Todd Pitman reports for The Associated Press:
‘It was an extraordinary act of defiance, and it was extraordinarily risky. But all he did was take out a pen, and write. Nearly 40 years ago, hunched on the floor of the wood-and-leaf hut he was forced to live in away from his children, Cambodian school inspector Poch Younly kept a secret diary vividly recounting the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime whose extreme experiment in social engineering took the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians from overwork, medical neglect, starvation and execution.
Acutely aware that he could be killed if discovered, Younly hid the diary inside a clay vase. In those dark days, when religion and schools were banned and anyone deemed educated was a threat, he had no right to own so much as a pen and paper. “Why is it that I have to die here like a cat or a dog … without any reason, without any meaning?” he wrote in the spiral-bound notebook’s last pages. Four decades later, that question still haunts Cambodia.’
Filed under: Asia & Oceania, Cambodia, History
