AFP
ANG SNUOL (Cambodia) - IT PLUNGED their country into a communist 'Year Zero' in the late 1970s and killed about a third of the population, but most young Cambodians shrug when asked about the Khmer Rouge.
'I don't know who are the Khmer Rouge. I never learned about the regime and my parents never told me about it either,' says 15-year-old Si Phana.
Her schoolmate Ang Pheaktra, 17, knows only a little more about that bleak time which traumatised a generation.
'My parents only told me that the Khmer Rouge were very cruel,' Ang Pheaktra says.
Even though there's a war crimes tribunal for senior leaders of the 1975-79 movement, most here are unaware the regime killed up to two million people, emptying cities and enslaving the population on collective farms.
The country is pocked with bone-strewn memorials and mass graves but Hang Chhum, principal at Hun Sen Ang Snuol High School, says many young people do not even believe Khmer Rouge atrocities occured.
'Cambodians rarely tell the bitter history to their children,' Mr Hang Chhum says. 'Many young Cambodians nowadays do not believe the regime happened because its tragedy was too extreme.' More than 70 per cent of Cambodia's 14 million people were born after the Khmer Rouge were ousted in 1979 and, as the topic has been sensitive among elites who were involved with the regime, little about it has been taught in schools.
But this year, three decades after the fall of the reign of terror, the Cambodian government has agreed to include a text on the Khmer Rouge - 'A History of Democratic Kampuchea' - in its 2009 high school curriculum.
Some half a million copies are being distributed to more than 1,300 schools across the country for grades nine through 12.
'We want students to know that this event did happen in Cambodia and it is not fabricated,' Mr Hang Chhum says.
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