About

Sophal Ear is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, a development economist, and a political scientist with a special focus on Southeast Asia. When he was an infant, his mother defied all odds and escaped the wrath of the Khmer Rouge by fleeing to Vietnam with five children. There they lived with a family member until 1978, when they moved to France and then the United States. Ear was placed in the seventh grade at age ten and entered UC Berkeley at age 16; he continued his education at Princeton, where he received his master’s degree. In 1997, he became a consultant for the World Bank, where he examined welfare policy in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. From 2002 to 2003, he served as assistant resident representative for the United Nations Development Programme in East Timor. This experience provided the foundation for his dissertation exploring aid dependence and governance, and a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Ear is a TED Fellow and an assistant professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

In his presentation, Ear takes us inside Tuol Sleng, a school where the classrooms were transformed into torture chambers by the Khmer Rouge. 16,000 died in Tuol Sleng, and these jailers did not discriminate by age or gender. The shocking thing, says Ear, is that many intellectuals in the West actually supported this barbaric regime. For example, Noam Chomsky, George Hildebrand, and Gareth Porter wrote favorably of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. More than three decades after the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, a four-year old Tribunal will render its verdict in July of 2010 on the guilt or innocence of the individual who ran Tuol Sleng. Ear's talk culminates in a plea for keeping an accurate historical record, one where genocide does not have a statute of limitations.