Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence the Rwandan version or: ‘you’re not alone’  has got its blessings! Some 600 people visited the two first performances in Kigali and have approved its right to be.

There is a difference caused by the opposite governmental policy after genocide. While Cambodian government, till now, is frustrating the open debate on (the Khmer Rouge) genocide and its juridical aftermath, Kagame has been provoking every citizen to speak up during the gacaca’s. He has found it necessary to dictate strict rules to the debate – like to forbid to speak about Tutsi’s and Hutu’s and to make jokes about the genocide. The audience did speak up and proved to be very interested in the history of the Cambodians – and how it does and does not mirror their own experiences.

More on Breaking the Silence blog – Cambodian (radio) version

GRASSROOTS

From a period of increasing corruption and instability that lasted until 1970, when Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk was deposed by dictator Lon Nol, to the domination of the capital Phnom Penh by the revolutionary movement Khmer Rouge in 1975, situation in the country has developed to brutal social restructurings and civil war.
Aiming to transform Cambodia into an agrarian cooperative, the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot's leadership, forced the entire population of the capital and provincial towns – including the sick, elderly and infirm – to march out to the countryside and undertake forced labor for 12 to 15 hours a day. Tortures, humiliations, isolation and starvation of the people during the regime challenge the limits of imagination. Leaders, intellectuals, executives and those who opposed the movement were systematically killed. The massacre – which lasted until 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion forced the Khmer Rouge to leave Phnom Penh – resulted in the execution of approximately 2 million people.
The implications of this atrocity still exist today and will continue to impact the country for a long time to come. The segment of the population necessary for the carrying forward of the society and development of Cambodia was wiped out leaving the country to illiterates and less educated people to take over after the Khmer Rouge era.

Vimeo

Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia

John Pilger

'The War You Don't See' now available online worldwide following US ban. John Pilger's new film 'The War You Don't See' is released online for the first time. You can watch the film online (worldwide excluding Australia) for $4.99

Cambodians beaten, raped and killed at illegal detention camp funded by UN

UN funding is being used to run a brutal internment camp for the destitute in Cambodia where detainees are held for months without trial, raped and beaten, sometimes to death, former inmates have told the Guardian.

The Prey Speu facility, 12 miles from Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, is officially described as a "social affairs centre" offering education and healthcare to vulnerable people.

But human rights groups and former inmates say the centre is an illegal, clandestine prison, where people deemed "undesirable" by the government – usually drug users, sex workers and the homeless – are held for months without charge.

Men, women and children are housed together in a single building and are regularly beaten with planks, whipped with wires or threatened with weapons, according to witnesses.

It is alleged that guards have beaten three detainees to death and gang-rapes by the same body of men are reportedly common.

The UN's own Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has described the conditions at Prey Speu as "appalling" with people "illegally confined and subject to a variety of abuses of power by the staff that included sub-humane conditions of detention, extortion, beating, rape, sometimes resulting in death and suicide".

The Guardian

PDF: Joint Cambodian NGO Report on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in the Kingdom of Cambodia (OHCHR)