heng sinith, sad stories

Heng Sinith: Photographer During the Pol Pot regime, I always dreamed that if I could make myself invisible or escape to other countries, I would bring lots of food for my villagers, so that they would no longer starve. I was born on April 4,1968. 1 had eight siblings: six brothers and two sisters. Before 1975, 1 lived in Prek Takov village, Khsach Kandal district, Kandal province, three kilometer east of Chroy Changva Bridge. My mother is a weaver and my father is a farmer and carpenter. In 1975, people were moved from the village to a refugee camp at Chroy Changva in order to escape the shelling. The only people left in my village were my father, my older brother and I; we stayed behind to tend cattle and catch fish for my mother to sell. Three of my older brothers were in Phnom Penh (two of them and two of my uncles were killed during the regime). On April 17, I was at Chroy Changva with parents. When the Khmer Rouge emptied the city, my family returned to our home village, which was then called the "fighting village." The unmarried children stayed with our parents, while married ones were evacuated far away. My mother was included in a middle aged group of people who tended crops in fields near the village. My father still worked as a carpenter and was told to make rakes and plow blades in the village. My brothers joined mobile units to build dams and irrigation channels. I was seven at the time and was assigned to tend two cows. In addition, I had to get up at sunrise each day to begin collecting cow dung and Siam weed to make fertilizer for the farm. Once every three days I had to sweep the oxcart road in the village. Sometimes, wre were ordered to work far from the village to build classrooms and farmhouses, to study Khmer language, or to build dikes at night. There were .always tasks for us to do. After transporting earth by hand, we would be told to build dikes, and then to pile hay, and so on. We had two meals a day, at noon and in the evening. In the beginning, we had rice with potatoes. Later, we had only a few bowls of thin rice soup. Everyone was hungry. I became bony thin; my knees were bigger than my waist. I picked everything I saw, like raw banana, jack-fruit, potato, corn, coconut, and rice...l stole everything that could be stolen. So, I have been trying to tell the world about the Khmer Rouge regime. I want to meet a most ferocious murderer who will reveal his experience to me. I want to make photographic records about the lives of those perpetrators; I want them to reveal the truth about their hunger to kill people. I do not want to show the history of their murders, but their lives as spouses and villagers. So far, few perpetrators have been brave enough to show their faces.