Phnom Penh – Srey Bandaul still remembers learning to draw.
It was in the late 1980s in a swelling refugee camp on the Thai border where thousands were sheltering as soldiers from the Vietnam-backed regime in Phnom Penh fought the Khmer Rouge guerrillas they had toppled from power.
His instructor was a French aid worker, who taught drawing to Bandaul and his classmates, all young teens like him who were traumatized by an early childhood under the ultra-Maoist regime. More than 1.5 million people are estimated to have died as a result of the Khmer Rouge regime.
