One Man’s Mission to Open History of Khmer Rouge

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia

Him Huy, fourth from left, leading group of Khmer Rouge guards at Tuol Sleng

Next week, four top leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime will be brought to trial in Cambodia for alleged crimes against humanity (known as Case 002). Journalism student Jake Schoneker reported from Cambodia ahead of the trial.

June 22, 2011
BY JAKE SCHONEKER
PBS Newshour (USA)

When my co-producer Mark Oltmanns and I set off to Phnom Penh to shoot our story on Case 002, we planned to focus on victims of the Khmer Rouge time, on those civil parties and witnesses who would be brought to testify against the four leaders during the upcoming trial. But though listening to their stories was harrowing — a woman left without family and forced to marry a soldier, a man still imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge in hellish nightmares — it was the story of the students, and the impact of education, that made the deepest impression on us.

A central figure in the incorporation of that Khmer Rouge education to classrooms was Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam. For over a decade, he’s compiled hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and testimony about the Khmer Rouge — evidence that now is playing a key role in the trials of the Khmer Rouge cadre.

But what gets Chhang most excited is when he talks about Cambodian students and the textbook that he’s helped incorporate into Cambodian classrooms. Sitting in his cluttered office in Phnom Penh this past March, he told me a story that helps put the whole trial into perspective. It goes something like this:

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