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| Book Review: The New York Times May 25, 1997, Witnesses to Genocide The enemies of the state on the Khmer Rouge's ``death list`` during Pol Pot's four-year reign of terror were ``the intellectuals, the doctors, the lawyers, the monks, the teachers and the civil servants . . . students . . . former celebrities, the poets . . . the rebellious, the kindhearted, the brave, the clever, the individualists, the people who wore glasses.'' This testimony was written by Teeda Butt Mam, one of 29 Cambodian refugees whose accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities have been collected in CHILDREN OF CAMBODIA'S KILLING FIELDS: Memoirs by Survivors (Yale University, $25) by Dith Pran, a photographer for The New York Times. The testimony of these now grown-up witnesses to the appalling savagery of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot gives voice to the unspeakable. Frequently the Khmer Rouge ``killed people by cutting out their livers with a knife. . . . Often they ate the livers. . . . Babies were thrown up in the air and came down on bayonets.'' To save bullets, the Khmer Rouge murdered innocents by practicing what they called vay choul, which consisted of ``beating people with the back of a hoe.'' Some estimate that the Pol Pot regime murdered one-quarter of Cambodia's population. But the potency of this book's condemnation does not derive solely from the gruesome brutality of the Khmer Rouge. The overwhelming simplicity of the contributors' recollections builds a solid, irrefutable censure of one of humanity's most shocking crimes. Lance Gould GRAPHIC: Photos: Photographs, from ``The Killing Fields,'' of Cambodians detained at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Of more than 14,000 imprisoned there between 1975 and 1979, virtually all were killed. |