For Young Cambodians, a Mobile History Lesson from Dark Time

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From NY Times

By Anton L. Delgado

Reporting from Phnom Penh and Kampong Speu, Cambodia

Aug. 24, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET

The brand-new bus gleamed as it weaved through rush-hour traffic in Cambodia’s capital. It was headed to a school, bearing a lesson about the country’s darkest period.

About two-thirds of Cambodia’s population is under 30, born a generation or more after the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Many of those young people have only a general awareness of its atrocities, which left at least 1.7 million Cambodians dead.

That horrific history has been thoroughly documented, in court documents and at places like the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the killing field in Choeung Ek. But both of these are in the capital, Phnom Penh, and most Cambodians live in the countryside.

The bus’s mission is to bring the history to them. An international effort, it is outfitted with touch screens, laptops and projectors and connected to a vast digital record of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against humanity, including executions, enslavement, torture, starvation and forced separations.

Its destination on a recent morning was Kampong Speu High School, an hour west of Phnom Penh. There, seven survivors of the Khmer Rouge met the bus at the school to share their stories with students.

Tuch Sakun, 82, wiped tears away with a leopard-print krama, a traditional scarf, as she described the killings of her father and her husband.

“As elders, we need to keep reminding everyone about what happened,” Ms. Tuch Sakun told the students. “You all are so lucky. You have nice clothes. You go to school. You have enough to eat. All we had back then was a black outfit and a red krama.”

The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 after a devastating civil war, during which the United States carried out a brutal bombing campaign in Cambodia as part of its war in neighboring Vietnam. Led by Pol Pot, the Communist regime banished people to the countryside, closed schools and ordered everyone, including children, to work toward its stated goal: an agrarian utopia. (Khmer Rouge means Red Khmer; the name refers to the Khmer people, Cambodia’s dominant ethnic group.)

It eviscerated minorities, outlawed money, closed all markets and killed people with skills and education — like doctors and merchants — whom it saw as threats. The Khmer Rouge was toppled by an invading Vietnamese force in 1979, but it continued a guerrilla war from Cambodia’s borderlands into the 1990s.

After years of wrangling, a United Nations-backed court was set up in Phnom Penh in 2006 with a mandate to prosecute top officials from the Khmer Rouge and those most responsible for its crimes. The tribunal, whose official name is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, has spent more than $330 million, but it convicted only three people.

Having completed its prosecutions, the tribunal is now declassifying and digitizing decades’ worth of documents. On the bus, which is an outreach initiative of the tribunal, roughly 975,000 scanned pages, audio records and video files from the tribunal’s 16 years of litigation are accessible.

Perhaps just as important, it brings students together with survivors like Ms. Tuch Sakun. “If the bus didn’t exist, it would be hard for me to reach students and even harder for them to reach me,” she said, touring the interior of the bus with students and other survivors.

Continues with photos

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-museum-bus.html