A unique archival collection in modern Cambodian history was donated to the Asian Studies Research Collection at the Sir Louis Matheson Library in the late 1990s by Professor David Chandler, Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University and former Director of Monash’s Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. Now an inventory of the collection has been completed and can be readily accessed from the Library website by researchers into this period of modern Cambodian history and by Cambodians seeking information about their families and their country’s dark past.
David Chandler, at left, with Julio Jeldres, who worked on the inventory, and Librarian Dennis Kishere
David Chandler is one of the foremost historians of Cambodia and amongst his many acclaimed books and other publications are The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945 and Brother Number One: a political biography of Pol Pot. The David Chandler Cambodia collection comprises the research materials collected for these projects plus other diverse published and unpublished materials relating to Cambodian history, such as news clippings, U.S. State Department despatches and cables, an unpublished manuscript by Cambodian nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh, and materials from the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Perhaps most significantly, it includes over 250 transcripts of forced “confessions” of victims from the Khmer Rouge regime’s notorious S-21 (Tuol Sleng) Prison. Most are in Khmer, but 21 of them include English translations.
The inventory project was commenced in 2007 and completed last year, coinciding (coincidentally) with the ending of the first trial of Khmer Rouge leaders by the UN-backed tribunal (the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). A new project is currently underway to digitise select items from the David Chandler Cambodia collection as well as other Cambodian collections held by the Library, including the Norodom Sihanouk Archival Collection. The digitised items will be available in Monash Library’s e-repository, ARROW, later this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment