Cercare la verità o seppellire il passato? Memoria collettiva, negazionismo e giustizia in Cambogia 1990-1999

The issue of national reconciliation and the construction of a collective memory after the mass violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese occupation has been, since the 1990s, at the centre of the political debate in Cambodia and the engagements of local civil society. The Cambodian government and the Cambodian People's Party first attempted to impose their own narrative of the atrocities committed and then implemented a policy of collective amnesia, in a society where perpetrators and victims lived side by side; the Khmer Rouge remained a force in the country until 1998, denying having committed any crimes. However, despite the ‘institutionalised’ forgetting, in the second half of the 1990s, some civil society organisations began documenting and collecting survivors' testimonies about what had happened in the country between 1975 and 1979, thanks also to increasing international pressure to demand a trial for those responsible for the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.