Congratulations to Janet Gardner and Pham Quoc Thai, whose documentary, "A World Beneath the War:  Secret Tunnels of Vietnam" won both an Emmy for Outstanding Historical Programming and the Deadline Club award for Best Feature Reporting. 

The government of Vietnam has awarded Friendship Medals to one organization and to nine individuals in recognition of their long-standing contribution to the country's development and the consolidation of cooperation and friendship with the people of Vietnam. The medals were presented in a September 8 ceremony in Hanoi by Vice President Nguyen Thi Binh.   

Nguyen Chi Vu, President of the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations said that the NGOs they represented had helped local people to, "resolve their own socio-economic difficulties and gradually improve their living towards sustainable development."

He urged NGOs to give special attention to people in the northern mountainous area, the central coast, the southwest and the highlands to improve their health, education and infrastructure, develop production and protect their environment.

Award recipients:
• Australian People for Health, Education & Development
• Jerry Sternin (Save the Children US)
• Lady Borton (American Friends Service Committee)
• Elizabeth McCall (Actionaid, UK)
• Michael Etherton (Oxfam UK & Ireland)
• Wolfgang Huhn (Hilfsaktion Vietnam, Germany)
• Louise Buhler (Bread for the World)
• Luc Picard (International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity, CIDSE)
• Eric Nachtergalle (Proviet, Belgium)
• Supriyanto (Plan International, UK)

With Cambodian and world opinion focusing on the developing prospect of an international criminal tribunal for the newly surrendered Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies has announced a major new release of data on the CGP's World Wide Web site.

Tying individuals to specific decisions, events, crimes, and victims, the CGP has developed the largest single collection of physical and electronic materials on the Pol Pot period in Cambodian history.

The new release significantly enhances the program's Cambodian Genocide Data Base. The CGP has added more than 3,000 new detailed bilingual records to its Biographical Database, which now contains about 10,500 such records on individual members of the Khmer Rouge and their victims.

Also new are 900 descriptive records in the Bibliographic Database, which now includes more than 3,000 electronic records relating to documents on the Khmer Rouge period from 1975 to 1979. The new records are mostly bilingual, with summaries in both Khmer and English, including 100 documents from Thailand on the genocide then occurring in neighboring Cambodia. In many cases, the records are "hot-linked" to scanned images of the original Khmer documents.

The Cambodian Genocide Data Base was developed by the CGP with   the assistance of the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies  at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, and the  Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. The CGP web site URL is www.yale.edu/cgp.

The CGP has also added a new "Translations" section to its web site. This section features "The Pol Pot Files," translated confidential correspondence to and from the top Khmer Rouge leader. It also includes the full 300-page text of "Ieng Sary's Regime," a confidential diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry during the genocide, translated by the CGP in collaboration with the Documentation Center. Another feature is the secret autobiography of Thiounn Prasith, who was the Khmer Rouge ambassador to the United Nations in New York (and who continues to reside in the New York area). The autobiography was discovered in an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages of Khmer-language documents collected by the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge secret police. This archive was obtained by the CGP in 1996.   Other Santebal documents translated by the CGP include a detailed description of the order of battle of the Khmer Rouge army during the period of the genocide.

The CGP has also translated the Khmer Rouge's internal biographical questionnaire from the Santebal files. More than 10,000 members of the ultra-secret Communist Party of Kampuchea were required by the Khmer Rouge to fill out these questionnaires, the originals of which are now held by the Documentation Center of Cambodia. The Documentation Center is an archive founded by the CGP in Phnom Penh in 1995 and launched in 1997 as an independent Cambodian research institute on the genocide, funded by the CGP through grants from the U.S. Department of State. In collaboration with the Documentation Center, the biographical forms are being used to compile thousands of additional electronic records on Khmer Rouge officials.

Another new addition to the CGP site is a powerful interactive computerized map of the Killing Fields. The software, generously provided and mounted on the Web by the School of Geomatic Engineering at the University of New South Wales, permits users to search Cambodian provincial and local geography for hundreds of sites of former Khmer Rouge prisons and extermination camps, mass graves of the victims, and memorials.

The CGP will soon add "hot-linked" access to related documents and  photographs for each genocide site, electronically recorded by the CGP in collaboration with the Documentation Center. Funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Netherlands Foreign Ministry, and the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies has allowed the CGP's mapping project to complete four seasons in the field, with more than 380 Sites recorded since 1995.

Other data available on the web site include 50 computer-drawn maps of the killing fields and more than 5,000 photographs of victims taken by  the Khmer Rouge prior to execution.

In November, the United Nations sent a Commission of Experts to  examine the evidence which the CGP has accumulated over the past four  years at the Documentation Center, with a view to a possible  recommendation that an international tribunal be established to judge the  crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. The commission, headed by the former governor-general of Australia, Sir Ninian Stephen, is expected to report to Secretary General Kofi Annan in February.

Edited from a release issued by Gila Reinstein, the Office of Public Affairs, Yale University (203) 432-1325 ext. 158

Briefs

Friends Without a Border seeks volunteer nurses for the Angkor Hospital for Children. This is a unique opportunity to help develop the nursing department of a new nonprofit pediatric hospital outside the Angkor monuments.Duties: Oversee and train local nursing staff. Looking for people with pediatric experience and a willingness to teach others. An adventure of a lifetime. Nurses who can commit 6 months or more will receive airfare, room and board. Designed as a general hospital, the Angkor Hospital for Children will specialize in treating landmine victims and pediatric diseases. Friends Without a Border is a New York based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping Asian children.

[Excerpted from Kyoto News Service, 1/5/99]

Heng Samrin acknowledged that his government, which failed to gain widespread international diplomatic recognition, ''was [in the 1980s] under the strong influence of Vietnam.''

"But that was unavoidable in view of the need to topple the Pol Potists. Who else other than Vietnam could have helped us do this?"

With the Cold War's end,, the party in October 1991 officially disclaimed its communist identity, changed its name to the CPP, and named Chea Sim to replace Heng Samrin as party president. Heng Samrin was named the party's honorary president.

While some scholars have written that Heng Samrin was pushed aside after defending the party's Marxist-Leninist orientation, he said he and others in the party were never died-in-the-wool communists to begin with, but merely went through the motions so that Cambodia could continue receiving aid from Hanoi and Moscow.

Once Vietnamese troops left Cambodia in 1989, there was no longer any need to keep up such pretenses, he said.

by Richard Walden

On October 26-28, 1998, Phnom Penh hosted the International Forum on Demining and Victim Assistance, funded in large part by the Government of Japan. Representatives of thirty countries attended, as did most of the major international, UN groups and NGOs. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen opened the conference and a small group was received at the Royal Palace by King Norodom Sihanouk. Both men were very supportive of efforts being made to remove anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordinance both in Cambodia and elsewhere.

Attendees included five foreign ministers and the various countries' demining and UXO removal officials. The Cambodia Mine Action Center (CMAC) provided staffing and leadership for the conference. H.E. Sam Sotha, Executive Director of CMAC had pushed for such a conference for several years and voiced a strongly held view among mine affected countries that funders must visit the minefields in order to gain perspective about the urgency with which demining must be done.

Issues of adequate funding of demining, victims' assistance and research into newer and faster methods of demining occupied the conferees.

CMAC can be contacted by fax, +855 (23) 367096. Operation USA, a member of the Forum, can also be contacted by fax, (323) 653-7846; or email: rwalden@opusa.org. Operation USA was one of three US NGOs who were official delegates to the conference.

Published quarterly by the U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project (USIRP)

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