Kigali, RWANDA- April 1975 was a cruel month for millions of Cambodians. Forty-nine years ago, on April 17, the Khmer Rouge finally captured Phnom Penh after a five-year civil war with the US-backed Lon Nol regime.
One million residents and another million refugees in the capital city initially felt a sense of jubilation that the war was finally over.
The Khmer Rouge had other ideas that didn’t include celebrating. They forcefully evacuated the city, a process that resulted in thousands of deaths, especially among the elderly and infirm, who walking in the blistering heat of April died along roadsides heading away from Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge’s subsequent three years, eight months and 20 day disastrous reign of terror –under the leadership of Pol Pot – left around two million people dead from disease, starvation, overwork, and execution.
It was a catastrophe of epic proportions, one of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century. Only an invasion by the Vietnamese military, along with Khmer Rouge defectors, in late 1978 forced Pol Pot and his henchmen from power.
There is no public institution in Phnom Penh that comprehensively tells the story of these horrors; there is no “Cambodian Genocide Museum.”
There are scattered monuments and memorials, gravesites and killing fields, but nothing that brings the entire story together, nor one that tries to educate people.
However, in a curious twist, 8,400 kilometers away in Rwanda there is a “Cambodian Corner” in the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) that “remembers” the Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans also “remember” April as a cruel month. On April 7, 1994, Hutu extremists began a well-planned and systematic slaughter of ethnic Tutsis that over the next 100 days would see more than 800,000 killed.
A friend of mine in Kigali who witnessed the genocide still remembers seeing piles of hacked-up bodies two meters high along many highways. He still has nightmares thinking about it.
It was only the intervention from Uganda by the Rwandan Patriotic Forces that ended the slaughter, pushing Hutu Genocidiares into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some still operate.
Rwanda, like Cambodia, has struggled for decades to recover from these horrors. The process has not been easy for either nation.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM), opened in 2004, is one effort that seeks through education and peace-building to honor 250,000 victims buried there. Mass gravesites of those murdered are still being discovered around the country.
The KGM cost about US$2 million to build, according to CEO Freddy Mutanguha. The Aegis Trust in the UK provided major funding. Other donors included the Belgian and Swedish governments, the Kigali City Council and the Clinton Wasserman Foundation.
The KGM receives about 120,000 visitors a year, operates with an annual budget of US$1 million, and has a serious outreach program. Entrance is free for all visitors.
“The education we provide gives strength to hearts,” said Mutanguha. “And we teach people not to be bystanders when they see injustice.”
Mutanguha believes violence can be prevented. “By identifying the increasing signs to violence, we can prevent the path from getting worse,” he says.
The KGM and its education programs also have a heavy emphasis on the negative effects of hate speech – a key factor in the Rwandan genocide.
Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center-Cambodia (DC-CAM), based in Phnom Penh, helped the KGM put together its Cambodian Remembrance Corner.
The separate, four-walled room includes photos of Khmer Rouge victims and leaders, panels with text describing what happened, and information on the Khmer Rouge’s major torture and execution center at Tuol Sleng, where around 14,000 people met a cruel fate.
Chhang has plans for a museum in Phnom Penh, a comprehensive entity called the Sleuk Rith Institute. He even managed to convince the famous architect Zaha Hadid to donate a design for the institute. However, progress on securing land for the site and funding has been negligible.
Many Cambodians think the Khmer Rouge genocide should be forgotten, that it should be consigned to history books few people read.
Sixty-five percent of Cambodia’s 15 million population are under the age of 35 and have no direct memories of those horrific events so many years ago. Many survivors don’t want to talk about it.
Others disagree. Michael Karnavas, a defense lawyer at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal made the point succinctly in a recent blog post:
So is it time for Cambodia to have a museum-institute that fully memorializes the legacy of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea? The answer is an emphatic and urgent yes. Time is of the essence. The window of opportunity for establishing this institute, while the generation that survived this regime is still alive, is closing.
The Cambodian government and newly elected Prime Minister Hun Manet, as well as the international community, would be well served by lending their support and assistance in nurturing the birth and sustainability of the Sleuk Rith Institute.”
We’ve all heard George Santayana’s quote so often it has almost become trite: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
There are more than a few well-meaning folks in Cambodia who want to make sure Khmers and others never forget how the Khmer Rouge almost completely destroyed an entire culture. They need help to do so. Rwanda, for its part in a small way, is doing just that.
Michael Hayes is founder and former editor-in-chief of the Phnom Penh Post