Old Emotions About Pol Pot Stirred Anew

For Irvine resident Sim Heng, reports of the death of Pol Pot stirred mixed emotions Thursday.

“I feel like he died and didn’t get to pay for his crime,” she said. “I lost my whole family, and I feel that he got off easy. I’m the only one left.”

Pol Pot’s regime is blamed for the deaths of more than a million people in Cambodia in the 1970s. Among those who died from execution, torture, starvation or illness were every member of 32-year-old Heng’s immediate family.

Heng expressed skepticism about the reports that Pol Pot died in his sleep of a heart attack Wednesday in northern Cambodia.

“The general feeling among the Cambodian community is that he is faking his death to avoid punishment or trial,” she said. “A few years ago we received similar news which was not true.”

Heng’s feelings were echoed across Orange County’s Cambodian community. Of the 10,000 Cambodians living here, almost all lost family members.

“The world should know why he did it,” said Orange resident Chea Sok Lim. “We won’t have that now, and I am very angry that he died without any consequences for his actions. He made millions of people suffer unspeakable things, and yet he seems to only say he made a mistake and did not take any punishment for that.”

Lim, who works for the Santa Ana-based organization Cambodian Family Inc. was 18 when he left Cambodia. Though his parents and siblings survived, he lost 33 other relatives, including a grandmother.

“There was a lot of despair,” said Lim, 40. “We felt like we had no hope.”

“We still have the pain when we recall his name,” he said of the notorious Khmer Rouge leader. “We just get so angry. I don’t want to talk about him even now.”

Lim, too, expressed some doubt about details of Pol Pot’s demise.

“It sounds legitimate, but you can never tell,” he said.

Yotheany Pok was only 4 when her family fled Cambodia in 1975. Though the Newport Beach resident has no memories of the atrocities in her native country, she learned of the horrors from her mother, who lost almost all her family.

Pok said her mother suffers from tremendous guilt over having survived, and that burden weighed heavily on her Thursday.

“It’s something she never really talks about,” the daughter said. “But all of the Cambodian people continue to suffer inside for not seeing or hearing Pol Pot admit to his acts of cruelty. He just died and left them with nothing.”

Yen Do, publisher of the Westminster-based Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest circulation Vietnamese-language daily newspaper in the United States, said Pol Pot’s death would allow the healing of the dictator’s victims to truly begin.

“It’s very, very important news for everyone who came from Indochina because this is how we begin the healing process after the genocide,” Do said. “During the last year we heard about Pol Pot all the time, about the trial, about the hunting and the hiding and the escaping, and now people don’t have to think and to talk about him anymore.”

“It’s a relief. . . . Now we can absolve the ghosts of Cambodia.”

Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this report.