Read Survival in the Killing Fields Online
Authors: Haing Ngor
To many
barang
s, or foreigners, the clearest proof of Cambodia’s incomplete recovery was the failure to put the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for genocide.
Haing Ngor was an outspoken supporter of war crimes trials. He gave time and money to Cambodian human rights groups, but he had supported the Hun Sen regime as the best way of preventing the Khmer
Rouge return to power. However, Hun Sen, the former mid-level Khmer Rouge operative, never went all-out to crush his former bosses militarily, when the old Khmer Rouge leaders had been reduced to
controlling a small western part of the country. Many of Hun Sen’s closest political allies and military commanders were former Khmer Rouge, too.
From time to time Haing sat down with a journalist he knew in Phnom Penh, a young and gifted American freelancer named Nate Thayer, who spoke the Khmer language and who had assigned
himself the difficult task of making contact with Khmer Rouge leaders in the forests. (Thayer’s later interview with Pol Pot was one of the great scoops in late 20th century journalism.)
Haing questioned Thayer at length, never smiling, drilling for information about the Khmer Rouge that hadn’t been distorted by the gossip mill or by propaganda of one sort or another. But
Haing wasn’t just worried about a possible Khmer Rouge return to power by force. ‘He was struggling with a contradiction,’ Thayer told me later.
What Haing was starting to fear, Thayer and I believe, was that he might have made a serious mistake throwing in his lot with the Hun Sen regime when he returned to Cambodia. So
many cadre were defecting from the Khmer Rouge and quietly joining the infrastructure of the Hun Sen regime that the idea that the regime could prevent a Khmer Rouge return was, in Thayer’s
view, ‘farcical.’ Furthermore, by declaring his support for Hun Sen’s CPP earlier, Haing had alienated the other political factions, the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC, ‘who hated him
with a vitriolic passion’, as Thayer put it.
‘Toward the end, he had enemies everywhere, and nobody he could trust,’ says Thayer. ‘He got stepped on big-time and he turned inward. He became very low
profile.’
By early 1996, Haing’s movie roles had started drying up. The last major role he had had was as a North Vietnamese in Oliver Stone’s film,
Heaven and Earth
,
released to cinemas in 1993.
He had enough money, because of his investments in Cambodia, and he was often doing informal business deals with friends who wanted to get around one kind of government bureaucracy
or another. But he wasn’t particularly adept at business, and there were people angry with him because of deals that fell through. He had his enemies, but he also had friends, and there were
people who admired him for speaking out. Most importantly, he was good to Sophia, who didn’t want anything to do with the politics of any of her uncles, and who only wanted a happy, normal
family life.
In February, 1996, Sophia travelled to Cambodia with Haing to visit her younger brother and older sister, who had survived the Khmer Rouge years. (Ever the peacemaker, Sophia
visited her uncle Chan Sarun, too.) Sophia’s younger brother (Haing’s father’s favourite grandson in Chapter 5) wanted to come to the US, and Haing helped arrange a visa by using
his influence at the US embassy in Phnom Penh.
The next day Haing returned to LA, with Sophia scheduled to follow a few days later. Sophia telephoned once and got him on his cell phone. When she called him again there was no
answer. Worried, she telephoned a neighbour in the little apartment building and was told that Haing Ngor had been murdered.
Sophia flew to LA, where she was joined by Adam, who flew in from New York. She went to the morgue and identified his body, and then to his apartment. There were policemen all over
the place, regular LAPD cops who didn’t speak Khmer and who didn’t have the slightest idea how to gather information from Asian immigrants without scaring them into silence. The TV
stations and newspapers theorized that Khmer Rouge hit men had assassinated Haing, which was unlikely; if Khmer Rouge loyalists had wanted to kill Haing Ngor, it would have been easy for them to do
it in Phnom Penh, where there were political murders every few months. But the other Cambodian factions were angry at him, too. The most likely explanation for Haing Ngor’s murder seemed to
be
kum
. Delayed revenge by a fellow Cambodian for a failed romance, or a business deal gone sour.
There was a funeral ceremony for Haing at the Rose Hill cemetery in early March, 1996. Sam Waterston spoke; a good-sized crowd of Cambodians and Hollywood people were there. Haing
Ngor was buried in the tuxedo he had worn when he won his Oscar award.
The question of justice for Haing Ngor was not going to be simple.
A myth had sprung up in the Cambodian community that Haing had a vast fortune, and Cambodians began coming out of the woodwork laying claims to his estate. There was even a
Cambodian woman with a Las Vegas marriage certificate claiming to be Haing Ngor’s wife. Sophia had never heard of the woman before and asked her if she was Haing’s wife, why
hadn’t she shown up for the funeral?
The Cambodians hoping to get rich from Haing’s estate were disappointed. At the end of his life, most of Haing’s assets had been in Cambodia, and his brother Chan Sarun
took them over. In the US, with the court’s consent, Haing’s American holdings went to pay lawyers for defending his estate against the frivolous claims.
When the quarrelling was over, there was no money left in the estate, not a single cent.
In Los Angeles, an investigation led to arrests in the killing of Haing Ngor. A trial got underway.
According to the prosecutor, Haing had spent most of his last day, an unusually cold Sunday 25 February 1996, in Long Beach with a friend. They had lunch, went to the friend’s
house, watched basketball on TV, laughed and joked with other friends, and had dinner. Snapshots taken then show a small bright spot on the inside of Haing’s shirt collar, perhaps a link of
the gold chain that held the locket of Huoy, perhaps not. Haing left Long Beach around 7.40 p.m. and drove to his apartment building east of L.A.’s Chinatown. He was driving an older-model
gold Mercedes. He pulled into the alleyway off Beaudry Street, parked the Mercedes in its space in the carport, shut the engine off and opened the door.
The prosecutor said that Haing had driven right past three members of an Asian street gang, the Oriental LazyBoyz: Tak Sun Tan, also known as ‘Rambo’, Jason Chan, known
as ‘Cloudy’, and Indra Lim, ‘Solo’. They were addicted to crack cocaine and they had just finished smoking the last of it in the alley as he drove past. They wanted more
crack, and to buy more crack they needed money. As the prosecutor told the jurors:
As Dr Ngor turns off his engine, the three defendants approach him. They are planning to rob him. To get money for more cocaine. And defendant Chan has a gun. A 9mm
semi-automatic handgun. And he’s ready to use it.
The defendants first demand Dr Ngor’s watch. He gives it to them. No problem. But then the defendants see Dr Ngor’s gold chain. The chain with the locket, and the
picture of his wife. The picture that means everything to him. The defendants demand the chain. The gold would give them plenty of money to buy more cocaine. But Dr Ngor refuses. After all he
had been through, Dr Ngor is not going to surrender his wife’s picture, the only thing he had left, to these three gangsters. He just isn’t gong to do it.
So Jason Chan, Cloudy, high on cocaine, shoots him. He aims his gun at Dr Ngor and he pulls the trigger. The gun fires. The first bullet passes through Dr Ngor’s right
leg. It misses the bone and comes out the other side of his leg. It is non-fatal. But the second bullet is much more lethal.
Defendant Chan fires his second bullet directly into the side of Dr Ngor’s chest. The bullet passes through Dr Ngor’s left lung, then tears into his heart and severs
his aorta, one of the main blood vessels of the heart. Blood pours into his chest. The bullet continues on, blasting a hole in Dr Ngor’s right lung. Dr Haing Ngor is dying.
As Dr Ngor gasps for breath, the defendants snatch the chain from his neck. They then flee on foot, running down the alleyway from the murder scene. In their haste to escape,
they overlook $2,900 in a jacket on the back seat of Dr Ngor’s car.
Dr Ngor, although mortally wounded, tries to pursue the defendants. But he is too weak. He manages to get part way out of his car, then collapses on the pavement, alone.
Sophia sat in the courtroom every day, along with Jack Ong, the executive director of the Dr Haing S. Ngor Foundation. The trial lasted five months, with separate juries for each
defendant. The judge ruled that a statement Jason Chan made to the police was inadmissible evidence, but even so, the three defendants were found guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree
robbery. Chan, the gunman, got life without parole and the other two got twenty-five years to life. They all had had previous convictions.
When the verdicts were announced in the courtroom, the police detectives and the prosecution team were jubilant. Sophia and Jack Ong were relieved, and glad that it was over, but
they had quiet doubts. Maybe it was true that the defendants were high on crack and had killed Haing as the prosecutor said. Maybe it was a bungled robbery, and the gang members had fled the scene
without even searching Haing’s pockets. At least there had been due process and a trial, which usually happens in America, and hardly ever happens in Cambodia.
But the unsettled feeling lingered.
The doubt was partly due to another announcement from Cambodia the same day the Haing Ngor murder trial ended. Pol Pot had died in the forests near the Thai border. The old Khmer
Rouge leader, responsible for the death of numberless Cambodians, drifted off peacefully, surrounded by a few followers.
Was the timing coincidence or
kama
? It wasn’t easily explained, a mass murderer dying in peace while Haing Ngor died at a murderer’s hand. If it was
kama
,
it was the complicated kind, to be resolved in future incarnations, as the souls of these men came into the world again, burdened by their deeds in previous lives.
Few Cambodians believed that Haing Ngor was killed in a drug-related robbery.
If the attack on Haing was a robbery, they asked, why had the gang members failed to go through his pockets? Did they miss the $2,900 in his coat pocket on the back seat of the car
because they surprised themselves when they shot Haing, and decided to run away?
And finally: How did the gang members know that Haing had a heavy gold chain? He always wore it next to his skin, under a T-shirt and a collared shirt. He never wore it as an
ornament on the outside of his shirt. Normally the gold chain and locket weren’t in sight, so how had the killers known they were there?
‘There are some questions we don’t have answers to,’ the lead detective on the case for the Los Angeles police department admitted.
The gold chain and locket were never recovered.
For more survivor stories and information documenting
Khmer Rouge atrocities, please visit the Digital Archive of
Cambodian Holocaust Survivors at:
http://www.cybercambodia.com/dachs
and the Documentation Center of Cambodia at
For more information on Dr Haing S. Ngor,
and to learn how to make donations to schools
and other worthwhile causes in his memory,
please visit the website of the Haing S. Ngor Foundation,
a charity based in Los Angeles, California:
Endnotes
1
. In Cambodia, as in most Asian Countries, the family name goes first, followed by the individual’s name. So I am Ngor Haing in
Asia but Haing Ngor in the West.
2
. In Cambodia, if we feel close to older people we call them ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt,’ whether or not they are actually
related. If I felt close to a male my own age, I would call him ‘brother.’
3
. Below Phnom Penh, the continuation of the Tonle Sap River is known as the Bassac.
4
. Note that two unrelated words have a similar sound: Angkor was the great Cambodian empire of centuries ago, but Angka was the name of
the Khmer Rouge ruling organization.
5
. Long afterward I learned that the army officers were driven away into the countryside. In a ‘rest’ break they climbed down
from the trucks, but the trucks suddenly drove away, and Khmer Rouge in concealment opened fire. Almost all the Lon Nol officers died.
6
. As I later learned, the UNHCR had a few good people in Thailand. My favourite was Mark Brown, an energetic, capable Englishman who was
at Sakeo and later at Khao-I-Dang. But my first impression was basically right. As a whole the UNHCR was extremely disappointing – a timid, incompetent bureaucracy that didn’t do its
job. It paid retail prices for huge truckloads of food and allowed corruption to flourish. It didn’t protect the safety of refugees on the border or even in the refugee camps inside Thailand.
When the UNHCR won the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize, I couldn’t believe it. I thought it had to be a mistake. So did most people who had seen the UNHCR’s performance in Thailand. Since then,
many of its functions have been taken over by the UN Border Relief Organization, or UNBRO, which does a much better job.
7
. Since then, I have attempted to get the US government to start an investigation. It is a delicate business. On one hand, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) presumably wants to catch people who lied to it and who are war criminals. On the other hand, INS officials could use an investigation as an excuse for
stopping all Cambodian refugees from coming to the United States. As this is written, about twenty thousand innocent people who want to come to the United States are stuck in Khao-I-Dang because
the INS has falsely accused them of Khmer Rouge associations. The INS has tightened its rules so much that Dith Pran himself could not come to the United States if he were a refugee today.