Khmer Rouge archives: appropriation, reconstruction, neo-colonial exploitation and their implications for the reuse of the records

The Khmer Rouge archives that are now held by the Documentation Center of Cambodia
in Phnom Penh are not the same archives as the ones that were built up during
the Khmer Rouge regime. The largest archive, the archive of the Tuol Sleng incarceration
centre, comprises records that were found in several places and brought
together in one archive. In the upheaval of the first months following the breakdown
of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, many records were lost, stolen, misappropriated
or destroyed. During the 1980s, the remaining records were kept in poor
conditions and remained uncatalogued. Some records known to have been in the
archive in 1979 later disappeared, and some records were later added to the archive.
By retracing the history of the Tuol Sleng Archive and looking through a Records
Continuum lens at the archival processes that were applied when the archive was
appropriated by the successor government and reconstructed into an archive that
supported their political aims, this paper uncovers some problems that have affected
the way the records were managed, which have serious implications for the reuse
of the records as instruments of evidence, accountability and memory. The author
argues that the work that was done on the archive by foreign organisations amounted
to a neo-colonial exploitation of the archive. She concludes that there is a clear need
to rethink the way the records are accessed and used and she advocates for an archival
system based on Cambodian values and ethics that takes into account the rights
of the subjects of the records and of their communities.