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.
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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
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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
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