Organization
Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University
The Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University was founded in 1994 to document the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime.[1][2] Its mandate was to investigate, catalog and make public the primary source material on the Khmer Rouge, and it set out to record the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979), both for future legal cases and as a lasting historical record.[1][2] It is a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, which dates the program's work from 1994 to 2019.[3]
History
Ben Kiernan founded the program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and served as its director from 1994 to 1999. Susan E. Cook was director by 2000.[2][4] In December 1994 the program received a first grant of $499,000 from the U.S. Department of State's Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations. The governments of Australia and the Netherlands and the Henry Luce Foundation added funds, and the State Department later gave $1 million in 1997 through its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and another $150,000 in 1999.[5] The program began with a two-year mandate. After the discovery of the Khmer Rouge security archive, new funding extended its documentation work by five years.[2]
In January 1995 the program founded the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh as its field office, and it trained and equipped the center's Cambodian staff.[2][5] The center became administratively independent in 1997. Until then most of its operating funds came from Yale through subcontracts and consulting payments.[2] The program funded the center from 1995 through 2001; the Genocide Studies Program dates Yale's assistance to the center from 1995 to 2005.[5][3]
In 1996 the program gained access in Phnom Penh to the 100,000-page archive of the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge security police.[3] Staff at the Documentation Center cleaned and reinforced damaged pages and removed staples and rubber that were eating into the paper.[2] The center finished microfilming the collection in 1999. The 115 reels went to Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, and a second master copy stayed at the center for public use so that the originals could be protected.[4] The program also supported microfilming of Lon Nol regime dossiers, biographical documents from Tuol Sleng and the Khmer Rouge magazine Revolutionary Flag.[4] In October 1999 the State Department gave a security grant for the center, and by August 2000 thirteen fireproof cabinets held the Santebal archive.[4]
In January 1998 Yale set up the Genocide Studies Program, which applies the program's experience to other modern tragedies, among them the Holocaust, Rwanda and East Timor.[5] Methods based on the Cambodian Genocide Database were used to document human rights violations in East Timor.[4]
Databases and research
The Cambodian Genocide Database went online in January 1997.[4] By 2000 it held 10,800 biographical records, 3,000 bibliographic records, more than 6,000 photographs and images, and information on 520 mass graves, prisons and memorials.[4] In 1999 researchers mapped 40 new sites in 12 provinces, and each mapped site was linked to photographs, summaries and details of alleged human rights violations.[4] Version 1.2 of the database on CD-ROM came out in August 1999 and was distributed in Cambodia and to selected institutions in the United States.[4] As of January 2008 the program had published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records and more than 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations and maps.[3] In all, the Cambodian Genocide Databases came to hold about 28,000 individual records.[5]
The program's geographic database, CGEO, maps Cambodia's 13,000 villages. It also records 115,000 sites targeted by U.S. bombing sorties over Cambodia from 1965 to 1975, which dropped half a million tons or more of munitions; 158 prisons run by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979; 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated 19,000 grave pits; and 76 memorials to the victims built after 1979.[3]
Its research also covered social and cultural life under the Khmer Rouge, with work on child cadres, women, ethnic Vietnamese and minority hill tribes.[2][4] The program shared its findings through books, the press, documentary films, museum exhibits and theater, and with students, legal experts, policymakers and Cambodians themselves.[2] It helped publish Genocide in Cambodia with the University of Pennsylvania Press. George Chigas joined as a research affiliate in July 1999 and wrote on the Santebal collection and Khmer Rouge tribunals.[4] In April 2000 its website was Asia Observer's Site of the Week.[4]
Justice
The program promoted a genocide tribunal in Cambodia for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, and its website followed the negotiations over such a court.[2][4] Its documentation was meant to support investigations and legal cases against those responsible.[4] It assisted the United Nations Group of Experts on Cambodia and the UN-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.[5] The Cambodia Justice Project, one part of the program, trained Cambodians in international law.[1]
Records
Yale's Sterling Memorial Library agreed to keep the program's website and database as a permanent archive on the Khmer Rouge regime.[4] The program's records, dated 1941 to 2019, are held in Yale's Manuscripts and Archives as part of Yale Record Group 37. They fill 93.19 linear feet in 132 boxes, plus 35.1 megabytes of digital files, and include reports, research material, correspondence, database printouts and manuals, as well as oral history interviews and recordings of visits to Cambodia. The materials are in English, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mon-Khmer languages and French. Access is restricted.[1]
Partners
The program worked with the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management at the University of New South Wales, whose servers hosted the database alongside Yale's.[4] It also had support from the Yale University Library and the Orville H. Schell, Jr., Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University, records
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 Yale MacMillan Center, Genocide Studies Program, Report to the State Department, 2000-01
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Yale MacMillan Center, Genocide Studies Program, Cambodian Genocide Program
- ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 Yale MacMillan Center, Genocide Studies Program, Report of the Cambodian Genocide Program, 1999-2000
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Yale MacMillan Center, Genocide Studies Program, Introduction to the Cambodian Genocide Program