User talk:Paxse

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[edit] Khmer Rouge

Dammit. I have to let off steam somewhere and this seems to be the place. As I wandered around the places where I may be able to add some information to this wonderful Wiki project – I found to my distress that many important and topical articles related to Cambodia like – Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot - are currently in a sad state indeed. The information included is scant, poorly cross- linked and contains many gaping holes.

I began plugging some of these by drafting an article about Khieu Thirith – Ieng Sary’s wife, Pol Pot’s sister-in-law, member of the DK central committee and Minister of Social Affairs and Education under the DK regime - who I noticed was a red link from various pages. Imagine my surprise to find that her even more infamous sister Khieu Ponnary – Pol Pot’s wife - also had no article and was barely mentioned in the encyclopaedia.

Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and the Kheiu sisters have been described as the Cambodian version of Mao’s “Gang of Four” the ideological heart of the revolution and the party – yet Ieng Sary has only six lines in Wiki (including three dates of birth) while both Ponnary and Thirith are missing entirely – indeed Khieu Samphan has only four lines.

Despite these glaring omissions and the meagre information currently available in the article, the talk pages for Khmer Rouge reveal SIX DAMN ARCHIVES full of arguments, counter-arguments and ideological debate. Most of this is about vaguely related topics – are Chomsky, Chandler, Kiernan, Vickery, Heder, Kissinger, Samdech Sihanouk, American Foreign Policy, The Red Menace, Green Men from Mars, Bill Gates or the Stay-Puff Donut Man REALLY to blame for the Genocide/Collateral Damage/unavoidable egg breaking that happened between 1975 and 1979 etc.

At present, any poor sucker who wants to actually USE Wiki to FIND some information on the Khmer Rouge is S out of L.

This stinks and undermines the purpose of an online encyclopaedia.

I would like to propose a small and worthwhile community sub project – A clean, detailed and working series of articles about the Khmer Rouge – taking in the history of the movement, bios of each of the major leaders, some info on the killing fields, evacuation of the cities, collectivisation, Toul Sleng, Choeng Ek, some links or summaries of survivors stories and an updated article on the preparations for the KR tribunal.

Finally (and not before) there should be a summary of the different academic points of view on the intent, culpability and destruction wrought (or not) of the KR/DK regime. This necessarily controversial article should present both sides of the debate – perhaps to even things up, each side could be written by it’s most vitriolic detractor

I would be interested in collaborating on such a project with some of you (or any interested others). I have read most of the published works by the authors above, I live and work in Cambodia and have a wonderful Khmer wife and family who lived through the 70’s in rural Cambodia. I speak Khmer and although I am Australian (Gidday mate owyergoin’?) I can even claim Cambodian citizenship by marriage. In my chequered past I have studied SE Asian history, worked as a journalist and photojournalist (Wiki needs more photos!). Currently, I work as a consultant and social researcher here in Cambodia.

Some of the required articles exist but need expansion or some work to weed out factual inaccuracies. All need to be linked in some coherent manner. There is an excellent online source for primary sources (translated into English) and secondary sources - [1] – and there are plenty of other Googleable resources around. If there is some interest in this idea, we could divide up the articles and tasks required between us and edit and proof each others work. This would be a very interesting task.

I would even go so far as to say this is an important task. To give voices to those who suffered and died here in the ‘70’s, to raise international awareness of the KR in the lead up to the Tribunal and like the Vietnam wall or the museum at Auschwitz to provide some global memorial that can inform the generations born after the downfall of the KR – may it never happen again.

Pax - Phnom Penh 2005