Theary C. Seng and the Road Ahead in Cambodia

By Michelle Phipps-Evans

The name Theary Chan Seng generates a fervor approaching reverence in the Cambodian community here and abroad. She is the Cambodian-born, American-educated lawyer and civil rights activist who founded the Cambodian Center for Justice & Reconciliation. It is a major component of another organization she serves as founding president, CIVICUS: Center for Cambodian Civic Education. This nonprofit group is dedicated to promoting an enlightened and responsible citizenry committed to democratic principles. It is actively engaged in the practice of democracy and reconciliation in Cambodia and the larger, globalized world.

So who really is Seng, the person? She is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime, and has spent almost two decades advocating for its victims, many of whom were orphaned, widowed, abused or molested—victims who were like Seng herself.

She was four when her father was killed by the KR, a Communist guerrilla movement in Cambodia (formerly Kampuchea) led by Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot and “brother number one.” Its reign of terror ran from April 17, 1975 to Jan. 6, 1979.

“My father was a target, as he was a military commander,” said Seng, 42, speaking to Asian Fortune from Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh via by Skype. At 4, she made the exodus to Svay Rieng province bordering Vietnam, where the killings were the most intense and where she spent five months in the Boeung Rei prison, shackled most of the time. She recalls that she became so emaciated that the cuffs fell off her bony feet.

“My job as a seven year old was to bring the toilet bucket to the other prisoners,” she said matter-of-factly. She said her mother held out hope for her father’s safe return, until she, too, was taken away in the night, to her death. Seng was 7.

For Seng, the memory is intense, vivid. She was awake when soldiers came by the cell and saw her eyes were open. They left. The last thing her mother said to her was, “My daughter, go back to sleep.” When Seng and her four-year-old brother awoke, they cried and cried at the sight of the empty cell. Seng also had three older brothers who were “preserved,” taken away from the other prisoners as the regime wanted to indoctrinate children who weren’t influenced by the Western world.

“My spirit wanted to join my mother,” Seng said. “My physical body wanted to join her. Everything within me knew I couldn’t see my mom again.” (Seng recounts these experiences in her 2005 book, “Memoir: Daughter of the Killing Fields.” )

The KR killed an estimated 2 to 3 million Cambodians via torture, execution, over-work or starvation in the mid- to late 1970s, about a quarter of the population. The regime sought to “cleanse” Cambodia of capitalists and intellectuals, and impose a new social structure based on collective agriculture. It emptied entire cities and marched residents into rural areas where the genocide began. Targeted were anyone with connections to Cambodian or foreign governments, professionals and intellectuals (also those wearing glasses), ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Thai and minorities in Eastern Highland, Cambodian Christians, Muslims, Buddhist monks, and “economic saboteurs,” former urbanites deemed guilty because they lacked agrarian ability.

In her memoir, Seng describes her experience as a child laborer in the killing fields. It was her task to collect buffalo dung for fertilizer amid the stench of inadequately buried human bodies.

Seng’s experience was hardly unusual, according to Voice of America producer Reasey Poch. “Many Cambodians lost both their parents during the Khmer Rouge years,” said Poch, who resettled in the United States in 1984. “My wife is among them. For me, I lost a father.”

After Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ended the KR rule, Seng and surviving family members trekked across the border to Thailand in November 1979, and then migrated to the United States on Dec. 23, 1980. “It was a cultural shock,” said Seng, who landed in a bitterly cold Grand Rapids, Mich., to live with a family. “I couldn’t make a distinction between a man or a woman.”

Speaking no English, Seng began the long process of acclimating to U.S. culture. She spent several years in Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor’s degree in international politics from Georgetown University in 1995. Returning to Michigan, she earned a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 2000. She is a member of the New York Bar Association and American Bar Association. After living for about 20 years in the United States, Seng returned to Cambodia in 2004, where she had volunteered with various labor and human rights groups since 1995.

“I didn’t return for some humanitarian reason,” she said. “My history informs who I am now. My work…is to respond to my own personal needs—to respond to the places in my past. I feel Cambodia is my home. When I’m in the U.S., I feel anxious and need to be in Cambodia.”

Now working on her second book, Seng is also president of the Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, the first association based in there to be registered with the Ministry of Interior. It is a network of survivors of the 1975-79 killing fields, joined in the fellowship of suffering in the demand for justice, and in the work for a just peace. She has served with served with other human rights organizations, and is vocal on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the court established to try the most senior members of the Khmer Rouge.

“Cambodia is at the bottom of every economic level—warfare and poverty,” she said. Referring to living in the United States, she said, “We went there with our own psychological baggage and trauma and had to start at the bottom rung,” adding many Cambodian Americans ended up in gangs.

Some Cambodians migrated to America with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the result of witnessing war-time atrocities, making it difficult to adjust to a new country, explained Pang Houa M. Toy, deputy director of the District of Columbia-based Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a national organization advancing the interests of Southeast Asians in a December Asian Fortune article on rising Asian-American poverty. “They came to this country as refugees with almost nothing besides what they could carry as they fled those countries,” said Toy.

“This points directly not only with our past but with the society now,” Seng said about Cambodia and other Cambodians in the Diaspora. Although the country is very poor, there’s a wealthy elite class, with much of this wealth coming from corruption, according to Seng.

Today, Cambodia is home to 13.8 million people, with about 85 percent living in rural areas. According to the World Bank, Cambodia is likely experiencing the greatest increase in poverty of any country in Southeast Asia, much of it caused by the global economic downturn. About 36 percent of Cambodians live in poverty. Seng said some live on less than $1 a day. In addition to the global influences, Cambodia’s financial sector is underdeveloped, making it more difficult to serve the financial needs of a country with a large rural population.

Seng said she was pleased that President Barack Obama visited Cambodia for the East Asia Summit hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in November 2012. “He rightly snubbed our prime minister for the myriad of human rights violations,” she said about Hun Sen. “But the president missed his opportunity to apologize to the Cambodian people for the U.S. policy of the Cold War years, when mainland Southeast Asia was the theatre of war, and Cambodia its pawn.”

She added President Obama should have met with the human rights community and activists challenging the regime, and offer an apology to the Cambodian people for the illegal U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War, which took the lives of half a million Cambodians and created the conditions for the ensuing KR genocide.

However, two top White House aides, White House Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, Valerie Jarrett, and Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights Samantha Power of the National Security Council, joined Cambodian Ambassador William Todd in meeting with human rights organizations at the urging of the president.

Jarrett wrote on a blog, “During our roundtable…we discussed with Cambodia’s courageous human rights defenders the ways in which the U.S. government is working to support their efforts to bring about a more just and democratic society. The United States aims to strengthen the demand for democracy, accountability, and human rights…while providing support to (NonGovernmental Organizations) advocating for political reform…U.S. officials work with local NGOs to investigate land grabbing, illegal arrest and detention, and obstruction of freedom of expression and assembly, while providing legal aid to victims.”

“Our message to human rights defenders reinforced that of President Obama, who, when he met with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, urged progress on these very issues, stressing that the promise of Cambodia’s great people will only be fully realized when human rights are respected and all voices are heard,” Jarrett said.

Looking ahead, Seng said she’s “prayerful” about individuals and the power of ideas creating change in 2013. She has taken it as her mission to focus on the victims of the Khmer Rouge, to focus on their political rights as citizens of Cambodia, and to ensure that genocide never happens again.

“Up to now, Cambodia has had only a society of ‘subjects’ and ‘survivors,’not of ‘representatives’ or ‘citizens,’” said Seng, who added that her work through various foundations is to help Cambodians see themselves as citizens. “In the embryonic democracy, how do we define this? How can we help move toward exercising our rights, and taking responsibility because freedom without responsibility will lead to anarchy.”