Publish By: Cambodianess

By: Community For Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS)

June 3, 2026,  8:15 PM

Link: https://cambodianess.com/article/remembering-with-purpose-why-we-revisit-painful-histories

Last month, on 20 May, Cambodia observed the National Remembrance Day to honor the victims and survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime. As Cambodianess argued in an editorial published on 24 May 2026, the National Remembrance Day carries "a universal message of mass crime prevention" that extends well beyond Cambodia's borders – one that places a shared responsibility on the international community to learn from Cambodia's experience and reinforce safeguards against totalitarian abuses.

Although the Khmer Rouge regime has marked Cambodia’s present history, many of our country’s youth have limited awareness of the extent to which the atrocities committed between 1975 and 1979 have shaped Cambodia. With that in mind, remembrance should be intentional rather than passive, giving those who never experienced the Khmer Rouge an opportunity to understand the present through the past. 

The importance of promoting intentional remembrance is the reason why the student-run Community for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) at the American University of Phnom Penh (AUPP) organized a series of interactive events to allow participants to understand what the Khmer Rouge regime was and, importantly, what it meant for our people and why its impacts were felt so deeply in our society. 

The lessons learned from organizing these events are worth being shared here, thus contributing to intentional remembrance.

The Problem with Passive Remembrance

Passive remembrance – the opposite of remembrance with intention – means acknowledging a painful history, such as Cambodia’s, without engaging with it deeply. 

Generalisation is a key obstacle. The Khmer Rouge is often reduced to a history of mass killing without engaging properly with the early stages of the regime or the long-term consequences for the country’s people and institutions, some of which are still felt today. This approach makes the past feel distant rather than alive.

Decades of silence by older generations have a compound effect. Many survivors have avoided speaking about their past because they might fear being judged or simply because it is just too painful for them to do so.

While this is understandable, youth often lack direct knowledge of what happened. In 2010, only 3 percent of 1,000 people who had not lived through the regime could identify the perpetrators who had been arrested and put on trial. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), described this as a lost generation — disconnected from its own past.

Another risk is that if this kind of discussion takes place, it often slides into victimization. Many second-generation Cambodians have experienced transgenerational trauma, and engagement with the country’s history can trigger psychological distress –  a well-documented concern.

Remembrance with intention aims at countering this type of distress by converting awareness of the past into agency. It means deep genocide literacy, participation in intergenerational healing, and active advocacy for global genocide prevention. These are the gaps that CSEAS's "Together We Remember" series was designed to close.

‘Together We Remember’: Learning with Intention

In April 2026, CSEAS held “Together We Remember,” a student-led genocide-commemoration event series that consisted of an exhibition, a film screening, followed by a panel discussion, and a field trip. These activities were created to allow students to learn about the Khmer Rouge genocide with intention.

The exhibition “Consent Denied: Reflecting on the Legacy of Forced Marriage and Sexual Violence” raised awareness among students, faculty, and staff at AUPP about forced marriage during the Khmer Rouge regime. The exhibition, which was supported by ECCC, emphasized the extreme control on private life that forced women and men to marry strangers for reproductive ends, with newly married couples kept under constant surveillance.

Adding the intersectional lens to the atrocities committed by the regime allowed for bringing up a less widely discussed yet equally important topic, touching upon women’s reproductive rights and access to justice.

Through the screening of Rithy Panh’s film “Meeting with Pol Pot” – which tells the story of three foreign journalists who were invited by the regime to report from Cambodia in 1978 – participants understood how propaganda allowed the regime to achieve extreme control within the country and to hold a façade toward the international community.

The power of filmmaking lies not only in its ability to convey a message but also in its ability to drive the audience to engage emotionally with it. This film screening empowered youth by making them more informed but also deeply engaged with history. 

The screening was followed by a panel discussion on the theme "The Role of Journalism in Exposing Truth and Propaganda in the Khmer Rouge." Panelists engaged participants on the challenges journalists face in conflict environments, the distinction between truth and propaganda, and the responsibility of bearing witness.

Kann Vichieka, a freelance journalist, drew a direct line from the film to the present: the documentary illustrates how propaganda functioned as a tool of domination — manipulating both the Cambodian population and the outside world into accepting the legitimacy of the Angkar.

Ang Pich, a lawyer at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), added that journalists provided the ECCC with crucial archival materials, noting that "journalists are the eyes of the people who can see the reality of the world."

Finally, CSEAS hosted a field trip to the Toul Sleng museum to help youth understand not only what happened behind the walls of the detention center, but also the dangers of unlawful detention and prosecution by putting themselves in detainees' shoes. Participants could listen to survivors’ stories and, after seeing pictures of some of the victims, some participants became curious to learn more about their life stories.

The site visit was made remembrance intentional by physical exposure to a former detention center rather than just reading documents about it.

Lessons Learned: What Does Intentional Remembrance Produce? 

‘Together We Remember’ was not an end in itself.  All three activities were created to generate historical literacy and inter-generational connections necessary for healing. 

Understanding why the genocide happened and what factors contributed to it matters in terms of historical literacy and, importantly, they create awareness among youth to recognize these patterns when they appear again.

Cambodian people, particularly youth, have the responsibility to engage with their history through curricular and extracurricular activities – such as ‘Together We Remember’ – to condemn the actions from the past and gain tools to prevent another mass atrocity from being committed. 

Intergenerational healing often begins with listening. Luke Hunt, an international journalist and panelist at the film screening, stated that "Just listening to people makes a huge difference to the survivor's life, makes them feel heard and seen, so does their psychological trauma.”

He also emphasized that truth-telling is a reminder of shared humanity — it allows grief and guilt to be projected outward, into dialogue, rather than carried inward in silence. This is what the panel discussion and the survivor encounters at Tuol Sleng made possible: not resolution, but contact. 

Beyond youth-led initiatives, institutions such as the ECCC have used testimonial therapy and survivor testimony to restore dignity alongside legal accountability. Intergenerational healing happens not through grand gestures, but through the recognition and honouring of individual stories.

The end goal of intentional remembrance should be the transformation of conversations not into forgetting, but into advocacy. Youth in Cambodia should not think of themselves as generations of Khmer Rouge victims, but as advocates, since they can all speak with a certain agency.

Taking Rithy Panh as an example, he used a traumatic experience as the foundation for a documentary that functions as an advocacy tool. He did not silence his experience and did not allow it to define him primarily as a victim. Instead, he created something that others can learn from.

Today, most young people in Cambodia are digital natives and are fluent in the use of social media platforms, which they can use to disseminate contrasted information about the Khmer Rouge, share survivor stories, and engage with educational content that reaches audiences outside Cambodia. 

Videos, personal reflections, and creative work can support survivors, facilitate remembrance, and build genocide awareness that the Cambodianess article argues is a shared international responsibility. As Voleak, an AUPP student, mentioned after the film screening, "The wounds do not make the warrior; the decision to rise after the fall does."

Remembrance with intention is not about honoring the atrocity of the past. It means youth are historically literate and actively advocate against acts of genocide, honoring those the past could not erase, and ensuring that we do not become a generation that lets them be forgotten.

From the Community for Southeast Asian Studies at the American University of Phnom Penh, we remain committed to doing exactly that.

This opinion was jointly authored by members of the Community for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS): Prida Chhoeur, Meying Gorv, Chhouby Nhim, Sokputhea Chamnan, Yuminea Nhouv, Thidapich Im, Vibol Teatserey Prek, Sothea Ra, Sopheakchesda Ly, and Sothyfairy Norn. Dr. Marc Piñol Rovira, Assistant Professor at the American University of Phnom Penh (AUPP), provided editorial support.