Learning to Teach About the Khmer Rouge
06/29/2009 @ 3:00 pm
By Men Kimseng, VOA Khmer
Original report for Washington
29 June 2009
Education officials this week are learning how to teach more history about the Khmer Rouge regime, as a course from the Documentation Center of Cambodia gets underway.
In a one-week course that began this weekend, 24 officials from the Ministry of Education will hear from genocide experts and receive training from a new manual designed specifically for teaching about the regime.
Cambodian students have until recently learned very little about the traumatic period in their country’s history, and studies indicate they sometimes learn little from their parents about it.
“Our teaching [on the Khmer Rouge regime] is unique compared to teaching on this genocidal topic in other countries 40 years ago or in the last century,” Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center, told VOA Khmer. “Our teaching is to teach Cambodian victims to become educators, and we don’t narrowly concentrate on our country.”
Among the trainers are David Chandler, professor of history from Monash University and a well-regarded historian on Cambodia, Ros Chantraboth, a Cambodian historian, George Chigas, associate director of Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Program, and Dy Kham Boly, the author of “A History of Democratic Kampuchea.”
“In this teacher’s manual we organize the teaching chapter by chapter,” Dy Kham Boly said. “Students are asked to read survivors’ accounts and later role play.”
Tuon Sa Im, secretary of state of the Ministry of Education, said that the 24 officials trained next week will then transfer their knowledge to history teachers at Cambodia’s junior high and high schools. The ministry hopes to finish training teachers by 2010.
Khmer Rouge survivor testifies
06/29/2009 @ 2:41 pm
One of the few survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime's notorious Tuol Sleng detention centre has testified at a UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia.
Van Nath is one of only three people still alive who experienced Tuol Sleng.
Van Nath described how hunger had driven him to eat insects, and said he had also eaten the food beside corpses of starved fellow prisoners.
He was appearing at the trial of the man who ran the prison, Comrade Duch.
About 15,000 people were detained at Tuol Sleng in the late 1970s, but only seven are thought to have survived.
Read the rest of the article...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8123541.stm
Democrat Endorsed Cambodia Invasion; Nixon Papers Cite 1970 Conversation
06/26/2009 @ 12:08 pm
President Richard M. Nixon, shown with then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford in 1973, spoke to Sen. John Stennis (D) five days before the incursion. (United Press International)
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Five days before U.S. and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise move into Cambodia on April 29, 1970, then-President Richard M. Nixon got the approval of the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee for that action, according for documents released yesterday by the Nixon library.
The unexpected U.S. incursion into Cambodia came as a surprise to the American public, most members of Congress and the new Cambodian government. What followed were a series of public demonstrations in Washington and later Kent State University in Ohio, which, in turn, expanded opposition to the war.
In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.
"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.
Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."
Several days earlier, in a memo to then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms proposed a plan to covertly deliver thousands of AK-47s and other military equipment to the Cambodian government with help from Indonesia.
Yesterday, about 30,000 pages of documents were opened to the public at the National Archives facility in College Park and the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., part of a staggered declassification of papers and tapes from the Nixon years.
The memos and tapes shed light on fateful moments of Nixon's second term, the Associated Press reported, among them a peace deal with North Vietnam, sea changes in domestic and foreign policy, and management of the Cold War.
They also give insights into a well-known characteristic of Nixon and his aides -- a hair-trigger sensitivity to political rivals and quick resort to machinations against them.
A 1972 meeting between Nixon and his chief of staff produced an informal directive to "destroy" Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, according to scribbled notes among the documents released yesterday that referred to Eagleton as a "pip-squeak."
In a 1969 memo, Nixon's staff assistant describes placing the movements of the Kennedys under observation in Massachusetts after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy drove off a bridge in an accident that drowned his female companion.
The materials show Nixon as sharp-witted, crude, manipulative and sometimes surprisingly liberal in comparison with mainstream Republicans today. In one letter, he solidly endorses the Equal Rights Amendment, saying that for 20 years "I have not altered my belief that equal rights for women warrant a constitutional guarantee." The amendment failed.
The library posted online more than 150 hours of tape recordings. The tapes cover January and February 1973, spanning Nixon's second inauguration, the peace deal with Hanoi, and the trial and conviction of burglars whose break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex precipitated the coverup that wrecked Nixon's presidency. He resigned in August 1974 under threat of being forced out by Congress.
Former K.Rouge foreign minister denied release
06/26/2009 @ 12:02 pm
Agence France-Presse - 6/26/2009
Judges on Friday rejected the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister's appeal for release from jail before his trial at Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court.
Ieng Sary, 83, is charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes but asked to be released into house arrest on the grounds that his life in jail at the tribunal is making him ill.
"The request for release or modification of conditions of detention is rejected," said pre-trial chamber judge Prak Kimsan in a formal reading of the decision.
Detention was necessary to protect the former leader's safety, keep him from fleeing Cambodia and to preserve public order, Prak Kimsan told the court.
Ieng Sary, who has been rushed to hospital at least nine times since he was detained by the court in November 2007, shuffled in and out of the courtroom with the help of a cane.
His trial is expected to begin sometime next year.
Ieng Sary is one of five top regime cadres detained by the joint Cambodia-UN tribunal that was established in 2006, after nearly a decade of haggling over how to deliver justice for one of the 20th century's bloodiest episodes.
The court's long-awaited first trial has seen Kaing Guek Eav, better known by the alias Duch, accept responsibility for overseeing the execution of more than 15,000 people at the main Khmer Rouge prison.
Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed, as the 1975-1979 regime emptied Cambodia's cities in its drive to create a communist utopia.
As the top Khmer Rouge diplomat, Ieng Sary was frequently the only point of contact between Cambodia's secretive communist rulers and the outside world.
He has denied any involvement in past atrocities but he was also one of the biggest public supporters of the regime's mass purges, researchers say.
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 before facing justice, and fears over the health of ageing suspects hang over the court.
Michael Jackson,1958-2009
06/26/2009 @ 11:57 am
No matter what was said about MJ in his later years, his talent was undeniable. Condolences to his family and fans.
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