Collection
Documentation Center of Cambodia Archives
The Documentation Center of Cambodia archives hold records of the Khmer Rouge regime, gathered in Phnom Penh since 1995.[1][2] The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) publishes selected holdings online and keeps a Public Information Room in Phnom Penh open to visitors.[1]
History
Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program founded DC-Cam as a field office in Phnom Penh in January 1995, under the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994 and with U.S. State Department grants. Its first task was to collect evidence of genocide and other atrocity crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. DC-Cam became an independent Cambodian research institute on January 1, 1997.[3] Through 1999 the Cambodian Genocide Program funded the center with grants from the U.S. Department of State and the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.[4]
In 1996 the Cambodian Genocide Program acquired the archives of the Santebal, the secret security force of Son Sen. Hundreds of thousands of pages of Khmer-language documents in this collection record decisions at the very top of the regime.[4] In November 1998 a team of three international jurists for the United Nations studied the evidence assembled at the center, and in 1999 the UN Group of Experts found a prima facie case against certain former Khmer Rouge leaders, based mainly on DC-Cam holdings.[4][3] By late 1999, Yale's Sterling Memorial Library had set up a project to microfilm the whole Santebal collection.[4]
More than 500,000 pages of DC-Cam documents have gone to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the court trying senior Khmer Rouge leaders. They went to its prosecutors, investigating judges, defense teams and civil-party lawyers.[2] In 2022, DC-Cam renamed its headquarters the Queen Mother Library, in honor of Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk.[3]
Material coverage
DC-Cam describes its archive as the world's largest collection of printed documents and original materials on the Democratic Kampuchea regime.[2] Its own counts differ by page. It gives about one million documents collected inside and outside Cambodia, an archive of well over one million items, and more than 1.7 million pages about the Khmer Rouge.[2][3][5] One count lists about 155,000 cataloged pages of primary Khmer Rouge documents and more than 6,000 photographs, with more than 400,000 further pages not yet cataloged.[3]
The records include biographies of former Khmer Rouge members and cadres, minutes of Central and Standing Committee meetings, daily reports, telegrams and confessions. Among them are complete minutes of 15 meetings of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and 18,000 biographies of party members.[2][4] There are also Khmer Rouge notebooks, songs and publications, crime-site photographs, interview transcripts, documentary films, physical objects, diaries and maps.[2] The archive reaches beyond the regime to the Cambodian War of 1970 to 1975 and earlier history, and it holds the personal files of King Norodom Sihanouk and of Colonel Les Kosem.[3]
DC-Cam has located and mapped 189 prisons, 19,403 mass graves and 80 genocide memorials across Cambodia.[3] The Queen Mother Library also keeps more than 100,000 hours of audio and video interviews with Khmer Rouge victims. Ambassador Julio A. Jeldres donated more than 3,000 books and at least 2,800 boxes of documents on the royal family and Cambodian history in late 2019, including photographs gathered from 1981 to 2019, most of them from the collection of King Father Norodom Sihanouk.[5]
Youk Chhang has said that "a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history."[1]
Catalog and access
The online archive groups its published holdings as documents, physical evidence, interviews, photographs and exhibitions, films, music and performing arts, and news clips and chronology. It also has sections on other sources for documents, on DC-Cam's appeals for the release of archives and on documenting the crimes of Democratic Kampuchea.[1] DC-Cam catalogs its documents in four databases, covering biographic, bibliographic, photographic and geographic information, with an online search engine. It is digitizing the documents and putting them online.[2] Each record carries a document number. For example, D01377 is a one-page Khmer typescript petition from teachers at Tuol Svay Prey High School, dated December 14, 1974.[6] No catalog number is published for the archive as a whole.[1]
Only selected documents are published online. Rules cover access, photocopying, viewing originals and the care and return of documents, and separate rules govern viewing in the Public Information Room.[1][2] The Public Information Room is at 66 Sihanouk Blvd., Phnom Penh, on the south side of the boulevard a few doors east of the national monument. Its telephone number is +855 23 211-875 (as of 2026), and its email address is dccam@online.com.kh.[1] DC-Cam also gives its address as Maison 11, Street 256, Sangkat Chakto Mukh, Khan Daun Penh, Phnom Penh (2026). Working hours are Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., except national holidays.[5][2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 DC-Cam Archives
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Documentation forges justice
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Our History
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Yale MacMillan Center, Report of the Cambodian Genocide Program, 1997-1999
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Queen Mother Library
- ↑ DC-Cam databases, record D01377