Music Blared from loudspeakers
Posted date : 07-04-2010
Source : Youth For Peace
Number of Visitors : 771 
Batheay pagoda
A 62-year-old Buddhist layman, Yim Smoa is talking loudly against the sound of the loudspeaker blaring 1960s-love songs nearby. He is talking about what happened at Wat Batheay pagoda in Kampong Cham province during the Khmer Rouge regime.
“During the killings, the Khmer Rouge played music from the loudspeaker so that the sound of the speakers overwhelmed the screams of the victims,” said the Buddhist layman. During the Pol Pot regime Yin Smoa worked and lived with 20 other families near the pagoda. He did various tasks according to the orders of the Khmer Rouge. He made whetstones, planted rice, made palm juice and sometimes cooked for the Khmer Rouge.
During the Pol Pot regime the pagoda was used as a security office where the victims were detained, interrogated and finally killed in the graveyard in front of the pagoda. Most of the victims were those who served in the Lon Nol government and those who were arrested in the Khmer Rouge east zone which is now Prey Vean, Svay Rieng, Kampong Cham and a part of Kandal province. After the Khmer Rouge were driven out of Phnom Penh in 1979, people and monks started digging up graves, taking the remains and keeping them as evidence of the Khmer Rouge regime. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, there are around 500 pits which around 10,000 victims were buried near this security office.
Not all the pits were exhumed. Nevertheless, one cannot find any more remains in the ground since the burial ground has turned into farmland and the unearthed remains have decomposed. The excavated bones and skulls are now stored in the new concrete stupa built in 2002 by the monks, villagers and Cambodian-Americans who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and are now living in the United States. The new stupa contains four shelves on which the skulls are displayed, while the bones rest on the floor. On the left and right interior walls of the stupa are paintings depicting how the Khmer Rouge killed the people. “The pictures are not from anyone who survived this place. They depict how the Khmer Rouge generally tortured and killed people. It was like in these pictures,” said Yim Smoa.
Keeping the remains is not only to make the next generation aware of what happened during the Khmer Rouge time, but also to have a place to perform religious ceremonies for the victims to be reborn.
Location: Batheay village, Batheay commune, Batheay district, Kampong Cham province
Distance: Around 50 kilometers northeast of Phnom Penh
Victims: 10,000 (source: DC-Cam)
Extracted from:
-Diary 2010, Stories from the Ground “Music Blared from loudspeakers”.
