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Article Excerpt: Craig Etcheson, a Cambodia expert at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, said that "for many years, there was a virtual taboo on even speaking of the Khmer Rouge, as if the very words were ... a malevolent spirit lurking in the corner of every room."
The silence was also due to the fact that Cambodians, in Seng's words, "lacked the vocabulary" of therapy and healing to process a crime of the magnitude of the one perpetrated against their society.
The Khmer Rouge's attempts to reboot society at "Year Zero" had involved a concentrated effort to exterminate the country's educated classes -- doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, merchants and clergy.
"Nearly two generations of young Cambodian men grew up learning little more than how to kill," said Etcheson. "When it was finally time to rebuild, there were effectively no bootstraps with which the country could pull itself up again."
Even today, said Uk, young Cambodians are not taught about the genocide in high school.
In an impoverished country -- one of Asia's poorest, albeit with 7% predicted economic growth this year -- most young people seemed to be focused on getting ahead than looking back, she said.
Some were even skeptical that the Khmer Rouge's crimes -- the systematic butchery of the "killing fields" -- had really occurred, she added.
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