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.
He turned back to his desk. On the screen was a scanned confession dated 1977. The prisoner had signed it with a shaky hand. Chheng adjusted the contrast, zoomed in on the signature, and added the name to a database.
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. ly chheng biography
By the time the Vietnamese army toppled the regime in January 1979, Chheng had lost most of his immediate family. He emerged from the camps weighing less than 40 kilograms, an orphan in a country that had been reduced to ash and bone. For a decade after the fall, Cambodia was a nation in shock. The surviving Khmer Rouge leaders retreated to the jungles along the Thai border, and the international community largely looked away. For survivors like Chheng, there was no justice—only the grinding work of rebuilding a life.
He paused. Outside, Phnom Penh’s traffic roared—a city of skyscrapers, coffee shops, and teenagers on smartphones who never knew the Year Zero. He is also working on a personal project:
"Justice is not just about prison cells," he says. "Justice is about a daughter knowing what happened to her father. Justice is about a village building a stupa of bones so the spirits can rest."
His meticulous cross-referencing helped build the evidentiary foundation for the —the UN-backed tribunal that finally tried senior Khmer Rouge leaders like "Duch" (Kaing Guek Eav) and Nuon Chea. On a recent afternoon, Chheng stood in the
His family was forced out of their home, stripped of their possessions, and marched into the agrarian labor camps. For four years, three months, and eight days, he lived in a world where hunger was the only constant and suspicion was the only currency. He survived through a combination of physical endurance and a quiet, internal refusal to let his mind be broken.
Another ghost, accounted for. Another debt, noted. Another day in the life of the man who refuses to let Cambodia forget its dead.
"I have seen the signature of the man who killed my cousin," he told a Phnom Penh Post reporter in 2012. "I have read the confession of the woman who lived next door to me in Battambang. She confessed to being a Vietnamese spy. She was a rice farmer. She was 22. She had a baby."
Today, Ly Chheng continues to work at DC-Cam, though he has begun training a younger generation of archivists. He is teaching them how to handle brittle paper, how to scan faded ink, and how to interview aging survivors before their memories go silent.