Prum Chit: The Absences That Never Heal — A Takeo Province Farmer Speaks of the Khmer Rouge

Prum Chit is 79 years old. He lives in Ba-noy village, Angkanh commune, Prey Kabbas district, Takeo province. Before the Khmer Rouge, he was a farmer. Afterward, he remained a farmer. But between the two, there were four years during which his cousins, his brother-in-law, his uncle, and the head monk of the local pagoda all vanished — taken in the night by the Angkar, for reasons no one ever explained to him.

Illustration photo — Elderly Cambodian farmer in Takeo Province. The individual pictured is not Prum Chit. © AI-generated image for illustrative purposes only

In the history of the Cambodian genocide, there are categories of victims discussed less than others. Not the Phnom Penh intellectuals, nor the officers of General Lon Nol's army, nor the Buddhist monks decimated by revolutionary brigades. The ones discussed least are the farmers — the very people the Pol Pot regime claimed to defend and liberate, in whose name every decision was made, and in whose honor people starved to death in collective cooperatives. Prum Chit is one of them. His story is not spectacular in the way newspapers mean. He was not tortured in a prison. His nails were not torn out. He simply worked, went hungry, and lost people he never saw again.

Collected in October 2025 in the village of Ba-noy, his testimony is one of many gathered across Takeo province by young volunteers in DC-Cam's 'Promoting Democracy and Good Governance' program. These young people travel between villages to sit with the last survivors, listen to what remains of their memories, and set it down before the living archive goes silent for good.

Angkanh Commune, Before

Prum Chit speaks of his village before the regime the way people talk about a world that no longer exists. In Angkanh commune, there was once a learned elder named Doung Ouch — a man of letters who kept palm-leaf manuscripts, those sacred texts that had transmitted the Khmer people's Buddhist memory, astronomical knowledge, medical wisdom, and poetry across centuries. Doung Ouch died before the Khmer Rouge arrived. Perhaps that was a mercy. He did not have to watch his manuscripts burn — because the Khmer Rouge burned libraries, shuttered pagodas, scattered monks, and declared Year Zero of a new humanity without a past.

In the Cambodia of before 1975, Prum Chit led a simple life as a cultivator, governed by the rhythms of rice, the flooding of the Mekong, and religious festivals. It was a hard life, but an ordered one — framed by institutions: the pagoda, the extended family, the village elders. That framework was about to be dismantled, piece by piece.

1975: The Angkar Uproots Everything

In April 1975, when Khmer Rouge forces seized the entire country, Prum Chit's life was upended like millions of others. But unlike the residents of Phnom Penh or the larger cities, he did not face the great deportation from the capital. What he faced was forced displacement within the province itself: the Angkar transferred him from his native Angkanh commune to Angkor Borei district, still within Takeo province.

That detail, unremarkable at first glance, reveals a central mechanism of the regime: even the farmers — whom Khmer Rouge propaganda presented as the masters of the new agrarian society — were uprooted, redistributed, and assigned residence in villages that were not their own. The goal was to sever every pre-existing network of solidarity: family, village, clan. To leave nothing standing except one's relationship to the Angkar.

"I was no longer living in my home village. The Angkar had evacuated me to live in Angkor Borei district."

Forced Labor, Hunger, Exhaustion

Like virtually every able-bodied adult, Prum Chit was assigned to the regime's great agricultural work sites: rice cultivation, dam construction, canal digging. Democratic Kampuchea intended to transform the country into a vast irrigated granary capable of exporting four tonnes of rice per hectare to fund the revolution. It was an agronomic fantasy divorced from all technical reality, enforced through forced labor, without machines, without fertilizers, without expertise.

Working days stretched without clear limits. During the flooding season — the monsoon that each year submerges the plains of Takeo under slow brown water — brigades cut grass in flooded rice fields, standing knee-deep in water, bent under the humid heat, from dawn until an hour Prum Chit does not specify but which, in all similar testimonies from the region, regularly stretched well past nightfall.

Food was systematically insufficient. The collective ration — a few spoonfuls of rice gruel from a large communal cauldron, boiled banana stalks, papaya leaves — did not compensate for the energy expended at the work sites. Chronic hunger was the ordinary condition. It settled in like a permanent state, quietly exhausting, weakening bodies and dulling minds.

"The events I lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime are my most bitter and painful memories."

The Loss That Cannot Be Borne: The Disappeared

What haunts Prum Chit most at 79, more than exhausting labor or constant hunger, is the disappearance of the people he loved. He does not remember the exact dates — somewhere in late 1974 or early 1975, in the chaotic period surrounding the Khmer Rouge's complete seizure of power. Men from his family were taken. Cousins. His brother-in-law. His uncle, Prum Pheng — the shared surname a marker of the clan solidarity common to Khmer rural communities — and the head abbot of Ba-noy pagoda.

The Angkar took them. With no formal accusation that Prum Chit was ever made aware of, no process, no possibility of return. He did not see them die. That is precisely what his testimony conveys with quiet, clinical precision: he did not witness the executions. He learned no details. He simply came to know that his loved ones had vanished — 'taken away to be killed unjustly,' in his words — and he never saw them again.

"I did not see the killings with my own eyes. But the loss of my family members became a deep psychological wound and a shock that haunts me to this day."

This form of suspended grief — without bodies, without a location, without a certain date — is one of the most traumatizing specificities of Khmer Rouge violence. Thousands of Cambodian families share the same void: you know someone is dead, but not where, or how, or precisely when. The pagoda of Ba-noy, whose head abbot was also taken, represents an additional loss of a symbolic nature: it was the spiritual heart of the community, the collective memory made stone and prayer.

After: Silence and Reconstruction

When liberation came in January 1979, Prum Chit returned to Ba-noy. He married Van Chheang, now 77 years old. Together they had four children — two sons and two daughters. One child became a teacher, something Prum Chit speaks of with visible pride in his testimony. In a country where the Angkar had driven out schoolteachers, shuttered schools, burned books, and banned education, seeing one of his children pass knowledge on to others is its own form of revenge against history.

Ba-noy village has changed since 1979. Concrete roads now crisscross it in all directions, though some stretches remain difficult in the rainy season. The commune has grown. Young people leave for the city or abroad. Prum Chit follows the news on the radio each morning — national affairs, border tensions, the world's upheavals.

At 79, he has begun to forget. Memory slips away in places. But the Khmer Rouge years — the names of the vanished, the faces that did not come back, the hunger in his legs and the endless grass-cutting in the flood waters — those he does not forget.

A Village, a Generation, a Series of Testimonies

Prum Chit's testimony is part of a larger whole. In the same DC-Cam series published in January 2026, several residents of Prey Kabbas district tell their own stories. Ti Trop, 67, from the neighboring village of Samdech Poan, describes the mobile work brigades and rice gruel so diluted there was not a single grain left to find. Pen Nhor, 80, a former soldier, recounts the deaths of his parents and sister in Battambang — carried off by hunger and forced labor. Sim Ry, 65, tells how she stole rice to bring to her mother and nearly faced execution for it, saved only by the chance recognition of an old acquaintance among the guards.

These stories echo without resembling one another. Each bears the mark of a singular life, a specific geography, a particular loss. Together, they form what DC-Cam calls the 'historical memory of victims' — an oral archive that, if not collected now, will disappear with the last survivors in the next ten or fifteen years.

"I want the next generation to clearly understand the history of the Khmer Rouge regime. Remembering is not about holding onto resentment — it is to ensure this never happens again on Cambodian soil."

Editorial Note

This testimony was collected on October 2, 2025, in Ba-noy village, Angkanh commune, Prey Kabbas district, Takeo province, by Hay Sokneang, a Cambodian youth volunteer from Takeo province, as part of DC-Cam's 'Promoting Democracy and Good Governance through Youth Volunteer Leadership in Social Activities' project. It was published on January 19, 2026, in the 'Unforgettable Life Story' series (DC-Cam, Takeo Documentation Center). The photograph accompanying this article is an illustration and does not depict Prum Chit. Sources: dccam.org