Organization

Documentation Center of Cambodia

The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an independent research institute in Phnom Penh, records the Khmer Rouge regime's history for memory and justice.[1] Founded in 1995, it collects, preserves and shares the record of Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979).[2] Its home page introduces its survivors' stories by noting that two million people were killed and five million lived to tell their story.[3]

A gold and green figure holding a raised sword at the center of a dark circle ringed with the center's Khmer and English names.
Logo of Documentation Center of Cambodia.

History

In 1994 the United States Congress passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, and the State Department then funded Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program.[2] DC-Cam was founded in 1995 as the program's field office in Cambodia, to gather evidence of genocide and other atrocity crimes by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. That year the Cambodian government authorized it to work as an independent research institute documenting the Khmer Rouge period.[2][1] When the Yale grant ended, DC-Cam became an independent nongovernmental organization on January 1, 1997, with legal recognition in both Cambodia and the United States.[2] Youk Chhang, who survived the Khmer Rouge period, has led it as executive director since 1997.[2]

In 1999 a United Nations Group of Experts with three members found a prima facie case (enough evidence to proceed) for charging some former Khmer Rouge leaders with war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. It drew mainly on DC-Cam's holdings.[2] DC-Cam later gave more than 500,000 pages of documents and survivor accounts to the United Nations and Cambodian tribunal that tried senior Khmer Rouge leaders, whose formal name is Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Its documents served as evidence in those prosecutions.[4][1] In 2007 DC-Cam published A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), a textbook by Khamboly Dy written for high school students.[5][6] DC-Cam describes it as the first such text by a Cambodian author.[6] In 2022 it renamed its headquarters the Queen Mother Library, in honor of Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk.[2]

Archive

DC-Cam's archive holds more than one million items.[2] Besides Khmer Rouge history, it covers the history of the Cambodian government, of Southeast Asia and of North Korea, and China's support for the Khmer Rouge. It also keeps sensitive records from the Cambodian War (1970 to 1975) and earlier, among them the personal files of King Norodom Sihanouk and of Colonel Les Kosem.[2] The collections include biographies of Khmer Rouge members and cadres, committee minutes, daily reports, telegrams, victim confessions, notebooks, songs, publications, photographs of crime sites, interview transcripts, documentary films, diaries and maps.[4] There are Vietnamese documents, and records of the International Cambodia Hearing held in Oslo from April 21 to 23, 1978.[7] DC-Cam calls it the world's largest collection of original Khmer Rouge documents.[1]

Counts of the holdings differ. About 155,000 pages of original Khmer Rouge documents have been cataloged, along with more than 6,000 photographs, and more than 400,000 further pages are awaiting cataloging.[2] The Queen Mother Library counts more than 1.7 million pages on the Khmer Rouge and more than 100,000 hours of recorded interviews with victims.[8] Four databases, biographic, bibliographic, photographic and geographic, can be searched online. DC-Cam has located and mapped 189 prisons, 80 genocide memorials and 19,403 mass graves across Cambodia.[2][4] It works with Yale University and the University of New South Wales to manage and catalog the documents, and it is putting them online.[4]

The Queen Mother Library, dedicated to the Queen Mother and to Cambodian women, holds books, medals, certificates and other personal items she donated.[8] In late 2019 Ambassador Julio A. Jeldres gave the center his collection of more than 3,000 books and documents on the royal family and Cambodian history, with at least 2,800 boxes of papers, photographs, films and audio recordings. Most of the photographs selected from it come from King Father Norodom Sihanouk's own collection and cover 1950 to 1991.[8]

Education and outreach

DC-Cam treats genocide education as a way to prevent genocide. Working with Cambodia's Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, it was mainly responsible for the national genocide education curriculum and its outreach programs.[2] It trains university professors and secondary school teachers across the country, helps survivors look for lost loved ones, and promotes art and culture after conflict.[1] With the office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, it built a program on preventing atrocity crimes, first tried with teachers in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.[2] With the International Center for Transitional Justice, it oversees an international group of documentation centers that share methods of recording and preventing atrocity crimes.[2] From 1995 to 2020 it ran CamboCorps, a youth volunteer program modeled on the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, with more than 3,000 volunteers.[2]

DC-Cam's work has focused on local communities from the start.[1] It has 21 centers, offices and sites, 18 of them offices or facilities and three development sites, mostly in rural Cambodia. The Ministry of Interior recognized 19 of these sites in November 2024.[2] They include genocide education centers in Prey Veng and Takeo, documentation centers in Kampong Cham, Koh Thma and Stung Treng, the Anlong Veng Peace Center, the Veal Veng Reconciliation Center, the S'Tieng Ethnic Community Center and the Hill Tribes Memory Community Center.[2] The Sleuk Rith Institute is planned as DC-Cam's permanent successor in Phnom Penh, honoring the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide.[8]

Recognition

In August 2006 the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Joseph A. Mussomeli, gave DC-Cam's staff certificates of appreciation for their work toward justice for victims and for preserving the record of Democratic Kampuchea.[9] Time magazine named Youk Chhang one of its 100 most influential people in 2007.[2] In 2017 the Center for Justice and Accountability gave DC-Cam its Judith Lee Stronach Human Rights Award, and King Norodom Sihamoni appointed Chhang to the Royal Order of Cambodia as a Commander.[3] In 2018 the Ramon Magsaysay Award, regarded as Asia's Nobel Prize, honored DC-Cam and Chhang for keeping historical memory alive for healing and justice.[3][2] In 2026 Chhang was appointed Ambassador to the King, a post that links the Royal Palace with the government.[3]

Organization

DC-Cam is a nonprofit and nonpartisan institute, and in the United States it is recognized as a 501(c)(3) organization. It describes itself as independent and not a government, political or judicial body.[2] PricewaterhouseCoopers audits it regularly.[2] It works with Cambodia's ministries of Education, Interior, Culture and Fine Arts, and Tourism, and with local civil and religious authorities.[1] A Documentation and Democracy grant from the U.S. Department of State funded its website.[3]

Visiting

The headquarters and Queen Mother Library are at Maison 11, Street 256, in Sangkat Chakto Mukh of Khan Daun Penh, Phnom Penh. The center is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on national holidays.[8] Its Public Information Room and the library have their own rules for viewing documents.[7][4]

See also

References 9
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Documentation and Democracy Project
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Our history
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Documentation Center of Cambodia, home page
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Documentation forges justice
  5. ↑ Documentation Center of Cambodia, Democratic Kampuchea History Textbook Distribution (undated)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Documentation Center of Cambodia, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), publication sheet (2007)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Archives: documents
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Queen Mother Library
  9. ↑ Documentation Center of Cambodia, Quarter 3 report (2006)
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This page was last edited on 22 October 2026, at 03:46.