Lessons in horror with Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tribunal
STILL A STALINST MONARCHY
By AFPApril 15, 2025
Mean Loeuy (C), survivor of a Khmer Rouge labour camp, tells his story to a group of children during an outreach programme at a school in Phnom Srok district - Copyright AFP TANG CHHIN Sothy
Alexis HONTANG, Suy SE
Sheltering in the shade of a bus repurposed into a mobile museum, Mean Loeuy tells a group of children about the hell he went through in a Khmer Rouge labour camp.
“At the beginning we shared a bowl of rice between 10 people,” recounts the 71-year-old man who lost more than a dozen family members during Cambodia’s bloodiest era.
“By the end, it was one grain of rice with a splash of water in the palm of our hands,” he says, describing the camp as “like a prison without walls”.
The children look on with expressions ranging from nonplussed to horror.
Mean Loeuy is one of a handful of survivors supporting the latest project of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the UN-sponsored tribunal that delivered its last verdict on Pol Pot’s brutal regime in September 2022 before wrapping up its trials.
Since January last year, a team led by a lawyer has travelled around Cambodia teaching schoolchildren about the government it ruled as genocidal, sharing 20 years’ worth of evidence and testimony from victims such as Mean Loeuy.
The capital Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge 50 years ago on Thursday, but now two-thirds of Cambodia’s population are under 30.
Most grew up without living through the horrors of Pol Pot’s rule between 1975 and 1979, nor the 20 years of conflict that followed.
Many young people have no more than an inkling of the grimmest period of their country’s history — one still haunted by the deaths of around two million people through starvation, disease, forced labour or murder.
– Human skulls –
In a high school courtyard in Phnom Srok in the nation’s northwest, dozens of children squeeze into the air-conditioned vehicle — a bus specially adapted to hold interactive history classes, with comics, iPads and other resources.
About 10 kilometres (six miles) away lies the Trapeang Thma reservoir where Mean Loeuy laboured, one of the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious projects, accounting for thousands of worker fatalities.
At a Buddhist temple in the town, the skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge line the shelves.
But Mouy Chheng, 14, admits she had difficulty believing the “brutality” of the ultra-Maoist government that her parents had told her little about.
“I was not born under the Khmer Rouge. I came to learn here… and understand the difficulties under the previous regime. Now I understand a lot more,” she tells AFP.
The educational initiative reached more than 60,000 children and teenagers at 92 institutions in 2024, according to the ECCC, and aims to visit 100 schools this year.
In a classroom, lawyer Ven Pov passes a microphone around between 150 or so high school students.
“Why wasn’t Pol Pot tried?”, “why weren’t (convicted Khmer Rouge cadres) given the death penalty?”, “how is it possible that famine killed so many?”, they ask one after another.
The 56-year-old Ven Pov tries his best to answer their questions but admits he still wonders why the Khmer Rouge committed such atrocities.
“We do not have answers,” he says. “We need to do more research.”
– ‘Symbolic legacy’ –
Back in the capital, the ECCC preserves hundreds of thousands of Khmer Rouge documents that are open to researchers and anyone interested.
Of the scores of ageing former leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement living freely in Cambodia, the ECCC convicted only three.
Former prime minister Hun Sen has pushed for peace and social cohesion, but critics say he sought to exploit the hybrid Cambodian-international tribunal to avoid prosecuting more Khmer Rouge cadres — of which he was once one.
“Justice and reconciliation go hand in hand,” says Ven Pov, who attributes the lack of trials to a widespread desire for unity.
“Victims want justice, but they also want peace, national unity and reconciliation.”
Nonetheless, Timothy Williams, a professor at Bundeswehr University in Munich, says “transitional justice isn’t just about those who committed the crimes, it’s also a symbolic legacy for society”.
The educational bus could have started its tours 15 years ago, he said, but added: “It’s important at a time marked by the strengthening of authoritarian power.
“The lessons of the past are crucial here.”
Cambodia genocide denial law open to abuse, say critics
By AFPApril 14, 2025
Survivors of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal regime welcome a beefed-up Cambodian law that forbids denying the movement's atrocities - Copyright AFP TANG CHHIN
Sothy Alexis HONTANG, Suy SE
Survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime welcome a beefed-up Cambodian law that forbids denying the movement’s atrocities, but rights advocates and academics warn it could also stifle legitimate dissent.
Enacted last month ahead of this week’s 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge seizing the capital Phnom Penh, the law threatens hefty jail sentences and fines for anyone who denies the genocide that killed around two million people between 1975 and 1979.
The atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge are widely accepted by Cambodians save a dwindling group of ageing former cadres and soldiers who live mostly in the remote northwest.
The hardline Maoist group led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot reset the calendar to “Year Zero” on April 17, 1975 and emptied cities in a bid to create a pure agrarian society free of class, politics or capital.
About a quarter of the population died — of disease, starvation, overwork or by execution — in the disastrous social engineering experiment memorably chronicled by the 1984 Oscar-winning movie “The Killing Fields”.
Some activists, however, say former prime minister Hun Sen is using the law to burnish his legacy and stifle any opposition to his son and successor, Hun Manet.
The government is trying to “reinforce state narratives rather than to genuinely encourage historical accountability”, said Sophal Ear, associate professor at Arizona State University.
“In practice, it could be another tool to silence dissent,” he said.
Political analyst Ou Virak called the law a “mistake”, adding: “A population that is afraid to discuss will be even more afraid to ask questions.”
– ‘I am the peacemaker’ –
Now 72, Hun Sen was a commander under Pol Pot before he fled to Vietnam in 1977, joining other Cambodian defectors to lead the Vietnamese army’s assault that drove the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh.
In the more than 30 years Hun Sen ruled Cambodia he stifled dissent, critics say, equating opposition to his leadership as support for those he replaced.
“Hun Sen wants to impose his vision of things, saying: ‘I am the peacemaker’,” said Adriana Escobar Rodriguez of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
One form of genocide denial tended to downplay Vietnam’s role in ousting the Khmer Rouge, she said, but another stemmed from the fact that some “people still can’t believe that Khmers could have killed other Khmers” — referring to Cambodia’s majority ethnic group.
Hun Sen has defended the stricter law, comparing it to similar legislation against Holocaust denial in Europe.
The 2013 law it replaced stemmed from a case involving one of Hun Sen’s main opponents that took place just before national elections.
Kem Sokha was accused of describing notorious Khmer Rouge prison S-21 — where an estimated 15,000 people were tortured to death — as a Vietnamese fabrication.
He has spent lengthy periods in prison on various charges since, and is currently under house arrest on treason charges and banned from politics.
Chum Mey, one of a small handful of people who emerged alive from S-21, sells books describing his experiences outside the former prison, which was turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
He says it would be stupid for anyone to deny the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.
“There is evidence,” the 94-year-old said.
“They killed my four children and my wife.”
