Youk chhang biography of albert

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Able to escape across the Thai border to freedom at the age of seventeen, he found his way as a refugee to the United States. He saw his family reduced to extreme privation; was himself tortured and detained; even worse, YOUK suffered the trauma of the death of his father, five of his siblings, and nearly sixty of his relatives.

He received the Truman-Reagan Freedom Award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC in 2000. They digitized these documents for online public access; produced digital mapping of over 23,000 mass graves in Cambodia’s “killing fields”; excavated samples of human skeletal remains for forensic examination; conducted interviews with over 10,000 persons, both victims and perpetrators; implemented research, publishing, and educational programs on genocide, transitional justice and human rights; and promoted public participation in the whole process.

More importantly, his work assures that the past is truthfully preserved for present and future generations so that it will not be distorted or ever repeated.

Born in Phnom Penh, YOUK was fourteen years old when his family was forced out of their home by Khmer Rouge operatives to work like slaves in a rural commune.

He is also a Board Trustee of Air Asia.

Chhang is the author of several articles and book chapters on Cambodia’s quest for memory and justice and is the co-editor of Cambodia’s Hidden Scars: Trauma Psychology in the Wake of the Khmer Rouge (2011).

Chhang is also the executive producer of a documentary film entitled A River Changes Course (2012), known as Kbang Tik Tonle in Khmer, about the changing social, economic, and environmental landscape in Cambodia.

Among other awards, that film won the 2013 World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival. Before he became the director of DC-Cam, Chhang worked for the International Republican Institute and was a member of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia.

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YOUK CHHANG, one of its survivors, has devoted his life to the monumental task of documenting and memorializing the genocide to serve the aims of judicial redress, national reconciliation, and collective healing.

Years later, he would earn a graduate degree in political science and chose to return to Cambodia when civic order had been restored, enrolling in the human rights and democracy training programs of the International Republican Institute and the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

YOUK found his life-long mission in 1995, when the Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project engaged him to head its Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), charged with investigating and documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities.

As its executive director from 1995 to the present, YOUK expanded DC-Cam’s work beyond documentation in aid of the Khmer Rouge War Crimes Trials that began in 2009; he pursued the broader task of promoting “memory and justice as the critical foundations for the rule of law and genuine national reconciliation.”

The scope of this work has been immense, arduous, and painfully difficult in Cambodia’s transitioning, polarized society.

It is imperative to the cause of justice that this horror is not forgotten. Despite the destruction, loss, or absence of records, DC-Cam was able to collect and assemble over one million documents, providing over half of these as evidence in the war crimes trials. He was named one of TIME magazine’s “60 Asian heroes” in 2006 and one of the “Time 100” most influential people in the world in 2007 for his stand against impunity in Cambodia and elsewhere.