Adventist World Radio is stepping up its presence in Southeast Asia with new programming to reach the more than 12 million people of Cambodia. The broadcasts in Khmer, the primary language of Cambodia, began airing October 27 from AWR’s Guam station. Khmer is considered a “mission language” by AWR because fewer than 5 percent of the country’s population is Christian.

Cambodia has been ravaged by guerrilla war—a conflict that lasted for almost two decades and killed more than one-fifth of the country’s population. Thousands more have been maimed by land mines. In 1975 when the Khmer Rouge regime took power, there were 33 Adventist members and most of those were killed in the subsequent upheaval. But a number of Cambodians who had fled to the safety of Thai refugee camps joined the Adventist Church. When the war ended in 1993, 600 of these new believers returned to Cambodia. In the years since, interest in Christianity has grown and there are now some 4,000 Adventist Church members.

Established in 1971, AWR broadcasts in 55 languages and has the potential to reach nearly 80 percent of the world’s population with its programming.