Cambodia: opening the ICfC office in Phnom Penh and current projects
Part of the outreach is bringing the villagers from remote rural areas to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum and the Choung Ek killing fields memorial site. Some will find pictures of relatives missing since the Pol Pot regime times (1975-1979).
The last six months have been a time of exciting program development for the ICfC in Cambodia. With an office in Phnom Penh and a staff of four, the ICfC has been able to simultaneously build partnerships with new organizations, conduct valuable workshops on historical conciliation, and implement an outreach project in some of the most remote parts of the country. Most recently, the ICfC has received a generous grant from the Open Society Institute to continue its projects for another year.
In June of this year, the ICfC worked together with the Cambodia office of Church World Service to produce a workshop for ten local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on historical conciliation. This workshop was aimed not at the directors of NGOs, but at practitioners of dialogue, mediation, conflict resolution, and historical commemoration. Some of our participants work with ethnic tension on an every day basis as they try to negotiate between municipal officials, ethnic Vietnamese, and Khmer interests. Participants left with a new understanding of why it is sometimes important to consider history when dealing with conflict. They also acquired a skill-set to work with historical narratives and build empathy, particularly in a dialogue.
At the end of August, the ICfC brought a group of villagers from a remote part of the country to one of Cambodia’s only mental health organizations and to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum and killing fields. The museum, a former high school turned incarceration and torture center during the Khmer Rouge regime, has an archive of photographs of many of the prisoners who passed through center’s doors but never made it out.
Like many Cambodians, this was the villagers’ first time to visit the museum, even though they live only few hours away by car. The mental health organization prepared the group for what they might see and gave them breathing exercises to be able to calm themselves and understand that the intense feelings they were having are normal. This was a life changing experience for many of the villagers with whom the ICfC has built up a relationship after spending several weeks in their village. Some saw missing relatives in the photos that the museum displayed, bringing closure to decades of wondering. For others, the visit and a subsequent dialogue, paved the way to open space in their village for public discussion about history.
The next several months will see more visits with villagers from other parts of the country and the expansion of our outreach project and ethnic conflict resolution workshops to more locations and audiences. The ICfC staff Kim Vuth and ICfC Fellow, Shanti Sattler, will travel to the United States in the upcoming weeks to help others from the ICfC co-facilitate the annual Henry Everett workshop on mediating history for conflict resolution and peace-building practitioners.