By Aubrey Belford, Kampong Trach, Cambodia
The Australian
SCHOOLTEACHER Bin Cheat has already had his lesson on the Khmer Rouge.
As a six-year-old, he saw Pol Pot's army roll into his village in Cambodia's scrappy southern countryside. Fascinated by the rare sight of a car, he trundled up to a tyre as the men stood distracted, unscrewed the cap and let out a hiss of air. Moments later he was dragged and bound, set, like many others, for death by bludgeoning.
"They tied my arms behind my back and stuffed me in a sack. I'm lucky that one of the neighbourhood women begged with them for so long that they let me go," Bin Cheat says with a laugh.
Many older Cambodians remember the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. Up to two million people were killed through executions, starvation and forced labour as the ultra-communist regime attempted to create an agrarian utopia, while erasing the history and memory of a people.
For younger generations of children, that forgetting has continued, with the four years of the Khmer Rouge regime left off the school curriculum.
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