SRE LIEV, Cambodia (AP) — Pheng Chea says the ghost came to him in a dream.
The spirit of the victim of the Khmer Rouge regime showed a gold necklace to the 29-year-old peasant, and told him to dig it out from her grave.
He found the gold near a big tree stump in one of Cambodia's many "killing fields," the mass graves where the Khmer Rouge dumped victims during its rule from 1975 to 1979. Peng Chea sold it for $240, which he used to buy his first cow. At a recent Buddhist ceremony, he offered a bowl of rice noodles to the ghost of his lucky dream and asked for her forgiveness.
"I thanked the spirit for giving me the gold," Pheng Chea said.
The pillaging by Peng Chea and other destitute peasants worries researchers trying to preserve a historical record of the Khmer Rouge, blamed for the death of 1.7 million people through hunger, illnesses, overwork and execution. By the time the researchers learned about Sre Liev, the bones had already been piled up in the open.
People are also reading…
Sre Liev village is tucked away in a forest about 80 miles southwest of the capital of Phnom Penh. Its 100 residents live in ramshackle thatched houses and eke out a living planting rice or cutting wood for sale.
For years, the villagers left the nearby grave site alone. But a team of Vietnamese soldiers recently excavated the site by mistake looking for the remains of comrades who had died after Vietnam drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979.
When the Vietnamese soldiers left, villagers began speculating that the pits held jewelry, and started digging up the graves.
The villagers acted out of desperate poverty, says Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent group collecting evidence of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.
The looting of the killing fields was common shortly after the regime lost power, he said. His center has documented about 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia; the vast majority of them have been disturbed, mostly by poor rural people, he said.
Srey Noeurn said she took a pair of earrings from the skeletal remains of what appeared to have been a woman.
"When I arrived home, I did not keep them in the house because I was afraid the ghost would come to ask for them back," the 48-year-old mother of four said. "So, I rolled them in a plastic bag and hid them in a tree in front of the house."
She sold one of the earrings for $37.50, a big sum in a country where 35 percent of the people survive on less than 50 cents a day.
She organized a Buddhist ceremony to show her gratitude to the original owner of the earrings and lit incense sticks to pray to the owner and ask for forgiveness. Pheng Chea had more worldly fears. Other villagers told him that local police were looking for him to demand a cut from his gains. He hid for three days at his mother's house 12 miles away.
Not all the villagers raided the grave.
"I told the grave diggers we ought to feel pity for (the dead)," Srey Bouy, 51, said. "They died painfully through execution and starvation."
Second wall planned across Arizona as Trump administration doubles down on border
