By Men Kimseng, VOA Khmer
Original report for Washington
29 June 2009
Education officials this week are learning how to teach more history about
the Khmer Rouge regime, as a course from the Documentation Center of
Cambodia gets underway.
In a one-week course that began this weekend, 24 officials from the Ministry
of Education will hear from genocide experts and receive training from a new
manual designed specifically for teaching about the regime.
Cambodian students have until recently learned very little about the
traumatic period in their country’s history, and studies indicate they
sometimes learn little from their parents about it.
“Our teaching [on the Khmer Rouge regime] is unique compared to teaching on
this genocidal topic in other countries 40 years ago or in the last
century,” Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center, told VOA
Khmer. “Our teaching is to teach Cambodian victims to become educators, and
we don’t narrowly concentrate on our country.”
Among the trainers are David Chandler, professor of history from Monash
University and a well-regarded historian on Cambodia, Ros Chantraboth, a
Cambodian historian, George Chigas, associate director of Yale University’s
Cambodia Genocide Program, and Dy Kham Boly, the author of “A History of
Democratic Kampuchea.”
“In this teacher’s manual we organize the teaching chapter by chapter,” Dy
Kham Boly said. “Students are asked to read survivors’ accounts and later
role play.”
Tuon Sa Im, secretary of state of the Ministry of Education, said that the
24 officials trained next week will then transfer their knowledge to history
teachers at Cambodia’s junior high and high schools. The ministry hopes to
finish training teachers by 2010.
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About Me
- Duong Dara
- Dara Duong was born in 1971 in Battambang province, Cambodia. His life changed forever at age four, when the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. During the regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975-1979, Dara’s father, grandparents, uncle and aunt were executed, along with almost 3 million other Cambodians. Dara’s mother managed to keep him and his brothers and sisters together and survive the years of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, when the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, she did not want to live under Communist rule. She fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, where they lived for more than ten years. Since arriving in the United States, Dara’s goal has been to educate people about the rich Cambodian culture that the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy and about the genocide, so that the world will not stand by and allow such atrocities to occur again. Toward that end, he has created the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which began in his garage and is now in White Center, Washington. Dara’s story is one of survival against enormous odds, one of perseverance, one of courage and hope.
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