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20 - Terror and Trauma in the Cambodian Genocide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

By
Alexander Hinton
Edited by
Laurence J. Kirmayer ,
Robert Lemelson  and
Mark Barad
Alexander Hinton
Affiliation:
Associate Professor Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Robert Lemelson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Mark Barad
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

I continue to think of revenge. But this thought of revenge, it doesn't know how to stop. And we should not have this thought or the matter will grow and keep going on and on for a long time. We should be a person who thinks and acts in accordance with dhamma. [A person who seeks revenge] only creates misery for our society. It is a germ in society. But I continue to think of revenge … The people who killed my brother, who put down his name to get into the truck, are all alive, living in my village. To this day, I still really want revenge. I keep observing them. But, I don't know what to do…. The government forbids it.

– Chlat, whose brother's family was executed by Khmer Rouge

There were many ways to die during Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the genocidal period of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia (1975–1979). Some starved to death. Others died from malnutrition and illness. Many more were executed, often en masse, in a genocide that took the lives of more than 1.7 of Cambodia's 8 million inhabitants (Kiernan, 1996) – almost a quarter of the population. Such numbers are almost incomprehensible, yet they fail to take account of the toll such death and destruction took on the survivors, who suffered the loss of friends and loved ones; struggled on in a world of privation and relentless work; tried to survive for another day in a time in which fear, terror, and trauma were omnipresent; and, after DK, attempted to piece together their fractured lives in a society that had been turned upside down.

Type
Chapter
Information
Understanding Trauma
Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
 , pp. 433 - 450
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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