Last modified: Wednesday, June 7, 2000 1:00 AM EDT Rehoboth native's return enlightens students about Cambodia horrors BY JAMES A. MEROLLA / SUN CHRONICLE STAFF REHOBOTH -- The question, of course, is `Why?' Why did the Khmer Rouge starve, torture, overwork and execute 1.7 million of their own people? (With photo) It has been asked countless times by Cambodian victims, historians, scholars, survivors and everyone who has ever heard of the genocide that nearly wiped out an entire people. On Wednesday, the question was asked again by a Beckwith Middle School seventh-grader. The student addressed it to Susan Cook, a former Beckwith student who has gone on to Brown University, Yale University and beyond, to direct the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale -- a four-year team of fact-finders and evidence gatherers. Cook's important team has documented all available facts concerning Cambodian genocide and is preparing to give all of its copious evidence to an international tribunal who are poised to bring the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to trial for genocide from 1975 to 1979. `` Yes, why? Why? That is the question we have all been trying to figure out,'' Cook told the student. `` Why would you do this to your own people?'' Cook, who has often returned to her Rehoboth roots to share information with teachers and students, was asked to come back this time by her former seventh-grade geography teacher Jim Digits. `` There have been cultural changes in the world. And maybe a little bit of good triumphing over evil,'' Digits said. `` Sue Cook has collaborated with us for many years and is doing this in cooperation with the school. Most people don't know about this subject. Our textbooks don't cover this genocide. I wanted to make the students aware of many aspects of what's going on in the world.'' Cook told about 75 seventh-graders that genocide -- wiping out an entire ethnic, religious, racial or national group of people -- is considered the worst crime in the world, punishable internationally no matter who did it, when they did it or where they did it. An international tribunal -- worked out through delicate negotiations between the United States, the United Nations and the present Cambodian government -- may begin such trials this year, even though the crimes were committed more than two decades ago. The students knew that the Nazis performed genocide and at least one of them had heard of Kosovo in their lifetime, but they didn't know about similar horrors in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, or last year's example in East Timor that Cook said was `` just coming to the surface now.'' Cook told them that many Cambodians refer to the 1975-79 reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge as the `` three years, eight months and 20 days. It seemed to go on forever to those who survived it.'' How many victims are 1.7 million? Cook said it was more people than those who live in Rehoboth, Norton, Mansfield, Taunton, Seekonk, Boston, Worcester, Cambridge, Lowell and Quincy combined. `` That's a lot of people,'' Cook said. In only a few allotted minutes, she tried to convey the frustration that an entire people felt, being enslaved to work in the fields to grow rice and other food products, harvesting that rice, while starving themselves and knowing that to touch even one grain would mean torture and death. Then, compounding this starving misery by seeing the harvested rice shipped to China for guns and other weapons in order to fight the Vietnamese at the border. `` This is a very violent, sad and tragic chapter in this country's history,'' Cook said. She showed a video entitled `` Dancing Through Death,'' which revealed how up to 90 percent of Cambodia's artists and intellectuals were killed during the terror, but also how 200,000 Cambodians who have emigrated to the United States and those who survived in the country try to pass on the oral traditions and classic dancing of an ancient culture that was almost eliminated from the face of the Earth. `` A culture was almost destroyed. What do people do when that happens? How do they regain their lives? It's something I want you to think about,'' she said.