Cambodia
I am among those people who suffered from the torture during the years of 1975-79. The Khmer Rouge took over the Khmer Empire in 1975 as Democratic Kampichea, ending a 600-year monarchy. The leader Pol Pot swiftly placed the entire population into rural communes, where death was the penalty for disobeying orders. I used to live in constant fear and pain because of the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge gorilla took over they did not start to do any killing yet. However, they didn't hesitate in making my whole family work for them 24 hours a day without giving us a chance to rest. Each day, I slept about one to two hours at most. When I was a little boy at the age of eight, I use to get up at one o'clock in the morning to go to the barn and herd the cows. I also had to go to the rice field and pick up loose crop after harvest, to the barns and to take out the cow manure. My father was very surprised and happy with my ability to handle the workload so he gave me a Garuda patch. Garuda was a mythical bird that was a sign of courage. At that time, I worked and work, and I never received ample sleep. Their reason for our constant work was we needed to produce more food or our country might fall into a state of famine.
I remember that one time an old man at the age of 70 in my Poumm of town was executed because he didn't want to get up one night. Once, my mother went out to the rice field to work, and she caught one big fish. I always had to sleep with a certain unattainable feeling of horror. They threatened that the next time they caught my family cheating on them, they will execute us. My mother took the fish back home to cook for the family and one of the Khmer Rouge leaders who lived in the same Poumm or town as us almost took my parents away to execute them. Pol Pot adopted a policy of isolationism because of his unwillingness to modernize. When I awoke in the morning the usual irrational workload and threats of torture greeted me by whipping or beating. My health was so bad that I always suffered from all kinds of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition, and more. Between 1976-79 we traveled across many Provinces. I always prayed to Lord Buddha that my nightmare would end soon, but my call to him was never been answered. There was never a point in our long workdays that I could relax and unwind. Then, at the end of 1975, after we worked so hard for them and they decided that they had had enough of my family and the other nine family in the area, they decided to force us out of the area, which according to them was execution. These ruthless men never chose their victims, but just like the wild animals, they killed anyone, anything that they could get their hands on. At that time, we really wanted to get away from that area, but we couldn't escape because if we tried to do so, they would try to kill us on the account of being traitors, and that we didn't care about our country. Luckily, upon arriving, we noticed that the non-communist allies arrived and the two forces fought each other there.
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