Battambang's Camp 32
Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 10:59 pm
Cambodian history should be included in this section, I think.
http://phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/r ... -nightmarePhnompenhpost.com wrote:Revisiting a childhood nightmare
Sat, 20 September 2014
Bennett Murray
In Battambang province’s Mong Russey district was the bloodiest Khmer Rouge prison the world has never heard of. It leaves barely a trace on the historical record, even though 30,000 prisoners are estimated to have perished there during the brutal 1978 purges. Its official name is not even known, though the former prisoners recall its radio call sign used by the guards: Camp 32.
One of the few survivors is Bunhom Chhorn, a Cambodian-Australian video producer now in his early 40s, who revisited the site for the first time in 2011 during research for his soon-to-be released documentary, Camp 32.
All evidence of the location’s horrific history had vanished, with rice crops standing where corpses were once piled.
A pond and tamarind tree rekindled memories from Chhorn’s boyhood, and on subsequent visits, accompanied by fellow survivors, recollections began flooding back. A bridge from which guards threw prisoners to their deaths. A spot where he had been beaten.
In 1983, Chhorn and his mother emigrated to Australia, where they were able to build new lives. After completing school, Chhorn launched a career in broadcast journalism with Australia’s SBS One television channel and eventually became a producer. Before beginning work this year with the US-based NGO Development Alternatives Incorporated, he worked in Phnom Penh for the BBC.
But despite his career success, he was still nagged by questions about what happened to him in his early childhood at Camp 32. His mother had also blanked out her memory of that time, he said.
“If you’re hungry for every day of your life, you try not to remember where you are,” he said.
Although Chhorn has spent his adult life trying to reconstruct what happened, his personal project did not begin in earnest until a chance encounter with Melbourne-based videographer Tim Purdie, 40, in 2010. Purdie was looking for help with sound on an unrelated project. Speaking over the phone from Melbourne last week, Purdie recalled their first meeting in 2010, which served as the genesis for Camp 32.
“What was to be a 30-minute conversation turned into a three-hour chat over several coffees as he told me about Camp 32 and how it hadn’t been documented,” said Purdie, adding that the two quickly became close friends.
Determined to find the site of Camp 32 and track down other survivors, the pair came to Cambodia in 2011 for a five-week expedition along with Andrew Blogg, co-director and producer, and Gaye Miller, co-producer and researcher.
Chhorn’s own memories from Camp 32 are few, but those he has are horrific. Born in 1972 or 1973 in Battambang city to a poor family, he spent the first three years of the Pol Pot regime in the relative safety of a youth group that worked tilling paddies near the city. The children were overworked and underfed, recalled Chhorn, but he does not recall witnessing death.
But sometime in the middle of 1978, Chhorn and thousands of others were taken by truck to Mong Russey, where they disembarked and were marched for about a week through the forest to the remote prison. The camp’s brutal nature, he said, was made evident on their first night.
“When we first arrived, they killed some people who had broken the rules . . . to demonstrate to us what would happen if we didn’t follow the instructions,” he said, adding that executions became a daily occurrence. The preferred killing implements were hoes and axes.
Camp 32 failed to achieve the notoriety of S-21 or Choeung Ek in the public conscience, locals in the area still recall the stories of mass murder. San Va Sak, a 46-year-old Battambang guide who helped arranged logistics for the film’s production, said that he had heard rumours about the camp as a boy in the 1980s.
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