THE DC-CAM'S PROMOTING ACCOUNTABILITY FIELD TRIP REPORT
Malai District -- A Former Khmer Rouge Stronghold
Banteay Meanchey Province
By Dany Long
Summary and Context within Large Project
The interviews summarized above are part of an ongoing project being conducted by the Promoting Accountability (PA) team at Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). This project involves conducting interviews with former Khmer Rouge cadres who live in the areas of Cambodia that were Khmer Rouge strongholds until the mid-1990s. In each of these areas the PA team interviews between 100 and 150 former Khmer Rouge cadres. To date, the PA team has found that these communities remain insular groups made up of individuals with markedly different viewpoints than other former Khmer Rouge cadres who have spent the past 30 plus years living side by side with victims of the Khmer Rouge regime throughout the rest of Cambodia. It is also become clear that these communities have not been integrated with the rest of Cambodian society.
The PA team’s work focuses on determining whether individuals within these insular, former Khmer Rouge communities can be humanized after being such staunch supporters of the bloody Khmer Rouge regime.
The team is currently drafting a book and photo exhibition of portraits of the individuals interviewed as part of this project entitled “Humanizing Perpetrators: Is It Possible?” Additionally, an international exhibition tour of photographs of family life in these communities, contrasting past and present portraits of former Khmer Rouge cadres and their families, is currently being developed.
See a report (PDF) attached herewith.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
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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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