Backstory: Cambodia's healing history lessons

One day in 1976, Van recalls planting rice shoots when "[I] saw my brothers being handcuffed [and] I ran over to them." She pats her chest gently to fight back renewed sobs that threaten to contort her open, honest face. "My oldest brother tried to comfort me. He said, 'Little sister, we have to go.' " She was later told her brothers – a rickshaw driver, a fisherman, and a student – had been labeled "enemies of the Revolution" and taken to Toul Sleng, a high-school-turned-prison in Phnom Penh, where inmates were tortured into confessing to trumped-up charges of espionage and sabotage before being killed.

"I still can't believe I survived," she says. In a family of seven siblings, only she and a sister did.

To let Bei tell you, he and many of his brothers-in-arms had nothing to do with the murder of innocents. "I joined the Revolution [in 1976 at age 18] for the good of the country," he says. "I was just a common footsoldier and was politically indoctrinated."

He stripped off his black Khmer Rouge uniform in 1998 when Pol Pot died, and insists he has a clear conscience: "I only killed the enemy." The "enemy" was the "Vietnamese aggressors." But how about all those skulls of his fellow Cambodians displayed at Choeung Ek? Kneading his knuckles, Bei cringes: "I didn't know my comrades were killing Khmers behind our backs."

DC-Cam invites some ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers like Bei on its educational tours to foster reconciliation in villages where victims and their former tormentors often live side by side, the former ostracizing the latter in silent but persistent acts of cold-shouldering.

During an earlier group tour, a woman and her onetime torturer – both from the same province – were seated across from each other in a Phnom Penh hotel dining hall. She fixed him with an accusatory glare but said not a word. He bowed his head in shame and whispered apologies.

"Justice," says DC-Cam's director, Chhang Youk, a survivor of the killing fields himself and Cambodia's foremost researcher on the period, "comes in different forms for different people."

Closure, too, comes in myriad forms. For three decades, Mot Voeun, a diminutive woman, has been waiting for her husband, an erstwhile royalist soldier arrested by the Khmer Rouge.

This morning she saw him again – in a photo displayed in a tableau of former inmates' mug shots at Toul Sleng (now a museum). Just seven of 17,000 men, women, and children brought there survived. What she had always feared but never dared admit to herself was true: He was dead.

Tormented by a tragedy that shattered lives and left questions unanswered, survivors often still can't come to terms with their loss. "My own mother doesn't want to believe her favorite brother is dead," says Mr. Youk. "I found a forced confession by one of his friends that implicated my uncle, but a fortuneteller has told my mother [that] her brother is alive, so she hopes and hopes, waiting for him to return." That's why, he says, education, not just trying a few mass murderers in court, remains crucial. Impoverished Cambodia has a literacy rate of just 35 percent, but there isn't much to read about the Khmer Rouge period, to begin with.

"The Khmer Rouge are not history; they're a living reality," Youk says. "They're still right here among us."

Two-thirds of Cambodia's 12 million citizens were born after the Pol Pot era, so most young Cambodians know little or nothing about the horrors their parents and grandparents experienced. In a 79-page textbook on Cambodian history published for ninth-graders by the Ministry of Education in 2000, the Khmer Rouge era rates two sentences. It has been excised from a later edition.

DC-Cam publishes "Searching for the Truth," a free monthly that contains testimonials by victims and perpetrators alike, and Youk has drafted a comprehensive textbook about the Khmer Rouge for high school students that awaits government approval and funding.

"We're serving the cause of justice just by teaching history – by remembering and commemorating victims," he says.

Van agrees: "So many people died.... If we let our memories of them fade away, their souls will never be at rest and find their peace."

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