Child soldier of Cambodian genocide to speak at college in Randolph
Sayon Soeun was 6 when he was recruited as a child soldier by the Khmer Rouge.
By the time he was 8, Soeun was in charge of a patrol with authority to execute anyone seen as an enemy of the communists or having violated orders of the Khmer Rouge.
“My task was to look for escapees,” Soeun said on Monday in an interview from his home in Lowell, Mass.”If I caught anyone trying to escape or steal, it was in my authority to execute them.”
Soeun, 48, will bring his chilling and heartbreaking story to the County College of Morris at 12:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 12, at the Student Community Center, Dragonetti Auditorium, 214 Center Grove Road, Randolph. The program is the latest in a series on genocide sponsored through the Legacy Project at County College of Morris.
Soeun also is the focus of a new documentary about child soldiers called “Lost Child ~ Sayon’s Journey” produced by the Gardner Documentary Group.
The Khmer Rouge communists seized control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975. During their bloody four-year rule, led by Pol Pot, 1.7 million Cambodians were slaughtered while thousands of child soldiers were recruited. The Khmer Rouge renamed the country Kampuchea and began a radical process to create a purely agrarian-based Communist society. Millions were forced to leave the cities and work on new communist farms while many intellectuals, city-dwellers, minorities and others were executed.
Soeun was born in the village of Tramkok, a target of the Khmer Rouge who were seeking to recruit young soldiers. It was a poor area with a significant drug problem and young people like Soeun wanted something to believe in.
“It was very difficult to stay away from it (Khmer Rouge),” Soeun said. “Everybody wants to believe in something. I was born right into it. I had no exposure to the outside world.”
He recalled that before he was captured, his mother warned him about going outside alone or straying from his home fearing he would be “kidnapped by the bogeyman.” That bogeyman was in the form of the Khmer Rouge.
On one day, Soeun and a friend were in a rice paddy, having fun while searching for frogs. A truck pulled up filled with children singing and dancing and appearing to be happy. Soeun jumped on board.
“I decided to join up,” he said. “I didn’t want to miss the fun. I thought I would return but it was the last time I saw my parents.”
Training Begins
The train brought the new recruits to a camp where Soeun was housed with 10 to 15 other children who were from 6 to 9 years old. Other areas had older children. Each day Soeun and a Khmer Rouge soldier sat under a tamarind tree where Soeun would learn to read and write and to understand the Khmer Rouge philosophy.
“Every morning and night we were lectured by a member of the government,” Soeun said. “They slowly grow you.”
The young recruits were told to cut all relations with family, to eliminate all personal belongings and to end any emotional attachments to anyone or any group. In the early years, recruits were told the enemy was parents, brothers and sisters. It wasn’t until the Khmer Rouge rule was nearing an end that young soldiers were told the enemy was Vietnam or the U.S.
“Everybody there belonged to the government,” Soeun said. “They explained that our potential enemies included our parents and siblings and that we were not to trust anyone.”
As part of the indoctrination, they were taken to a community prison camp where they watched as prisoners were tortured. Then each child soldier was ordered to execute a prisoner who had been accused of some kind of wrongdoing.
Soeun learned to use a variety of weapons including the AK47 and M16 rifles, 9 mm handgun and grenades.
No one ran away from the camp but many disappeared, including those who seemed too weak to become soldiers.
“There was an old saying that went “if we kill you we don’t lose anything,”” Soeun said.
Soeun made no friends because he learned he could trust no one. Young soldiers quickly turned in anyone heard making the slightest criticism of the Khmer Rouge or the government. Those who were turned in were killed; those who turned them in were rewarded with promotions that brought better housing and more responsibilities.
By the time Soeun was 8 or 9 he was considered a full fledged Khmer Rouge soldier with blanket authority to kill anyone he believed to be a threat. He was promoted to lead a platoon of 10 to 15 soldiers whose job was to find escapees or thieves and to kill them.
The Khmer Rouge pitted soldiers against each other. The soldiers in each village had the authority to execute anyone, including Khmer Rouge who were from other regions, Soeun said.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Dec. 25, 1978 before capturing Phnom Penh on Jan.8, 1979. Soon after the Vietnamese invasion, Soeun had his first battlefield experiences. He was ordered to join with two other platoons to begin evacuating thousands of Cambodians from the front lines away form invading Vietnamese and to lead them deep into the jungle.
Soeun was involved in four different firefights before he was shot in the back. He recovered but the platoons’ resources were exhausted with very little food and ammunition remaining. Soon the Khmer Rouge units were dissolving as soldiers threw away weapons and tried to blend into the civilian countryside.
Soeun was 12 years old when he found himself part of a wave of refugees fleeing toward the border with Thailand.
“I didn’t know where we were going,” Soeun said. “I was just following people.”
He came to the mountainous border with Thailand and climbed to the relative freedom of a refugee camp where he was kept for around three weeks. Often he would forage in the woods to collect logs that he would exchange for rice or porridge. During one excursion, a log fell and severely damaged his ankle. He could not walk and fell unconscious. When he awakened, he found himself in a Thai orphanage.
A couple from Middletown, Conn., worked through the Lutheran Church to adopt Soeun and he left Thailand on Sept. 29, 1983. He later married and has raised a family and in 2010, he returned to Cambodia for the first time. He found little that was familiar, as the countryside had been radically changed to eliminate any memories of the Khmer Rouge past.
Soeun said he was not welcomed in his village but rather was treated as a “foreigner and a traitor.”
“I was a foreigner in the United States and in my homeland,” Soeun said.
Soeun could not locate any relatives as his brothers and sisters had all changed their names since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Soeun mentioned his family name to an elder of the village and the man knew Soeun’s family and he soon met up with an uncle and five siblings.
He hadn’t seen his family in more than 40 years and was cautious that people might lie to him in order to get money from the visiting American. Soeun said he asked that the apparent siblings submit to DNA tests but only two older brothers and a younger sister agreed to the test. The tests positively linked Soeun with the family he had not seen in so many years but there was little emotional bonding.
“Today, we’re a little closer,” Soeun said.
The most senior members of the Khmer Rouge were found guilty of genocide last year by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, officially known as Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Soeun said the convictions helped with a semblance of closure.
“There is some sort of closure but not a feeling that justice was served,” Soeun said.
Soeun said he hopes the film will draw attention to the use of child soldiers in the past and today. The use of children as soldiers is not new and has not ended as evidenced by recent news footage of a child pointing a gun at a hostage awaiting execution by ISIS Islamic militants. The notorious Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram also is known to force children into its army.
“World leaders haven’t focused much on the issue of child soldiers,” Soeun said. “Many people still use children as soldiers.”
Soeun has a construction business and has been involved with an organization, “Light of Cambodian Children,” that helps at-risk Cambodian kids.
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