Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 64

1970—

Worth My Being Alive

By the time she was eight years old, Loung Ung’s parents and two of her siblings were among the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Prior to the Khmer takeover in 1975, Ung and her family lived a comfortable life in the capital city of Phnom Penh, where her father was a senior police officer. Because of their wealth and her father’s rank, Ung’s family was targeted by Pol Pot’s thugs. They were forced to evacuate Phnom Penh, her father was taken away by soldiers and never seen again, and Ung was put in a training camp for child soldiers. She finally escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand with the aid of her older brother Meng.

Ung was one of the lucky refugees who managed to get out of war-torn Southeast Asia. Through the auspices of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, she eventually wound up with a foster family in Vermont when she was ten years old. During the next few years she attended high school, living more or less like a typical American teen except for recurring nightmares about her ordeal in Cambodia.

After graduating from college, Ung returned to Cambodia to be reunited with the members of her family who survived the Pol Pot years. The devastation she encountered there, even fifteen years after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated, horrified her. She was especially struck by the number of adults and children she met who were maimed from stepping on undetonated landmines left over from the war years. An estimated four to six million of them are still scattered just beneath the ground throughout Cambodia.

Shortly after her visit to her homeland, Ung, determined to do something about what she witnessed there, got involved with the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. For several years she toured the United States, speaking at colleges and universities, churches, and other venues to tell her own story and to raise support for a multilateral agreement to impose a ban on the use of landmines. (Several nations throughout the world have since signed onto an anti-landmine pledge. The United States isn’t one of them.) In 2000, she published a best-selling memoir, First They Killed My Father, which described the Pol Pot years; raised awareness about Cambodian genocide, child soldiers, poverty, AIDS, and child prostitution; and served as a vehicle for her anti-landmine activism.

For Ung, her participation in the campaign to ban landmines is “the chance to do something that’s worth my being alive”: helping to heal Cambodia’s wounds and to rid other countries of explosive remnants from past war that continue to maim innocent men, women, and children. But her activism does something else as well. “The more I tell people,” she says, “the less the nightmares haunt me. The more people listen to me, the less I hate.”