Culture
Confronting the Cambodian Genocide Through Oral History
In Phnom Penh, a new exhibit uses video interviews to expose the country’s youth to events they’d rather not believe.
An estimated two million Cambodians—an astonishing quarter of the population—died from starvation, disease, torture, and execution at the hands of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Today, piles of victims’ bones can be seen at memorials throughout the country.
Even with such graphic proof, those who were born after the era of Pol Pot’s agrarian Communist vision and killing fields don’t always believe—or want to believe—the horrific stories their elders tell them about those years. Part of the reason is that, for decades, information about the genocide wasn’t part of official public culture. A 1991 peace accord, for instance, mandated that school textbooks not include material on the killing fields.