"لقد كنا هنا من قبل": شهادة عن الإبادة الجماعية في فلسطين من ناجي من الإبادة الجماعية الكمبودية

I was conceived during genocide and born into war. Fleeing Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh in 1975, my family found refuge in Khao I Dang camp, where I was born in 1980. We were farmers and laborers from the northwest province of Battambang, close to the Thai-Cambodian border. Here, the United Nations set up multiple camps for the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

After World War II, the United States developed the “domino theory,” a foreign policy concept based on the idea that if one country in a region became communist, its neighbors would inevitably fall like a row of dominoes.”¹ The rise of communism in non-Western countries was viewed as a direct threat to the development of liberal Western democratic capitalism. This imperialist logic justified the U.S. invasion of Vietnam in 1965, leading to a long and costly war against the communist North. U.S. bombings made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita, while U.S.-backed forces conducted clandestine operations in Cambodia. The U.S. withdrew its forces in 1975, leaving untold devastation and conditions ripe for genocide in its wake. History books called this conflict the “Vietnam War,” but we know it, feel it, and remember it as the “American War

My family and I resettled in Revere, Massachusetts, a gateway city for new immigrants. I grew up as a first-generation immigrant in a working-class refugee community in the 1980s and 1990s. We lived through a period of growing economic inequality fueled by neoliberal globalization, a cascading War on Drugs with far-reaching consequences, and an unprecedented expansion of the carceral state. Faced with populist violence in the streets, institutional racism in the schools, and neglect from highly traumatized parents and elders, the first wave of Southeast Asian youth formed gangs for protection and a sense of chosen family.

Despite how they were constructed by racist imaginations, these gangs were community formations that sheltered Southeast Asian young people from the harsh realities of living in a racial capitalist society that viewed us as reminders of a war the U.S. lost. These gangs provided mutual aid to Southeast Asian families and individuals. They gave us access to housing and peer support, and collected funds to help with funeral expenses, stepping in for the systematic failure of organized care by the state and its refugee resettlement program. But as these gangs grew as unauthorized forms of organized kinship, they became the target of the police which operated in collusion with the carceral forces of U.S. schools.2 I watched friends funneled into the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. To make sense of the world and the violence around me, I channeled my despair and rage into community organizing. I focused my energy on fighting back against the very systems that create refugees like me.

My community organizing experiences gave me a certain clarity about the world that I lacked in childhood. In 1998, I began studying at Brown University, aiming to transform this emotional and psychic clarity into a vocabulary to better equip me as an organizer. I became deeply involved in campus activism, fighting for need-blind admissions, fair wages for university workers, increased enrollment of Providence residents at Brown, and an Ethnic Studies program focused on anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. We took over University Hall and staged direct actions to force Brown to address our demands and its history of racist exclusion, violence, and subjugation. After facing retaliation from the administration and extreme exhaustion from trying to survive as a queer, working-class refugee in an Ivy League institution, I left Brown after my third year, bitter and burned out.

For the next two decades, Providence became my social, political, and organizing base. I built organizations that stood against racist state police violence and the cruelty of immigration enforcement, especially in the post-9/11 era. Immigrants and refugees faced increased racialized surveillance and suspicion, leading to more detentions and deportations. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the eruption of the second Intifada in Palestine in 2000, marked the so-called War on Terror. Having witnessed U.S. wars against communism, drugs, and crime, I instinctively understood that this was ultimately a war on Muslims and Arabs.

In fall 2023, I returned to Brown University to complete my Ethnic Studies degree after a 22-year hiatus focused on front line organizing work. I’ve deliberately avoided campus organizing to concentrate on finishing my graduation requirements. While I know a degree does not define my worth or intelligence, especially in a racist capitalist system, earning one could help quiet my impostor syndrome and honor my refugee parents’ dream for me.

Being a student right now at Brown, known for its historic activism yet mired in progressive neoliberalism, has been intriguing. More than the complex emotions of returning two decades after the U.S. waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what has occupied my thoughts over the last seven months stems from what it means to be a survivor of genocide in a time of ongoing genocide.

It has been incredibly difficult to be a genocide survivor these past seven months, watching Israel rain U.S.-funded bombs on Palestinians while the world continues with business as usual. Since Oct. 7, I’ve nervously followed the news. Even though every ounce of my being urged me to not watch the unfolding carnage of Palestinian bodies dismembered, something inside me compelled me to bear witness. “We’ve been here before,” my bones told me. “Cry if you have to but you must watch,” my ancestors whispered, “It is happening again; history is repeating itself.” I watched, I listened, and I took note of the world's actions and inactions. I've rediscovered that the worst of humanity isn't just in the enacting of genocide; it's in allowing it to continue. The world's toleration of genocide is as evil as the act itself.

Over fifty years ago, and 10 years before I was born, the Ohio National Guard opened fire into a crowd of students at Kent State University as they protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the expansion of the U.S. military in Southeast Asia. Twenty-eight soldiers fired sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds into a crowd of more than three hundred students, killing four and wounding nine; one was paralyzed for life.

A week and a half later, in the early hours of May 15, at least seventy-five police officers in Jackson, Mississippi responded to a gathering of one hundred Black students at Jackson State College protesting systemic anti-Black racism on campus and the Vietnam War). The officers fired more than four hundred and fifty shots into the crowd for almost thirty seconds, shattering every window of the buildings facing the street. One college student and a high school senior were killed, and twelve were gravely injured and scarred for life. None of the Jackson police officers were prosecuted, and all of the Ohio National Guardsmen were acquitted.

There were voices raised in solidarity; support wasn't absent. Some students gave their lives protesting the U.S. military's actions against us.

Across the country and around the world, students are taking over university property, demanding an end to their institution’s investment in Israel’s war machine. Many encampments and protesters face violent hostility from the universities, including academic retaliation, disciplinary punishment, and, as usual, the involvement of police and armed forces. On the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Kent State Massacre and the Jackson State Killings, and on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cambodian genocide and the Vietnam War, I held my breath as I watched the police raids, violence, and arrests at places like Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles. I visited Brown’s encampment, crossing my fingers and hoping that these courageous students would not be met with violence or gunfire. Despite the pervasive feeling that history might repeat itself, I found myself inspired by these students and countless others who are on the right side of history.

I have hope that in fifty years, Palestinian genocide survivors won’t look around and wonder what the rest of the world did while their people were being slaughtered, their country bombed, their past erased, and their future denied. I hope they know that the majority of us cared, that we tried, that we never stopped, and that we did the best we could in a time of genocide. More than anything, I hope that Palestinians by then will have attained their full rights and freedom, and that the very idea of genocide will be thrown into the dustbins of history. Then, we can all begin to heal.

¹ Ishihara, Kohei D., For Justice and Love: The Quality of Life for Southeast Asian Youth. 2010. 
² Ibid.