some were robbed. Some were beaten. Some were sent back to the Khmer Rouge soldiers, and some were “repatriated” back to Cambodia.

According to statistics, refugees flee due to war, poverty, violence, and economic collapse. When we have nothing to eat, we can’t send our children to school, and we lack dignity. It’s hard for us to live. The number of refugees worldwide is increasing year by year. Some countries do not welcome refugees because they think those people are escaping for economic reasons. Wars never cease, but no one considers the refugees that wars create. In fact, no refugee wants to leave their homeland. You can go ask them. No one wants to leave their family, friends, and homeland to go to a camp and to depend on food aid from others. No one wants to do that. Most of them flee because of crises such as violence. Not many people pay much attention to its causes. It is hard for us to live completely reliant on others in a foreign land, treated like a kind of parasitic plant that grows on tree branches. We have nothing of our own, not even the right to speak, the right to travel, or the right to produce rice or other food for ourselves.

It is heartbreaking to be a refugee and know what it means. We are “stateless people.” It seems to be stuck in our head forever. It is hard to move on. Some refugees reach distant lands and still have problems. For example, in Site 2 between 1988 and 1989, refugees arrived in the camp already suffering from mental health crises, but little attention was paid to them. According to statistics, some refugees committed suicide out of despair. They faced obstacles if they wanted to return home. Most of these refugees were women. They were desperate and felt helpless. After waking up each day, they sat, waited until night, and went back to sleep. They did this repeatedly, every day. Their lives felt meaningless. Sometimes, gradual despair prompted them to commit suicide. They had trauma and suffered invisibly. At that time, PTSD was not yet believed to be a problem at the camp. In fact, it did exist. When thinking about the global migrant crisis today, we cannot blame refugees, who should be protected from the beginning.

 

Colin Grafton: I think I have the distinction of being the only non-Cambodian here, and also maybe the only one who was walking around in Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in 1980, apart from Mok Rotha. Y-Dang, you were probably just crawling at that time! What I’m going to do is just give you an overview of what was happening in 1979 and 1980.

When the Khmer Rouge were driven out of Phnom Penh in 1979, the Vietnamese army came in, the people were free to move, and they were encouraged to move wherever they wanted to go, at first. Some people tried to get back to their villages, and a lot of people moved towards the border. They were either escaping from the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese military, or both. The refugees arrived at the border at first not so much for reasons of politics or starvation. There was no starvation at that time. This happened later in the year, and in a certain group. The first refugees were mostly former city dwellers. They were going to the border for commerce, or to join the Khmer Serei (Free Khmers), which included all of the groups on the border who were in resistance against the Vietnamese occupation.

In September 1979, about 30,000 people came out of Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, and these refugees were in desperate condition. They were starving, they were dying from disease, and they had been barely surviving for six months. These were the people that attracted worldwide attention. Journalists came and took photographs of them, and the world was suddenly aware that there was a refugee problem. To cope with this, Sa Kaeo Holding Center was set up on October 24, 1979. Sa Kaeo consisted of a group of people brought over with the Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer Rouge retained control over them in this space. The people at Sa Kaeo were mostly from the countryside, and they had no relatives anywhere in other countries, so they had no thoughts of getting to a third country. They were expecting to go back to Cambodia when it was safe to do so. The Khmer Rouge wanted to get everyone back into Cambodia as soon as possible. That was Sa Kaeo with 30,000 people.

Information received by UNICEF and the Red Cross had led these organizations to believe that there were over 100,000 people moving towards the border from inside Cambodia. They expected conditions of malnutrition and disease, so they decided to set up Khao-I-Dang. This was only decided at the end of October 1979, but on November 21, Khao-I-Dang was opened. Only about 28,000 people came in the first week, and they were in fairly good condition. It wasn’t what the Thai government and the international relief organizations expected, but then the numbers increased gradually and by the time I got there, which was in April 1980, there were 130,000 people in Khao-I-Dang. The majority of these people came from the cities. They came out in groups or individually. They didn’t come with the Khmer Rouge. A lot of these people were hoping to be resettled in a third country. Just to see them, the difference from the refugees at Sa Kaeo was obvious; these new arrivals at Khao-I-Dang cast off the black pajamas they had been forced by the Khmer Rouge to wear for the past four years. The first thing they did was buy colourful sarongs. They shed their skin; they changed their image. This was the feeling in Khao-I-Dang. When I was there, I was with people who had just found refuge and relief from three years of suffering. People had to pay a lot of money to get to the camps. It was very dangerous coming over the border. They had to pay off the bandits, and then the Thai military, and the only negotiable currency was gold. When they arrived in the camp, they had food, they had medical attention, they had a place to live. They also had hope for a future for the first time. This was a very optimistic period in the life of Khao-I-Dang.

This spirit of optimism is evident in the photographs that I took in Khao-I-Dang. They were all taken between May and September 1980, when the situation on the Thai border had stabilized. It was almost a year after Cambodians had started crossing the border. People are smiling a lot in these photographs. When I went back to England the next year, I made an exhibition in London, and I found I had to almost apologize to the British audience looking at these scenes. I had to explain why people were smiling. They were not expected to smile, because they were refugees. They had nothing, but they seemed to be enjoying life. British people could not understand this. Of course, the point is that relative to what they had just gone through, they were enjoying life. For the first time since 1975, they had relative security, enough to eat, and enough to drink. And they had the opportunity, as far as the kids were concerned, to play and have a good time, so they did that as much as they could.

Someone set up a playground. There were art classes and kids with trucks—toy trucks made from empty oil cans. A lot of imagination went into making toys which were traditionally made for festivals. There were always little girls at the camp gate selling baskets or pendants. Some pendants were even made from intravenous drip tubes from the hospital. There were even dance classes held in Khao-I-Dang. There were no beds in the camp hospital yet, so they allowed the dance teachers to set up classes there. I took some photos of the first open-air performance where the Cambodian girls could dress up. It was a very windy day. The principal dancer wasn’t bothered at all, but some of the others were laughing or looking rather angry because of the strong wind blowing through their hair.

 

 

 

 

There were kids’ and teenagers’ classes, and don’t forget the musicians. The musicians sometimes found discarded instruments; sometimes they made their own instruments from various scraps. People showed so much ingenuity and creativity in their everyday lives.

There are very few images in the exhibition that are sad or horrific. I think my photographs contrast with the situation eight years later, when Rithy Panh made his film, where people were suffering from a kind of lethargy because they had lost hope for the future. A lot of them thought that they could eventually go back to Cambodia, that it would be stable, but many of them were also hoping to go to a third country—France, America, Australia, Canada, or somewhere else. Khao-I-Dang closed in 1985, and, by that time, a lot of people had been stuck there for years. Refugees were no longer hoping for resettlement. They had settled into this rut of not knowing where they were going, and they were totally dependent on outside help. That is a small part of the history of the border camps.

 

 

Phala Chea: I am speaking to you right now from Florida, but I actually live in Lowell, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and work for Lowell public schools. Lowell, Massachusetts has a large population of Cambodian people. It’s the second largest Cambodian community in the US. The first is Long Beach, the second is Lowell, and the third is Lynn, also in Massachusetts. So, with that, I’ve had the opportunity to work in a school system where about twenty-four percent of our students are of Cambodian descent. Families in the Lowell public schools have experienced a great deal of trauma, and they come with the experience of being a refugee. Trauma is very prevalent in Lowell, not just in the first generation, but down to the second and third generations as they raise and interact with family members. The second and third generations are now struggling to communicate with their elders in their native language. In our community, it’s very difficult for people to seek help because they don’t see it as an issue or as a problem. We’re lucky that we have so many Cambodian temples in Lowell where they can go socialize and be among people of their background and religion, but to seek professional help to help treat their mental health is still an issue within our community. I think they don’t want to have that identity or stigma that they’re not well or not mentally healthy. They just don’t want to be seen that way. We still see problems of alcoholism within the family. It’s a long process of recovery that we have to go through together—to support each other, and not just when we see each other in the neighbourhood. We have to try to empower each other and encourage Cambodian elders to socialize with each other, to interact with each other, to not be left alone.

At this moment in Lowell, we are also seeing a number of refugees arriving from all over the world. Many of the refugees come to Lowell from the Congo, Burma, Myanmar, Syria, and other parts of the world. We continue to see this displacement of refugees happening, so I think it’s important for us to understand what it is to be a refugee and what it’s like to be a refugee, and the experiences that continue to carry on long after arriving in the new country. Like Rithy mentioned earlier, we are stateless, and it’s very difficult to learn how to navigate a new world and be able to find acceptance and fit in. We need to have some resilience in order to survive and to be able to adapt and find success in our world.

I, myself, experienced being a refugee; I left Cambodia when I was seven with my family. We escaped Cambodia and we went to live in Khao-I-Dang for a few years, and then we made our way to Indonesia, Galang Island, and we stayed there for several months, and then we finally arrived in the US. When I arrived in the US, I was nine years old and starting life in a new country and in a new school. I’d never had an education before, so it was quite scary, entering the school without having any experience. Our family worked very hard to survive. Because of my personal experiences, I wanted to do something to help the Cambodian community not only in Lowell, but back in Cambodia as well. In 2017, I met a director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), who had recently published a book by Khamboly Dy about the history of Democratic Kampuchea and the Cambodian Genocide. The director wanted that history to be taught in Cambodian middle schools and high schools, so he wanted to find someone who would be able to write a curriculum to help support the instruction. I signed up, along with my colleague Christopher Dearing, to write the curriculum to help support teachers. After we completed that publication, we went back to Cambodia several times to help train teachers and professors on how to use Dy’s book in their classrooms. Thankfully the Ministry of Education in Cambodia was able to grant us that endorsement, and the prime minister also helped endorse the program. We were able to go and travel across the country to help support teachers. Right now, that history is part of the instruction and the national exam.

 

Rotha Mok: Let me introduce myself. My name is Rotha Mok. I was born in Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, my family was evacuated to Battambang’s Krous village near Kampong Pouy water reservoir. Then, when the Vietnamese forces came into Cambodia, my uncle hired the militia to bring us—me and my sisters—to a refugee camp in Thailand. Like the other refugees, we had to be in the camp before we could go to the US, France, or Canada. We had to move from one camp to another, like from Khao-I-Dang to Kampu, and from Kampu to Chonburi.

At Chonburi, I met a painter, Mr. Nget Sin. Do any of you know him? He was the only one in his family to survive the Khmer Rouge. All of his family members were killed during the Khmer Rouge. He was a teacher of painting at the Royal University of Fine Arts, in Phnom Penh, before the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, he lost all of his family. He was also a sculptor. His work mostly depicted his pain from the Khmer Rouge era. At that time, I was just a kid, aged ten. I knew nothing about the Khmer Rouge, and I did not understand anything about the war. When I saw his paintings, I came to understand that terrible things had happened in Cambodia, causing great pain to many people. I saw this artwork about the killing, rape, and death from hunger and sickness that had happened. Mr. Sin did a lot of work. He gave his paintings to foreigners who came into the camps as NGO aid workers. He gave them as gifts, as a witness and memory to inform the public about what had happened in Cambodia.

After Chonburi, I went to another camp, a transit stop, of which I have little memory, before arriving in France. I just knew that it was like a prison. Before going to France, we were kept in that place, what might be called an “adaptation centre,” which was like a prison. I was there for a week in Bangkok, then I arrived in France. I arrived in France in the winter, January or February of 1983. It was extremely cold for me. We had climatic and culture shock, especially the elderly people. For me, I was just happy to discover new things that we did not see in Cambodia. I was different from the elders. It was so difficult for them. I had the chance to go to school, and I earned a master’s degree at a university and became an entrepreneur. I encountered a project that brought me back to Cambodia. It was a theatrical musical titled The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, written by the famous French feminist philosopher H?l?ne Cixous. It was an eight-hour musical performance on stage in France. The title of the play was very interesting and attractive—and it recounted the tragedy of Cambodia. Some people called it “Franco-Shakespearian.”

 

FONKi Yav: To introduce my myself, my name is FONKi Yav. FONKi is a nickname because my background is graffiti, so I sort of reinvented myself when I was fifteen by doing graffiti. I was born in France after my parents fled the war and the genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s. I was born from refugee parents, and then grew up in Canada. Since I was four years old, I’ve been coming to Cambodia. I am based now in Phnom Penh, and I’ll explain what led me to dedicate my time to setting up a gallery and new platform for art here in Phnom Penh recently.

In 2011, Rithy Panh came to Montreal for a conference about Cambodian memory at Concordia University. That is where I met Rithy. At the time, I was studying film animation and cinema, so Rithy invited me to the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh. This really changed my life. Growing up, I was basically in the streets doing my own thing. In Montreal, I grew up around a lot immigrants, direct refugees, or children of refugees. Growing up with this reality and sharing stories with this community, consciously or unconsciously, led me to come to Cambodia in 2012 to the Bophana Center. The team at Bophana helped me make a movie called The Roots Remain with my Canadian filmmaker friends. I wanted to adapt my graffiti style and really dig into our community’s identity and culture, and to use the traditional kbach style from the Angkor Wat temples. I have many styles. When I started coming to Cambodia, I was really struck by the ornaments carved on the walls of these ancient temples. I mixed kbach with the graffiti style that I had learned in Montreal. I also do a lot of photorealistic art. There was a period where I did realistic portraits of traditional Khmer portraits and of mythical Khmer statues. This is a way to know my cultural heritage and to share it. By doing research or going to the national museum, I’ve learned that there are a lot of statues coming back to Cambodia that have been looted—for example, the Sotheby collection of Khmer statues. This is how I do research: an image captivates me, and then I do research and I learn so much about, for example, the Rigveda or the Ramayana, classic literary texts that really influenced the whole region here. That’s the style of research that I do, as a way to really dig into our heritage and make it alive today.

When I started adapting my graffiti to the Cambodian landscape, I wanted to paint murals of my great-grandfather, because I grew up with my great-grandparents, who had been through the war and genocide. Some of their personal archives convey really strong moments—coming out of the refugee camps, living in the refugee camps, waiting to go to France or to go back to Phnom Penh. This whole return trip to Cambodia in 2012 changed my life, and I wanted to paint my great-grandfather somewhere in Phnom Penh to honour his life. To make a long story short, with that little intention, I started meeting communities through graffiti by painting out in fields and in slums. I had been doing traditional graffiti before and then this new form of graffiti opened up an intergenerational dialogue, not just with my family, but with a lot of people around me. After finishing the film, I started travelling to show it to different audiences around the world. The premiere of the film was in Long Beach, California, where we shared the film with a lot of refugees and second-generation Cambodians who were born in America. This is when I realized the power of art and the responsibility of the artist. I realized that I had become part of the “Khmer Renaissance” without realizing it. Because I grew up in the diaspora, all I heard were bad stories, right? I understand this was because you hear these stories from a generation that was traumatized first-hand. Then when I came back to Cambodia, I saw a change. I came in 1994 for the first time, then in 2004, 2007, and 2012. Between 2012 and 2015, things changed in Cambodia so quickly. With music and other forms of art, through which we could have a discussion without speaking, I could feel that there was a process of healing or even just a dialogue happening. It is a Renaissance. I actually heard the term “Khmer Renaissance” for the first time from my friend, who is sort of the pioneer of bringing hip hop to Cambodia, mixing hip hop with old Khmer rock ’n’ roll songs from the 1960s. So that’s why, in 2012, I realized that this was going to be a life’s work.

Today, I see so many great artists working within this Khmer Renaissance, from music, to film, to art, and literature. I found the purpose of art—to open up a certain kind of dialogue, to grasp what’s happening now. Everything that we do now is based on people like Rithy Panh, as well as on people who sacrificed their life or lost their life because they were artists or intellectuals. My understanding of these sacrifices became the fuel of my work, and the result is what I am doing right now—along with other artists—in Cambodia and elsewhere. There are many, many things happening now, but it’s important that we remember the people who lost their lives in the war. We have a heritage that is over one thousand years old. How do we recreate meaning for this generation, our heritage of today, which is going to be the heritage of tomorrow, to continue a cycle of regeneration? When you try to cut down a tree, something that is so old, the roots remain.

 

Y-Dang: That’s a great way to conclude our discussion today. Thank you to everyone. To be continued.

 

Notes

1 Rithy Panh’s contribution to this forum was translated from the Khmer language. Questions were submitted to Panh by Y-Dang Troeung in English and translated into French with the help of Hoi Kong and Tara Mayer. Panh’s filmed answers in Khmer were translated into English script by Ratana Cheng, Sopheap Chea, and Colin Grafton.

2 Rotha Mok’s contribution to this forum was translated from the Khmer language. Questioned were posed to Mok by Y-Dang Troeung in English. Mok’s live responses in Khmer were translated into English script by Sopheap Chea and Colin Grafton.