Recording
Khmer Oral History Project: Interview with Yoeuth Yan
The Khmer Oral History Project interview with Yoeuth Yan records a Battambang student's survival of Khmer Rouge work camps and his road to Minnesota.[1] It is one of 15 interviews in the Khmer Oral History Project, recorded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in July and August 1992.[2]
About the recording
Yoeuth Yan was a student in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge regime began. He was sent out of Battambang City and fell ill with malaria while working on the youth mobile team. He found his mother and siblings and learned that his father had been taken away and killed.[1]
He fell ill again and was made to work in several camps, among them a reeducation camp. After Vietnamese soldiers arrived in 1979 he found his family, and then he left for Thailand. There he supported himself by selling Thai goods to Cambodians. A sponsor from the American Refugee Committee brought him to Minnesota.[1]
The collection
The Khmer Oral History Project grew out of a mock trial of the Khmer Rouge leadership for genocide. The Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee held the trial at the Minnesota State Capitol on June 9, 1990. Members of Minnesota's Khmer community served as witnesses and told of their lives from 1975 to 1979, years in which an estimated 1.7 million people were killed under the Khmer Rouge-led government. A panel of Minnesota public officials, sitting as an "International Court of Justice," found Pol Pot and his agents guilty of genocide.[2]
In the project that followed, community members were interviewed on videotape about the genocide years, the refugee camps and their emigration to the United States. The 15 interviews run 16 hours and 24 minutes in all. Each has a transcript in English and, where appropriate, Khmer, for a total of 414 pages in English and 81 in Khmer.[2]
Credits
Yoeuth Yan is the narrator. No interviewer is named for this recording, and the project lists its interviewers as various. Copyright in the interviews is held by Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.[1][2]
Access
- Minnesota Historical Society collections: interview record
- No item number, access restriction or online recording link is published.[1]