Cambodian Author Unravels Greater Khmer Rouge Anti-Muslim Atrocities
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Osman estimates between 400,000 and 500,000 Muslims perished during the Khmer Rouge
period
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PHNOM PENH
, August 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A Cambodian author has
found a litany of unrecorded atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge,
substantially revising upward the number of Muslim chams who were
killed by Pol Pot’s regime.
In
his soon to be released book Oukoubah, Ysa Osman says the number of
ethnic Muslim Chams living in
Cambodia
was about 700,000 when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 after five
years of civil war, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
The
previous estimate was 250,000 Muslims, a figure historians had based
on a French census undertaken in 1936 and criticized for being too out
of date.
Osman
interviewed 500 people during his research and estimates between
400,000 and 500,000 Muslims perished during the Khmer Rouge period
compared with the previously thought 75,000 deaths.
In
Oukoubah, Osman details 13 cases of torture, imprisonment and death,
and uses the personal stories from those cases to expand on the
broader sufferings incurred by Cambodia’s Muslims.
His
research has also focused on two villages - Koh Phal and Svey Khleng -
in central
Cambodia
which were devastated by the Killing Fields era.
Svey
Khleng was home to 1,240 families in 1975 or about 6,200 people. Just
120 families survived the tortuous years and beyond to 1979. The
remaining families were completely erased.
“And
all the surviving families had lost a father, a mother, or brother or
sister and grandparents,” Osman told AFP.
The
results of the ultra-Maoists policies, which also banned religion,
forced Muslim men to eat pork, Muslim women to cut their hair and
banned the Muslim Cham language, had similar results at Koh Phal.
Of
500 families, or 2,500 Muslims, just 170 people survived.
“The
Muslim chams were killed in much greater numbers and in a more
systematic way than any other ethnic group in
Cambodia
,” Osman said.
He
details the case of Haj Saleh Yahya, a former senator of the Lon Nol
regime who was arrested by the incoming Khmer Rouge, accused of
mounting a Muslim rebellion and sent to Mikanpoul prison.
Osman
said Yahya was repeatedly beaten and then sent to the S21 torture
center at Toul Sleng in
Phnom Penh
where the formal rules outlawed crying after electrocution.
According
to his death certificate, Yahya died of an illness after a beating.
Osman
said
Cambodia
’s surviving Muslims were in complete support for a trial of
surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. That tribunal is currently on hold
after the United Nations walked out of negotiations last February amid
a dispute over whether the U.N. or
Cambodia
would control the trial.
“We
want a trial, to help Cambodians understand what happened,” he said.
Osman lost a sister, brother and grandparents to the Khmer Rouge.
Including
Osman’s revisions, about two million people, or about one-third of
Cambodia
’s total population died through genocide, starvation and illness
between 1975 and 1979.
In
March 1970, with strong U.S. support, the Khmer Rouge guerrilla
movement under Pol Pot deposed Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk in a coup
d'état, and established the Khmer Republic.
Under
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge set up a collectively organized economy
dominated by terror, and introduced a catastrophic system of social
engineering designed to “purify” the Khmer race.
This
involved evacuating entire cities to a huge network of agrarian slave
labor camps, abolishing banking, finance and currency, sealing
borders, outlawing all religions, and eliminating private property to
a degree where even requisites of personal hygiene were made communal.
The
“purification” also required the extermination of all the educated
classes, along with any people perceived to oppose the new regime. As
a result, an estimated 1.7 million people, possibly a lot more, were
murdered or died of hunger, disease, or torture.
Pol
Pot was confirmed dead in April 1998 which marked the end of the Khmer
Rouge’s power.
Senior
surviving figures from the Khmer Rouge still live freely in
Cambodia
’s remote northwest.
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