Collection
Cambodian Genocide Program records
The Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University, records are the working files of Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program, dated 1941 to 2019.[1] They are held in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library and include oral history interviews and recordings of visits to Cambodia.[1]
History
The Cambodian Genocide Program was created in 1994 at Yale's Center for International and Area Studies, with funding from the U.S. Department of State.[1] Yale history professor Ben Kiernan founded it and led it from 1994 to 1999.[2] Its task was to investigate, catalog and make public the primary sources on the Khmer Rouge.[1] An initial grant of $499,000 came from the State Department's Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations in December 1994.[3][4] The program's 1997 to 1999 report lists a State Department grant of $531,000 for 1995 to 1997.[2] The governments of Australia and the Netherlands and the Henry Luce Foundation added funds in 1995 and 1996, and the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor gave $1 million in 1997 and $150,000 more in 1999.[3]
The program had three parts: the program at Yale, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, and the Cambodia Justice Project, which trained Cambodians in international law.[1] The program founded the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh in January 1995 as its field office and trained and equipped its Cambodian staff.[3][5] The center became an independent Cambodian institute in 1997, and Yale supported it until 2005.[5][6]
In 1996, in Phnom Penh, the program gained access to the archive of the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge security police. The archive runs to about 100,000 pages; the 1997 to 1999 report puts it at hundreds of thousands of pages of Khmer-language documents.[6][4][2] Yale's Sterling Library microfilmed the archive and made it available to researchers around the world.[6] Many of the biographies in these files rest on confessions obtained under torture.[7]
A United Nations team of international jurists studied evidence gathered by the program when it considered legal responses to Khmer Rouge crimes.[2] The program also assisted the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the UN-backed tribunal of Cambodian and international judges.[3] In 2018 those chambers ruled that the Khmer Rouge regime had committed genocide.[6] The program ran until 2019.[6]
Material coverage
The collection fills 93.19 linear feet (about 28.4 meters) in 132 boxes, with 35.1 megabytes of digital files, and is arranged by accession.[1] It holds the program's implementation plan, reports, research files, correspondence, and the printouts and manuals for its databases. Alongside these are oral history interviews and recordings of visits to Cambodia by program members.[1] The material is in English, French, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer languages.[1]
The records document the program's Cambodian Genocide Databases.[1] The bibliographic database describes about 3,000 books, articles, maps, primary documents and audio and video recordings. The biographic database holds information on more than 19,000 people, drawn in part from interviews, and the Tuol Sleng image database holds more than 5,000 photographs.[8] The geographic database maps Khmer Rouge prisons, execution centers, mass graves and memorials.[5] It includes 13,000 villages, 158 Khmer Rouge prisons of 1975 to 1979, 309 mass grave sites with an estimated 19,000 grave pits, and 76 memorials built after 1979.[6] The Documentation Center, Yale and the University of New South Wales built the databases together until September 2001.[5][9]
Catalog and access
The collection belongs to Yale Record Group 37, which gathers the records of organizations affiliated with Yale. Yale's catalog also lists it under call number RU 902.[1][10] Daniel Hartwig compiled the finding aid, dated May 2008.[1] Access is restricted, and some records are redacted because they contain student names, donor names or other restricted data. Yale University keeps the copyright in material produced as official university business.[1] The records are kept at Sterling Memorial Library, Room 147, 120 High Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511.[1]
Yale also holds 482 reels of microfilm of the Santebal files and related Khmer Rouge records, published from 1998 by Yale University Library and the Documentation Center of Cambodia. They are kept in the library's non-circulating microform collection.[7]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 Yale University Library finding aid
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Report of the Cambodian Genocide Program, 1997-1999
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 MacMillan Center at Yale, Introduction to Cambodian Genocide Program
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 MacMillan Center at Yale, Programme d'Etude sur le Génocide
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), Cambodian Genocide Databases
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Cambodian Genocide Program
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Yale University Library, Santebal Microfilms (Film B19884)
- ↑ Yale Cambodian Genocide Databases
- ↑ Documentation Center of Cambodia, The Cambodian Genocide Databases
- ↑ Yale Archives, Yale University. Cambodian Genocide Program