“…a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history,” reads a message on the main website of Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam).

As DC-Cam publishes ‘Searching for the Truth,’ a monthly print publication on the Khmer Rouge for over a decade, in 2007 the independent research institute took a major step when it launched Cambodia Tribunal Monitor (CTM), a rich-content site that aggregates Khmer Rouge tribunal news and serves trial footage and video feed from the United Nations-backed court.

“Exclusive video coverage of the Khmer Rouge trial is CTM’s most important site feature,” Peou Dara Vanthan, a deputy director of the Center, told me in an interview this week. CTM also aggregates and picks up trial related-news items from media news outlets.

A spike in traffic (from June until August 2010) to the CTM site as it made video footage of the verdict in the case of Duch was available. Click to zoom in.

The graphic compares the official site of The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) with Cambodia Tribunal Monitor.

While a 2009-report says “Yet 85 percent of those surveyed had little or no knowledge about the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC),” Peou Dara Vanthan and his team have until now visited several thousands of university students to present CTM site and its key tools for academic research.

Suggested links:
From Archiving to Legacy: The Virtual Tribunal Project at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
The Virtual Tribunal Project (PDF)