“I would ask the chamber to release me. Thank you.”

Acting international co-prosecutor William Smith (left) and national co-prosecutor Chea Leang (right) address a press conference at the end of the Duch trial on Friday. Credit: Robert Carmichael/IPS

Those were the final words spoken by 67-year-old war crimes defendant, Kaing Guek Eav, better known as ‘Comrade Duch’, on Friday at the end of his 77-day trial in front of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

To anyone following the trial, his request was staggering—it represented a complete change of defence direction at the last minute. Additionally, the legal reasoning behind the request was fatally flawed.

It stunned the court, the audience and trial observers: Here was a man, whose defence strategy had been built on contrition and accepting responsibility for his role in the deaths of thousands, telling the court in its final hour that international law does not apply and that he should not be on trial in the first place.

Duch’s request provided an extraordinary conclusion to the trial of the Khmer Rouge’s former chief executioner, the first person to be brought to book in an international court for complicity in the deaths of some two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

Sentence will be handed down early next year, with a maximum term of life imprisonment since there is no death penalty in Cambodia.

Duch’s closing words demolished a carefully crafted defence that was built up over nine months. In the face of overwhelming evidence of Duch’s guilt, the defence’s argument was that Duch accepted responsibility for the deaths of more than 12,000 people at S-21 prison, and in return for showing contrition and cooperation would receive a reduction in jail time.

But if the week started well for the defence, it began to unravel on Wednesday. Duch’s final statement on Friday came two days after a rambling and legally flawed argument by his Cambodian defence lawyer, Kar Savuth, that the court had no jurisdiction over his client and that international criminal law did not apply since, among other things, Duch had only been following orders.

Other than the obvious legal flaws in Kar Savuth’s arguments, his pleading raised eyebrows, since it ran entirely counter to the nine-months-old argument put forward by Duch’s international lawyer, Francois Roux. It revealed a significant split in the defence.

And if the prosecution was understandably outraged by the defence tactic—it accused the defence of “riding two horses”—most other people were confused. As Wednesday closed, few were quite able to work out what was going on. On reflection Kar Savuth’s argument led the way for him to undermine the nine months of strategy put together by his defence teammate Roux—that of accepting responsibility, showing contrition and claiming to be following orders for fear of his own life.

Roux was as taken aback by the last-minute change in plea as everyone else. He told the court on Thursday that Kar Savuth’s pleading the previous day had necessitated a complete rewriting of Roux’s own approach. Roux told the court the two men had “disagreements” over the approach to the case. He went on to say that “of course” Duch was guilty, and that it was clear that international law applied.

Roux’s lack of awareness may seem unlikely, but is easily explained by the arrangement of the ECCC. As a joint United Nations-Cambodian body, the court has a dual structure in which every organ has an international component and a Cambodian one.

That is the case for the defence too—Duch has two lead lawyers: Roux on the international side, and Kar Savuth as his Cambodian counsel. Both lawyers have equal standing with the court, a design that has been shown up in the trial’s final week.

Roux knew from the start that Duch had no chance of trying to convince the court that he was not guilty, since his signature was on thousands of executions, he had run S-21, and he had admitted responsibility.

It made the task of the defence one of mitigation. In a court that has no death penalty, the most severe sanction would be life in jail. Roux reasoned that an effectively guilty plea, contrition and expressions of remorse were his 67-year-old client’s best chance of one day living as a free man.

Throughout the 77 days of tribunal hearings, that was the defence Roux painstakingly assembled. And when the prosecution and lawyers for civil parties—mainly the relatives of those who were murdered on Duch’s instruction at S-21—charged that Duch was simply shedding crocodile tears and was not genuinely sorry, Roux railed at them, saying they were not giving his client a chance “to regain his humanity.”

As the trial drew to a close this week, the defence was widely seen to have done a good job for its client. The prosecution called for a 45-year sentence, with five years off for time already served and for showing some contrition and limited cooperation with the court.

For Francois Roux, this last defence case of his professional life seemed to be heading to a predictable end: Duch effectively pleads guilty and benefits from a reduction in sentence.

That changed on Wednesday afternoon, when Kar Savuth stood up and with Duch’s blessing, told the court that his client should not even be on trial.

Quite why Duch chose to go along with a strategy that could well see him go to jail for the full 40-year term is unclear. After all, Roux’s approach offered his best chance that he could get somewhat less than that.

But whatever the reasons—and we may never know what they are—many Cambodians and the civil parties themselves were less surprised. Roux had asked the court to believe that a man—even one such as Duch—has the capacity to change and to return to humanity.

In Duch’s case that capacity appears lacking.

Mey Chamnan has learned the hard way about the global economic crisis. Both she and her husband were fired from their 50 U.S.-dollar a month jobs in a local garment factory after declining overseas orders caused huge job losses across Cambodia’s garment industry.

Mor Kim, 18, came to the capital last year to work in the garment sector. Such a decision generally has little to do with the economic crisis, says an education official. Credit: Vandeth Dararoath/IPS

They were not the only ones in their family to be affected. As neither of them had an income, they were forced to send their eight-year-old son back to the province to live with her parents while they tried to find other work. So far they have not succeeded.

“It is so hard for me – I’m so disappointed right now,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

There are plenty of anecdotal stories like Mey Chamnan’s that show the global economic downturn has affected Cambodians. But anecdotes do not provide wider answers: how the country’s youth – those under the age of 18 like her son – have been affected by the global economic crisis.

On one key measure – education – the surprising answer seems to be: Not that much. On another – nutrition – the experts say it is too early to say.

The worldwide financial crisis has caused huge damage to Cambodia’s tourism, garment manufacturing and construction sectors. Those sectors comprise three of the South-east Asian kingdom’s four economic pillars and the bulk of its economic growth over the past decade. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs in the past 16 months or are not earning as much.

Less money means families must either spend less or try to earn more, possibly by pulling their children out of school and putting them to work. The key concern for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was whether the education and nutrition rates of Cambodian children were affected.

To check the effect on education, UNICEF undertook two assessments of children in vulnerable areas in six provinces in which it operates. Peter Leth, a monitoring and evaluation specialist at the U.N. agency, says the results indicate the global financial meltdown has not caused children to be pulled out of school.

“The children who were identified as being regularly absent from these schools were not absent because of the food crisis or [the global economic crisis],” says Leth. “It was more a chronic situation – you could say it’s more attributable to chronic poverty or chronic issues in the family.”

UNICEF’s findings chime with figures from the Ministry of Education. They show the percentage of children quitting school in Grades 10 to 12 – those aged between 15 and 18 and therefore most likely to be put to work – has hardly changed over the past three academic years.

During the academic year 2006-2007, around 10,600 children dropped out between Grades 10 and 12. That equates to 4.8 percent of the total number of 222,000 who were enrolled at the start of that academic year.

Although the actual number of children who quit school across those three grades increased to 14,000 in the most recent academic year, 2008-2009, the percentage remained at 4.8 percent – since the number enrolled in those three years rose to 292,000.

Primary school education has not been affected either, says Phan Sokim, the director-general of the department of youth at the Ministry of Education. Overall, he thinks that the global economic crisis has not affected youth education.

That seems accurate on a national level, but on an individual level it has certainly affected some, as 18-year-old garment factory worker Mor Kim knows. A year ago she came to Phnom Penh from Kampong Thom province in central Cambodia to work at a garment factory – one of more than 300,000 people once employed in the sector.

Mor Kim rents a house with three friends. She says the rent recently increased from 40 to 50 U.S. dollars a month, which added 2.50 U.S. dollars to her outgoings. That may not sound like much, but she only earns 50 U.S. dollars each month, and on top of that food prices rose sharply last year, catching her in an economic vice.

The result was that she could no longer afford to send money to her home province to support her parents and 16-year-old brother who had recently finished Grade 9.

“Because of the effects of the global economic crisis I couldn’t afford to pay for myself and my family, so I had to ask my brother to come to Phnom Penh and work with me in the factory,” she says. “He has been working here now for a fortnight.”

Phan Sokim of the Ministry of Education maintains that such decisions generally have little to do with the economic crisis. “Don’t blame the global economic crisis – the young people want to come to Phnom Penh because they want to enjoy life,” he says. “It is different from how life is in the countryside.”

While there is some truth in the attraction of the bright lights of the capital – Mor Kim admits her brother was not particularly upset about starting work – the unwelcome end of his formal education will probably harm his future prospects.

At the office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Phnom Penh, chief technical adviser M.P. Joseph says there are good reasons why school enrolment numbers are largely unaltered. A recent ILO study found Cambodians are culturally highly aware of the importance of education and are very reluctant to pull their children out of school.

“Ordinary poor people … respect education [and] they respect learning,” says Joseph. “Therefore one of the last acts in coping with an economic crisis when it starts directly hitting their family is to pull the child out of school if the child is already in school.”

But Joseph sounds a note of caution.

“Just because there is no impact now, it doesn’t mean there won’t be an impact [in the future] if the crisis continues,” he says. “So if the impact continues and the negatives of that start impinging on the family, this will happen. The fact that it has not happened now is certainly not a guarantee it won’t happen in the future.”

If the effect on education is so far unremarkable, what of the impact on nutrition?

UNICEF’s Leth says the situation with nutrition is more complicated. Child nutrition measures three factors: underweight, where the weight for age is too low; stunting, where the child’s height for age is too low; and finally wasting, where the weight for height is too low.

“Wasting – which is your weight for your height – is a very short-term indicator, because you can imagine if you don’t eat for one week or two weeks, your weight might go down, but of course your height will be about the same,” says Leth. “So wasting can fluctuate very quickly. Stunting and underweight are more long-term, or what we call ‘chronic measurements of malnutrition’.”

Looking at the possible effects of the global economic crisis on wasting, UNICEF found that progress on reducing the prevalence of wasting had stagnated between 2005 and 2008, when the last measure was taken, at around 8.5 percent. That came despite progress made in the first half of the decade when the rate was cut in half.

But Leth says the reasons behind that stagnation are unclear.

“I would say that is a concern, but we cannot say that it is attributable to the economic crisis,” he says. “It is a concern that it [has come] at the same time as the crisis, and therefore it’s possible that there’s some link, but really we need more data – a more qualitative understanding of the situation in order to find out the direct cause of this trend.”

Leth adds that data will be gathered next year when the country’s five-yearly Cambodian Demographic Health Survey is compiled. If the survey shows that the trends are continuing to improve, then, says Leth, “there is not very much to be worried about”. But only then will the experts know for sure whether the global economic crisis has had a significant impact.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)

Tan Pho Yi, 65, has lived with his family in their corrugated iron home here in the Cambodian capital since 1992. Those 17 years came to an end in just 20 minutes when his family were evicted and their home torn down by City Hall’s workers on Jul. 17.

Standing outside his home as it was being demolished just down the road from the new Australian embassy, the teacher of modern art said he has had enough of living in Cambodia. “I don’t know where we will stay tonight,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “I want to go to Australia. I don’t want to be in Cambodia any more.”

The demolition team paused briefly while colleagues brought out Tan Pho Yi’s 63-year-old wife, Lok Sor, who was in a wheelchair. She watched the demolition of their house while seated next to a stack of corrugated iron, wood and their possessions.

As the morning wore on, the elderly couple’s belongings were loaded into the back of a truck, one of several dozen at the Group 78 eviction site in the heart of Phnom Penh. Tan Pho Yi said their property would go to a friend’s home while he and his wife work out how to rebuild their lives at the new relocation site outside the city.

Tan Pho Yi and his family are the latest of tens of thousands of mainly poor Cambodians who have been thrown off their land in the past few years. It is a nationwide problem, but is particularly acute in urban areas and tourist zones where land prices have climbed fastest.

The wave of forced evictions has reversed some of the gains from poverty alleviation programmes in the country, critics say.

The issue of land ownership in Cambodia is complicated, partly due to the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, which outlawed private ownership of property and destroyed all land records during its genocidal rule between 1975 and 1979.

It has been made worse by the rapid rise in land prices, which has resulted in entire communities being evicted in a scramble to pocket easy profits.

That links to the third problem, which is that residents who under Cambodia’s Land Law ought to be awarded legal title to their land are reportedly refused the paperwork by the authorities. In some parts of the country, there is too much money to be made by withholding legal title.

It is the lack of legal title that leads to the sights seen on the morning of Jul. 17, when dozens of red-shirted men from demolition teams arrived at 6 a.m., backed up by armed military police and riot police. The surrounding streets were blocked off, and although violence was not used this time – it has been in previous evictions – the threat was there.

The action had the unusual consequence of forcing Cambodia’s international donors, who fund around half of the country’s budget, to issue a statement calling on the government to halt forced evictions until “a fair and transparent mechanism for resolving land disputes is put in place and a comprehensive resettlement policy is developed”.

The statement was issued by the United Nations, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and a clutch of Western embassies. But the donor call came too late for G78’s residents, who originally numbered almost 150 families.

Human rights groups issued similar statements of concern. “Today is yet another black day for land rights in Cambodia,” said Naly Pilorge, the director of local human rights group Licadho. “Once more, some of Phnom Penh’s poorest and most vulnerable residents have been forced off their land in return for grossly inadequate compensation.”

“Group 78 was clearly cut off from due process and denied justice,” said Amnesty International country specialist Brittis Edman. “The Municipality of Phnom Penh made no attempts to properly consult with the affected community or explore any feasible alternative to eviction. This makes a mockery of the government’s obligations to protect the right to housing.” Amnesty said 23,000 people were forcibly evicted in 2008 alone.

Rights workers say a problem is the government’s refusal to honour the provisions of the Land Law, which requires that people who have right of ownership of their land are fairly compensated before eviction.

But deputy governor Mann Chhoeun was quoted as praising G78 residents for their reasonable attitude in leaving, and saying the eviction was done ‘with love’. But he did admit to the ‘Phnom Penh Post’ newspaper that the relocation site lacks amenities such as running water and electricity.

Asked about Phnom Penh’s response to the donors’ call to cease evictions, government spokesman Phay Siphan claims that the steps donors want are already in place. He says those relocated are offered compensation, low-interest loans and provided with a plot of land to live on.

But Phay says donors fail to look at evictions – which he describes as ‘relocations’ – as individual events. “They are mixing up facts and information, and putting everything in the same basket to evaluate it,” he said. “They should study it (better). It is the case that some people are not entitled to be compensated because they are living on state public land.”

Daniel King, an Australian legal adviser at a local NGO that advised the families at G78, says inadequate compensation is a major problem. G78 was independently valued this year at 15 million U.S. dollars, but the total compensation offered was just 500,000 or around 8,000 per qualifying family, plus a small plot of land outside the city.

The unfairness in the current system is transparent in the case of 66-year-old Lim Ly Kien, who had lived at G78 since 1994. He says he bought the land legally and has the documents to prove it.

According to independent valuation, his house and land were worth 330,000 dollars. The municipality eventually agreed to pay him 20,000 dollars, which was more than twice what he was first offered. “If I were staying on land that belonged to the (development) company, then I would not take one penny in compensation and I would leave,” Lim Ly Kien said in an interview. “But the land belongs to me – I bought it according to the law.”

Rights workers point out that the law is seldom on the side of the poor, so it is futile to pursue remedies through the Land Law. Evicted residents who had filed lawsuits lost, and the authorities successfully prosecuted them in return, says King.

If there is one bright spot in Cambodia’s land debate, it is that one million land title documents have been issued – around 8 percent of the total number of plots, according to the World Bank.

But rights activists complain that land titles have been issued mainly in parts of the country that are not contentious. The World Bank admits there is a very long way to go. Its land-titling programme will end later this year with more than 90 percent of the nation’s plots untitled.

Moreover, land title documents have yet to come up in any number against Cambodia’s judicial system.

*Our Mekong (http://www.newsmekong.org)

These are tough times to be either a journalist or an opposition politician in Cambodia.

That is because the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen is cracking down on both the opposition-aligned media and politicians from the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP).

In June, an editor of a newspaper affiliated with the SRP was jailed for a year for publishing a story the government objected to. The publisher of the newspaper ‘Moneaksekar Khmer’, was told this month that he would be sued after publishing a series of articles that the prosecutor said was designed to sow conflict between government ministers.

On the political front, two opposition members of parliament were stripped of their immunity and are being sued. Their lawyer recently quit their cases and the SRP and crossed over to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) after being told he would be sued.

Two other opposition MPs have been told they could have their immunity taken away too. Two NGOs have also received threats of lawsuits.

There are fears that this South-east Asian country’s democracy is under threat as the CPP — which won more than two-thirds of the seats in the 2008 general election and which controls all the organs of state and the judiciary – moves against dissenters.

“We are being treated like the enemies of the state. It’s a crisis in this country,” veteran opposition MP Son Chhay said.

But government spokesman Phay Siphan says the government is simply using the courts to target those people it considers to be spreading disinformation or threatening the country’s stability.

“According to the Constitution, everyone has the right to say anything they like,” Phay Siphan said. “But the Constitution prescribes clearly that (people may not) abuse other people’s rights. So the government has to protect that.”

That is cold comfort to local and international observers such as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, both of which have issued statements expressing concern about recent events. Human Rights Watch country specialist Sara Colm says recent events are a matter of “extreme concern”.

“To have all of these different sectors of society effectively silenced is definitely a step backwards for the whole democratic process in Cambodia,” Colm said, adding that the right to express views critical of the government is being eroded. “It’s a very worrying trend in Cambodia to see lawsuits filed and even criminal charges levied against people for simply doing their jobs.”

In the legal action against the media, some noted that the prosecutors are using a law that allows journalists to be jailed for what they write. That is what has happened with Hang Chakra, the editor who in June began a one- year jail term after his newspaper ran a series of articles reporting that a senior government minister’s staff had committed corrupt acts.

But the law the government ought to use in such cases is the 1995 Press Law, critics say. Local human rights group Licadho says the Press Law’s provisions do not permit the jailing of media professionals found to have breached its provisions. It states that “no person shall be arrested or subject to criminal charges as a result of expression of opinion”.

So why did the government prosecutor use the older law in the case against Hang Chakra? Phay Siphan says that is a question for the prosecutor, not the government, to answer. But, he says, the information minister has recently said that he does not want to see media workers jailed for what they publish.

To critics, the CPP, which has never been known for being tolerant of criticism, has become even more thin-skinned lately.

“We totally 100 percent accept that criticism,” Phay Siphan insisted. “But insulting – no. And misleading – no. Freedom of expression is different from insulting and misleading.” He maintains that the government is simply balancing the right of expression against its duty to maintain law and order. It is “concerned about national security too'”, he added.

At the SRP headquarters, opposition MP Son Chhay believes there are a number of reasons for the government’s action against critics. First, the ruling party is worried about the social unrest that the effects of the global economic crisis could spark among younger Cambodians who are hard put finding jobs. Second, he says, there is dissatisfaction within the CPP over what critics call Hun Sen’s autocratic style.

Son Chhay says Cambodia risks a reversal in its young democracy. To avoid that, he says donor nations, which pledged more than 950 U.S. million dollars to the Cambodian government this year, should pressure the government into making reforms.

“We don’t want to live lives like the North Korean people – we have suffered enough,” he said of the kingdom’s traumatic decades of war and the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge.

But the government’s actions seem to be making many cautious about criticising it, for fear of being sued for disinformation, defamation or incitement. Son Chhay admits that official intimidation has led the opposition to conclude that these are bad times to speak out.

“We have no alternative,” he said. “I think we will quiet down for a while. We are not going to speak too much. We are not going to raise the issue of corruption. We are not going to speak about landgrabbing. We are not going to talk about the corrupt court system.”

It does not help that the judiciary is not entirely independent, which is why the government wins its court cases, he adds.

This explains why the publisher of ‘Moneaksekar Khmer’ tried to resolve his case as he did. Days after being told he would be sued for incitement and disinformation, Dam Sith wrote a grovelling letter of apology to Hun Sen begging forgiveness.

But in Dam Sith’s defence, he has seen what happens when the media and the CPP collide. Last year, Dam was jailed for a week for publishing a story that offended the foreign minister. Shortly before the 2008 general election, one of his journalists was shot dead – the tenth to be murdered since 1993. None of those murder cases has been solved, and they are unlikely to be.

In his letter, Dam Sith told the prime minister that he would cease publishing his newspaper if Hun Sen saw to it that the court case was dropped. The government lawyer who filed the case told the English-language ‘Phnom Penh Post’ on Jul. 10 that Hun Sen had instructed him to withdraw the complaints against Dam Sith.

The result is that the country’s non-CPP media just became even weaker. Licadho’s annual media report shows that the CPP effectively controls all eight of the nation’s TV stations, most of its radio stations, and by far the majority of the Khmer-language newspapers.

*Asia Media Forum (http:/www.theasiamediaforum.org)

Walking through the former S21 security prison here, one cannot help but be struck by the hundreds of black-and-white photographs of former prisoners who were brought here, tortured, and then executed.

Around 20,000 people – men, women and children – are believed to have been murdered here. As many as two million died under the rule of the genocidal Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.

Students at Cambodia’s schools have not learned much more than that – until now, the course work describing the four years of Khmer Rouge rule consisted of literally a few paragraphs.

Chea Vandeth, a final year student in Phnom Penh, says less than one lesson was devoted to the Khmer Rouge era in his entire schooling. Although he lives only three kilometres from S21, he has never visited it.

“My friends and I learned very little about the Khmer Rouge history at school, and what we did learn wasn’t very clear,” he says. “But I would like to have learned a lot more if possible.”

Vandeth says most of what he knows about the Khmer Rouge regime he learned by talking to his parents or by listening to radio broadcasts of the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal, which is currently taking place on the city’s outskirts. The man in the dock is Comrade Duch, who used to run S21.

Later this year, that lack of coverage will change. Cambodia’s ministry of education is restructuring the syllabus dealing with the history of the Khmer Rouge.

Together with the country’s leading genocide research organisation – the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) – education officials have created a comprehensive study programme that involves the use of the first textbook in the country about the Khmer Rouge. It is called ‘A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)’.

The glossy 70-page book, launched in May, contains photographs and maps, survivor testimony and background on key people and events within Khmer Rouge history. It also explains how the Khmer Rouge rose to power, and how the group then ran Cambodia.

Ton Sa Im, undersecretary of state at the education ministry, whose job it is to coordinate this addition to the curriculum, says it is vital that high school children learn what happened. Some doubt that the terrible events – starvation, disease, state-sanctioned murders that killed two million people – ever happened.

“When we talk one-on-one with students, some believe that the genocide happened, but others are still sceptical,” she says. “Although I must say that the Khmer Rouge tribunal at the international court is getting the attention of many students who are starting to believe that these things happened.”

By the time the new academic year starts in October, around 3,000 teachers will have been trained in the new syllabus. But what of the fact that any teacher who is older than about 40 will likely have vivid and terrible memories of surviving the genocide? Does that bring certain risks?

Youk Chhang, the director of DC-Cam, had first-hand experience of that recently. In April, DC-Cam brought 400 students and their teachers to Phnom Penh. The group visited the Khmer Rouge tribunal, and later watched a film about victims and perpetrators of the genocide.

Afterwards, the students discussed whether reconciliation for such crimes was possible and then voted on it. They voted broadly for reconciliation, at which point one of their teachers stood up and asked Youk Chhang for permission to speak to the students.

“He said to them: ‘Look, all of you – you don’t know how much I suffered. I lost my father, I lost my brother, my sister. They were starved to death, they tortured me. You don’t know how I feel. And now you want me to forgive them?’ ” Youk Chhang recalls.

The students were shocked.

“The whole room was silent – nobody talked. This is their own teacher,” says Youk Chhang, adding that the incident illustrates why DC-Cam brought in psychiatrists and experts in genocide studies to help compile the teachers aid book in “a scientific way.”

Ton Sa Im, herself a former teacher, understands the issue better than most: Her entire family – both parents and all seven siblings – died during the Khmer Rouge period. But she says the risks associated with teaching the syllabus are completely outweighed by the risks of not teaching it in the first place.

“The research in this book is so detailed that it can enable students to understand the reason why such a genocidal killing occurred, and can remember that atrocity, so they understand that this chapter of history should never be repeated,” she says.

She explains that the period in question will appear not just in history lessons, but will be worked into the Khmer literature and social philosophy classes in school. This way, students can better understand how the Khmer Rouge era fits into the different social and cultural aspects of the country’s past.

Chhang says teaching the youth what happened fits well with DC-Cam’s remit. Much of the information contained in the textbook has come from his organisation’s research into the country’s brutal past. He sees DC-Cam’s role as finding out what happened, and then passing on that knowledge.

He points out a brief poem in the introduction to the textbook that makes clear that learning about the past can help to heal a traumatised nation. ” ‘Transform the blood river/Into a river of reconciliation/A river of responsibility’.”

The analogy is simple, he says: So many people died under the Khmer Rouge that the river – a potent symbol for this agricultural society – became a river of blood.

“Imagining that the river became blood – it’s something that is so hopeless, so despairing,” he says. “So we want to transform that history [so] that that we can reconcile [and] live in a peaceful way.”

*Newsmekong is a news site focusing on reporting on Mekong issues, coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific. It is also the news site of the ‘Imaging Our Mekong’ media fellowship programme.

(*This story was written as part of the Imaging Our Mekong media programme.)