Original text uploaded to YouTube with video, by The Oslo Freedom Forum:
Sophal Ear discusses how Cambodia - at one point an island of peace and a model of development as war raged in Vietnam - deteriorated into the home of one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. Ear explains his family's history as they were forced to move to the countryside once the Khmer Rouge took power and re-ordered society in pursuit of the agrarian utopia that they promised the Cambodian people. The result of this social experiment? The starvation of one out of every four Cambodians as they tried to live off of rationed porridge. 1.7 million died, including Ear's father. The only reason Ear is still alive today is that his mother was able to use her limited knowledge of Vietnamese to fake her identity and sneak her children out of Cambodia. Ear takes us inside Tuol Sleng, a school where the classrooms were transformed into torture chambers by the Khmer Rouge. 16,000 died in Tuol Sleng, and these jailers did not discriminate by age or gender - thousands of women, boys, and girls were tortured and executed. Shockingly, says Ear, is that many intellectuals in the West actually supported this barbaric regime. For example, Noam Chomsky, George Hildebrand, and Gareth Porter wrote favorably of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Partly as a result of this praise and support, confusion was sowed about what, precisely, was happening in Cambodia. More than three decades after the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, a four-year old Tribunal will render its verdict in July of 2010 on the guilt or innocence of the individual who ran Tuol Sleng. Ear's talk culminates in a plea for keeping an accurate historical record, one where genocide does not have a statue of limitations.