Youk Chhang

For more than a decade, Youk Chhang has been Cambodia’s conscience. If today there is a real possibility of bringing at least some of the former Khmer Rouge leaders before the international tribunal that will begin hearings next year, he, more than anyone, is responsible.

Youk’s Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private organization financed mainly by foreign grants, has amassed more than 600,000 pages of documents detailing the workings of the Khmer Rouge regime that from April 1975 to January 1979 transformed Cambodia into a slave state. The Center’s holdings in the capital Phnom Penh include minutes of Cambodian Communist Party leadership meetings chaired by the movement’s ultra-radical chief Pol Pot; confidential reports describing conditions in the countryside where more than a million people died of starvation or related illness; and the confessions under torture of thousands of prisoners killed by Pol Pot’s secret police. Without these documents, a trial would be almost impossible. Today the most damning items are kept in armor-plated, fireproof cabinets, guarded day and night.

An affable, engaging 45-year-old, Youk has the demeanor of a soft-spoken diplomat rather than a man investigating mass murder. Yet his quest for justice has been as much a personal odyssey as an abstract search for historical truth. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was marched off, like millions of others, to do forced labor in the countryside. His brother-in-law and two nieces died. Then his sister was accused of stealing rice. “She denied it,” he remembers, “but the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her. To prove his accusation, he took a knife and slashed her belly open. Her stomach was empty. She died a slow and horrible death.”

Years later, Youk tracked down the man who had killed her. He had grown old and pathetically poor. Youk has decided that revenge is not the answer. “Nothing can resurrect what we’ve lost,” he says. “Violence won’t erase the horrible memories. It could never ease the pain of Cambodia’s past.” Youk believes the trial, to which he has devoted so many years, will help Cambodia find closure. Without accountability, he argues, the country will remain dysfunctional and unable to advance, no matter how much foreign aid is poured in. “Cambodia is like broken glass,” he says. “Without justice, we cannot put the pieces together.”