Survivor from Cambodia

Press, 30 April 1988, Page 25

Survivor from Cambodia

Stay Mive, My eon. By Pin Yathay with John Man. Bloomsbury, 1987. 240 PP- fs& (Reviewed by Glen Perkinson) The author was woken early (by the sound of thousands of people streaming through city streets, burdened with assorted possessions. In the distance the noise of gunfire and war raged across the countryside. On April 17, 1975, Pin Yathay and 17 members of his family confronted this situation. The Communist Khmer Rouge had entered Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penn.

Little was left of the familiar, civilised community that the Yathay family had called home for a lifetime. Aware security was under threat, because of civil unrest for months beforehand. Yathay listened eagerly for the scant news or rumour that might inform him this migration really was the end product of the defeat of an oppressive right-wing leadership that the nation has awaited.

Ordered to evacuate with his family to the already liberated countryside until the last of the fighting was over and the new, supposedly fair, administration had taken complete control, Yathay gathered relations and enough food, clothing and goods to last just a few days, and headed out of the city with thousands of his-compatriots, leaving the gunfire and fighting behind.

Apparently, the threat of continued aggression aimed at overthrowing the left-w-ing regime had to be eliminated before the population could return home to a more equitable life. But into what were they being herded?

More than two years later Pin Yathay collapsed with exhaustion — riddled with disease and racked by malnutrition — over the Cambodian border and into Thailand and freedom. His entire family was dead or missing — either through rampant disease, or as statistics in the regime of genocide wrought by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Yathay’s book, dedicated to his missing son he and his wife. Any. had

(•- || i * '| ” ' ■i, to abandon before they attempted escape; details the road he and his family; took, along with millions of Cambodians! after the forced evacuation of Phnom Penn. I It was a road to nothing. Patriotism, intellectual life jof any kind, conversation, humour — all these things were to be of the past; eradicated by their hellish persecution by the Khmer Rouge. Their only preoccupation was; to survive; their only consolations were the predictions of the Buddhist philosopher Puth. At times it appears far fetched. The luck and chances that permitted Yathay finally to reach Thailand and freedom happen as though guided by God (or Buddha in his case). No doubt' a degree of fortune was necessary to overcome the obstacles that allowed \ only a handful to escape the genocide which claimed as many as four million Cambodians. However, it is (absorbing reading, and “Stay Alive, My Son” has already been acclaimed overseas as one of the * most important human rights stories of the 1980 s. I