23rd May 2012

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Ros Sereysothea - Unknown Song. 

Ros Sereysothea was a famous romantic ballad singer during the final years of Cambodia’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum and the Khmer Republic. Sothea never sang under any one record label and made a modest living as a musician. Details of her life are relatively scarce and her fate during Democratic Kampuchea remains a mystery.

As a high profile individual and a musician, she was a prime candidate for extermination during Pol Pot’s regime.

After she was discovered hiding in the countryside, she was forced by Pol Pot to marry one of his assistants in 1977 and was forced to exclusively perform songs for the new regime. Her new marriage was an unhappy one marred by physical abuses. Eventually the disputes got out of hand and the Khmer Rouge cadre of her village decided she was more trouble alive. She was told that she and her family would be moved to another village and she was last seen by survivors departing by ox cart. She then disappeared under typically mysterious circumstances and is almost certainly dead.
Some accounts believe that she died from being overworked in a Khmer Rouge agricultural camp. Another account even says that she was still alive when the Vietnamese invading forces arrived in Phnom Penh in 1979 but died of malnutrition shortly after in a hospital.

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