NAME: CLASS:

THEME: Patriotism TOPIC: Justice SKILL: Summary Writing

Comprehension text
(About Youk Chhang’s suffering during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime and his determined efforts to
bring justice to the Cambodian people who had suffered during the dark era.)
1 It was autumn of 1995, and Youk Chhang drove angrily down the road. He was finally
about to meet the man responsible for the deaths of his brother-in-law and niece and the
disappearance of his uncle. Chhoung had been the head of a village where families from Phnom
Penh had been forcefully relocated during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. Under his
brutal rule, Chhang and his family lived in extreme poverty. Chhang, in his teens, watched 5
helplessly as his brother-in-law and niece died of starvation. Later, an uncle had gone missing too.
2 Now, almost two decades later, the tall, well-built Cambodian-American was ready to beat
up Chhoung, if needed. However, he found an old, skinny man sitting bare-chested outside a small
house, weaving a basket. The former chief was no longer the imposing figure of Chhang’s 10
memory. ‘I lived in your village during Pol Pot,’ Chhang told him. But the chief could not
remember.
3 Chhang was determined to uncover the truth about those years and lay those memories
of his and thousands of Cambodians to rest. He had only a black-and-white snapshot from his
childhood, taken at the wedding of his sister, Tithsorye, in Phnom Penh in 1968. He was the only 15
one alive of eight people there a decade later. Chhang wanted to document the Khmer Rouge era
and provide an unvarnished record of what happened to provide vital evidence for prosecutions.
Between 1975 and 1979, approximately 1.7 million Cambodians (over 20% of the population) had
lost their lives. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, had died in 1998. But none of the surviving
senior leaders had been tried or punished for their atrocities. In fact, many lived openly and freely 20
in Cambodia.
4 Youk Chhang’s extraordinary journey began when the invading Vietnamese army drove Pol
Pot from power in 1979. His father had died when he was a boy. At 17, he returned to Phnom
Penh with his mother and other surviving relatives. As the dismal capital offered little hope,
Chhang sneaked into Thailand and reached Khao-I-Dang, a refugee camp near the Cambodian 25
border. He learnt English by playing Scrabble; and in 1987, aged 26, he was accepted for
resettlement in the United States. He worked, making venetian blinds in Dallas, polished his
English and joined the University of Texas to study political science. Here, he joined a campaign to
persuade the US government to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to trial, taking part in demonstrations
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and handing out leaflets. But, few people listened.
5 After graduating in September 1991, he went to Cambodia for almost two years, working
as an electoral officer for United Nations-sponsored elections. In 1994, Yale University obtained
funding to document the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings and hired Chhang as its field representative.
Leaving his wife and two children in Texas, Chhang reached Phnom Penh again in January 1995.
He helped set up the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), staffed by local volunteers 35
and Western scholars. They worked to find documents – minutes of meetings, orders,
biographies, prison records, confessions, execution lists. It was a daunting task. There were many
people with blood on their hands. Worse still, in the 16 years since the Khmer Rouge was ousted
from power, truckloads of documents had been destroyed, many files were stored haphazardly in
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government offices, while in the National Library and Archives, documents were faded and
crumbling, damaged by insects, tropical heat and humidity.
6 Chhang and his team progressed slowly, until they located a 100 000-page archival
history of Santebal, the Khmer Rouge’s secret police. Prime Minister Hun Sen soon handed over
‘the million documents’ lists of Khmer Rouge killings and losses verified by one million
thumbprints. With stability returning to Cambodia, politicians were talking of bringing Khmer 45
Rouge leaders to trial. Based mainly on Chhang’s submissions, legal experts decided there was 4
enough evidence and witnesses to begin the judicial process.
7 Chhang was not intimidated by his enemies, who renounced him as an imperialist puppet
 and threatened him. The legal process too, was bogged down by endless bickering, causing the
UN to pull out of talks in 2002. Desperate, he wrote to the opinion page of the New York Times 50
and implored contacts and supporters for help. So many voices were raised in both the US and
Cambodia that the UN resumed negotiations. DC-Cam researches then traversed Cambodia,
recording oral histories, compiling lists of potential witnesses and gathering testimonies on the
dark era.
8 This year, five senior Khmer Rouge leaders are expected to be tried by special tribunal, a 55
logical conclusion to Youk Chhang’s work t show the Cambodian people how justice can be done.
When the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders is finally over; Chhang wants some time to rest and
reflect. ‘When one of them in jail, my mission will be accomplished,’ he said.
Adapted from ‘Youk Chhang’s Journey to Justice’,
Reader’s Digest, 2010

Based on the passage given, write a summary on what Chhang suffered during Pol Pot’s regime, how he went
about bringing justice to the Cambodian people who had suffered during the Khmer Rouge era and the
problems he faced in his task.

Credit will be given for use of own words but care must be taken not to change the original meaning.

Your summary must:

 be in continuous writing form (not in note form)
 use materials from line 2 to line 57
 not be longer than 130 words, including the 10 words given below

Begin your summary as follows:

During the Khmer Rouge era, Chhang’s family suffered under Chhoung’s …