James A. Tyner, Professor of Geography, Kent State University
It is well-established that the Khmer Rouge, upon assuming power in 1975, set out to destroy the existing societal infrastructure: health, education, commerce, religion, family. However, what is less discussed is that the Khmer Rouge intended to construct an entirely new state and society. The objective of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and other leaders of the CPK was to make an entirely new, modern, and productive communal society. This goal of the Khmer Rouge was in fact two-fold: to first erase all vestiges of the previous society and, second, to erect an entirely new, socialist-based society. It was with this understanding that Cambodia ceased to exist, replaced by Democratic Kampuchea (as the country was renamed by the Khmer Rouge). Indeed, it was Pol Pot who declared, “There are no schools, faculties or universities in the traditional sense, although they did exist in our country prior to liberation, because we wish to do away with all vestiges of the past.”[1]
In this chapter I suggest that organized mass political violence―genocide―was explicitly adopted by the Khmer Rouge as an instrument of post-conflict political construction. Furthermore, I maintain that a geographic-based education, as manifest in a political textbook[2] produced by the Khmer Rouge, was a key to the CPK’s post-war project. As such I provide a needed corrective to our understanding of both post-conflict societies and the ‘causes’ of genocide.
Genocide as Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Although the close association between ‘war’ and ‘genocide’ is well-documented, the form of this relationship remains open to debate. Genocides, for example, frequently occur during, or in the immediate aftermath, of war. This is clearly seen in the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust of the Second World War, and in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Scholars assert that the upheavals and uncertainties associated with war contribute to the conditions that make possible the targeting of ‘enemy’ civilians. The common understand is that genocide is extension of war. However, there remains the possibility that genocide may be approached as a political instrument of post-conflict (re)construction. In the case of Cambodia, genocide was perpetrated during a period in which the war was believed over. Indeed, for the Khmer Rouge, the date of their military victory marked ‘year zero’―a tangible clue that signaled their understanding of war’s end. The Cambodian genocide followed in the wake of civil war; the termination of conflict however did not bring about peace as this concept is normally understood.
On April 17, 1975, thousands of war-hardened Khmer Rouge soldiers poured into the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. Coinciding with the cessation of the broader Indochina War that engulfed neighboring Vietnam and Laos, the Cambodian Civil War (1970-1975) was over. In five bloody years, the Khmer Rouge had defeated the US-supported Republican forces of the Lon Nol government. In the process, tens of thousands of people had died; many hundreds of thousands found themselves refugees in their own land—what we would now describe by the innocuous term ‘internally displaced persons.’ But for the majority of Cambodians, post-war society was anything but peaceful.
The victory of the Khmer Rouge would mark the termination of years of military conflict but not the end of widespread violence. In the weeks and months that followed, the cities and towns of Cambodia were evacuated, their inhabitants forced onto agricultural collectives in the countryside. Hospitals, factories and schools were closed; money and wages were abolished, and monasteries were emptied.
Upon assuming power, the Communist Party of Kampuchea sought to transform Cambodia into a modern, communal utopia. As such, Party members attempted to replace what they saw as impediments to national autonomy and social justice with revolutionary energy and incentives. In their attempt to create—not recreate—a utopian society, the leadership of the Khmer Rouge embarked on a massive program of social and spatial engineering.
Rather than reconstructing a war-devastated society, the Khmer Rouge explicitly attempted to erase time and space to construct (in their minds) a new and pure communal society. This is seen most clearly in the Khmer Rouge’s decision to forcibly evacuate Phnom Penh and all other urban areas of Cambodia. But it is also seen in the justifications for the mass violence of all facets of daily life—including the promotion of education.
(Geographic) Educational Policies of the Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge understood the importance of education in their post-conflict construction of Democratic Kampuchea. Indeed, education was vital to their revolutionary project in that it would provide support and legitimacy for associated political and economic programs. When the Khmer Rouge stood victorious on the streets of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they constituted neither a centralized, efficient political party nor military force. Having achieved ‘military victory’, the Khmer leadership understood that they would have to centralize power and ‘build socialism’.
With such a tentative hold on the populace―and its own political power―the Khmer Rouge leadership sought to solidify their position through various means. On the one hand, the Khmer Rouge utilized a practice of state-terror. Within Democratic Kampuchea, for example, the public display of torture and execution served to reify the authority of the Khmer Rouge. Moreover, the systematic violence and the killing of its own populace were understood by the Khmer Rouge as a prelude to the construction of a moral and properly ordered post-war society.
On the other hand, the Khmer Rouge turned to education―generally considered a ‘positive’ peace building exercise―as a means of establishing both legitimacy and political control. However, education under the Khmer Rouge included both destructive and constructive practices (see Clayton 1998). First, and in conformance with other practices, the Khmer Rouge sought to dismantle the pre-existing educational infrastructure. Prior to the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power, for example, Cambodia was home to 5,275 primary schools, 146 secondary schools, and 9 institutes of higher education (see Clayton 1998: 5).
Under the direction of the CPK, however, this infrastructure was literally ‘smashed’ or demolished. Teachers were ‘smashed’, as anywhere from 75 percent to 90 percent of all teachers at all levels were killed during the genocide. Most school buildings were destroyed; libraries were emptied and books were burned. Those buildings left standing were often converted to other uses. The Royal University was turned into a farm. Perhaps most symbolic, a former high school (Tuol Svay Prey) was converted into a detention and torture facility; at this site, now known as Tuol Sleng prison, approximately 14,000 people were detained, tortured, and eventually killed.
Along side these destructive practices, the Khmer Rouge forwarded a number of (in their view) constructive practices. This marked the second phase of the CPK’s educational agenda: the construction of Democratic Kampuchea. Simply stated, the Khmer Rouge leadership proposed a new educational system, one that was intended to promote a national political consciousness and in turn provide legitimacy to Khmer Rouge rule. In fact, the Khmer Rouge explicitly sought to justify their political and economic programs through education.
Education in general, but geographic education specifically, is far from a neutral activity. Indeed, with respect to the latter, it is now well-understand that the teaching of geography is important in the development of a political consciousness. Geographic instruction, firstly, provides students with basic knowledge about people and places: the ‘facts-and-figures’ of geography, or the traditional ‘capes-and-bays’ form of knowledge that appear on maps and in text-books. However, there is also a ‘hidden curriculum’ (or subtext) in the teaching of geography. Indeed, geographic education may facilitate the construction of ‘national identities.’ This is seen, for example, in the re-drawing of political maps following war. And, in fact, following the victory of the CPK, a new map appeared, one that symbolically spoke to the new state of Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge’s map portrays the administrative divisions of Democratic Kampuchea. At the broadest scale, Democratic Kampuchea was divided into seven geographic zones, identified by cardinal compass directions: North, Northeast, East, Southwest, West, Northwest, and Center. These zones were apparently derived from military designations established by the Khmer Rouge during the war (1970-1975). These zones, significantly, did not conform to any pre-existing political division of Cambodia. The Northeast, East, and Southwest zones, for example, included the former eastern portion of Stung Treng province and the provinces of Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, eastern Kompong Cham, Kandal, southern Kompong Speu, and Kampot.
The political geography of Democratic Kampuchea as delineated on the map is very significant. Certainly, one sees evidence of the militarized society promoted by the Khmer Rouge. The fact that political divisions, for example, were derived from military necessity is certainly important. However, the map also reveals how the Khmer Rouge sought to erase previous regional identities, to be replaced by an imaginative geography that suppressed regionalism and provincialism in favor of a broader nationalism. The entire political geographic organization of Democratic Kampuchea was based on an abstract system composed of cardinal direction points and numbers and, in the process, the Khmer Rouge’s cartography signified ‘egalitarianism’ in that all regions were identical; there was nothing to distinguish one zone from the other.
The production of geographic knowledge, whether in the form of maps or school texts, thus assumes a primary place in post-conflict construction. State schooling practices, serve to establish and reinforce specific ideologies of nationalism. In turn, these practices may be used to justify and legitimate political processes and practices—including mass violence and genocide.
Political Geography under the Khmer Rouge
Apart from agricultural and industrial development, education was seen by the CPK to be of prime importance in the building of Democratic Kampuchea. In part, the importance of education is related to the place of children within the new society. A traditional saying in Cambodia holds that ‘clay is molded while it is soft.’ According to Henri Locard, this slogan was often used to signify that only young children could be selected by the CPK to become loyal servants of Angkar. This idea, in fact, was developed by Pol Pot, who said of the young: “Those, among our comrades, who are young, must make a great effort to re-educate themselves. They must never allow themselves to lose sight of this goal. You have to be, and remain, faithful to the revolution. People age quickly. Being young, you are at the most receptive age, and capable to assimilate what the revolution stands for, better than anyone else.”[3]
Given that education within Democratic Kampuchea was so important for the cultivation of a political consciousness, it is not surprising that the Khmer Rouge produced school texts. Text-books for the CPK imparted an authority to which students were expected to respect without question, and thus complemented the role performed by the secretive ‘Angkar’. In Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge was known to have published at least three text-books, including two books on geography.[4] The first, a general geography text, was intended for first-grade use; the second, a text on political geography, was designed for second-grade use. It is the latter text that occupies my focus for the remainder of this paper.
In 1977 the Ministry of Education published a second-grade text entitled “Political Geography of Democratic Kampuchea.” Numbering 72 pages in length, the text is composed of twelve ‘lessons’ or chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of the nation and people of Democratic Kampuchea; the second chapter details the organizational structure of Democratic Kampuchea, including its provinces, regions, zones, and districts. Lessons three through eleven cover the various provinces of Democratic Kampuchea. Between 1975 and 1979, the state of Democratic Kampuchea (as administered by the Khmer Rouge) was composed of 19 provinces; these were further divided into 112 districts, 1,160 communes, and innumerable villages. These provinces were also aggregated for administrative purposes into larger regions and zones.
The text, in effect, constitutes a fairly traditional regional geography of Democratic Kampuchea. Lessons Three through Eleven are identical in structure. Each lesson begins with a brief summary of the province(s), followed by a (repetitive) lesson summary and series of questions. Lesson four, for example, identifies Kandal Province as being “situated around the intersection of … four rivers” and having Takhmao as its provincial town” (page 21). These brief summaries give further elaboration on neighboring provinces and/or physical features. In short, each lesson begins with the basic ‘site-and-situation’ of the province. Next, the text informs students of the various districts which compose the provinces, along with specific communes. Stung Treng Province, for example, consists of four districts, including Siem Bok; this latter district is further composed of three communes. Lesson chapters are illustrated with photographs. As a regional geography, however, the text is far from idiographic; rather, it is normative in approach, commanding students to learn not only the political (i.e., administrative) divisions of the country, but also the politics behind the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea.
Having established the basic political boundaries of each province, lessons subsequently inform students of the relevancy of each location to the overall revolution. Thus, with respect to Kandal Province, students learn that Democratic Kampuchea’s “poor peasants at all revolutionary strongholds in Kandal Province stood up to struggle against the secret agents, soldiers, police, and the exploitative class of all forms, who infiltrated, repressed, and slaughtered our brothers and sisters” (page 22). Likewise, students learn that for both Siem Reap Province and Oddar Meanchey Province, “our people … [but] particularly the poor peasant farmers, joined the rest of the people in the country in the revolutionary struggles against the American imperialist, its puppets, and the traitorous Lon Nol clique with bursting energy and enthusiasm” (page 53). Chapters conclude with ‘lesson summaries’, in which the main points of the preceding relevancy sections are repeated, followed by ‘suggested’ questions for discussion. One question, for example, asks students: “During the period of over five years of revolutionary war, how did our people in Preah Vihear province participate in the struggles?” (page 62).
Lessons are brief, direct, and repetitive. They entail basic geographic concepts (i.e., site and situation), followed by political lessons designed to promote a particular geographic imaginary of both the revolutionary struggle and the contemporary state of Democratic Kampuchea.
Significantly, these lessons provide insight into the establishment of citizenry for Democratic Kampuchea. Students learn who was to be included within the state, and for what reasons; likewise, students learned who was to be excluded—or ‘smashed’. Consequently, these lessons could be applied in the students’ everyday lives, as a means of providing justification and legitimacy to other Khmer Rouge practices, such as detentions, forced labors, and executions.
The Khmer Rouge understood the construction of Democratic Kampuchea’s ‘new’ geography from its ‘old’. As indicated in the political geography text book:
“Over the past two thousand years under the administration of the feudal and capitalist class and the iron yoke of the old and new colonialists and the foreign imperialists, our Kampuchean nation has nothing remained but an empty shell and a mere label. The true nature and essence of the national unit were entirely shattered. For the nation suffered territorial losses and the country and people became subservient to foreigners. Furthermore, everything associated with the national identity from politics, economics, culture, arts, literature, and traditions to social order, attitude and behavior, language, clothing fashion, and so on were foreign imports or were transformed by foreign influences” (page 2).
Lesson One, therefore, is quite clear as to whom was to be included (and thus allowed to live) in Democratic Kampuchea. The lesson explains that the “people of Kampuchea are Kampucheans of all ethnic origins, including the Khmers and all ethnic minorities who are based in regional localities and other areas throughout the country and who were born and have earned their livelihood from farming in the territory of the Democratic Kampuchea since a long time ago” (page 3). However, the text also notes that the ‘nation’ consists of “people of all ethnic backgrounds who are collective laborers and peasants who have a long history of audacious struggles against the oppression and exploitation of the feudal and capitalist reactionaries and the invasion of foreign imperialists and colonialists of the old and new kinds” (page 1). According to this ‘second-grade’ text book, here is a clear political statement as to who was to be included or excluded from Democratic Kampuchea. In other words, we may view the political geography text as providing a lesson in citizenship.
The lesson is brutally self-evident. The Khmer Rouge ideologues were not content with reconstructing Cambodia, but rather in construction a new Democratic Kampuchea. The CPK believed itself to be justified in its planned and deliberate actions, through the use of genocide as a post-war political tool of construction. The transformation of Cambodia into Democratic Kampuchea was, from the perspective of the CPK, literally to ‘smash’ all pre-existing histories, geographies, and societies.
Citizens—as students were taught—were to be economically and/or politically useful; citizens were to live only for the state. The Khmer Rouge saying ‘If you live there is no gain. If you die, there is no loss’, approaches this conception of the sovereign’s right over life and death. This is the lesson that was taught in the second-grade text-book.
The killings that were sanctioned and justified by the Khmer Rouge were designed, in part, to centralize authority; likewise, the tortures, forced confessions, and executions were enacted to justify and legitimize the sovereignty of the CPK. Hence we see in Democratic Kampuchea, that genocide had a clear and distinct post-conflict purpose: a systematic eradication of persons who did not conform with the imagined geographies of a sovereign Democratic Kampuchea.
Conclusions
When fighting ceases, it is often assumed, peace is at hand, and a process of reconstruction begins. Unfortunately, the reality is decidedly more complex. Through an examination of a second-grade political geography text-book produced by the Khmer Rouge, I have argued that the Khmer Rouge used genocidal policies in order to construct a new nation-state following the termination of war. The Khmer Rouge justified their actions and condoned the death of millions of their own citizens. These deaths occurred via both direct violence (e.g., murder and execution) and structural violence (e.g., starvation, inadequate health facilities).
In the aftermath of war, the Khmer Rouge proposed and implemented a geographic-based pedagogy, an educational curricula designed to formulate a specific geographical imagination and political consciousness. I maintain that the political geography text-book, while traditional in orientation with an emphasis on regional geography, was explicit in forwarding the Khmer Rouge’s justification and legitimacy of both its political rule and organized mass violence. In other words, the text-book itself is an admission on behalf of the Khmer Rouge that it acknowledged, recognized, and condoned the brutal practices that led to the death of approximately two-million people.
END.
[1] Quoted in T. Clayton (1998) “Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979,” History of Education Quarterly 38(1): 1-16; at 3.
[2] The text is entitled Political Geography of Democratic Kampuchea and was published in 1977 by the Ministry of Education, Democratic Kampuchea. I sincerely thank Mr. Youk Chhang for making this document available and Mr. Bou Lim for his exceptional translation work. A longer version of this paper appears as J. Tyner, (2010) “Genocide as Reconstruction: The Political Geography of Democratic Kampuchea,” in Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies, edited by Scott Kirsch and Colin Flint (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate).
[3] H. Locard (2004) Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books)
[4] A math text was also produced.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
IMPOSSIBLE TO FORGET, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
IT was just a single day in Phnom Penh, one of many, but even now I can’t get it out of my head. The genocide was over — Vietnam, the traditional enemy, had ended it by driving out the Khmer Rouge and setting up a collaborationist government. But in 1988, Cambodia was still mourning. So many people had died, and thousands of refugees, including those who had suffered from the Khmer Rouge and those loyal to it, lived in politicized border camps inside Thailand, waiting for a diplomatic settlement that never quite seemed to arrive.
“All the intelligent Cambodians either fled the Khmer Rouge or were killed by them,” my Cambodian friend and fixer, Phin Chanda, once said to me, lightly, as if joking. “We’re the residue.”
I was the bureau chief for Southeast Asia at the time, and I tried to go to Vietnam and Cambodia whenever I could from my base in Bangkok. That winter day 23 years ago was a warm one, and long, because you could not enter Cambodia except through Vietnam. Getting a visa into Vietnam was hard enough, and then you had to get permission to enter Cambodia, which was still a place full of ghosts. There were few residents from capitalist countries, except a handful of Australian aid workers. There was no air service, so I hired a taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to drive me to Phnom Penh, through a landscape of rice fields and palms and scrawny villages to the stunning expanse of the Mekong, where it joins the Bassac and Tonle Sap Rivers.
The Vietnamese were trying to justify their occupation by memorializing the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. They had established a museum at Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school where the Khmer Rouge had interrogated and executed so many, first taking their haunting portraits, which hung on the walls. In a classroom, I stared at a now famous metal bed, with electrodes attached, where victims were tortured. The museum remains there, grandly titled the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The Vietnamese were also building an ossuary, a memorial to the murdered. Cambodia was full of bones and shallow graves; I remember the empty gasoline storage tanks of a looted Shell station, used for the massed bodies of the dead. Finger bones were scattered in the grass.
Near the construction site of the new memorial, at Choeung Ek, south of the city, were heaps of bones, and a skinny Cambodian worker, with a kramar, the traditional plaid cotton scarf, around his waist, sitting at a picnic table under a thatched roof. He smoked a cigarette with one hand, while the other rested on a pile of skulls.
I then went to the Central Market, a massive and beautiful Art Deco structure left by the French. The people were scraping by; the vegetables were fresh and cheap; there was a bit of expensive buffalo meat hanging in strips, coated with flies. There were small shops to have Cambodian café au lait — with cloying condensed milk, the way my grandfather liked it; and a tiny massage clinic where young men and women exercised the old medical magic of cupping.
A young woman, carefully supervised by an older woman — her mother? — heated small drinking glasses and applied them to my back; my skin was sucked up into the glasses as they cooled. I must have looked like a sort of insect, an arthropod with glass scales. It hurt, but the pain helped me, in a way, suffer a little myself.
The day finally turned cool, with a stunning sunset and dinner at a little restaurant over the Boeng Kak lake in the city. I dined on stuffed crab and amok, a curried fish steamed in a banana leaf. Mostly I remember the short cyclo ride back to my tattered hotel in central Phnom Penh, staring up at the apartments faintly illuminated by stolen electricity and weak bulbs, thinking of how the Khmer Rouge had emptied the city entirely and murdered so many of its inhabitants, and how the people living here now, however meagerly, had won an extraordinary victory over ideology and evil.
I know the city is tarted up now, with too much Thai, Chinese and Singaporean money. But I want to see it again, to feel that quiet sense of relief that madness has an end.
__________________
Inauguration of Anti-Genocide Memorial
Tuol Tum Poung High School, Phnom Penh, January 10, 2011
The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) is cooperating with the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports to mount slogans across all high schools both in Phnom Penh and provinces for the purpose of promoting forgiveness, tolerance, education and reconciliation. The slogans also help to recall the past and generate interest in the upcoming trial of the four surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge. The two slogans say (1) "Talking about experience during the Khmer Rouge regime promotes reconciliation and educates children about forgiveness and tolerance," and (2) "Learning about the history of Democratic Kampuchea helps prevent genocide."
DC-Cam will hold an inauguration ceremony of an Anti-Genocide Memorial at Tuol Tum Pong High School on January 10, 2011, at 7:30AM. Her Excellency Chumteav Tun Sa-Im, Undersecretary of Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports and Mr. Chea Cheat, Head of Phnom Penh´s Municipal Education Department will be the guests of honor for this ceremony. Tuol Tum Pong High School is the fifth location to hold a memorial inauguration ceremony after Indra Devi, Russey Keo, Preah Sisowath and Hun Sen Ang Snuol High Schools.
Tuol Tum Pong High School was previously named "Sala Preah Keo Morokat" and was established in 1954 near Preah Keo Morokat temple (or Tuol Tum Pong pagoda). When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Sala Preah Keo Morokat was closed and no students or teachers were allowed to enter. At that time, this school was turned into a prison in order to detain, torture, and execute former Khmer Rouge cadres, intellectuals, and people who were accused of betraying “Angkar.” It was reopened in 1979 after the Khmer Rouge collapse. In 1981, it was renamed Tuol Tum Pong High School.
During the inauguration, DC-Cam will distribute its monthly magazine "Searching for the Truth," anti-genocide posters to students, and Case 002 booklets to teachers in order to broaden their understanding of Democratic Kampuchea and the process of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Her Excellency Chumteav Tun Sa-Im will speak about the significance of the slogans, which have an important role in educating students and survivors about reconciliation, forgiveness and tolerance.
The school is proud that a former student of this high school has become a remarkable woman in Cambodia society who is now fulfilling an historical position in seeking for justice for the millions of victims lost to the Khmer Rouge regime. This woman is Her Excellency Chumteav Chea Leang, National Co-prosecutor of the ECCC and the General Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Cambodia.
The slogans are being mounted with financial support from DC-Cam staff members and their friends who were former students of Tuol Tum Pong High School, and teachers and students from Tuol Tum Pong High School. Apart from the important objective of mounting the Anti-Genocide slogans, this ceremony is also a great opportunity for Tuol Tum Pong High School students to meet with each other to discuss the need to prevent genocide. DC-Cam will encourage its staff members to continue making efforts to mount slogans in their former high schools and all high schools across Cambodia.
For additional information, please contact:
Meas Bunthann at truthbunthann.m@dccam.org and 012 33 69 93
Koy Seda at 012 51 94 56
_________________________
A Public Education Forum between teachers, students and parents
Chi Phat Commune, Thmar Bang District, Koh Kong Province
January 9, 2011
On January 9, 2011, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)'s Genocide Education Project is conducting a public education forum in Chi Phat Commune, Thmar Bang District, Koh Kong Province. The forum is conducted at a hall in the compound of Chi Phat primary school, which was former Khmer Rouge cadre's houses and offices in 1976-1978. The participants attending the forum are approximately 200. Among these number, there are 30-40 villagers, 150 students and about 10 teachers.
KOH KONG -- CHI PHAT was a village of Andaung Tik commune of Botum Sakor district. In late 1979, this village was formed as a new commune called Chi Phat. This new commune was not located in Botum Sakor anymore, but it becomes one among six communes of Koh Kong's Thmar Bang district. Under the administration of The People Republic of Kampuchea, there are four villages include Chi Phat, Kamlot, Tik La-ak and Choam Sla village, in this commune. After the national election in 1993, new comers from everywhere in Cambodia came to live in this commune to earn there living by cutting and sawing woods, farming and selling. Until 1996, the new comers were asked to settle their lives in the other three villages - Kamlot, Tik La-ak and Choam Sla. According to the commune chief, there are 121 families living in Chi Phat village, 117 families in Choam Sla, 165 families in Kamlot and 72 families in Tik La-ak. A large number of these people mainly work as farmer while a small number of people are raising their living standard by selling something at tourism places. Presently, there are many natural attractions in this commune including river, forest, wildlife, mountain, waterfall, and some cultural attractions such as beautiful village and collection of multi group of people from other parts of the country. Chi Phat can be reached by national road No. 4 to Sihanouk Ville and turn to road 48 to Koh Kong Province. It is approximately 4 hours drive from Phnom Penh. During Khmer Rouge regime, this place was in Southwest zone (or Zone 401) supervised by Chou Chet. All people in the village were evacuated to live and work in other places in Andaung Tik commune, Pralay commune of Thmar Bang district and Prey Nup district of Preah Sihanouk Ville province. After the evacuation, Khmer Rouge built many sawmills and houses for the Khmer Rouge cadres' living and working on the land of this village. Chi Phat primary school in nowadays was a former Khmer Rouge's house and office from 1976-1978. The school just rebuilt in this recent year.
The public education forum will discuss the experiences of the people's lives under the KR and will also encourage the younger and the older generations to discuss the importance of genocide education and survivors to share their real life experiences under the KR. The project's team members will distribute copies of the textbook "A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)" and discuss one chapter from it. Other materials for distribution include the magazine Searching for the Truth and booklets on Khmer Rouge tribunal Cases 001 and 002.
The forum is being held in cooperation with the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and funded by The Asia Foundation (TAF), Phnom Penh, Cambodia with core support from the Swedish International Agency for Development (Sida) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
For more information, please contact:
Pheng Pong-Rasy Cell: 012 225522
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
The New York Times
IT was just a single day in Phnom Penh, one of many, but even now I can’t get it out of my head. The genocide was over — Vietnam, the traditional enemy, had ended it by driving out the Khmer Rouge and setting up a collaborationist government. But in 1988, Cambodia was still mourning. So many people had died, and thousands of refugees, including those who had suffered from the Khmer Rouge and those loyal to it, lived in politicized border camps inside Thailand, waiting for a diplomatic settlement that never quite seemed to arrive.
“All the intelligent Cambodians either fled the Khmer Rouge or were killed by them,” my Cambodian friend and fixer, Phin Chanda, once said to me, lightly, as if joking. “We’re the residue.”
I was the bureau chief for Southeast Asia at the time, and I tried to go to Vietnam and Cambodia whenever I could from my base in Bangkok. That winter day 23 years ago was a warm one, and long, because you could not enter Cambodia except through Vietnam. Getting a visa into Vietnam was hard enough, and then you had to get permission to enter Cambodia, which was still a place full of ghosts. There were few residents from capitalist countries, except a handful of Australian aid workers. There was no air service, so I hired a taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to drive me to Phnom Penh, through a landscape of rice fields and palms and scrawny villages to the stunning expanse of the Mekong, where it joins the Bassac and Tonle Sap Rivers.
The Vietnamese were trying to justify their occupation by memorializing the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. They had established a museum at Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school where the Khmer Rouge had interrogated and executed so many, first taking their haunting portraits, which hung on the walls. In a classroom, I stared at a now famous metal bed, with electrodes attached, where victims were tortured. The museum remains there, grandly titled the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The Vietnamese were also building an ossuary, a memorial to the murdered. Cambodia was full of bones and shallow graves; I remember the empty gasoline storage tanks of a looted Shell station, used for the massed bodies of the dead. Finger bones were scattered in the grass.
Near the construction site of the new memorial, at Choeung Ek, south of the city, were heaps of bones, and a skinny Cambodian worker, with a kramar, the traditional plaid cotton scarf, around his waist, sitting at a picnic table under a thatched roof. He smoked a cigarette with one hand, while the other rested on a pile of skulls.
I then went to the Central Market, a massive and beautiful Art Deco structure left by the French. The people were scraping by; the vegetables were fresh and cheap; there was a bit of expensive buffalo meat hanging in strips, coated with flies. There were small shops to have Cambodian café au lait — with cloying condensed milk, the way my grandfather liked it; and a tiny massage clinic where young men and women exercised the old medical magic of cupping.
A young woman, carefully supervised by an older woman — her mother? — heated small drinking glasses and applied them to my back; my skin was sucked up into the glasses as they cooled. I must have looked like a sort of insect, an arthropod with glass scales. It hurt, but the pain helped me, in a way, suffer a little myself.
The day finally turned cool, with a stunning sunset and dinner at a little restaurant over the Boeng Kak lake in the city. I dined on stuffed crab and amok, a curried fish steamed in a banana leaf. Mostly I remember the short cyclo ride back to my tattered hotel in central Phnom Penh, staring up at the apartments faintly illuminated by stolen electricity and weak bulbs, thinking of how the Khmer Rouge had emptied the city entirely and murdered so many of its inhabitants, and how the people living here now, however meagerly, had won an extraordinary victory over ideology and evil.
I know the city is tarted up now, with too much Thai, Chinese and Singaporean money. But I want to see it again, to feel that quiet sense of relief that madness has an end.
__________________
Inauguration of Anti-Genocide Memorial
Tuol Tum Poung High School, Phnom Penh, January 10, 2011
The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) is cooperating with the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports to mount slogans across all high schools both in Phnom Penh and provinces for the purpose of promoting forgiveness, tolerance, education and reconciliation. The slogans also help to recall the past and generate interest in the upcoming trial of the four surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge. The two slogans say (1) "Talking about experience during the Khmer Rouge regime promotes reconciliation and educates children about forgiveness and tolerance," and (2) "Learning about the history of Democratic Kampuchea helps prevent genocide."
DC-Cam will hold an inauguration ceremony of an Anti-Genocide Memorial at Tuol Tum Pong High School on January 10, 2011, at 7:30AM. Her Excellency Chumteav Tun Sa-Im, Undersecretary of Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports and Mr. Chea Cheat, Head of Phnom Penh´s Municipal Education Department will be the guests of honor for this ceremony. Tuol Tum Pong High School is the fifth location to hold a memorial inauguration ceremony after Indra Devi, Russey Keo, Preah Sisowath and Hun Sen Ang Snuol High Schools.
Tuol Tum Pong High School was previously named "Sala Preah Keo Morokat" and was established in 1954 near Preah Keo Morokat temple (or Tuol Tum Pong pagoda). When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Sala Preah Keo Morokat was closed and no students or teachers were allowed to enter. At that time, this school was turned into a prison in order to detain, torture, and execute former Khmer Rouge cadres, intellectuals, and people who were accused of betraying “Angkar.” It was reopened in 1979 after the Khmer Rouge collapse. In 1981, it was renamed Tuol Tum Pong High School.
During the inauguration, DC-Cam will distribute its monthly magazine "Searching for the Truth," anti-genocide posters to students, and Case 002 booklets to teachers in order to broaden their understanding of Democratic Kampuchea and the process of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Her Excellency Chumteav Tun Sa-Im will speak about the significance of the slogans, which have an important role in educating students and survivors about reconciliation, forgiveness and tolerance.
The school is proud that a former student of this high school has become a remarkable woman in Cambodia society who is now fulfilling an historical position in seeking for justice for the millions of victims lost to the Khmer Rouge regime. This woman is Her Excellency Chumteav Chea Leang, National Co-prosecutor of the ECCC and the General Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Cambodia.
The slogans are being mounted with financial support from DC-Cam staff members and their friends who were former students of Tuol Tum Pong High School, and teachers and students from Tuol Tum Pong High School. Apart from the important objective of mounting the Anti-Genocide slogans, this ceremony is also a great opportunity for Tuol Tum Pong High School students to meet with each other to discuss the need to prevent genocide. DC-Cam will encourage its staff members to continue making efforts to mount slogans in their former high schools and all high schools across Cambodia.
For additional information, please contact:
Meas Bunthann at truthbunthann.m@dccam.org and 012 33 69 93
Koy Seda at 012 51 94 56
_________________________
A Public Education Forum between teachers, students and parents
Chi Phat Commune, Thmar Bang District, Koh Kong Province
January 9, 2011
On January 9, 2011, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)'s Genocide Education Project is conducting a public education forum in Chi Phat Commune, Thmar Bang District, Koh Kong Province. The forum is conducted at a hall in the compound of Chi Phat primary school, which was former Khmer Rouge cadre's houses and offices in 1976-1978. The participants attending the forum are approximately 200. Among these number, there are 30-40 villagers, 150 students and about 10 teachers.
KOH KONG -- CHI PHAT was a village of Andaung Tik commune of Botum Sakor district. In late 1979, this village was formed as a new commune called Chi Phat. This new commune was not located in Botum Sakor anymore, but it becomes one among six communes of Koh Kong's Thmar Bang district. Under the administration of The People Republic of Kampuchea, there are four villages include Chi Phat, Kamlot, Tik La-ak and Choam Sla village, in this commune. After the national election in 1993, new comers from everywhere in Cambodia came to live in this commune to earn there living by cutting and sawing woods, farming and selling. Until 1996, the new comers were asked to settle their lives in the other three villages - Kamlot, Tik La-ak and Choam Sla. According to the commune chief, there are 121 families living in Chi Phat village, 117 families in Choam Sla, 165 families in Kamlot and 72 families in Tik La-ak. A large number of these people mainly work as farmer while a small number of people are raising their living standard by selling something at tourism places. Presently, there are many natural attractions in this commune including river, forest, wildlife, mountain, waterfall, and some cultural attractions such as beautiful village and collection of multi group of people from other parts of the country. Chi Phat can be reached by national road No. 4 to Sihanouk Ville and turn to road 48 to Koh Kong Province. It is approximately 4 hours drive from Phnom Penh. During Khmer Rouge regime, this place was in Southwest zone (or Zone 401) supervised by Chou Chet. All people in the village were evacuated to live and work in other places in Andaung Tik commune, Pralay commune of Thmar Bang district and Prey Nup district of Preah Sihanouk Ville province. After the evacuation, Khmer Rouge built many sawmills and houses for the Khmer Rouge cadres' living and working on the land of this village. Chi Phat primary school in nowadays was a former Khmer Rouge's house and office from 1976-1978. The school just rebuilt in this recent year.
The public education forum will discuss the experiences of the people's lives under the KR and will also encourage the younger and the older generations to discuss the importance of genocide education and survivors to share their real life experiences under the KR. The project's team members will distribute copies of the textbook "A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)" and discuss one chapter from it. Other materials for distribution include the magazine Searching for the Truth and booklets on Khmer Rouge tribunal Cases 001 and 002.
The forum is being held in cooperation with the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and funded by The Asia Foundation (TAF), Phnom Penh, Cambodia with core support from the Swedish International Agency for Development (Sida) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
For more information, please contact:
Pheng Pong-Rasy
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Oh, Phnom Penh Euy!
The words to the song "Oh, Phnom Penh Euy" were written by a former Culture and Information Minister and Phnom Penh Governor, Keo Chenda, in 1979. Keo Chenda also wrote the national anthem of the People Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). Oh, Phnom Penh Euy was composed by Morm Bunnaray, who was working at the national radio station in Phnom Penh. The song was sung by Morm Sokha, a sister of Morm Bunnaray, just a few months after the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed. According to Sum Chhumbun, the Under Secretary General of the Royal Academy of Cambodia, Morm Bunnaray defected from the PRK government sometime in the 1980s and was later imprisoned. Later, he passed away. His sister, Morm Sokha, ended up in the United States as a refugee. Keo Chenda has also passed away. The song then seemed to have been disappeared from the public.
The use of the song, as well as the celebration of the liberation of 7 January, was controversial in the 1990s when the political parties were reunified. In late 1990s, the song return and was heard on public media.
Listen to song, please click: http://www.dccam.org/Archives/Musics/Music.htm
Nhean Socheat
Documentation Center of Cambodia
-----------
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011010445860/National-news/ministry-bans-remake-of-classic-song.html
Ministry bans remake of classic song
TUESDAY, 04 JANUARY 2011 18:58 MOM KUNTHEAR
The Minister of Information has issued an order banning the broadcast of a remake of “Or Phnom Penh Euy”, a popular song often aired in the lead up to the January 7 anniversary of the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime. In a letter dated Monday, Minister Khieu Kanharith argued that rewording the lyrics of the original song, which was written by former municipal official Keo Chenda in the early 1980s, was “improper” regardless of the intentions behind the cover version.
“The meaning of the song called “Or Phnom Penh Euy” expresses fully enough the sufferings of the Cambodian people in the Pol Pot regime; the standing up of the patriots to save the nation; the creation of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation on December 2, 1978; and the great victory on January 7, 1979, when the nation was liberated and the people met each other again,” the letter stated. It added: “Phnom Penh is the heart of our country and survived after it was seriously destroyed for three years, eight months and 20 days.”
Classic track
“Or Phnom Penh Euy”, which translates as “Oh, Phnom Penh”, refers to the capital city as being “representative of the Khmer spirit”.
“Oh, Phnom Penh, I missed you so in the three years I left you, with suffering the enemies separated me from you,” reads an unofficial translation of the original song.
“Oh, Phnom Penh, when I met you again, your suffering was better.”
The new song retains the melody of the original but substitutes in new pop lyrics, according to Khieu Kanharith’s letter, which was sent to radio and television stations nationwide with orders to cease broadcast of the new version “immediately”. The lyrics to the new song could not be obtained Tuesday.
San Putheary, director of the Information Ministry’s Audiovisual Department, said “Or Phnom Penh Euy” was part of Cambodia’s “national heritage” and had to be “protected forever”.
“We really won’t allow all the radio and television stations to broadcast the new song with the same music at all,” he said, but declined to answer questions regarding what sort of punishments people who breach the ban would face.
He said officials did not know who had produced the new version of the song. Khieu Kanharith could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Yim Sovann, spokesman for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, said songs can help teach the younger generation “what happened so they do not do the same thing”.
Copyright © 2011 The Phnom Penh Post. All Rights Reserved.
------------
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
The use of the song, as well as the celebration of the liberation of 7 January, was controversial in the 1990s when the political parties were reunified. In late 1990s, the song return and was heard on public media.
Listen to song, please click: http://www.dccam.org/Archives/Musics/Music.htm
Nhean Socheat
Documentation Center of Cambodia
-----------
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011010445860/National-news/ministry-bans-remake-of-classic-song.html
Ministry bans remake of classic song
TUESDAY, 04 JANUARY 2011 18:58 MOM KUNTHEAR
The Minister of Information has issued an order banning the broadcast of a remake of “Or Phnom Penh Euy”, a popular song often aired in the lead up to the January 7 anniversary of the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime. In a letter dated Monday, Minister Khieu Kanharith argued that rewording the lyrics of the original song, which was written by former municipal official Keo Chenda in the early 1980s, was “improper” regardless of the intentions behind the cover version.
“The meaning of the song called “Or Phnom Penh Euy” expresses fully enough the sufferings of the Cambodian people in the Pol Pot regime; the standing up of the patriots to save the nation; the creation of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation on December 2, 1978; and the great victory on January 7, 1979, when the nation was liberated and the people met each other again,” the letter stated. It added: “Phnom Penh is the heart of our country and survived after it was seriously destroyed for three years, eight months and 20 days.”
Classic track
“Or Phnom Penh Euy”, which translates as “Oh, Phnom Penh”, refers to the capital city as being “representative of the Khmer spirit”.
“Oh, Phnom Penh, I missed you so in the three years I left you, with suffering the enemies separated me from you,” reads an unofficial translation of the original song.
“Oh, Phnom Penh, when I met you again, your suffering was better.”
The new song retains the melody of the original but substitutes in new pop lyrics, according to Khieu Kanharith’s letter, which was sent to radio and television stations nationwide with orders to cease broadcast of the new version “immediately”. The lyrics to the new song could not be obtained Tuesday.
San Putheary, director of the Information Ministry’s Audiovisual Department, said “Or Phnom Penh Euy” was part of Cambodia’s “national heritage” and had to be “protected forever”.
“We really won’t allow all the radio and television stations to broadcast the new song with the same music at all,” he said, but declined to answer questions regarding what sort of punishments people who breach the ban would face.
He said officials did not know who had produced the new version of the song. Khieu Kanharith could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Yim Sovann, spokesman for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, said songs can help teach the younger generation “what happened so they do not do the same thing”.
Copyright © 2011 The Phnom Penh Post. All Rights Reserved.
------------
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Cambodia remembers its fallen Muslims
By Julie Masis
PHNOM PENH - In September 1975, 2,000 or so Cambodian Muslims picked up their swords and machetes and for several days fought off heavily armed Khmer Rouge soldiers at the village of Svay Khleang. The rebellion was sparked during the holy month of Ramadan in response to Khmer Rouge attempts to arrest Muslims for praying at their local mosque.
The rebellion was defeated but won't soon be forgotten: a museum that will preserve the stories of Muslim survivors of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal reign of terror from 1975-79 is scheduled to open at the Mabarak mosque outside Phnom Penh later this year.
Between 100,000 and 400,000 Cham Muslims died under the Khmer Rouge regime, according to figures provided by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, either from murder, starvation or disease. Most of the country's mosques were destroyed or desecrated during the Khmer Rouge's radical attempt to create a communist utopia.
After the Khmer Rouge put down the Svay Khleang rebellion, the village's women were separated from the men and the revolt's leaders were sent to prison. Other villagers were deported to live in forested areas where many eventually died from malaria or starvation.
The persecution of Muslims remains an understudied aspect of Cambodia's genocide experience - where as many as two million people perished - but the extent of that suffering is now coming to academic light. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCC), Muslims who were forcibly relocated from their communities died at a higher rate than any other ethnic or religious group.
Cambodia's population is predominantly Buddhist; Muslims currently make up around 2% of the population, according to official statistics. While Cambodia's Muslims are no longer systematically persecuted, as they were under the atheist Khmer Rouge, they remain largely segregated from the Buddhist majority and are under-represented in the country's universities and bureaucracy.
The DCC has collected 500 interviews with Cambodian Muslims about there experiences under the Khmer Rouge, testimonies that will be accessible at the new memorial museum, according to Farina So, the project's oral history leader. The museum will feature Cambodia's first genocide-related exhibit inside a mosque and will be housed in a former Islamic school that was converted to a communal cafeteria under the Khmer Rouge.
The memorial's creation coincides with the ongoing legal proceedings at the United Nations-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), where former top Khmer Rouge leaders are currently on trial for their alleged roles in genocide.
In July, the ECCC convicted former Khmer Rouge prison warden, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, for war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. His sentence was commuted to 19 years in compensation for the time he was ruled to have been illegally detained by a military court.
The ECCC's proceedings have brought back bitter memories among the regime's Muslim survivors. Him Soh, a Muslim survivor who lost seven family members including his parents and siblings during the Khmer Rouge period, recalls how soldiers murdered Muslim community leaders and deported Cham Muslims to other provinces where they were forced to integrate into ethnic Khmer villages.
"The Khmer Rouge did not allow Muslims to pray in the mosque or at home," he said. "They spied to see if a person prayed and if the person prayed they were taken away and killed."
The Khmer Rouge also forced Muslim girls to cut their hair and made men shave their beards – deliberate affronts to Muslim culture. Nor did they allow Chams to cover their heads or wear traditional Muslim clothes. The Koran was confiscated and in certain instances the pages were used for toilet paper, Soh said.
Chi Sleh, a 75-year-old survivor, was imprisoned twice during the Khmer Rouge regime but lived to tell his tale after a sympathetic Khmer Rouge soldier helped him. Sleh said he had to watch as soldiers destroyed the mosque in his home village, which he says the Khmer Rouge razed for scrap metal. "Some mosques were destroyed; others were used to store rice," he recalls.
Because of Cambodia's history of Cham-led rebellions, the Khmer Rouge were particularly suspicious of Muslim populations. "The Khmer Rouge viewed the Cham people as an internal enemy," So said. "Some people were asked if they were Cham and if they were Cham, they were killed. Some survived by hiding their identity."
The Mabarak mosque aims to promote understanding about Cham culture. The new memorial museum will be housed in a mosque built in 1963, one of the oldest Islamic shrines in the country to survive the Khmer Rouge's demolition campaign. It was bombed and damaged in 1973 during the war between the Khmer Rouge and the government's army. The building's bullet-scarred walls still bear witness to that conflict.
The memorial will contain a collection of artifacts, including Cambodian-language Korans which were buried for safekeeping during Khmer Rouge purges, as well as the swords the Chams used during their rebellion. On the lighter side, the exhibitions will introduce visitors to Cham culture and languages, as well as other minority groups which suffered under the Khmer Rouge.
Many of Cambodia's Muslims are descendents of the Cham, an ethnic group which once boasted a far-reaching kingdom known as Champa that included territory in today's central and southern Vietnam. The kingdom was defeated by the Vietnamese in the early 1700s and many Chams fled to areas of modern day Cambodia, including the province now known as Kampong Cham.
Julie Masis is a Cambodia-based journalist.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
PHNOM PENH - In September 1975, 2,000 or so Cambodian Muslims picked up their swords and machetes and for several days fought off heavily armed Khmer Rouge soldiers at the village of Svay Khleang. The rebellion was sparked during the holy month of Ramadan in response to Khmer Rouge attempts to arrest Muslims for praying at their local mosque.
The rebellion was defeated but won't soon be forgotten: a museum that will preserve the stories of Muslim survivors of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal reign of terror from 1975-79 is scheduled to open at the Mabarak mosque outside Phnom Penh later this year.
Between 100,000 and 400,000 Cham Muslims died under the Khmer Rouge regime, according to figures provided by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, either from murder, starvation or disease. Most of the country's mosques were destroyed or desecrated during the Khmer Rouge's radical attempt to create a communist utopia.
After the Khmer Rouge put down the Svay Khleang rebellion, the village's women were separated from the men and the revolt's leaders were sent to prison. Other villagers were deported to live in forested areas where many eventually died from malaria or starvation.
The persecution of Muslims remains an understudied aspect of Cambodia's genocide experience - where as many as two million people perished - but the extent of that suffering is now coming to academic light. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCC), Muslims who were forcibly relocated from their communities died at a higher rate than any other ethnic or religious group.
Cambodia's population is predominantly Buddhist; Muslims currently make up around 2% of the population, according to official statistics. While Cambodia's Muslims are no longer systematically persecuted, as they were under the atheist Khmer Rouge, they remain largely segregated from the Buddhist majority and are under-represented in the country's universities and bureaucracy.
The DCC has collected 500 interviews with Cambodian Muslims about there experiences under the Khmer Rouge, testimonies that will be accessible at the new memorial museum, according to Farina So, the project's oral history leader. The museum will feature Cambodia's first genocide-related exhibit inside a mosque and will be housed in a former Islamic school that was converted to a communal cafeteria under the Khmer Rouge.
The memorial's creation coincides with the ongoing legal proceedings at the United Nations-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), where former top Khmer Rouge leaders are currently on trial for their alleged roles in genocide.
In July, the ECCC convicted former Khmer Rouge prison warden, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, for war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. His sentence was commuted to 19 years in compensation for the time he was ruled to have been illegally detained by a military court.
The ECCC's proceedings have brought back bitter memories among the regime's Muslim survivors. Him Soh, a Muslim survivor who lost seven family members including his parents and siblings during the Khmer Rouge period, recalls how soldiers murdered Muslim community leaders and deported Cham Muslims to other provinces where they were forced to integrate into ethnic Khmer villages.
"The Khmer Rouge did not allow Muslims to pray in the mosque or at home," he said. "They spied to see if a person prayed and if the person prayed they were taken away and killed."
The Khmer Rouge also forced Muslim girls to cut their hair and made men shave their beards – deliberate affronts to Muslim culture. Nor did they allow Chams to cover their heads or wear traditional Muslim clothes. The Koran was confiscated and in certain instances the pages were used for toilet paper, Soh said.
Chi Sleh, a 75-year-old survivor, was imprisoned twice during the Khmer Rouge regime but lived to tell his tale after a sympathetic Khmer Rouge soldier helped him. Sleh said he had to watch as soldiers destroyed the mosque in his home village, which he says the Khmer Rouge razed for scrap metal. "Some mosques were destroyed; others were used to store rice," he recalls.
Because of Cambodia's history of Cham-led rebellions, the Khmer Rouge were particularly suspicious of Muslim populations. "The Khmer Rouge viewed the Cham people as an internal enemy," So said. "Some people were asked if they were Cham and if they were Cham, they were killed. Some survived by hiding their identity."
The Mabarak mosque aims to promote understanding about Cham culture. The new memorial museum will be housed in a mosque built in 1963, one of the oldest Islamic shrines in the country to survive the Khmer Rouge's demolition campaign. It was bombed and damaged in 1973 during the war between the Khmer Rouge and the government's army. The building's bullet-scarred walls still bear witness to that conflict.
The memorial will contain a collection of artifacts, including Cambodian-language Korans which were buried for safekeeping during Khmer Rouge purges, as well as the swords the Chams used during their rebellion. On the lighter side, the exhibitions will introduce visitors to Cham culture and languages, as well as other minority groups which suffered under the Khmer Rouge.
Many of Cambodia's Muslims are descendents of the Cham, an ethnic group which once boasted a far-reaching kingdom known as Champa that included territory in today's central and southern Vietnam. The kingdom was defeated by the Vietnamese in the early 1700s and many Chams fled to areas of modern day Cambodia, including the province now known as Kampong Cham.
Julie Masis is a Cambodia-based journalist.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
The Beleaguered Cambodians
JANUARY 13, 2011
Margo Picken
Magnum Photos
The causeway across the moat at Angkor Wat; photograph by Steve McCurry
More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the
hands of Pol Pot’s regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer
Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking
place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav,
commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war
crimes and crimes against humanity—a sentence that he and the prosecution
have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol
Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and
officials, were tortured and killed.1
Even more important, the next trial, which will probably begin in 2011,
involves the four most senior Khmer leaders still alive: Nuon Chea, known as
Brother Number Two; Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister; his wife, Ieng
Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Khieu Samphan, who was president
of Democratic Kampuchea. Now in their late seventies and early eighties, all
four were arrested in 2007 and on September 16 were formally charged with
war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and related crimes under
Cambodian laws.
While the trials have refocused international attention on Cambodia’s dark
past, little attention has been given to how the much-watched proceedings
relate to the troubled politics of Cambodia today. Will they lead to a new
era of justice and accountability for a beleaguered people or end in another
betrayal?
Cambodia is ruled by longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian
People’s Party. They govern with absolute power and control all institutions
that could challenge their authority. Opposition political parties exist,
giving the illusion of multiparty democracy, but elections have not been
fair and the opposition no longer poses any threat to Hun Sen. The monarchy
has survived but has little influence. The freedoms of expression,
association, and assembly are severely curtailed. Human rights organizations
are intimidated, and a draft law aims to bring them under the regime’s
authority. The judiciary is controlled by the executive, and the flawed laws
that exist are selectively enforced. Hundreds of murders and violent attacks
against politicians, journalists, labor leaders, and others critical of Hun
Sen and his party remain unsolved.
The regime’s violence against political opponents has been flagrant. In
March 1997 Hun Sen’s bodyguards were clearly implicated in a grenade attack
on a peaceful rally in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, led by opposition
leader Sam Rainsy.2 Sixteen people were killed and over 140 injured,
including a US citizen. No serious inquiry was ever completed. Royalist
opponents of Hun Sen were murdered when he deposed Prime Minister Norodom
Ranariddh in a coup on July 5–6, 1997. More people were killed during the
July 1998 elections, which Hun Sen won. In January 2004, the popular labor
leader Chea Vichea, an outspoken critic of the government, was shot, one of
several contract killings in Phnom Penh before and after the July 2003
elections, carried out in broad daylight by helmeted gunmen on motorbikes.
In October 2005, in an attempt to encourage prosecution of these murders and
other serious crimes, Peter Leuprecht, at the time the United Nations
secretary-general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia,
issued a report tracing a continuing and accepted practice of impunity since
the start of the 1990s. However, open discussion of the report and its
recommendations was not possible in Cambodia and it was ignored.
By confronting the crimes committed between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge
trials offer hope of breaking the pattern of impunity that has characterized
Cambodia’s recent history. But they could also allow Cambodia’s leaders to
claim a commitment to justice and the rule of law while avoiding
accountability for their own crimes and repressive practices.
Cambodia was once one of Asia’s greatest empires. The only existing account
of life in what we now call Angkor was written by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese
envoy, after he spent almost a year there at the end of the thirteenth
century. What he saw and described was an extraordinary civilization still
at its height, the outcome of five centuries of political and cultural
continuity. His stories are taught in schools and scholars draw on them to
gain a picture of life and society in Angkor.3
Angkor’s ancient glory is reassuring to a people whose history after gaining
independence from France in 1953 has been so perilous. Drawn into the cold
war and the war against Vietnam, they endured the Nixon administration’s
covert and illegal bombing in the late 1960s in pursuit of the Vietcong; the
overthrow of their head of state and former king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk,
in 1970; and years of more bombing and civil war that culminated in the
Khmer Rouge taking absolute control when it captured Phnom Penh in April
1975 and founded the state of Democratic Kampuchea. It ruled until it was
ousted in January 1979 by Vietnamese troops who installed the People’s
Republic of Kampuchea with Soviet backing.
Hun Sen, formerly a Khmer Rouge regimental commander who fled to Vietnam in
1978, emerged as a principal leader of the new government, serving first as
foreign minister and then as prime minister. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had
retreated to camps on the Thai border, allied itself with other opposition
forces, and continued to claim power. Since the US and other nations did not
want to recognize a Cambodian government dominated by Vietnam, these
disparate forces were supported and armed by China, the US, and Thailand,
among others, and recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate
government of Cambodia.
The end of the cold war, and exhaustion among Cambodians after so many years
of war, made possible an internationally brokered peace agreement in
1991—the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia
Conflict4—and the deployment a year later of the United Nations Transitional
Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest peacekeeping operation the UN
had ever mounted. UNTAC was charged with overseeing an end to armed
conflict, disarming the armies of the fighting factions, repatriating
refugees, and creating a neutral political environment for fair elections,
which it was to organize.
The royalist party won the May 1993 elections.5 When Hun Sen threatened
armed secession, a power-sharing arrangement was brokered to meet his
demands, resulting in an unwieldy coalition government that he came to
dominate. Cambodia became the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia under a new
constitution, and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne. UNTAC left in
September 1993, its departure dictated by the UN Security Council, not by
conditions in Cambodia where violence and fighting against the Khmer Rouge,
which had boycotted the elections, continued. For the outside world, the
main objective had been achieved, namely to enable the former cold war
powers to disengage from a country in which they no longer had any interest.
The stage was set for a series of deceptions and disappointments. In 1993,
the UN Commission on Human Rights asked the secretary-general to appoint an
independent expert to serve as his special representative for human rights
in Cambodia and to establish an office in the country. The UN office and the
special representative were jointly charged with assistance to the
government, monitoring the human rights situation, and reporting annually to
the commission and UN General Assembly. This mandate, one of the strongest
ever given to a UN human rights operation, deserved support, but many
governments regarded it as too intrusive. Wary of setting precedents that
might be followed elsewhere, they gave little help, making an already
difficult task almost impossible.
For a decade and a half, four successive special representatives tried to
get the Cambodian government to set up the laws, institutions, policies, and
practices necessary to uphold and protect elementary rights. From the
outset, Hun Sen, who was steadily consolidating his power over the country,
swung between reluctant cooperation with the representatives and vindictive
personal attacks on them.6 He spoke of Yash Ghai, the last representative—a
distinguished academic and constitutional lawyer from Kenya—with utter
contempt and refused to meet him. In his reports, Ghai regretted that
deliberate and systemic violations of human rights had become central to the
government’s hold on power. Hun Sen’s ruling party still dominated Cambodian
politics; the constitution and legal and judicial system were regularly
subverted; corruption was entrenched; and government impunity and threats
against those who criticized the status quo continued.
Hun Sen demanded that Ghai be dismissed and that the position of special
representative of the secretary-general be abolished. In the end he got his
way. Yash Ghai resigned in frustration in September 2008, and the UN Human
Rights Council, which had replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006,
eliminated the position. The council established instead its own “special
rapporteur,” thereby bringing this office under its direct control. The
human rights office has also not been exempt from criticism, and Hun Sen has
asked that it be closed down on several occasions, first in 1995 and most
recently when Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited Cambodia in October.
Despite the country’s poor record on human rights, Hun Sen and his party
boast that Cambodia has the most liberal and open economy in Southeast Asia.
Economic growth has indeed been rapid since the mid-1990s, averaging 7
percent a year. But the new wealth is concentrated in Phnom Penh, a city
with its back turned on rural Cambodia, where over 80 percent of Cambodia’s
14.6 million people live. One in three Cambodians lives below the poverty
line. Many more live just slightly above it. Most subsist on farming tiny
plots of land and by foraging.
About nine million hectares, half of Cambodia’s surface area, are estimated
to be reasonably productive. Under the Khmer Rouge, all land was
expropriated, entire populations uprooted, and land records destroyed.
During the Vietnamese occupation that followed, land remained largely
collectivized. The Land Law of 2001 could have helped to bring about
equitable land distribution and security of tenure; instead, under a
compliant judiciary, well-connected investors and companies have grabbed
land at an alarming rate, rapidly destroying the livelihood of the rural
poor. Those living on the land are simply told that it now belongs to
someone else and they must go. The urban poor also suffer, notably in Phnom
Penh where thousands have been evicted from their homes to desolate
settlements outside the city.7
The Land Law allows the government to lease land to national and foreign
companies for plantations and commercial agriculture for up to ninety-nine
years under terms tantamount to ownership. Basic information about these
“economic land concessions,” such as the identity of companies and
shareholders, is hard to obtain. The largest lease was awarded in 2000 to
Pheapimex Company Ltd., which is owned by close friends of Hun Sen. It spans
two provinces and is over 300,000 hectares, far exceeding the 10,000-hectare
ceiling stipulated in the Land Law.
The leaseholders of these concessions have seldom adhered to the conditions
and safeguards stipulated in the law; nor have they contributed to state
revenue, reduced poverty, or increased rural employment, which was the
government’s rationale for granting them.8 Most often the concessions have
been held for speculative purposes or have provided a cover for cutting down
forests, which are protected under other laws. Since 1994, the government
has also handed over vast tracts of land to the military as “military
development zones,” ostensibly to provide land and jobs to demobilized
soldiers. It refuses to say how much land it has allocated or where these
zones are.
Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images
Cambodian children holding portraits of Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany, at a
protest in front of the prime minister’s residence, Phnom Penh, September
2010
The World Bank has advised the government to support small farms and
smallholder agriculture, which, it argues, would be as or more economically
beneficial than Cambodia’s leasing policy.9 But the government has ignored
this advice, and still more concessions are in the offing. Concessions for
gem and mineral exploration, hydroelectricity dams, special economic zones,
and tourism development have raised similar concerns.
For over a decade, the UK-based organization Global Witness has courageously
exposed widespread illegal logging, asset stripping, and corruption
involving highly placed government and military officials. Its reports have
been confiscated, its staff threatened, its recommendations dismissed; and
it can no longer operate in Cambodia. Its report “Cambodia’s Family Trees,”
issued in June 2007, provides shocking evidence that the country is run by
an elite that generates much of its wealth from the seizure of public
assets. It shows how a relatively small group of Cambodian tycoons with
political, business, or family ties to senior government officials have
benefited from the allocation of forest concessions.10 “Country for Sale,”
issued in February 2009, finds the same patterns of corruption and patronage
in the management of Cambodia’s oil, gas, and minerals. It deplores the
rapid parceling up and selling off of the country’s land and resources, with
millions of dollars in company payments to secure contracts unaccounted
for.11 “Shifting Sand,” issued in May 2010, records the wholesale removal of
Cambodia’s sand to Singapore where it is used to extend the island’s
landmass.12
These policies have wrought havoc on Cambodia’s environment and driven vast
numbers of poor people out of the city and off the land, their meager
livelihoods destroyed. With nowhere to go, they become a source of cheap
labor for plantations and factories in special economic zones. When members
of desperate communities protest, their villages come under ever stricter
control and their leaders are arrested on charges such as incitement or
damage to property.
Roughly half of Cambodia’s national budget is provided by foreign
governments and development agencies. Known collectively as “the donors,”
they form a large and diverse presence in Phnom Penh. Yash Ghai repeatedly
underlined their moral and legal responsibility toward Cambodia, urging them
to be far more active in demanding progress on human rights and democratic
and accountable institutions. While several voice the need for “good
governance,” “participation,” “transparency,” “accountability,” and “the
rule of law,” these concepts lack the clarity of human rights standards
defined in law, and Cambodia’s leaders have become masters at interpreting
them narrowly.
Hun Sen has routinely criticized and threatened organizations advocating for
human rights, accusing them of pursuing a politically partisan agenda and
inciting the people to unrest. Donor nations ranging from Japan to France
have typically advised human rights groups to engage in a more
“constructive” dialogue with the government. Many are inclined to view
human rights as far too ambitious a concern for a country like Cambodia, and
are more at ease with the UN’s 2000 Millennium Development Goals than with
human rights treaties that are legally binding.
In any case, the donors have competing interests. China, which stands apart,
is the largest contributor and does much to keep the ruling party in
power.13 Japan is next, vying with China for influence. It is also largely
supportive of the regime, and takes a lead role in UN deliberations on the
Khmer Rouge trials and human rights. France, the former colonial power, is
pragmatic and influential in the European Commission, a significant
contributor. In 2008, the US resumed direct government aid, cut off after
the 1997 coup. It has funded civil society organizations like the Community
Legal Education Center and has sought to improve the functioning of
political parties and the electoral system, but lately has given increasing
priority to counterterrorism measures and military training and
cooperation.14
The UN Development Program and other UN agencies, which together contribute
a considerable amount, are supposed to give human rights central attention
in their programs; but they have been hesitant to take on human rights
violations. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have generally
steered clear of human rights altogether.15
While donor nations have called for measures to strengthen the rule of
law—primarily to improve the environment for foreign investment and private
business development—the results have been disappointing. The judiciary
remains the creature of the executive, and an anticorruption law, under
discussion since 1994 and then rushed through parliament in March 2010, is
extremely weak. Meanwhile the discovery of potentially significant deposits
of oil and natural gas has made concerns about corruption ever more
pressing.
For all but a few Cambodians, the supposed “beneficiaries” of overseas
development aid, the donor world is remote and hard to comprehend, and such
organizations as Human Rights Watch and Global Witness urge donors to be far
more exacting about the way their funds are used. Despite these concerns, in
June, donor nations including Japan, the US, and members of the EU pledged a
record $1.1 billion with few questions asked.
The Khmer Rouge trials capture what little attention the outside world has
to give Cambodia. The country’s citizens remain bewildered about the
killings, deaths, and enormity of suffering under Democratic Kampuchea, and
the forthcoming trial of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders may provide
some of the answers and understanding they are looking for. But it is far
from clear that the proceedings will have a useful effect on Cambodia’s
current predicament.
The prosecution, with the title Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia (ECCC), was formally set up by the UN and the Hun Sen government in
2006 to prosecute
senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible
for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international
humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognized by
Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6
January 1979.
The ECCC is a hybrid court, with Cambodian judges and staff in the majority,
assisted by international judges and staff recruited through the UN. Its
complex structure was initially established in a 2003 agreement, the result
of years of wearisome negotiation between the representative of then UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Hun Sen’s government.
Many more hurdles had to be overcome, including the court’s location. The
government persuaded the UN to agree to a location not in central Phnom Penh
but instead at the site of the new Military High Command Headquarters, some
ten miles from the city center, arguing that it would have advantages for
security and would reduce costs. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan’s recommendation that
the trials be funded through the UN’s regular budget and not exposed to the
vagaries of voluntary contributions was disregarded, leaving the court in
continuing financial difficulties, dogged by corruption, and open to
meddling from donors and the government alike. The court’s budget was
increased in 2008 from the original $56.3 million to $135.4 million to allow
the trials to continue until the end of 2010. Many more millions will be
needed to keep them going after that date.
The court continues to be mired in political interference and delay, and Hun
Sen has made clear his opposition to extending prosecutions beyond the
present five defendants.16 The judges and staff assigned by the UN to assist
the court face familiar dilemmas, among them how to avoid lending legitimacy
to a process in which Cambodia’s judiciary is not independent and the
country’s leaders have set out to limit and control the trials.
The ECCC agreement allows the UN to withdraw should the government cause the
court to function in a manner that does not conform to UN standards. But
most certainly the UN, not the government, would be blamed. One of Hun Sen’s
main claims is that the UN has a history of betraying Cambodia. Why, he
asks, did it do nothing during Pol Pot’s regime? Why did it give the Khmer
Rouge a seat in the General Assembly in the 1980s, when his own government
in Cambodia went unrecognized? If the UN withdraws from the trials, or
additional funds are not forthcoming, he will ask why the international
community is abandoning Cambodia and failing to confront one of the most
horrendous atrocities of the twentieth century, when a quarter of the
country’s population died, even though the ECCC is set to accomplish little
that the ordinary Cambodian courts could not accomplish themselves.
If the trials are to serve justice, one outcome must be the transformation
of the “ordinary” system of justice in Cambodia today and an end to impunity
for government and military officials and their friends once and for all.
The trials must also establish as complete a record as possible of the
crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge, and open the way to dispassionate
examination of what happened before and after. Cambodia’s recent history
continues to be intensely contested, and the questions it raises cannot
continue to be buried if Cambodians are to build a decent future for their
nation.
For most foreigners, Cambodia seems to be a relatively stable country,
hospitable to outside investment and welcoming for expatriates and visitors
touring Angkor’s temples and the killing fields. Hun Sen, now one of the
world’s longest-serving prime ministers, maintains good relations with
China, Japan, the US, Australia, and France. Unlike the Burmese generals, he
has managed to manufacture an outwardly acceptable face, and has used
international assistance to gain legitimacy at home and abroad.
Taking credit for ridding Cambodia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen
cooperates with the trials as long as they don’t diminish his power. He
talks of sustainable development and reducing poverty while he and his party
have exploited the country’s resources and pocketed the payoffs. He
tolerates the UN human rights presence, provided it limits itself to
overcoming the legacy of Cambodia’s tragic Khmer Rouge past. He uses Pol Pot’s
record as the yardstick to measure progress, thereby making failure
impossible. The trials reinforce this message. No outside governments care
to ask too many questions. Their economic and security interests are more
important, as Hun Sen knows, and human rights are treated as dispensable.
Some believe that sooner or later Cambodians will rebel, but it seems more
likely that their discontent will instead be channeled into extreme forms of
nationalism, as under the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia has been divided and preyed
upon for much of its modern history. Many Cambodians fear Vietnam and
Thailand as predatory neighbors, and passions against both countries can
become quickly inflamed.17
In the 1991 peace agreements, the “international community” assumed special
responsibilities to the people of Cambodia that have yet to be properly
honored. Cambodia today is a corrupt and cruel semidictatorship that should
be getting much more scrutiny from the rest of the world. The Cambodian
people deserve better. Thirty years after the appalling transgressions of
the Khmer Rouge, much of the country still lives in fear.
—December 15, 2010
Duch will serve nineteen years of this sentence. He benefits from deduction
of the eleven years he has served since his arrest in May 1999, and a
five-year reduction to compensate for the time he spent in military
detention without trial before his transfer to the court in July 2007. His
trial divulged little information that was not already known about his
responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of thousands. Now
being held in the special prison complex built for the trial, he has
appealed his sentence and is seeking acquittal, while the prosecution is
asking for life imprisonment. A detailed account of Duch can be found in
Richard Bernstein's " At Last, Justice for Monsters ," The New York Review ,
April 9, 2009, and in Stéphanie Giry's " Cambodia's Perfect War Criminal ,"
NYR Blog, October 25, 2010. ↩
In January 2010, Sam Rainsy was sentenced quite unjustly to two years'
imprisonment in absentia, which Cambodia's Appeal Court upheld in
October—for damage to property and incitement to racial discrimination in
connection with the demarcation of Cambodia's border with Vietnam, a highly
volatile issue. In September he was sentenced, again in absentia, to ten
years' imprisonment on related charges of disinformation and falsifying
public documents. ↩
The first rendition into English from the original Chinese of Zhou Daguan's
A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People was published in 2007 by
Silkworm Books. Peter Harris, the translator, provides a fascinating
introduction setting Zhou in his time and place, along with meticulous
notes, maps, and photographs to explain the text. ↩
The peace agreements were signed in Paris on October 23, 1991, following the
withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in 1989. They laid down a blueprint for a
liberal democratic political regime. They were signed by Cambodia and
eighteen other nations, including Australia, Canada, China, France, India,
Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the USSR, the UK, the US,
and Vietnam. Cambodia was represented by a twelve-person Supreme National
Council, chaired by Sihanouk, with members from the State of Cambodia (the
renamed People's Republic of Kampuchea); the Party of Democratic Kampuchea
(the Khmer Rouge); the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, which
became the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party; and the royalist party,
Funcinpec, established by Sihanouk in 1981. Funcinpec is the French acronym
for Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et
Coopératif, or the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral,
Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia. ↩
Four and a quarter million Cambodians voted in the election, representing 90
percent of the registered electorate. Funcinpec received 45 percent of the
vote, the Cambodian People's Party 38 percent, and the Buddhist Liberal
Democratic Party 4 percent, with the rest shared between seventeen other
political parties. William Shawcross's " A New Cambodia " provides a
firsthand account of the election and its immediate aftermath: see The New
York Review , August 12, 1993. ↩
The special representatives were Michael Kirby, Thomas Hammarberg, Peter
Leuprecht, and Yash Ghai. They served without remuneration, discharging
their mandate through regular missions to Cambodia. Their reports can be
found on the website of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights in Cambodia: cambodia.ohchr.org. ↩
Reports recording the impact of these policies on Cambodia's poorest people
include "Rights Razed: Forced Evictions in Cambodia," Amnesty International,
February 2008; "Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian
Land Sector," issued in October 2009 by Bridges Across Borders Southeast
Asia, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the Jesuit Refugee
Services; and "Losing Ground: Forced Evictions and Intimidation in
Cambodia," September 2009, the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, a
coalition of national nongovernmental organizations. ↩
Reports with these findings include "Land Concessions for Economic Purposes
in Cambodia: A Human Rights Perspective," Special Representative of the
Secretary-General for human rights in Cambodia, November 2004. This report
was updated in June 2007 with much the same overall findings. ↩
Cambodia: Halving Poverty by 2015? Poverty Assessment 2006," report of the
World Bank, February 2006. ↩
"Cambodia's Family Trees: Illegal Logging and the Stripping of Public Assets
by Cambodia's Elite," Global Witness, June 2007. The report includes a
detailed case study of illegal logging in Prey Long Forest, the largest
lowland evergreen forest in mainland Southeast Asia, which has allegedly
involved Hun Sen, his minister of agriculture, the director of forest
administration and families and friends. ↩
"Country for Sale: How Cambodia's Elite Has Captured the Country's
Extractive Industries," Global Witness, February 2009. In a statement of
March 5, 2010, Global Witness urged donors to condemn a new policy announced
by Hun Sen in late February whereby private businesses will support
particular military units through voluntary donations. Its concern was that
this policy officially sanctions and legitimizes a practice of companies
hiring soldiers to protect their business interests. Cambodian businessmen
Ly Yong Phat and Mong Reththy, who figure prominently in "Country for Sale,"
were among those named as sponsors. ↩
"Shifting Sand: How Singapore's Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens
Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance," Global Witness, May 2010. ↩
China has only recently begun to put figures to the development assistance
it provides. Its pervasive economic presence in Cambodia is described in
François Hauter's " Chinese Shadows ," The New York Review , October 11,
2007. ↩
According to Human Rights Watch, the US has provided more than $4.5 million
worth of military equipment and training to Cambodia since 2006, some of
which has gone to military units and officials with records of serious human
rights violations. In a statement of July 8, 2010, the organization called
for a halt to US military aid pending thorough vetting of Cambodia's armed
forces to screen out individuals and units with records of human rights
violations. Its call was prompted by Angkor Sentinel, a regional military
exercise held in Cambodia in July as part of the US Defense and State
Departments' 2010 Global Peace Operations Initiative to train peacekeepers,
and the selection of the ACO Tank Unit, which has been involved in illegal
land seizures, to host part of the exercise. ↩
Other donor nations include Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the UK, and
Denmark, and aid agencies such as AUSAID, USAID, JICA, and Sida. ↩
Hun Sen reiterated this position during his meeting with Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon on October 27, 2010. See also "Political Interference at the
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice
Initiative, July 2010, and "Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a
Principled Completion Plan for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, November 2010. ↩
Anti-Thai riots were set off in the lead up to the July 2003 elections by
ill-founded rumors that a Thai actress popular in Cambodia had said that
Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand and that Cambodians were dogs. Anger against
Thailand erupted again just before the July 2008 elections over Preah
Vihear, a disputed eleventh-century Angkor temple on the Thai-Cambodian
border, a source of continuing tension. ↩
Copyright © 1963-2010 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Margo Picken
Magnum Photos
The causeway across the moat at Angkor Wat; photograph by Steve McCurry
More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the
hands of Pol Pot’s regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer
Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking
place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav,
commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war
crimes and crimes against humanity—a sentence that he and the prosecution
have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol
Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and
officials, were tortured and killed.1
Even more important, the next trial, which will probably begin in 2011,
involves the four most senior Khmer leaders still alive: Nuon Chea, known as
Brother Number Two; Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister; his wife, Ieng
Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Khieu Samphan, who was president
of Democratic Kampuchea. Now in their late seventies and early eighties, all
four were arrested in 2007 and on September 16 were formally charged with
war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and related crimes under
Cambodian laws.
While the trials have refocused international attention on Cambodia’s dark
past, little attention has been given to how the much-watched proceedings
relate to the troubled politics of Cambodia today. Will they lead to a new
era of justice and accountability for a beleaguered people or end in another
betrayal?
Cambodia is ruled by longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian
People’s Party. They govern with absolute power and control all institutions
that could challenge their authority. Opposition political parties exist,
giving the illusion of multiparty democracy, but elections have not been
fair and the opposition no longer poses any threat to Hun Sen. The monarchy
has survived but has little influence. The freedoms of expression,
association, and assembly are severely curtailed. Human rights organizations
are intimidated, and a draft law aims to bring them under the regime’s
authority. The judiciary is controlled by the executive, and the flawed laws
that exist are selectively enforced. Hundreds of murders and violent attacks
against politicians, journalists, labor leaders, and others critical of Hun
Sen and his party remain unsolved.
The regime’s violence against political opponents has been flagrant. In
March 1997 Hun Sen’s bodyguards were clearly implicated in a grenade attack
on a peaceful rally in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, led by opposition
leader Sam Rainsy.2 Sixteen people were killed and over 140 injured,
including a US citizen. No serious inquiry was ever completed. Royalist
opponents of Hun Sen were murdered when he deposed Prime Minister Norodom
Ranariddh in a coup on July 5–6, 1997. More people were killed during the
July 1998 elections, which Hun Sen won. In January 2004, the popular labor
leader Chea Vichea, an outspoken critic of the government, was shot, one of
several contract killings in Phnom Penh before and after the July 2003
elections, carried out in broad daylight by helmeted gunmen on motorbikes.
In October 2005, in an attempt to encourage prosecution of these murders and
other serious crimes, Peter Leuprecht, at the time the United Nations
secretary-general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia,
issued a report tracing a continuing and accepted practice of impunity since
the start of the 1990s. However, open discussion of the report and its
recommendations was not possible in Cambodia and it was ignored.
By confronting the crimes committed between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge
trials offer hope of breaking the pattern of impunity that has characterized
Cambodia’s recent history. But they could also allow Cambodia’s leaders to
claim a commitment to justice and the rule of law while avoiding
accountability for their own crimes and repressive practices.
Cambodia was once one of Asia’s greatest empires. The only existing account
of life in what we now call Angkor was written by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese
envoy, after he spent almost a year there at the end of the thirteenth
century. What he saw and described was an extraordinary civilization still
at its height, the outcome of five centuries of political and cultural
continuity. His stories are taught in schools and scholars draw on them to
gain a picture of life and society in Angkor.3
Angkor’s ancient glory is reassuring to a people whose history after gaining
independence from France in 1953 has been so perilous. Drawn into the cold
war and the war against Vietnam, they endured the Nixon administration’s
covert and illegal bombing in the late 1960s in pursuit of the Vietcong; the
overthrow of their head of state and former king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk,
in 1970; and years of more bombing and civil war that culminated in the
Khmer Rouge taking absolute control when it captured Phnom Penh in April
1975 and founded the state of Democratic Kampuchea. It ruled until it was
ousted in January 1979 by Vietnamese troops who installed the People’s
Republic of Kampuchea with Soviet backing.
Hun Sen, formerly a Khmer Rouge regimental commander who fled to Vietnam in
1978, emerged as a principal leader of the new government, serving first as
foreign minister and then as prime minister. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had
retreated to camps on the Thai border, allied itself with other opposition
forces, and continued to claim power. Since the US and other nations did not
want to recognize a Cambodian government dominated by Vietnam, these
disparate forces were supported and armed by China, the US, and Thailand,
among others, and recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate
government of Cambodia.
The end of the cold war, and exhaustion among Cambodians after so many years
of war, made possible an internationally brokered peace agreement in
1991—the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia
Conflict4—and the deployment a year later of the United Nations Transitional
Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest peacekeeping operation the UN
had ever mounted. UNTAC was charged with overseeing an end to armed
conflict, disarming the armies of the fighting factions, repatriating
refugees, and creating a neutral political environment for fair elections,
which it was to organize.
The royalist party won the May 1993 elections.5 When Hun Sen threatened
armed secession, a power-sharing arrangement was brokered to meet his
demands, resulting in an unwieldy coalition government that he came to
dominate. Cambodia became the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia under a new
constitution, and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne. UNTAC left in
September 1993, its departure dictated by the UN Security Council, not by
conditions in Cambodia where violence and fighting against the Khmer Rouge,
which had boycotted the elections, continued. For the outside world, the
main objective had been achieved, namely to enable the former cold war
powers to disengage from a country in which they no longer had any interest.
The stage was set for a series of deceptions and disappointments. In 1993,
the UN Commission on Human Rights asked the secretary-general to appoint an
independent expert to serve as his special representative for human rights
in Cambodia and to establish an office in the country. The UN office and the
special representative were jointly charged with assistance to the
government, monitoring the human rights situation, and reporting annually to
the commission and UN General Assembly. This mandate, one of the strongest
ever given to a UN human rights operation, deserved support, but many
governments regarded it as too intrusive. Wary of setting precedents that
might be followed elsewhere, they gave little help, making an already
difficult task almost impossible.
For a decade and a half, four successive special representatives tried to
get the Cambodian government to set up the laws, institutions, policies, and
practices necessary to uphold and protect elementary rights. From the
outset, Hun Sen, who was steadily consolidating his power over the country,
swung between reluctant cooperation with the representatives and vindictive
personal attacks on them.6 He spoke of Yash Ghai, the last representative—a
distinguished academic and constitutional lawyer from Kenya—with utter
contempt and refused to meet him. In his reports, Ghai regretted that
deliberate and systemic violations of human rights had become central to the
government’s hold on power. Hun Sen’s ruling party still dominated Cambodian
politics; the constitution and legal and judicial system were regularly
subverted; corruption was entrenched; and government impunity and threats
against those who criticized the status quo continued.
Hun Sen demanded that Ghai be dismissed and that the position of special
representative of the secretary-general be abolished. In the end he got his
way. Yash Ghai resigned in frustration in September 2008, and the UN Human
Rights Council, which had replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006,
eliminated the position. The council established instead its own “special
rapporteur,” thereby bringing this office under its direct control. The
human rights office has also not been exempt from criticism, and Hun Sen has
asked that it be closed down on several occasions, first in 1995 and most
recently when Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited Cambodia in October.
Despite the country’s poor record on human rights, Hun Sen and his party
boast that Cambodia has the most liberal and open economy in Southeast Asia.
Economic growth has indeed been rapid since the mid-1990s, averaging 7
percent a year. But the new wealth is concentrated in Phnom Penh, a city
with its back turned on rural Cambodia, where over 80 percent of Cambodia’s
14.6 million people live. One in three Cambodians lives below the poverty
line. Many more live just slightly above it. Most subsist on farming tiny
plots of land and by foraging.
About nine million hectares, half of Cambodia’s surface area, are estimated
to be reasonably productive. Under the Khmer Rouge, all land was
expropriated, entire populations uprooted, and land records destroyed.
During the Vietnamese occupation that followed, land remained largely
collectivized. The Land Law of 2001 could have helped to bring about
equitable land distribution and security of tenure; instead, under a
compliant judiciary, well-connected investors and companies have grabbed
land at an alarming rate, rapidly destroying the livelihood of the rural
poor. Those living on the land are simply told that it now belongs to
someone else and they must go. The urban poor also suffer, notably in Phnom
Penh where thousands have been evicted from their homes to desolate
settlements outside the city.7
The Land Law allows the government to lease land to national and foreign
companies for plantations and commercial agriculture for up to ninety-nine
years under terms tantamount to ownership. Basic information about these
“economic land concessions,” such as the identity of companies and
shareholders, is hard to obtain. The largest lease was awarded in 2000 to
Pheapimex Company Ltd., which is owned by close friends of Hun Sen. It spans
two provinces and is over 300,000 hectares, far exceeding the 10,000-hectare
ceiling stipulated in the Land Law.
The leaseholders of these concessions have seldom adhered to the conditions
and safeguards stipulated in the law; nor have they contributed to state
revenue, reduced poverty, or increased rural employment, which was the
government’s rationale for granting them.8 Most often the concessions have
been held for speculative purposes or have provided a cover for cutting down
forests, which are protected under other laws. Since 1994, the government
has also handed over vast tracts of land to the military as “military
development zones,” ostensibly to provide land and jobs to demobilized
soldiers. It refuses to say how much land it has allocated or where these
zones are.
Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images
Cambodian children holding portraits of Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany, at a
protest in front of the prime minister’s residence, Phnom Penh, September
2010
The World Bank has advised the government to support small farms and
smallholder agriculture, which, it argues, would be as or more economically
beneficial than Cambodia’s leasing policy.9 But the government has ignored
this advice, and still more concessions are in the offing. Concessions for
gem and mineral exploration, hydroelectricity dams, special economic zones,
and tourism development have raised similar concerns.
For over a decade, the UK-based organization Global Witness has courageously
exposed widespread illegal logging, asset stripping, and corruption
involving highly placed government and military officials. Its reports have
been confiscated, its staff threatened, its recommendations dismissed; and
it can no longer operate in Cambodia. Its report “Cambodia’s Family Trees,”
issued in June 2007, provides shocking evidence that the country is run by
an elite that generates much of its wealth from the seizure of public
assets. It shows how a relatively small group of Cambodian tycoons with
political, business, or family ties to senior government officials have
benefited from the allocation of forest concessions.10 “Country for Sale,”
issued in February 2009, finds the same patterns of corruption and patronage
in the management of Cambodia’s oil, gas, and minerals. It deplores the
rapid parceling up and selling off of the country’s land and resources, with
millions of dollars in company payments to secure contracts unaccounted
for.11 “Shifting Sand,” issued in May 2010, records the wholesale removal of
Cambodia’s sand to Singapore where it is used to extend the island’s
landmass.12
These policies have wrought havoc on Cambodia’s environment and driven vast
numbers of poor people out of the city and off the land, their meager
livelihoods destroyed. With nowhere to go, they become a source of cheap
labor for plantations and factories in special economic zones. When members
of desperate communities protest, their villages come under ever stricter
control and their leaders are arrested on charges such as incitement or
damage to property.
Roughly half of Cambodia’s national budget is provided by foreign
governments and development agencies. Known collectively as “the donors,”
they form a large and diverse presence in Phnom Penh. Yash Ghai repeatedly
underlined their moral and legal responsibility toward Cambodia, urging them
to be far more active in demanding progress on human rights and democratic
and accountable institutions. While several voice the need for “good
governance,” “participation,” “transparency,” “accountability,” and “the
rule of law,” these concepts lack the clarity of human rights standards
defined in law, and Cambodia’s leaders have become masters at interpreting
them narrowly.
Hun Sen has routinely criticized and threatened organizations advocating for
human rights, accusing them of pursuing a politically partisan agenda and
inciting the people to unrest. Donor nations ranging from Japan to France
have typically advised human rights groups to engage in a more
“constructive” dialogue with the government. Many are inclined to view
human rights as far too ambitious a concern for a country like Cambodia, and
are more at ease with the UN’s 2000 Millennium Development Goals than with
human rights treaties that are legally binding.
In any case, the donors have competing interests. China, which stands apart,
is the largest contributor and does much to keep the ruling party in
power.13 Japan is next, vying with China for influence. It is also largely
supportive of the regime, and takes a lead role in UN deliberations on the
Khmer Rouge trials and human rights. France, the former colonial power, is
pragmatic and influential in the European Commission, a significant
contributor. In 2008, the US resumed direct government aid, cut off after
the 1997 coup. It has funded civil society organizations like the Community
Legal Education Center and has sought to improve the functioning of
political parties and the electoral system, but lately has given increasing
priority to counterterrorism measures and military training and
cooperation.14
The UN Development Program and other UN agencies, which together contribute
a considerable amount, are supposed to give human rights central attention
in their programs; but they have been hesitant to take on human rights
violations. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have generally
steered clear of human rights altogether.15
While donor nations have called for measures to strengthen the rule of
law—primarily to improve the environment for foreign investment and private
business development—the results have been disappointing. The judiciary
remains the creature of the executive, and an anticorruption law, under
discussion since 1994 and then rushed through parliament in March 2010, is
extremely weak. Meanwhile the discovery of potentially significant deposits
of oil and natural gas has made concerns about corruption ever more
pressing.
For all but a few Cambodians, the supposed “beneficiaries” of overseas
development aid, the donor world is remote and hard to comprehend, and such
organizations as Human Rights Watch and Global Witness urge donors to be far
more exacting about the way their funds are used. Despite these concerns, in
June, donor nations including Japan, the US, and members of the EU pledged a
record $1.1 billion with few questions asked.
The Khmer Rouge trials capture what little attention the outside world has
to give Cambodia. The country’s citizens remain bewildered about the
killings, deaths, and enormity of suffering under Democratic Kampuchea, and
the forthcoming trial of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders may provide
some of the answers and understanding they are looking for. But it is far
from clear that the proceedings will have a useful effect on Cambodia’s
current predicament.
The prosecution, with the title Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia (ECCC), was formally set up by the UN and the Hun Sen government in
2006 to prosecute
senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible
for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international
humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognized by
Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6
January 1979.
The ECCC is a hybrid court, with Cambodian judges and staff in the majority,
assisted by international judges and staff recruited through the UN. Its
complex structure was initially established in a 2003 agreement, the result
of years of wearisome negotiation between the representative of then UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Hun Sen’s government.
Many more hurdles had to be overcome, including the court’s location. The
government persuaded the UN to agree to a location not in central Phnom Penh
but instead at the site of the new Military High Command Headquarters, some
ten miles from the city center, arguing that it would have advantages for
security and would reduce costs. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan’s recommendation that
the trials be funded through the UN’s regular budget and not exposed to the
vagaries of voluntary contributions was disregarded, leaving the court in
continuing financial difficulties, dogged by corruption, and open to
meddling from donors and the government alike. The court’s budget was
increased in 2008 from the original $56.3 million to $135.4 million to allow
the trials to continue until the end of 2010. Many more millions will be
needed to keep them going after that date.
The court continues to be mired in political interference and delay, and Hun
Sen has made clear his opposition to extending prosecutions beyond the
present five defendants.16 The judges and staff assigned by the UN to assist
the court face familiar dilemmas, among them how to avoid lending legitimacy
to a process in which Cambodia’s judiciary is not independent and the
country’s leaders have set out to limit and control the trials.
The ECCC agreement allows the UN to withdraw should the government cause the
court to function in a manner that does not conform to UN standards. But
most certainly the UN, not the government, would be blamed. One of Hun Sen’s
main claims is that the UN has a history of betraying Cambodia. Why, he
asks, did it do nothing during Pol Pot’s regime? Why did it give the Khmer
Rouge a seat in the General Assembly in the 1980s, when his own government
in Cambodia went unrecognized? If the UN withdraws from the trials, or
additional funds are not forthcoming, he will ask why the international
community is abandoning Cambodia and failing to confront one of the most
horrendous atrocities of the twentieth century, when a quarter of the
country’s population died, even though the ECCC is set to accomplish little
that the ordinary Cambodian courts could not accomplish themselves.
If the trials are to serve justice, one outcome must be the transformation
of the “ordinary” system of justice in Cambodia today and an end to impunity
for government and military officials and their friends once and for all.
The trials must also establish as complete a record as possible of the
crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge, and open the way to dispassionate
examination of what happened before and after. Cambodia’s recent history
continues to be intensely contested, and the questions it raises cannot
continue to be buried if Cambodians are to build a decent future for their
nation.
For most foreigners, Cambodia seems to be a relatively stable country,
hospitable to outside investment and welcoming for expatriates and visitors
touring Angkor’s temples and the killing fields. Hun Sen, now one of the
world’s longest-serving prime ministers, maintains good relations with
China, Japan, the US, Australia, and France. Unlike the Burmese generals, he
has managed to manufacture an outwardly acceptable face, and has used
international assistance to gain legitimacy at home and abroad.
Taking credit for ridding Cambodia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen
cooperates with the trials as long as they don’t diminish his power. He
talks of sustainable development and reducing poverty while he and his party
have exploited the country’s resources and pocketed the payoffs. He
tolerates the UN human rights presence, provided it limits itself to
overcoming the legacy of Cambodia’s tragic Khmer Rouge past. He uses Pol Pot’s
record as the yardstick to measure progress, thereby making failure
impossible. The trials reinforce this message. No outside governments care
to ask too many questions. Their economic and security interests are more
important, as Hun Sen knows, and human rights are treated as dispensable.
Some believe that sooner or later Cambodians will rebel, but it seems more
likely that their discontent will instead be channeled into extreme forms of
nationalism, as under the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia has been divided and preyed
upon for much of its modern history. Many Cambodians fear Vietnam and
Thailand as predatory neighbors, and passions against both countries can
become quickly inflamed.17
In the 1991 peace agreements, the “international community” assumed special
responsibilities to the people of Cambodia that have yet to be properly
honored. Cambodia today is a corrupt and cruel semidictatorship that should
be getting much more scrutiny from the rest of the world. The Cambodian
people deserve better. Thirty years after the appalling transgressions of
the Khmer Rouge, much of the country still lives in fear.
—December 15, 2010
Duch will serve nineteen years of this sentence. He benefits from deduction
of the eleven years he has served since his arrest in May 1999, and a
five-year reduction to compensate for the time he spent in military
detention without trial before his transfer to the court in July 2007. His
trial divulged little information that was not already known about his
responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of thousands. Now
being held in the special prison complex built for the trial, he has
appealed his sentence and is seeking acquittal, while the prosecution is
asking for life imprisonment. A detailed account of Duch can be found in
Richard Bernstein's " At Last, Justice for Monsters ," The New York Review ,
April 9, 2009, and in Stéphanie Giry's " Cambodia's Perfect War Criminal ,"
NYR Blog, October 25, 2010. ↩
In January 2010, Sam Rainsy was sentenced quite unjustly to two years'
imprisonment in absentia, which Cambodia's Appeal Court upheld in
October—for damage to property and incitement to racial discrimination in
connection with the demarcation of Cambodia's border with Vietnam, a highly
volatile issue. In September he was sentenced, again in absentia, to ten
years' imprisonment on related charges of disinformation and falsifying
public documents. ↩
The first rendition into English from the original Chinese of Zhou Daguan's
A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People was published in 2007 by
Silkworm Books. Peter Harris, the translator, provides a fascinating
introduction setting Zhou in his time and place, along with meticulous
notes, maps, and photographs to explain the text. ↩
The peace agreements were signed in Paris on October 23, 1991, following the
withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in 1989. They laid down a blueprint for a
liberal democratic political regime. They were signed by Cambodia and
eighteen other nations, including Australia, Canada, China, France, India,
Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the USSR, the UK, the US,
and Vietnam. Cambodia was represented by a twelve-person Supreme National
Council, chaired by Sihanouk, with members from the State of Cambodia (the
renamed People's Republic of Kampuchea); the Party of Democratic Kampuchea
(the Khmer Rouge); the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, which
became the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party; and the royalist party,
Funcinpec, established by Sihanouk in 1981. Funcinpec is the French acronym
for Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et
Coopératif, or the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral,
Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia. ↩
Four and a quarter million Cambodians voted in the election, representing 90
percent of the registered electorate. Funcinpec received 45 percent of the
vote, the Cambodian People's Party 38 percent, and the Buddhist Liberal
Democratic Party 4 percent, with the rest shared between seventeen other
political parties. William Shawcross's " A New Cambodia " provides a
firsthand account of the election and its immediate aftermath: see The New
York Review , August 12, 1993. ↩
The special representatives were Michael Kirby, Thomas Hammarberg, Peter
Leuprecht, and Yash Ghai. They served without remuneration, discharging
their mandate through regular missions to Cambodia. Their reports can be
found on the website of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights in Cambodia: cambodia.ohchr.org. ↩
Reports recording the impact of these policies on Cambodia's poorest people
include "Rights Razed: Forced Evictions in Cambodia," Amnesty International,
February 2008; "Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian
Land Sector," issued in October 2009 by Bridges Across Borders Southeast
Asia, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the Jesuit Refugee
Services; and "Losing Ground: Forced Evictions and Intimidation in
Cambodia," September 2009, the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, a
coalition of national nongovernmental organizations. ↩
Reports with these findings include "Land Concessions for Economic Purposes
in Cambodia: A Human Rights Perspective," Special Representative of the
Secretary-General for human rights in Cambodia, November 2004. This report
was updated in June 2007 with much the same overall findings. ↩
Cambodia: Halving Poverty by 2015? Poverty Assessment 2006," report of the
World Bank, February 2006. ↩
"Cambodia's Family Trees: Illegal Logging and the Stripping of Public Assets
by Cambodia's Elite," Global Witness, June 2007. The report includes a
detailed case study of illegal logging in Prey Long Forest, the largest
lowland evergreen forest in mainland Southeast Asia, which has allegedly
involved Hun Sen, his minister of agriculture, the director of forest
administration and families and friends. ↩
"Country for Sale: How Cambodia's Elite Has Captured the Country's
Extractive Industries," Global Witness, February 2009. In a statement of
March 5, 2010, Global Witness urged donors to condemn a new policy announced
by Hun Sen in late February whereby private businesses will support
particular military units through voluntary donations. Its concern was that
this policy officially sanctions and legitimizes a practice of companies
hiring soldiers to protect their business interests. Cambodian businessmen
Ly Yong Phat and Mong Reththy, who figure prominently in "Country for Sale,"
were among those named as sponsors. ↩
"Shifting Sand: How Singapore's Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens
Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance," Global Witness, May 2010. ↩
China has only recently begun to put figures to the development assistance
it provides. Its pervasive economic presence in Cambodia is described in
François Hauter's " Chinese Shadows ," The New York Review , October 11,
2007. ↩
According to Human Rights Watch, the US has provided more than $4.5 million
worth of military equipment and training to Cambodia since 2006, some of
which has gone to military units and officials with records of serious human
rights violations. In a statement of July 8, 2010, the organization called
for a halt to US military aid pending thorough vetting of Cambodia's armed
forces to screen out individuals and units with records of human rights
violations. Its call was prompted by Angkor Sentinel, a regional military
exercise held in Cambodia in July as part of the US Defense and State
Departments' 2010 Global Peace Operations Initiative to train peacekeepers,
and the selection of the ACO Tank Unit, which has been involved in illegal
land seizures, to host part of the exercise. ↩
Other donor nations include Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the UK, and
Denmark, and aid agencies such as AUSAID, USAID, JICA, and Sida. ↩
Hun Sen reiterated this position during his meeting with Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon on October 27, 2010. See also "Political Interference at the
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice
Initiative, July 2010, and "Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a
Principled Completion Plan for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, November 2010. ↩
Anti-Thai riots were set off in the lead up to the July 2003 elections by
ill-founded rumors that a Thai actress popular in Cambodia had said that
Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand and that Cambodians were dogs. Anger against
Thailand erupted again just before the July 2008 elections over Preah
Vihear, a disputed eleventh-century Angkor temple on the Thai-Cambodian
border, a source of continuing tension. ↩
Copyright © 1963-2010 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
'Dragon Chica'
by May-lee Chai
By ANNE MORRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Anne Morris, a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News
s Circle, lives in Austin.
When a church sponsors an Asian refugee family and sets them up with a
trailer in a small town west of Dallas, difficulties arise. The family has
survived the Khmer Rouge, but now the children must endure nasty treatment
from their new classmates, who at first think they are Native Americans.
It is the strong bond between the two Chinese-Cambodian sisters that makes
Dragon Chica a tender story. Sometimes funny, always very much alive, this
novel introduces yet another variation on the modern-day immigrant
experience as the Chhim family continues to move on – to East Dallas, where
Ma gets a job in a Chinese restaurant, then on to Nebraska.
May-lee Chai creates a lively narrator in Nea Chhim, who goes from age 11 to
19 in the course of the novel, and never loses her willingness to defend her
family – especially her much prettier sister, Sourdi, four years older. Nea
is the scrappy Dragon Chica of the title. She remembers how Sourdi once
carried her through a Cambodian minefield, finding safety by stepping on
corpses. She would do anything for Sourdi. In the pattern of little sisters
everywhere, sometimes Nea tries to do too much. In part, the book is about
both girls' coming of age, and the different paths they take to happiness.
Their mother – or Ma – charts the course of the family using miracles, luck
and dreams she backs with hard work and intelligence. When Ma loses her job
in Texas, she almost simultaneously receives a letter from her older
sister's family. Missing until now, they are miraculously alive in Nebraska
and have started a restaurant called The Palace. They want Ma and her family
to join in their undertaking.
"We left quickly," Nea says, "not because we were naïve or simple or
foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but
rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life
was as long as a butterfly's summer." That lyrical phrase may surprise the
reader, coming as it does in the middle of practical prose, but it's one of
the stylistic hallmarks of Chai's best writing.
When Nea's family reaches Nebraska, the restaurant has as yet no customers.
Moreover, Auntie and her husband are in debt to a loan shark. At one time
they had been prominent in Cambodian society. Now they have very little –
only bitter memories and the scars of war. But at least Ma and her sister
are reunited.
In the course of the novel, this second sister bond is shown to have deadly
weaknesses.
Asians stand out even more in small town Nebraska than in Texas. Nea's
description of feeling different at school echoes that of anyone who ever
failed to fit in. Eventually, she and her siblings learn to survive.
One thing that separates this immigrant narrative from many others is the
skill with which the author describes how the kids are tortured by their
peers. Naive brother Sam's wrestling teammates invite him to a party but
then try to get him to cook the family dog "gook-style" and serve it to the
others on the team. Such an act, they say, would show team spirit. The drama
of the kids' problems in Dragon Chica suggests that this novel might also
appeal to young-adult readers.
Chai is the author of six books, including The Girl From Purple Mountain.
She lives in San Francisco and is a translator for PEN American Center.
Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.
books@dallasnews.com
Dragon Chica
May-lee Chai
(Gemma, $14.95)
Print | RSS | | Yahoo! Buzz | Send a news tip
© 2010, The Dallas Morning News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://khmernz.blogspot.com/2010/12/center-will-tell-cambodian-story.html
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Center will tell Cambodian story
HISTORY: Fundraiser is first step in creating facility at CSULB, as well as online museum.
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/17/2010
LONG BEACH - Although Long Beach is well known for having the largest Cambodian population in the U.S., there have been precious few resources to research how this has come to pass.
The Khmer Genocide Study and Resource Center, planned for Cal State Long Beach, will attempt to help fill that gap. The first formal step in its creation starts tonight with a fundraising dinner at Sophy's Restaurant. However, the idea has been a long time coming. In the late 1970s, Long Beach became a hub for incoming refugees who escaped from the ravages of the genocide that engulfed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and left upwards of 2 million dead. Since that time, a large Cambodian community has developed in Long Beach, with businesses, arts and social service agencies. What hasn't evolved is a place where academics and the community can learn about the calamitous history and circumstances that led to Long Beach becoming the home of Cambodia Town. Although the center will have a physical location on the Cal State campus, primarily it will be a virtual museum online with an array of information across multiple platforms.
"The intent is to develop an archive of the genocide experience," said John Fallon, one of those helping create the center.
"It will have three components," Fallon said. "An academic venue for information with oral histories; an electronic library; and third, an most important I suppose, an initiation of the Cambodian community as stakeholders."
Dr. Donald Schwartz, a Fulbright Specialist and retired professor at Cal State Long Beach, will be helping to head up the academic side and is hoping to link up with other universities, including Stanford, Yale and Pannasastra University in Phnom Penh, along with the Document Center in Cambodia, which has provided much of the information for the Khmer Rouge War Tribunals. Schwartz will also be teaching in the spring at Pannasastra and hopes to get funding for videographers to do a project on the infamous Tuol Sleng, or S-21, security prison. Schwartz is an expert on the Holocaust during World War II. He said one theme from survivors of that genocide was that they didn't tell their children what they endured. He sees parallels with the children of Cambodian genocide survivors and hopes this project can help answer their questions. Fallon, who has been at the forefront of the refugee movement since the '70s and has helped place 22,000 families, said his inspiration comes from the words of a survivor he met: "He said, `My children must understand what happened to me, so the world will not forget."'
Schwartz said the primary purpose of the dinner, in addition to raising funds, is to invite the Cambodian community to be part of the process and inform them what's envisioned.
Or as Fallon says, "It's their life and their history."
greg.mellen@presstelegram.com , 562-499-1291
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
By ANNE MORRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Anne Morris, a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News
s Circle, lives in Austin.
When a church sponsors an Asian refugee family and sets them up with a
trailer in a small town west of Dallas, difficulties arise. The family has
survived the Khmer Rouge, but now the children must endure nasty treatment
from their new classmates, who at first think they are Native Americans.
It is the strong bond between the two Chinese-Cambodian sisters that makes
Dragon Chica a tender story. Sometimes funny, always very much alive, this
novel introduces yet another variation on the modern-day immigrant
experience as the Chhim family continues to move on – to East Dallas, where
Ma gets a job in a Chinese restaurant, then on to Nebraska.
May-lee Chai creates a lively narrator in Nea Chhim, who goes from age 11 to
19 in the course of the novel, and never loses her willingness to defend her
family – especially her much prettier sister, Sourdi, four years older. Nea
is the scrappy Dragon Chica of the title. She remembers how Sourdi once
carried her through a Cambodian minefield, finding safety by stepping on
corpses. She would do anything for Sourdi. In the pattern of little sisters
everywhere, sometimes Nea tries to do too much. In part, the book is about
both girls' coming of age, and the different paths they take to happiness.
Their mother – or Ma – charts the course of the family using miracles, luck
and dreams she backs with hard work and intelligence. When Ma loses her job
in Texas, she almost simultaneously receives a letter from her older
sister's family. Missing until now, they are miraculously alive in Nebraska
and have started a restaurant called The Palace. They want Ma and her family
to join in their undertaking.
"We left quickly," Nea says, "not because we were naïve or simple or
foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but
rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life
was as long as a butterfly's summer." That lyrical phrase may surprise the
reader, coming as it does in the middle of practical prose, but it's one of
the stylistic hallmarks of Chai's best writing.
When Nea's family reaches Nebraska, the restaurant has as yet no customers.
Moreover, Auntie and her husband are in debt to a loan shark. At one time
they had been prominent in Cambodian society. Now they have very little –
only bitter memories and the scars of war. But at least Ma and her sister
are reunited.
In the course of the novel, this second sister bond is shown to have deadly
weaknesses.
Asians stand out even more in small town Nebraska than in Texas. Nea's
description of feeling different at school echoes that of anyone who ever
failed to fit in. Eventually, she and her siblings learn to survive.
One thing that separates this immigrant narrative from many others is the
skill with which the author describes how the kids are tortured by their
peers. Naive brother Sam's wrestling teammates invite him to a party but
then try to get him to cook the family dog "gook-style" and serve it to the
others on the team. Such an act, they say, would show team spirit. The drama
of the kids' problems in Dragon Chica suggests that this novel might also
appeal to young-adult readers.
Chai is the author of six books, including The Girl From Purple Mountain.
She lives in San Francisco and is a translator for PEN American Center.
Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.
books@dallasnews.com
Dragon Chica
May-lee Chai
(Gemma, $14.95)
Print | RSS | | Yahoo! Buzz | Send a news tip
© 2010, The Dallas Morning News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://khmernz.blogspot.com/2010/12/center-will-tell-cambodian-story.html
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Center will tell Cambodian story
HISTORY: Fundraiser is first step in creating facility at CSULB, as well as online museum.
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/17/2010
LONG BEACH - Although Long Beach is well known for having the largest Cambodian population in the U.S., there have been precious few resources to research how this has come to pass.
The Khmer Genocide Study and Resource Center, planned for Cal State Long Beach, will attempt to help fill that gap. The first formal step in its creation starts tonight with a fundraising dinner at Sophy's Restaurant. However, the idea has been a long time coming. In the late 1970s, Long Beach became a hub for incoming refugees who escaped from the ravages of the genocide that engulfed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and left upwards of 2 million dead. Since that time, a large Cambodian community has developed in Long Beach, with businesses, arts and social service agencies. What hasn't evolved is a place where academics and the community can learn about the calamitous history and circumstances that led to Long Beach becoming the home of Cambodia Town. Although the center will have a physical location on the Cal State campus, primarily it will be a virtual museum online with an array of information across multiple platforms.
"The intent is to develop an archive of the genocide experience," said John Fallon, one of those helping create the center.
"It will have three components," Fallon said. "An academic venue for information with oral histories; an electronic library; and third, an most important I suppose, an initiation of the Cambodian community as stakeholders."
Dr. Donald Schwartz, a Fulbright Specialist and retired professor at Cal State Long Beach, will be helping to head up the academic side and is hoping to link up with other universities, including Stanford, Yale and Pannasastra University in Phnom Penh, along with the Document Center in Cambodia, which has provided much of the information for the Khmer Rouge War Tribunals. Schwartz will also be teaching in the spring at Pannasastra and hopes to get funding for videographers to do a project on the infamous Tuol Sleng, or S-21, security prison. Schwartz is an expert on the Holocaust during World War II. He said one theme from survivors of that genocide was that they didn't tell their children what they endured. He sees parallels with the children of Cambodian genocide survivors and hopes this project can help answer their questions. Fallon, who has been at the forefront of the refugee movement since the '70s and has helped place 22,000 families, said his inspiration comes from the words of a survivor he met: "He said, `My children must understand what happened to me, so the world will not forget."'
Schwartz said the primary purpose of the dinner, in addition to raising funds, is to invite the Cambodian community to be part of the process and inform them what's envisioned.
Or as Fallon says, "It's their life and their history."
greg.mellen@presstelegram.com , 562-499-1291
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”
Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Training for University Professors across Cambodia
Phnom Penh, 2010
On December 6, 2010, the Cambodian government tasked the Documentation Center of Cambodia with training university level professors on Khmer Rouge history. The decision stems from the Cambodian government's mandate of October 2009 that required all first year university students to study the history of Democratic Kampuchea.
These new initiatives are part of the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports' ongoing genocide education project, which seeks to implement genocide education curriculum into all public Cambodian high schools by 2013. In order to teach this complex, and at times, sensitive history, teachers must first be educated in the history as well as in methodology on how to grapple with enormous tragedies. To date, the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Ministry of Education have trained over 1,000 history teachers; in 2011, they will train an additional 1,000 teachers of such subjects as morality and literature. They have also distributed over 500,000 Democratic Kampuchea textbooks with the goal of reaching 1 million.
The Cambodian government's new mandate will affect 70 universities in Cambodia (21 state universities and 49 private universities) and thousands of students. Local and international trainers will train university professors using the same materials Documentation Center of Cambodia created for the high school teacher trainings. Additional university-level materials will be provided by international experts, including Professor David Chandler and persons with experience teaching about the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. This initiative will be carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Education, the History Department of the Royal University Phnom Penh, and the Accreditation Committee of Cambodia (ACC).
The training sessions prove to be both rewarding and challenging, as survivors often confront their own personal histories, albeit, in a larger historical context. Often times, impromptu testimonial sessions will occur, allowing teachers to bear witness to each other. At the same time, students also learn about their families’ and communities’ past, information that was previously absent in Cambodian society. Many students either did not believe the genocide happened, or if it did, thought it to be exaggerated. Sat Sorya, one of Long Vannak's students, struggled to make sense of the fragmented histories she heard from relatives. "I want to know why they killed so many of their own people," she said. "I want to know why they left their own country in such terrible condition." Genocide education seeks to answer these questions and provide a framework to put pieces to a larger historical puzzle together.
Yet, training about such difficult history is never easy. Due to personal traumas or political affiliations, teachers often avoid teaching Khmer Rouge history. Likewise, some students also resist acknowledging this past. As children of former perpetrators often sit (and live) side-by-side with children of former Khmer Rouge victims, conflict continues to disrupt classrooms.
Despite these challenged, knowing history is important for any individual or society to reconcile with its past. As H.E. Mr. Im Sethy, the Minister of Education, Youth, and Sport has said: "Younger generations of Cambodians must understand and know about this grave past in order to learn from past mistakes, prevent such events from happening again, and recognize and know when to stand up for fundamental principles of humanity, integrity, and justice."
For more information, please contact:
H.E Ms. Tum Sa Im
Under-Secretary of State
Ministry of Education Youth and Sport
012 869 458
Youk Chhang
Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia
012 90 55 95
The training is supported by the Government of Belgium, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
On December 6, 2010, the Cambodian government tasked the Documentation Center of Cambodia with training university level professors on Khmer Rouge history. The decision stems from the Cambodian government's mandate of October 2009 that required all first year university students to study the history of Democratic Kampuchea.
These new initiatives are part of the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports' ongoing genocide education project, which seeks to implement genocide education curriculum into all public Cambodian high schools by 2013. In order to teach this complex, and at times, sensitive history, teachers must first be educated in the history as well as in methodology on how to grapple with enormous tragedies. To date, the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Ministry of Education have trained over 1,000 history teachers; in 2011, they will train an additional 1,000 teachers of such subjects as morality and literature. They have also distributed over 500,000 Democratic Kampuchea textbooks with the goal of reaching 1 million.
The Cambodian government's new mandate will affect 70 universities in Cambodia (21 state universities and 49 private universities) and thousands of students. Local and international trainers will train university professors using the same materials Documentation Center of Cambodia created for the high school teacher trainings. Additional university-level materials will be provided by international experts, including Professor David Chandler and persons with experience teaching about the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. This initiative will be carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Education, the History Department of the Royal University Phnom Penh, and the Accreditation Committee of Cambodia (ACC).
The training sessions prove to be both rewarding and challenging, as survivors often confront their own personal histories, albeit, in a larger historical context. Often times, impromptu testimonial sessions will occur, allowing teachers to bear witness to each other. At the same time, students also learn about their families’ and communities’ past, information that was previously absent in Cambodian society. Many students either did not believe the genocide happened, or if it did, thought it to be exaggerated. Sat Sorya, one of Long Vannak's students, struggled to make sense of the fragmented histories she heard from relatives. "I want to know why they killed so many of their own people," she said. "I want to know why they left their own country in such terrible condition." Genocide education seeks to answer these questions and provide a framework to put pieces to a larger historical puzzle together.
Yet, training about such difficult history is never easy. Due to personal traumas or political affiliations, teachers often avoid teaching Khmer Rouge history. Likewise, some students also resist acknowledging this past. As children of former perpetrators often sit (and live) side-by-side with children of former Khmer Rouge victims, conflict continues to disrupt classrooms.
Despite these challenged, knowing history is important for any individual or society to reconcile with its past. As H.E. Mr. Im Sethy, the Minister of Education, Youth, and Sport has said: "Younger generations of Cambodians must understand and know about this grave past in order to learn from past mistakes, prevent such events from happening again, and recognize and know when to stand up for fundamental principles of humanity, integrity, and justice."
For more information, please contact:
H.E Ms. Tum Sa Im
Under-Secretary of State
Ministry of Education Youth and Sport
012 869 458
Youk Chhang
Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia
012 90 55 95
The training is supported by the Government of Belgium, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).
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.