Mark your calendars January 17, 2008, 1:00 p.m. Judy VanDyck, Director, Office of International Affairs “Internationalization of Portland State” Room 338, Smith Memorial Student Union February 21, 2008, 1:00 p.m. Guided tour of “The Dancer” Special Exhibit at Portland Art Museum March 20, 2008 Potluck Lunch Program to be announced Room 333, Smith Memorial Student Union April 17, 2008 President’s Luncheon University Place, Columbia Falls Ballroom Welcome the newest members of RAPS! Harold Cummings, Senior Research Assistant/ Project Coordinator, Regional Research Institute Roger Shope, Wage Pool, School of Bus Administration Stephen Fishler, Program Technician 1, Business Affairs Office Gerald Hearn, Office Specialist 2, Admissions and Registration Alan Zeiber, Director of Weekend Undergraduate Program, School of Business Administration Horror story: A survivor recalls Cambodia’s ‘killing fields’ Kilong Ung began his remarkable story with plain, straightforward words: “A crime was committed 32 years ago. It seems like it was a long time ago, but nonetheless, I live through it every day.” For the next hour Ung related a harrowing account of the Cambodian killing fields to two dozen RAPS members at the first lecture of the 2007-08 RAPS Speakers Series. Ung is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. About 2 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people died during the 1975-79 genocide, which, when the percentage of the population murdered is considered, makes the communist Khmer Rouge regime among the most lethal in history. Today Ung is a software engineer with degrees from Reed College and Bowling Green. He is a husband, a father of two, president of the CambodianAmerican Community of Oregon, a Rotarian, a Royal Rosarian, and a member of several Portlandarea committees and boards. But in 1975, as the Khmer Rouge closed in, he was a child of about 12 years (he’s not sure when he was born) of a middle-class Cambodian family. Ung told his story in clear, lightly accented English. During the hour-long talk he occasionally stopped for several seconds before continuing. “It’s an emotional story,” he explained, “and sometimes I have to pause. Two million people died. Many of the survivors are getting older, and they take their stories to the grave untold. I have self-nominated myself to be the voice of those 2 million and the survivors who cannot speak.” The day the Khmer Rouge swept into Ung’s town in Battambang province, they quickly set the tone for their regime by shooting a man who, they claimed, had stolen a bicycle. “They said this would set an example,” Ung said. “Cambodia was going to be the most moral country in the world, a utopia.” The next day the Khmer Rouge announced that they were evacuating the city. “‘We’re going to give you one day’,” Ung recalled them saying. “‘And then we start shooting.’ You can imagine the chaos.” The Khmer Rouge sent Ung to join a farm labor group. A food ration consisted of a bowl of rice porridge. “If you poured out the water, you’re lucky if there are two tablespoons of rice,” he said. Executions and torture were commonplace and an important instrument of control. Watching Khmer Rouge guards slowly suffocate a man by tying a plastic bag around his head was “how they controlled you, by getting into your head,” said Ung. “That’s how you’re broken.” By 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and loosened the Khmer Rouge’s grip, Ung had lost 10 family members, including his parents, youngest sister, grandmother, two brothers-in-law, and a nephew, to starvation or execution. Still, he says, “there is nothing special about my story.” He eventually escaped with his sister and brotherin-law to a refugee camp in Thailand, and from there went in San Diego. He arrived in Portland in February 1980.
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