Ly Chheng Biography Direct

When prosecutors needed to prove that the regime’s policies amounted to genocide against the Cham Muslim minority and the Vietnamese, they turned to Chheng’s spreadsheets. He created a relational database that matched prison logs with mass grave coordinates. He proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the killing was not chaotic but systematic.

That changed in 1995 when Yale University opened the . For the first time, there was a systematic effort to locate, preserve, and digitize the paper trail the Khmer Rouge had left behind. The regime was famously bureaucratic: they kept records of arrests, confessions (often tortured), and executions. ly chheng biography

He is also working on a personal project: a digital map of every mass grave in Cambodia. So far, he has logged 23,000 sites. He estimates there are 5,000 more. On a recent afternoon, Chheng stood in the storage vault of DC-Cam, surrounded by 1.2 million pages of documents. A foreign journalist asked him if he ever feels hope. When prosecutors needed to prove that the regime’s

For nearly four decades, has sat at the intersection of memory and mathematics. As the chief document examiner and senior investigator for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) , his life’s work has been to count the uncountable: the 1.7 million to 2.2 million Cambodians who perished during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979). That changed in 1995 when Yale University opened the

One of his most haunting discoveries was a logbook from a cooperative in Kampong Cham. On a single page, the local chief had recorded the names of 47 people "transferred." In the margin, a tiny code—barely visible—indicated that all 47 were taken to a sandbar and killed with hoe handles. Chheng found the sandbar. Forensic teams found the teeth. To spend a day with Ly Chheng is to understand the psychological weight of his work. He does not cry. He does not raise his voice. He has developed the affect of a coroner: clinical, precise, detached. But the detachment is a survival mechanism.