It is no coincidence that Youk Chhang is Cambodia’s most trusted civic leader. Leading by example, he taught a nation how to forgive without forgetting. Like Angkor Wat and Tonle Sap Lake, Chhang is nothing less than a Cambodian national treasure. The youngest son of a Phnom Penh gem merchant’s nine children, Youk Chhang was 14 years old when the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975, and forced him from his home at gunpoint. The teenager walked in the direction of what he believed to be his mother’s village, four months later was reunited with his family at one of Democratic Kampuchea’s newly established “compulsory communes.” There, he worked like a slave and death became as common as life. Read more
