ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, I interviewed hundreds of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, and begun to publish their accounts. 1 In Australia during the 1980s, I translated most of these interviews and a number of confidential Khmer Rouge documents, and published detailed accounts of specific aspects of the genocide and historical analyses of the Khmer Rouge rise to power. 2 At Yale University in 1994, I established the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) to continue this work with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department 222of State. In January 1995, we opened the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Four years later, the United Nations Group of Experts completed its report to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the legal ramifications of the Cambodian genocide. In March 1999, this report was published by the secretary-general. It stated:
Over the last 20 years, various attempts have been made to gather evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities to build a historical record of these acts. For nearly 20 years, scholars have been accumulating such evidence by talking with survivors and participants in the terror and reviewing documents, photographs, and gravesites. The most impressive and organized effort in this regard is the Documentation Center of Cambodia, located in Phnom Penh. Originally set up by Yale University through a grant from the Government of the United States of America, the Center now functions as an independent research institute with funding from several governments and foundations. It has conducted a documentation project to collect, catalogue and store documents of Democratic Kampuchea, as well as a mapping project to locate sites of execution centres and mass graves. 3
