Youk chhang biography of donald
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CAMBODIA / FRONTLINE DIARY
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA OCTOBER 2005
1. SOUNDBITE: (English) Youk Chhang, Director, Genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia:
"During the Khmer Rouge one of my sisters she's pregnant and inom stole rice from the rice field to feed her because I couldn't stand seeing her starve while she's pregnant. And I was caught by the Khmer Rouge prison guard. So they tie me up and hit me four or fem big guy. I was a skinny boy of around 14 years old. They hit me and the way they tortyr me I didn't cry, inom remember clearly I did not cry, because I endure the pain. But what they did that I could not forgive them until 25 year later is that they did this in front of my mother. And they force her not to cry, because crying was a crime. So I was very confused because I ask my mother for help and she walk away. And at the same time they were torturing me so I don't know, I was lost, inom was a lost boy.
I can understand how the victims would fee
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Research brings relief
Youk Chhang was 14 in 1975 when his life changed forever. A native of Phnom Penh, he had learned to live with dread as the war raging in the Cambodian countryside between the radical Khmer Rouge communists and government forces got closer and closer to the capital. The sounds of explosions outside the city had become commonplace; refugees streamed into the city, seeking escape from the rural violence. Phnom Penh residents, weary of years of war, just wanted peace, and quiet.
A sort of peace did descend, briefly, in April when Phnom Penh fell to Khmer Rouge forces. Chhang was home alone since his mother and sister had gone to a different part of the city looking for a safer place to stay after a small rocket had landed near their home the day before. They planned to come back for him when they found a refuge, but the road was cut; they couldn't get back. On April 17, Chhang woke up to a very unusual silence.
"All the sound I had heard for three o
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More than 30 years after the darkest chapter in its history, Cambodia remains a damaged and fragile society, a leading Cambodian genocide expert told an audience at Stanford GSB.
Cambodia is still suffering from the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal, ultra-communist regime that ruled the Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1979. Cambodia is like shattered glass, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). “It’s a fragile, broken society as a nation. People are divided,” he said in an April 22 talk. “You drop a glass on the floor. It’s broken.”
DC-Cam, a Phnom Penh non-profit group founded in 1995, gathers and researches information and materials related to the Khmer Rouge regime. DC-Cam’s twin missions are preserving Cambodia’s historical memory and helping to bring justice for victims of Khmer Rouge atrocities. The group has collected more than one million documents, interviewed thousands of former Khmer Rouge cadres and identified or mapped