KHMER ROUGE IN SCHOOLS: Challenges of teaching a brutal past

Friday, 08 January 2010 15:02 Robbie Corey Boulet

DC-Cam hopes that its history lessons about the Khmer Rouge can promote
reconciliation, but pushes teachers to use new techniques.

Photo by: DC-CAM ARCHIVES AND VIETNAM NEWS AGENCY
Cambodians in Phnom Penh hold signs that read "Hooray, Cambodia has been
completely liberated", and "Hooray, the People's Advisory Council,
Revolutionary Kampuchea", on January 17, 1979.

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THE REGIME WAS BAD, BUT NOT EVERY INDIVIDUAL WHO JOINED THE REGIME WAS BAD.
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Takeo Province
ON a recent Thursday, a classroom full of high school teachers in Takeo
province sat in groups of five sharing survivors' recollections of
20th-century mass atrocities.

In one group, the first teacher to speak delivered a five-minute summary of
the Holocaust structured around the account of a Jew who fled the ghetto in
Horochow, Poland, to forage in the forest. "It's an amazing thing," the
teacher said, reading from the survivor's account. "When one is hungry and
completely demoralised, you become inventive. When I even say it I don't
believe it - I ate worms, I ate bugs, I ate anything that I could put in my
mouth. And, I don't know, sometimes I would get very ill."

Another told the group about the killing of more than 8,000 men and boys
during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, relating the story of a 17-year-old,
identified as Witness O, who survived and later testified in court about his
experience. "The soldiers tied Witness O's hands behind his back with a kind
of very hard string, and then put him in another classroom, where he could
feel clothes under his feet," the teacher said. "When all the men's hands
were tied, the soldiers took them out of the building and put them on a
truck."

A third teacher told the group about the Iraqi government's 1988 campaign
against the Kurds, reading aloud the account of a labourer who was nearly
buried alive in a mass grave. "When I sat down, I was hit on the back of the
head," he read. "I fell down inside the hole. I saw one of the guys inside
the hole, and I lost my consciousness."

And then it was Yeb Dodon's turn. The 55-year-old teacher from Kep was
tasked with providing a brief history of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was this
history that was the focus of the training programme, organised by the
Documentation Centre of Cambodia, in which the teachers had been
participating for the past two weeks.
The training was one of six held in November and December that covered A
History of Democratic Kampuchea, the first government-sanctioned textbook
about the regime. Between now and the end of 2010, the 186 teachers who
participated will, in turn, help to train 3,000 of their peers.

DC-Cam is hopeful that, 31 years after the regime fell from power, the
curriculum can help Cambodia along the difficult road to national
reconciliation, though doubts remain about whether the teachers will be able
to successfully implement the innovative methods it prescribes.

Beginning his presentation, Yeb Dodon said: "Khmer Rouge was the name the
King gave to his communist opponents in the 1960s. April 17, 1975, ended
five years of foreign interventions, bombardment and civil war in Cambodia.
On this date, Phnom Penh fell to the communist forces.

But under Democratic Kampuchea, all the people were deprived of their basic
rights."

He went on from there, eschewing the survivor's narrative he had been given
and instead reciting facts about the leadership structure of the Khmer
Rouge, its 1977 four-year plan and its construction projects. He touched on
Norodom Sihanouk's support of the regime, and how the King was later placed
under house arrest on the Royal Palace compound. But just as he began to
tell of the abolition of religion, Christopher Dearing, who was helping to
run the training for DC-Cam, told the teachers that time was up.

Yeb Dodon closed his book and laughed. "I think there is too much," he said.

Written by DC-Cam researcher Khamboly Dy and published in 2007, A History of
Democratic Kampuchea offers a straightforward and thorough account of the
regime's rise, reign and legacy, though one that skirts several points of
contention, such as whether the 1979 overthrow by the Vietnamese amounted to
liberation or an invasion.
The teacher's guidebook has been more controversial. During the approval
process, members of a Ministry of Education review committee occasionally
clashed with DC-Cam staff members over how the material should be taught,
objecting to some of the more interactive lessons.

The guidebook calls for, among other things, an in-class lecture by a
survivor of the regime, an interview with a former cadre and a role-play in
which students pretend to be both victims and perpetrators of Khmer Rouge
crimes.

Teachers who participated in the Takeo training said they were apprehensive
about the interactive and small-group activities, many of which differ
markedly from the traditional lecture-style teaching methods commonly
employed in Cambodia. Several said, in fact, that they were far more
concerned about the format of the lessons than their content.

"Dividing in groups is new for me, and I have never really done this
before," said Sam Rethy, 55. "Usually I just have my students read and
answer questions, without any activities."

Yeb Dodon said he was grateful for the exposure to new techniques, though he
added that he was worried about the prospect of having to actually use them
on his own. "I think this guidebook and the foreign instructors taught me
how to teach more effectively," he said, "but it is going to be very
difficult to follow these instructions because my teaching style has never
been to divide people in groups and have discussions like this."

Though DC-Cam Director Youk Chhang said he believed the teachers had adapted
to the methods, the organisers of the Takeo training indicated that there
could be obstacles down the road.

"In relation to history teaching, the differences in pedagogy are not great
or insurmountable: the main difference relates to a greater emphasis on
organised student participation and collaboration," Laura Summers, a
Cambodia expert at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom who served
as a training monitor, said via email.

However, she added, "Most classrooms will not have the space that we had in
the training centre, or the easily moveable chairs with writing arms.

Most schools have heavy, wooden desks and no assembly hall or spare teaching
rooms."

Beyond resource limitations, Dearing said, some of the teachers might lack
the confidence to try the new techniques outside the context of the
training.

"The idea is to increase the teachers' competency and confidence in these
methods so they will be comfortable using them in large classes. Many are
ready to do this now," he said. "However, I expect that not all teachers
would readily implement these methods on their own."

Youk Chhang defended the interactive teaching methods, citing as an example
the comparative history exercise, which he said would contextualise the
Khmer Rouge years for students unfamiliar with mass crimes in other
countries.

"I want to show that, yes, these are crimes against humanity, but we're not
the only victims," he said.

The inclusion of a wide range of voices in the lessons, he added, would help
to establish a balanced, authoritative narrative of Democratic Kampuchea.

This would be a welcome change from years past, some teachers said. Because
the Ministry of Education has never before endorsed a textbook specific to
the Khmer Rouge, what little classroom instruction students have received
until now has been informal, often drawing heavily from teachers' personal
experiences - or, in the cases of younger teachers, those of their
families - rather than peer-reviewed academic material.

For example, Eng Bo, a 39-year-old teacher who travelled from Kampot to take
part in the Takeo training, said during a break that, in previous years, he
had often told students of being separated from his parents and of being
ordered, at the age of 5, to retrieve clothes from the dead bodies of cadres
at the cooperative to which he was sent. But he said he had been unable to
relate those experiences to broader crimes committed by the regime because
he himself had known little about the scale of its destruction.

"I was alive during the Pol Pot time, so some of this is not news to me," he
said. "But this week I have been very shocked to learn about all of the
people that Pol Pot killed."

Reaching for reconciliation
Youk Chhang is convinced that the teaching of Khmer Rouge history can
promote national reconciliation - in the acknowledgments of the teacher's
guidebook, he goes so far as to assert that DC-Cam's Genocide Education
Project "has become the truth commission of Cambodia".

But even among teachers participating in the trainings, he said, there
remains a tendency to demonise former cadres, particularly regime leaders.

"The teachers want to see who these people were. They always ask for
photographs," he said. "They want to see their faces. But when they see the
pictures, they're not satisfied because the faces look so human. They don't
see the cruelty. They want to confirm what they already know, and so they
keep asking for more pictures."

He added: "We need teachers to recognise that half of their students are the
children of former Khmer Rouge. The regime was bad, but not every individual
who joined the regime was bad."

Historian David Chandler, who has consulted on the Genocide Education
Project, said this idea was central to attempts at reconciliation. "I think
understanding that human beings are human beings rather than monsters from
outer space is crucial for coming to terms with a phenomenon like the Khmer
Rouge," he said.

To this end, even those most deserving of condemnation are presented in a
nuanced manner. The guidebook, for example, includes a photograph of Pol
Pot, taken in the 1980s near the Thai border, sitting in a chair with his
daughter in his lap, smiling, while five other children gather around him.
"I want to humanise him," Youk Chhang said of the image. "Pol Pot was
obviously a bad leader, but I don't want to create hate."

The curriculum has been designed to strike a balance between laying bare the
atrocities for which the regime is responsible and defusing any tension that
knowledge might spark.

Asked to give an example of how such tension might manifest itself, Youk
Chhang recalled a textbook distribution event at Phnom Penh's Youkunthor
High School involving Norng Chan Phal, a child survivor of Tuol Sleng
prison, and Him Huy, who worked there as a guard.

Though the event was intended to demonstrate the potential for
reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, the question-and-answer
session went in a different direction.

"At first, the whole class was silent," Youk Chhang said. "You could tell
they were preparing questions. But they were undecided on who to ask.

Finally, one of the students got up and asked Him Huy: 'Did you join the
Khmer Rouge because you wanted power?' And then the whole class started
clapping. The whole class! They did not stop! And Huy tried to answer
politely, but the students wouldn't accept the answer.

"And that kind of question can make a teacher uncomfortable," he added.

Though the wounds of the regime are far from healed, those who organised the
Takeo training said they believed that, by the end, the teachers were
capable of presenting the period in a manner that downplayed individual
wrongdoing, thereby limiting the potential for similar incidents.

"The teachers recognised that they were not only teaching the history of
[Democratic Kampuchea] in terms of raising students' historical
understanding of the period, but also their historical empathy with people
who lived during the period," Dearing said.

Summers noted that many of the teachers at the Takeo training were Khmer
Rouge survivors - "so they knew many party, army or co-op cadres as human
beings".

"The teachers were interested in promoting reconciliation through the
teaching of history and in preparing their students for life in the rapidly
changing social and economic circumstances of today," she said.

"One teacher stated during a general discussion that a greater knowledge of
history would not ensure that all students would become good citizens, but
he said 'we must aim for that' and then hope that 'at least some of them
will be better citizens'."