Sovannora leng should be dead. Just before his 14th birthday in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over his hometown Phnom Penh. Civilians were evacuated from cities and put to work in the countryside, as part of an "agrarian socialist" revolution targeting the educated and wealthy. After surviving a severe illness, teenage Sovannora was enlisted to "report" on his neighbors, friends and family—something that could lead to their death. "The only way I can explain it is that people had no choice," said Sovannora to VICE.
In the next few years, Sovannora escaped reporting duty and went onto survive a stint in a prison camp, an execution attempt and an unfathomable journey over a minefield near the Thai border. His family eventually wound up as refugees in Australia in 1980. Not everybody was that lucky. An estimated 1.7 million—21 percent of the population—died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's four year reign in Cambodia, either through starvation, forced labour or execution in Cambodia's now infamous "Killing Fields."
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