CGP Bibliographic Database (CBIB): Instructions for Use

I. PURPOSE OF CBIB
The purpose of the CGP Bibliographic Database is to provide a comprehensive annotated listing of all known primary and secondary sources pertaining to the violations of human rights during the Democratic Kampuchea regime between 1975 and 1979. To accomplish this, the Cambodian Genocide Program will continue to add citations to the data set. This database currently includes records on about 2,000 books and documents. Each record contains up to 56 fields of information, providing as complete a bibliographic citation for each item as is possible. We want this information to be available to researchers, legal scholars, and Cambodian citizens who are interested in a better understanding of the massive violence of the Khmer Rouge era. We also want this data to be accessible to any tribunal, truth commission or commission of inquiry that may be convened to examine and judge the question of crimes against humanity committed during the Democratic Kampuchea regime.

II. CATEGORIES OF DOCUMENTS IN CBIB
This database contains material from many sources. Categories included are:

1. Documents of the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal (PRT), the 1979 Cambodian government-sponsored trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. A number of personal testimonies were given as to what happened to them and their families. There were also reports on conditions in different parts of the country during the DK regime, as well as after the regime fell. These documents exist in three languages (Khmer, French and English), so there are three sets of these documents. They were stencilled at the time and distributed at the trial; a number of people have partial sets. The database was commenced with copies of these from the National Archives of Cambodia (NAC).

2. Documents collected by the Documentation Center of Cambodia from Royal Cambodian Government bodies like the National Archives of Cambodia, as well as from NGOs and private individuals, are included in this database. An important example is the set of documents from the Krang Ta Chan prison in Takeo province, copied by Ben Kiernan and deposited at the Tuol Sleng Museum in 1980.

3. The database of confessions from the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh is included in part. Cornell University organized an effort to microfilm the confessions, and contributed a copy of their database to CGP. In addition to the material that was microfilmed by Cornell, it seems that there is quite a lot of other material which escaped microfilming. During the past year, the CGP has found a number of documents at the Tuol Sleng Museum that have not yet been microfilmed. A selection of this material is also included in the database.

4. Ben Kiernan has a significant archive of materials on the Cambodian genocide, such as interviews and other materials that he has collected over twenty years. We are continuing to put this material into the database. Current entries include records on Kiernan’s copies of the minutes of meetings of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee and other high-level Communist Party of Kampuchea meetings in 1975-76.

5. Cambodia records from Israel Charny’s “Holocaust and Genocide Bibliographic Database” are also included in the CGDB Bibliographical Database.

6. Cambodia entries from Samuel Totten’s “First-person accounts of genocidal acts committed in the twentieth century: an annotated bibliography” have also been included.