Breaking down the Data In Cambodia

In many districts visited by Documentation Center mapping teams, additional genocide sites are believed to exist, some of which are reputed to be very large, but could not be surveyed by the team due to a variety of unfavorable conditions ranging from security concerns, inclement environmental conditions, or scheduling problems. Thus, there exist many more additional sites in districts already visited than are currently reflected in the raw data. Moreover, in many cases for sites actually surveyed, for a variety of reasons, the team made no attempt to estimate the actual number of mass grave pits, and therefore those sites are recorded as containing zero mass grave pits and zero victims. (We will return to this question below, under the topic of limitations of the data.) Thus, the raw count of more than twenty-thousand mass graves remains a conservative estimate, even for the 150 districts at least partially mapped to date.Tables 1 and 2 show that mass grave mapping teams have located 125 Khmer Rouge prison facilities to date, a total of nearly one per district, which is quite a high number for a country whose officials denied the existence of any prisons at all. The data suggest that on average, each of these prisons “processed” nearly ten thousand persons each, with fatal results for all persons so processed. However, as Table 2 demonstrates, this average varies considerably from province to province. In some provinces -- Preah Sihanouk and Svay Rieng -- the average is much lower, in the vicinity of five hundred victims per prison, while in others -- especially Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Thom -- the average is significantly higher, up to more than forty thousand victims per prison in one case. An average of one hundred and fifty mass graves are associated with each prison, though again, this provincial averages range widely, from a low of one mass grave per prison in Ratanakiri[10] and eight in Kratie, to a high of 524 mass graves per prison in Kampong Chhnang. Table 2 shows an average of 42 mass graves and approximately three thousands victims per site, which in turn reflects the findings that there were typically from three to four mass grave sites associated with each prison.
Table 3 (following page) presents the data in the light of population distributions in Cambodia. Using demographic estimates of the provincial populations as of June 1975, after the first major round of population relocations carried out by the Khmer Rouge, we see that there are great regional population variations, from the sparsely populated mountainous northeast where provinces such as Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri and Stung Treng each boast less than one percent of Cambodia's total population, to the densely populated lowland provinces such as Battambang, Kampong Cham, Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Thom, which together account for more than half of Cambodia's entire population. (See below: Table 3: Analytical Statistics)