The lion's share of our work involves empirical documentation of matters relating to war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity during the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.

We have a bibliographic database that contains records on 4,000 documents pertaining to gross violations of human rights during the Khmer Rouge regime. We've assembled a biographical database with dossiers on 18,000 members of Khmer Rouge political and military organizations. We have assembled a photographic database of scanned images of some 12,000 photographs and documents pertaining to this subject matter. And, finally, a geographical database where we have precisely surveyed the location of 9,132 mass graves in Cambodia.

Gathering Data
This data has come from a wide variety of sources. First, we incorporated into our databases all of the previously known existing information. Early on, in fact in January 1995, I traveled to Phnom Penh and set up a nongovernmental organization there called the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Through the Documentation Center, for the last three years, we have been scouring Cambodia; the various government ministries, private warehouses, and the countryside. Everywhere we can think to look to see what evidence might still be remaining in nearly twenty years now after the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown early in 1979.

To our very great surprise, we discovered that there were several large, previously unknown archives of documents from within the Khmer Rouge internal security apparatus. Essentially, these are the records of the Khmer Rouge secret police. They explain in excruciating detail the operation of the Khmer Rouge's nationwide network of extermination centers.

Answering Questions
This huge amount of new information that we've uncovered will in some respects revolutionize the study of modern Cambodian history. And there is such a huge volume of new material, more than 500,000 pages of documents, that it will require all of the Cambodia scholars in the world many years to thoroughly and properly digest all of this stuff. A secondary and also a very key audience is the international legal community and the governments of the world that are interested in achieving accountability for the gross human rights violations of the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s.

Of the thousands of Cambodians I've talked to over the years, the most common question I've been asked is, "Why?" "Why did they do this to us?" This is our attempt to help them gain some understanding of why this horrible event happened to their country.

Perhaps one of the most telling examples of that is our photographic database. On the Internet [http://www.yale.edu/cgp] we have photographs of more than five thousand victims of the Khmer Rouge who were executed at secret police headquarters in Phnom Penh. Most of these victims are unidentified. We have posted their pictures on the Internet and in various places. Cambodians are going through this database of photographs attempting to identify people they may recognize from the past.

One of the aspects of genocidal regimes that we've noticed all over the world is that invariably they deny that these crimes have ever taken place. And this is tantamount to denying the very existence of their victims. This is the same thing as insulting the dignity of these people the second time. First you kill them, next you deny that they ever even existed.

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