BEN KIERNAN

Thanks, Ann. It's a great pleasure to be here, and I'd like to thank YCIAS and Yale University Library for the opportunity to talk a little bit about Cambodian history and its documentation. And then Rich Richie will follow up with the library's specific project.

Since the Cambodian court left Angkor Wat in the 15th century and moved down river, there have been at least six changes of capital of the Cambodian kingdom. And, on each occasion, archives have been lost. At one point, in the 16th century, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors from the Philippines invaded Cambodia and burnt the capital to the ground and killed the entire court. On other occasions, changes of the court were inspired by trading opportunities, but, all the same, archives were left behind and lost. The palm leaf records from the Angkor period vanished and we really are limited to the stone inscriptions that survive, in great numbers from that medieval period. Archives since then are very scarce. Just in the 20th century, although Phnom Penh has been the capital for most of the 19th and 20th century, there have been six changes of regime in Cambodia, just since 1945 alone. And, on each occasion, there has been a political tumult and, often, destruction of records.

When I first visited Phnom Penh in 1975, a couple of months before the Khmer Rouge took over, an American I met had just bought a duck in the market in Phnom Penh and it was wrapped in paper. He unwrapped the duck and found a letter from President Eisenhower to King Sihanouk.

When the Khmer Rouge took over a couple of months later, they not only evacuated the cities, but they also cut off all communications with the outside world by expelling journalists and so on, but also within the country. They closed down schools; they closed down most of the hospitals. They abolished all newspapers and the postal service. All of this was stopped. For four years, there was very little written communication and, certainly from the outside, it looked as if there was unlikely to be any record, on paper, of what was happening during the Khmer Rouge period from 1975 until they were overthrown in 1979.

In January of 1979, when the Vietnamese came in and drove the Khmer Rouge to the Thai border, it was pretty clear that if any record was going to be preserved of what happened, it would have to be oral and there would have to be a large concentration on interviews with refugees and survivors inside the country. That's what most of the scholars who were interested in Cambodian history and the genocide that had just taken place set out to do, was to record interviews with survivors.

None of us had much idea that there would be any written record. I remember seeing a journalist's account, when I was in London, in the London Guardian in May of 1979, purporting to use prison records from the Khmer Rouge period to give details of persecution and execution of prisoners. I was skeptical about the existence of such archives. I didn't really believe that the Khmer Rouge was the kind of regime that would have left behind a large written record.

It turns out that they did their best to destroy it. When they were evacuating the city in January, 1979, the leadership of Pol Pot and Nuon Chea gave orders to the prison chief Deuch to destroy all of the records of the secret prison, which the outside world didn't know about and most people even in Cambodia didn't know about. And he didn't. He preferred to kill the last surviving prisoners instead, in the couple of hours of time that he had before the Vietnamese arrived at the prison. When they did get there, they found 100,000 pages of archives of the prison - execution schedules, daily record of torture of prisoners and their forced confessions. In the next couple of years, Cornell University began a microfilming project to record that prison data.

There was another prison in the countryside -- in fact, there were many, but the archives of only one survived. By the time I got to that prison, I was told by local people that most of the archives had been "smoked." They had used them for cigarette paper. However, a large number of archives had survived and they were also copied.

I don't think the Khmer Rouge expected that their archives would ever be made available, for instance, on the worldwide web. When the first journalistic accounts came out of the prison records, apparently some of the Khmer Rouge got together at the Thai border and Nuon Chea, the number 2 in the Pol Pot regime, said to Deuch, you stupid idiot why didn't you burn all those archives ? It wasn't possible for the Khmer Rouge to really deny what they had done after that.

In 1994, the Cambodian Genocide Program was established at Yale University. One of its major missions was to document the record. We thought, even then, that the written record would be limited to what we already knew: the two prison archives. We had a mandate from the Cambodian government, and were funded by the State Department of the US, to look for more records, but we didn't really expect to find all that much. Our major anticipated focus was to catalogue and assemble an archive of what had already been found. We also started a mapping project to map the mass graves and the prison sites across Cambodia. We worked with the University of New South Wales and with Yale University Library to do both of those projects, particularly the microfilm project of the archives that we thought we might be able to find and, secondly, with Yale University Library and the GIS mapping section, to put on the worldwide web the material that we recovered about the locations of the mass graves and other sites.

Luckily, there was a huge collection of archives, which had remained undetected from 1979 until we located them in 1996. This was the archives of the Khmer Rouge secret police, the Santebal. Not just the central prison records, but the high-level reporting to the Pol Pot leadership. Many of these documents, which were also about 100,000 pages, include their handwritten annotations on the margins. There are documents with Pol Pot's signature on them. There's a list of prisoners arrested, and a confession by one of them listing all of his family members and contacts. And the words scribbled on the margin by Pol Pot himself, "Follow up" on this person. In other words, arrest all of the people named on the list. So it was a big find to come across these Santebal archives of the Khmer Rouge prison system across the country, showing high-level involvement and the implication of the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge in the crimes that were committed.

Rich Richie will now give us an introduction to the microfilm project that resulted from that.

RICH RICHIE

Thanks, Ben. In 1998, Professor Ben Kiernan approached us in the library about the possibility of preserving these Santibal archives that were held at the Documentation Center in Cambodia. It was a great idea, but I had not much experience myself in developing any sort of preservation project. So, together with Ben's assistance and the director of the Documentation Center in Cambodia, Yuk Tung, we sat down together with the head of the preservation department here at Yale University Library, who was then Paul Conway, and discussed ideas on how we could try and preserve a copy of the Santibal collection and get it out of Cambodia.

Part of our concern was, because the political situation was uncertain, we thought it would be both useful to have a copy of this archive outside of Cambodia to make it available to international researchers who couldn't travel to Cambodia, but also just to make sure that there was a copy of this archive available in case something should happen to the originals in Phnom Penh.

Originally, the Documentation Center had thought about possibly scanning all of these documents, 100,000 pages approximately. It turned out that process was very slow, and they realized they didn't quite have the computer capacity to store up all of these digital documents. We needed to find something that would be quicker and more tested. So Paul Conway suggested that we just go back and think about the idea of microfilming these collections.

I had no experience in how to set up a microfilming project. Together with Paul and our local microfilming/processing company we came up with a budget proposal. Paul provided us with a borrowed World War II era portable microfilm camera, which he quickly trained me how to operate and how to find spare parts and replacement bulbs. We also realized that, of course, the electric current in Cambodia was not the same as the United States so we had to think of, you know, a good transformer that we could take along with us to make sure that the camera would operate properly.

The library was very generous in providing some of the funding for this project, but we thought that we should go ahead and propose this to the Southeast Asia Microforms Project of the Center for Research Libraries as a possible cooperative funding effort. In the Spring of 1998, I went to the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting and proposed it to the Southeast Asia Microforms Project, and we were successful.

In May of 1998, I wrapped this poor old camera up in bubble wrap and tried to get it in a small enough cardboard box that the airline would let me put it on the plane and I headed off to Phnom Penh. We decided with this project, because I had never been to Phnom Penh and there were no microfilm processing machines in Cambodia at the time, that the best idea would be to go ahead and have them shoot the film, put it in a DHL box and ship it back to the US, We would process the film here and try and correct for any problems with lighting and shading. Focus we couldn't work with, but we thought we could do some more quality control on the film when it came back to the United States. So we went ahead and processed it back here.

The project was certainly successful enough that we decided to go ahead and expand the project. Originally it was supposed to be for two years, but we decided to expand the project and proposed again to the Southeast Asia Microforms Project -- to microfilm the Renoxe Collection, which was made up of petitions of victims of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, or their family members who survived. of the government in 1975, and there were all sort of dossiers containing information about the Lon Mol government's relations or dealings with the Khmer Rouge military.

Then a final collection that we decided to go ahead and microfilm was made up of Khmer Rouge notebooks, which were notebooks of -- about 385 notebooks -- written by prison guards. And it included their own notes, their meeting minutes, poetry, medical training, military training information, all sorts of rather interesting points on the lives of the military guards at the time.

The project took a long time. The idea of having to ship the film back and, when there were technical problems with the film, we had to get back in touch with our microfilm camera operator in Cambodia and try and reshoot lots of film. There were problems with lighting. Sometimes they'd stuck their thumb in the middle of a document and hadn't realized it. And, of course, it took a month to get the film back to us, process it, turn around and tell them, oops, your thumb's in document number 367 on reel number 43. Please reshoot that document. And they had kept very good records of, you know, which document that might be, so they were able to refilm it.

Now, about six years later, we've finally finished the project. A copy of the film, in positive format, is here at Yale. There's a copy at the Center for Research Libraries. And a third copy at Cornell University. And, of course, we also gave a positive copy back to the Documentation Center of Cambodia so that researchers there could go ahead and use the positive film, rather than the original documents.

Thank you.

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. He is the founding Director of Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program and Genocide Studies Program (www.yale.edu/gsp). In 2000-2002, he served as Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project. He gained his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from Monash University, Australia, in 1983. Kiernan is the author of numerous books and articles, including How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (Verso, London, 1985; 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2004); The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Yale, 1996, 2nd ed., 2002); and other works on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide. He is a member of the editorial boards of Critical Asian Studies, Human Rights Review, the Journal of Human Rights, the Journal of Genocide Research, and Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung. His edited collection Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002. He is currently writing a global history of genocide since 1450 for Yale University Press.

His undergraduate courses include Southeast Asia from Earliest Times to 1900, Southeast Asia since 1900, Vietnamese History from Earliest Times, The Vietnam War, Environmental History of Southeast Asia, and graduate seminars on the Vietnam War and on various aspects of the history of genocide. Professor Kiernan is in great demand as a teacher and lecturer.

Rich Richie is Yale Library's Curator for Southeast Asian and South Asian studies. One of his key projects while at Yale has been to arrange for preservation microfilming of a significant archive of Cambodian genocide documentation materials identified and organized under the Cambodian Genocide Documentation Project in Phom Penh.

back to top