Yale scholar of Cambodia, Ben Kiernan, uncovers rare 19th-century Khmer-language documents

May 17, 2018

April 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the regime that is responsible for the genocide that in four years took the lives of over 1.5 million people. The genocide is today known as one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.

This year, Pol Pot’s deputy, along with his regime’s head of state, will be judged by a UN-backed tribunal for genocide against Cambodia’s Vietnamese and Muslim ethnic minorities. The perpetrators have been tried using archives of the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge secret police. These archives were discovered in 1996 by Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program, led by historian Ben Kiernan and his team of researchers.

The archives found in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, says Kiernan, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, comprise about 100,000 pages of documents produced by the Khmer Rouge secret police from 1975 to 1979.

Yale played an important part in accumulating the evidence we found in the archives of the Khmer Rouge security ministry,” says Kiernan, who came to Yale in 1990 to teach Southeast Asian history. In 1995-97, Kiernan won $1.5 million in grants from the U.S. State Department to run a historical investigation of the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. The grant funded the establishment of large databases that are still available online at Yale.

Kiernan had founded the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale in 1994 to study these acts of genocide and to help determine who was responsible. In 1996 Yale University Press published his book, “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979.”

Read the full article at Yale News.