From the Killing Fields to Sainsbury’s
It’s surprising who works in our local Sainsbury’s. Take Sokphal Din for instance. He has worked on the check outs since 2010 ever since the Basingstoke Press and its successor Synergie closed. For twenty two years there he had been very much involved with artwork preparation and plate making, winning printing industry awards in the process. But what to do thereafter? And his name is hardly Anglo Saxon or even European, so where does he come from? Why and how did he end up living in Basingstoke?
Born in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia 58 years ago, he was seventeen when Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. Their aim was to create a communist classless state where agriculture was the mainstay, nobody being rich or poor and the banning of religion, money and property. Intellectuals and anyone educated to be able to read and write were considered enemies of the state that had to be re-educated or put more simply, brainwashed.
A knock on the front door of the family house one morning changed their lives forever. Two teenage soldiers, wearing the black uniform of the Khmer Rouge and carrying AK47 assault rifles forced them to immediately vacate their home and leave the city. All the residents of the capital were evicted leaving it a ghost town. People were forced into the country to work as slave labour in the rice paddy fields and to grow potatoes. They were issued with a hoe and a small basket on a pole to carry their minuscule possessions including a woven sheet to sleep on the ground and they each had one spoon. Twelve hour days with only a small bowl of rice for those working and watered down version for those unable to keep up with the physical labour meant that over the next four years over two million people perished in what became known as the Cambodian killing fields.
Sokphal Din’s family were not immune to family tragedy. His father, a lieutenant in the original army, was taken away in the early days to be re-educated but never returned after the promised three months. Being forced to move to another area within the jungle, and left to fend for themselves to clear areas to create some kind of shelters for ten families, his grandmother and his youngest brother died. Sokphal himself suffered terribly with malaria which returned daily to wrack his body.
Suffering torture at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, which left him physically scarred for life, Sokphal was nevertheless forced to join them after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, being issued with a black uniform and weapon. He was taken captive by the Vietnamese, tortured and then spent three months in prison. Eventually he, his mother and remaining younger brother and sister managed to escape and made their way to a refugee camp on the border with Thailand. They were moved to several camps in the next six years during which Sokphal became a Buddhist monk before eventually managing to leave Cambodia in 1987.
It was Chansopha, a cousin of Sokphal, the wife of Cllr Martin Biermann of Chineham, who sponsored Sokphal and his family through the Red Cross. The Biermann’s initially put them up in their house in Chineham before another relative rented them a house in the same area. Some years ago Sokphal managed to buy his own house in Popley where he and his two siblings live together.
As well as working in Sainsbury’s, where they generously allow him unpaid leave for his charity work, Sokphal is involved in spreading the word about the genocide in Cambodia. He is a keen advocate of the Holocaust Memorial Day celebrations that take place annually in January which includes WW2, Rwanda, Bosnia as well as Cambodia. In the process he has many photographs of the famous people he has met from the King and Queen of Cambodia, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, through many politicians of all parties; Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Nick Clegg, Eric Pickles, all the way to Prime Minister David Cameron on more than one occasion.
Even in June Sokphal Din was at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke where he was nominated for the Unsung Hero Awards that were presented by broadcaster Anne Diamond. In fact Sokphal and the broadcast media are no stranger to each other as he is often called upon for translation services as he speaks Cambodian, Thai, French and of course English. He has worked for BBC TV and radio, CNN, Hat Trick Productions, Rock Hopper Productions, Al Jazeera and several others. He was also recently at the Old Bailey helping in a court case with translations and before that at Maidstone Magistrates and Reading County Court.
Sokphal Din is a man with a mission to remind the world about the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. With his intimate knowledge and bitter experience of the subject matter he tells an impressive story.
