Further, “the ECCC is not just a court. It is part of a process of coming to terms with Cambodia’s past, both personally and historically.”
Tek rose at 6 a.m. to catch a United Nations bus that took her to the tribunal, where she worked on an outreach team that explained to victims of the Khmer Rouge their legal rights. She helped those who applied as civil parties against the regime through a complicated process that required highly specific documentation.
Victim participation “is something very new,” Tek said. “Imagine if all the millions of Jewish people were able to sue Hitler.”
Tek’s work in the southeast Asian country gave her something all her research and even her mother’s, grandmother’s, and aunts’ own stories had not: a full perspective of the Cambodian genocide.
Tek’s parents had not returned to their native country since they left 30 years ago. Nor had her grandmother, Sany Nhem, until she accompanied Tek last year. Nhem had lost so much under the Khmer Rouge: her home, the properties she had accumulated as a real estate investor, family and friends.
Now the 81-year old wanted to introduce her granddaughter to her relatives in Cambodia. She wanted them to look after Tek.
Nhem had watched the tribunals on Cambodian television, beamed into the large Bristow, Va., home where three generations of the family live: Nhem; Tek; and Nhem’s daughter, Sophal Monh Cheang, and Cheang’s husband and children.
Nhem never imagined – 30 years ago or three – that her granddaughter would seek some measure of justice on behalf of Cambodians, she said through a translator.
If a new place can feel like home, Cambodia did.
Tek visited relatives she had known only through long-distance telephone calls. She watched as her grandmother reconnected with family she had not seen in decades, watched as Nhem’s eyes filled with tears as she looked on what remained of the house she had built as a young woman. All that was left were the pillars of the gates.