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The cambodian genocide, 1975-1979 (ben kiernan, 2004).

Kiernan, Ben (2004). The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-1979. A Century of Genocide Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts . Samuel Totten et al, Ed. New York, Routledge : 338-373.

Ben Kiernan, in “The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-1979”, provides a detailed account of the Pol Pot regime’s systematic attempt to exterminate ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities from Cambodia. The essay is divided into three sections. The first is a facts-based retelling of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign in the late 1970s, from the rise of Pol Pot to the excruciating details of how the regime attempted to subjugate or eliminate different demographic groups. The second section is a comparison of two scholars’ interpretations of the Cambodian genocide along with Kiernan’s own commentary. And the third is a selection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the Khmer Rouge as collected and transcribed by Kiernan and Chanthou Boua. Through these three lenses, Kiernan provides a factually rich and emotionally compelling perspective of a dark period in Cambodia’s history.

Pol Pot’s rise to power

In the first third of the essay, Kiernan recounts how Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge, developed intellectually and came to power. Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar to a large family of Khmer peasants. Pol Pot’s parents owned 9 hectares of riceland and six buffalo, however, and even had royal connections—they were “peasants with a difference” (Kiernan 342). He would have no experience farming and would be relatively ignorant of village life. In 1948, Pol Pot received a scholarship to study in Paris and involved himself in political life. When he returned home in 1953 after flunking out of his program, Pol Pot responded to King Sihanouk’s declaration of martial law in Cambodia by following his closest brother to join the Cambodian and Vietnamese Communists. In 1966 the party changed its name to the “Communist Party of Kampuchea” (CPK) and in 1975 it was victorious over Sihanouk’s successor regime. They proclaimed the state of Democratic Kampuchea, with Pol Pot as secretary general.  

Having narrated the rise of the CPK under Pol Pot and his collaborators’ leadership, Kiernan details how the Party established and maintained control over DK. CPK leadership sealed off Cambodia from communications, closing borders, banning foreign language, and suppressing local journalism. They violently purged the Party of dissenters and individuals “too close” to Vietnam’s Communists. And CPK forces systematically took control of and purged each of DK’s major zones. With control over the whole of DK, Pol Pot and his collaborators began to execute a political program based on their “national and racial grandiosity” (Kiernan 346). Kiernan describes their belief system as such: Cambodia did not need to import anything, including knowledge, from its neighboring countries. It could recover its pre-Buddhist glory by rebuilding its society (and economy) in the image of the medieval Angkor kingdom. 

A systematic campaign of extermination

A major form this “rebuilding” took was the eradication of Buddhism from Cambodia. By Kiernan’s estimation, fewer than 2,000 of Cambodia’s 70,000 Buddhist monks may have survived the massacres. In addition to the extermination of Buddhism and its practitioners from the country, the Party targeted the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Cham minorities. While these groups made up a total of 15% of Cambodia’s population, Pol Pot’s regime claimed they were less than 1% of the population. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Cambodians were expelled or murdered in what Kiernan calls a “campaign of systematic racial extermination” (Kiernan 347). The Chinese population, 425,000 in 1975, was reduced to 200,000 over the next four years. The largely urban ethnic Chinese were targeted, Kiernan believes, less for their race than for their city-dwelling status. They were forced to work in deplorable conditions, succumbing to disease and hunger, and had their language and culture banned. Finally, the Muslim Chams suffered greatly for their distinct religion, language, and culture. After rebellions against the new government, all 113 Cham villages were emptied and about 100,000 individuals murdered. Islamic schools and religious practices were banned, as well as the Cham language. Many were forced to eat pork, or were murdered if they refused. The result of this four-year campaign to exterminate racial and cultural minorities from Cambodia did not limit itself to those in the aforementioned minority groups, and not even those in the peasant majority fared well under the regime. 

International responses and scholarship

In the second section of the essay, Kiernan addresses the international community’s attitudes toward the Khmer Rouge and its leadership. A key takeaway is that the United States, its allies, and the United Nations failed to condemn the campaign of extermination that took place in Cambodia from 1975-1979. In particular, the United States continued to support the Pol Pot regime because it desired Cambodia’s independence as a counterweight to Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. Kiernan also provides two contrasting examples of scholars’ interpretations of the Khmer Rouge’s actions. The pro-Chinese neo-Marxist Samir Amin initially praised DK as a model for African socialists to follow, though in 1981 he conceded it suffered from “excesses” because it was a “principally peasant revolution” (Kiernan 357). Historical Michael Vickery seized on this idea in 1984 as reason to reject DK, writing that “nationalism, populism and peasantism really won out over communism” (Kiernan 357, quoting Vickery 1984, p. 289). Kiernan effectively points out flaws in both scholars’ arguments about the nature of the Pol Pot regime. In particular, he notes how Vickery failed to collect first-hand testimony from witnesses of diverse backgrounds to support his claims about the conditions of various peasant groups. Kiernan also introduces a major controversy in the historiography of the Cambodian revolution: the “central control” question. Scholars debated whether the Pol Pot regime was a centralised dictatorship or a chaotic project driven by peasant whims; Kiernan claims the regime was only capable of such mass murder because it had concentrated power. Today, consensus supports Kiernan’s contention that the events of 1975-1979 constituted genocide. A collection of primary source documents from the Khmer Rouge regime lives at Yale and will fuel continued investigations into the genocide.

First-hand accounts of the Cambodian genocide

Finally, Kiernan introduces several first-hand accounts of the Cambodian genocide from individuals belonging to targeted minority communities — including a Muslim Cham woman named Nao Gha. He also includes the perspectives of two peasant boys, Sat and Mien, who eventually fled to Thailand after being forced to labor in dire conditions under the Khmer Rouge. These transcriptions add human context to the facts and figures Kiernan gave at the outset. Kiernan does not add commentary to the interviews. Instead, he allows the stories of these witnesses to take center stage and add credibility to the entirety of the essay. 

I have little to add to Kiernan’s essay on the Cambodian genocide. His neutral language and limited communication of his personal opinions allowed the horror of Pol Pot’s state-sponsored genocide to command the reader’s full attention. He provides many lenses through which readers can interpret this period in Cambodia’s history – politics, human rights, biography, international relations, and first-hand narratives. 

It was disappointing but unsurprising to learn that the international community failed to take immediate action against the Khmer Rouge, as geopolitical concerns dwarfed human rights issues in importance to state actors. And it was fascinating to see how different scholars interpreted the same series of events, each impacted by his own political beliefs and biases. Finally, it was disturbing but important to read through the first-hand accounts of the atrocities committed by the Pol Pot regime. I appreciate that Kiernan earlier criticized other scholars for their lack of diverse first-hand accounts, then did the necessary work to collect and transcribe such accounts. This is recommended reading for anyone unfamiliar with the details of the Cambodian genocide or wishing to better understand its events in context.

“The late 20th century saw the era of mass communications, but DK tolled a vicious silence. Internally and externally, Cambodia was sealed off. Its borders were closed, all neighboring countries militarily attacked, use of foreign languages banned, embassies and press agencies expelled, local newspapers and television shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, mail and telephones suppressed.” (Kiernan 344)

Fascinating and disturbing to see listed the mechanisms of control the Party used – would be interested to learn how these methods compare with other authoritarian/genocidal regimes.

“The Vietnamese community, for example, was entirely eradicated… In research conducted in Cambodia since 1979 it has not been possible to find a Vietnamese resident who had survived the Pol Pot years there.” (Kiernan 347)

“The Chinese under Pol Pot’s regime suffered the worst disaster ever to befall any ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia.” (Kiernan 347)

“About 100,000 Chams were massacred… Islamic schools and religion, as well as the Cham language, were banned. Thousands of Muslims were physically forced to eat pork. Many were murdered for refusing.” (Kiernan 348)

“…While the Cambodian genocide progressed, Washington, Bejing, and Bangkok all supported the continued independent existence of the Khmer Rouge regime.” (Kiernan 354)

“They also executed college students and former government officials, soldiers, and police. I saw the bodies of many such people not far from the village.” (Thoun Cheng, first-hand account recorded by Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua)

There is at first less discussion of the non-ethnic/religious targets of the Khmer Rouge’s extermination program, but this speaks to the regime’s hatred of anyone educated or involved in prior governments.

“I was never allowed to eat any of the fruits of my labor, all of which were carted away by truck; I don’t know where.” (Sat, a peasant boy who lived through the genocide in Cambodia, account recorded by Kiernan and Boua)

Particularly ironic, as the revolution was supposedly for the benefit of the peasant class. Sat, a peasant boy, works constantly for the regime yet cannot even eat what he produces. His account also implicitly weakens many of Amin and Vickery’s claims about the ideology of the Pol Pot regime. 

Based on this essay, how does Kiernan define genocide and what are the key points he makes in support of his claim that a genocide took place in Cambodia 1975-1979?

What was the driving ideology behind the attempts of the Khmer Rouge to eliminate groups like the Buddhists, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Cham from Cambodia?

As recently as 1991, the UN failed to condemn the events in Cambodia as genocide with reference to the Genocide Convention. And during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, international actors and commentators alike failed to publicly recognize the regime for what it was. International legal organisations also dismissed proposals to investigate the crimes committed by the DK regime in the decades after Pol Pot’s overthrow. What caused this inaction in the international community, and was this avoidable? Is it unreasonable to hope that this would not happen in the future?

How should scholars or politicians interested in communist ideology, like Stalinism or some aspects of Maoism, approach discussion of the Khmer Rouge? Note how Samir Amin and Michael Vickery address the influence (or lack thereof) of international communist models on Pol Pot’s regime, peasant participation, and urban vs. peasant conflict. 

You certainly went above and beyond the call of duty with this review of the reading. Very comprehensive and thorough!

I suppose my question for you is not about this text, then, but about your feelings about the capacity historical writing has to convey the horror of a genocidal regime in general. I have read this text by Kiernan numerous times and agree with everthing you note in your review. But I always end the reading dry eyed and a bit distanced from the events. Meanwhile, when I watch New Year Baby I find myself moved in an indescribable way. Given this, what are ways that historical writing can bring in the power of affect in ways that the film does?

Professor Harms – Thank you for the kind comment! I just saw this. I think the answer to your question is that different people are affected emotionally (and driven to seek change for the better) by different styles. Personally, I got chills and was very moved by Kiernan’s text and was for some reason not more moved by the New Year Baby film. (But I agree, it is very well done and difficult to watch.) Clearly, others might feel differently and therefore it’s ideal for multiple framings of the horror of the Cambodian genocide to exist to get the message across. Also, different approaches to communication – emotionally affected vs. dry and factual – are effective in different spaces, for example in legal matters the fact-based approach is valuable. It’s certainly important to have individuals doing both kinds of work!

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Cambodian genocide

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• United States Holocaust Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - Cambodia 1975–1979
• University of Minnesota - College of Liberal Arts - Cambodia
• GlobalSecurity.org - Cambodia 1975-79 - Year Zero / Killing Fields
• Academia - The ethnic element in the Cambodian genocide

Cambodian genocide , systematic murder of up to three million people in Cambodia from 1976 to 1978 that was carried out by the Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot .

Immediately after World War II , the Americans and the French fought wars against communism in Korea and Vietnam , respectively. Cambodia became independent in 1953 when French Indochina collapsed under the assault of Ho Chi Minh ’s Viet Minh communist army. Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy under Prince Sihanouk remained neutral during the Vietnam War , until he was ousted in 1970 by an American-backed coup. Forced to seek refuge in Beijing , he became the figurehead for communist Khmer Rouge insurgents, whose cause was greatly aided when the United States bombed Cambodia in an attempt to suppress guerrilla activity. Cambodia’s civil war ended in 1975 when capital city Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, who renamed the country Kampuchea.

Pol Pot declared 1975 to be “Year Zero,” when Cambodia was to be isolated and its society remade in accordance with communist ideals. Civil rights and property rights were immediately eliminated, and any public expression of religious belief was forbidden. Taking the view that Cambodian society had been corrupted by exposure to the world beyond Cambodia’s borders, the new regime started destroying evidence of Western influence, emptying cities and force-marching the urban population into the countryside to engage in hopelessly inadequate agricultural projects. As starvation and disease set in, these actions alone would have created a significant humanitarian disaster.

The Khmer Rouge also persecuted and killed minorities, particularly ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, in large numbers. Other targets included Cham Muslims, of whom 70–80 percent of the population was exterminated; professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers; and anyone who could remotely be described as “intellectual,” which included anyone wearing spectacles or who could speak a foreign language. The Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh became a center for mass murder , and there were rural sites—referred to as the Killing Fields, which is also the title of a 1984 film that brought the plight of Khmer Rouge victims to worldwide attention—where a huge number of people were executed. As hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled into Thailand , the genocide intensified, with the Khmer Rouge turning on itself and murdering thousands of suspected traitors and spies in its ranks.

By November 1978, when Vietnam invaded and put an end to the Khmer Rouge’s excesses, at least 1.25 million and as many as 3 million Cambodians had died as a result of Khmer Rouge action; Cambodia’s population had been 7.5 million. Even though the Khmer Rouge kept extensive records, many disappeared into Vietnamese archives, and so the exact number of victims has not been ascertained; the working consensus is 2 million.

In 1979, following the Khmer Rouge’s defeat at the hands of Vietnamese forces, the movement’s de facto leader fled into the jungles on Cambodia’s border with Thailand where he maintained the pretense of leading a legitimate government. Pol Pot died in 1998 while under house arrest imposed by rivals within the Khmer Rouge, which largely disintegrated afterward. Vietnam occupied Cambodia until 1989, and free elections were held in 1993, inaugurating a democratic government.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, was established in 2006 as an effort to bring surviving leaders to justice , and trials held under its auspices secured a number of convictions . In 2012 Kaing Guek Eav, the commandant of Tuol Sleng Prison, was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity; he died in 2020. In 2018 Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea , two high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials, were convicted of genocide . The Tribunal ceased active litigation in 2022 but has not been decommissioned.

The genocide is a locus of Cambodian memory today. Under the Vietnamese occupation, part of the Tuol Sleng Prison, also called S-21, was converted into a museum , and today it sees significant visitation from Cambodians and foreign tourists alike. Signs across the rural countryside mark the sites of former killing fields. An extensive Cambodian exodus to the United States followed the years of genocide, and observances by expatriates are held at Chicago’s National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial and elsewhere in the country.

Time Essay: Cambodia: An Experiment in Genocide

The enormity of the tragedy has been carefully reconstructed from the reports of many eyewitnesses. Some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Yet it remains perhaps the most dreadful infliction of suffering on a nation by its government in the past three decades. The nation is Cambodia.

On the morning of April 17, 1975, advance units of Cambodia’s Communist insurgents, who had been actively fighting the defeated Western-backed government of Marshal Lon Nol for nearly five years, began entering the capital of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge looted things, such as watches and cameras, but they did not go on a rampage. They seemed disciplined. And at first, there was general jubilation among the city’s terrified, exhausted and bewildered inhabitants. After all, the civil war seemed finally over, the Americans had gone, and order, everyone seemed to assume, would soon be graciously restored.

Then came the shock. After a few hours, the black-uniformed troops began firing into the air. It was a signal for Phnom Penh’s entire population, swollen by refugees to some 3 million, to abandon the city. Young and old, the well and the sick, businessmen and beggars, were all ordered at gunpoint onto the streets and highways leading into the countryside.

Among the first pitiful sights on the road, witnessed by several Westerners, were patients from Phnom Penh’s grossly overcrowded hospitals, perhaps 20,000 people all told. Even the dying, the maimed and the pregnant were herded out stumbling onto the streets. Several pathetic cases were pushed along the road in their beds by relatives, the intravenous bottles still attached to the bedframes. In some hospitals, foreign doctors were ordered to abandon their patients in mid-operation. It took two days before the Bruegel-like multitude was fully under way, shuffling, limping and crawling to a designated appointment with revolution.

With almost no preparations for so enormous an exodus —how could there have been with a war on?—thousands died along the route, the wounded from loss of blood, the weak from exhaustion, and others by execution, usually because they had not been quick enough to obey a Khmer Rouge order. Phnom Penh was not alone: the entire urban population of Cambodia, some 4 million people, set out on a similar grotesque pilgrimage. It was one of the greatest transfers of human beings in modern history.

The survivors were settled in villages and agricultural communes all around Cambodia and were put to work for frantic 16-or 17-hour days, planting rice and building an enormous new irrigation system. Many died from dysentery or malaria, others from malnutrition, having been forced to survive on a condensed-milk can of rice every two days. Still others were taken away at night by Khmer Rouge guards to be shot or bludgeoned to death. The lowest estimate of the bloodbath to date —by execution, starvation and disease—is in the hundreds of thousands. The highest exceeds 1 million, and that in a country that once numbered no more than 7 million. Moreover, the killing continues, according to the latest refugees.

The Roman Catholic cathedral in Phnom Penh has been razed, and even the native Buddhism is reviled as a “reactionary” religion. There are no private telephones, no forms of public transportation, no postal service, no universities. A Scandinavian diplomat who last year visited Phnom Penh—today a ghost city of shuttered shops, abandoned offices and painted-over street signs—said on his return: “It was like an absurd film; it was a nightmare. It is difficult to believe it is true.”

Yet, why is it so difficult to believe? Have not the worst atrocities of the 20th century all been committed in the name of some perverse pseudo science, usually during efforts to create a new heaven on earth, or even a “new man”? The Nazi notion of racial purity led inexorably to Auschwitz and the Final Solution. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sent millions to their deaths in the name of a supposedly moral cause—in their case, the desired triumph of socialism. Now the Cambodians have taken bloodbath sociology to its logical conclusion. Karl Marx declared that money was at the heart of man’s original sin, the acquisition of capital. The men behind Cambodia’s Angka Loeu (Organization on High), who absorbed such verities while students in the West, have decided to abolish money.

How to do that? Well, one simplistic way was to abolish cities, because cities cannot survive without money. The new Cambodian rulers did just that. What matter that hundreds of thousands died as the cities were depopulated? It apparently meant little, if anything, to Premier Pol Pot and his shadowy colleagues on the politburo of Democratic Kampuchea, as they now call Cambodia. When asked about the figure of 1 million deaths, President Khieu Samphan replied: “It’s incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals.” Radio Phnom Penh even dared to boast of this atrocity in the name of collectivism: “More than 2,000 years of Cambodian history have virtually ended.”

Somehow, the enormity of the Cambodian tragedy—even leaving aside the grim question of how many or how few actually died in Angka Loeu ‘s experiment in genocide—has failed to evoke an appropriate response of outrage in the West. To be sure, President Carter has declared Cambodia to be the worst violator of human rights in the world today. And, true, members of the U.S. Congress have ringingly denounced the Cambodian holocaust. The U.N., ever quick to adopt a resolution condemning Israel or South Africa, acted with its customary tortoise-like caution when dealing with a Third World horror: it wrote a letter to Phnom Penh asking for an explanation of charges against the regime.

Perhaps the greatest shock has been in France, a country where many of Cambodia’s new rulers learned their Marx and where worship of revolution has for years been something of a national obsession among the intelligentsia. Said New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, a former leftist who has turned against Marxism: “We thought of revolution in its purest form as an angel. The Cambodian revolution was as pure as an angel, but it was barbarous. The question we ask ourselves now is, can revolution be anything but barbarous?”

Lévy has clearly pointed out the abyss to which worship of revolution leads. Nonetheless, many Western European intellectuals are still reluctant to face the issue squarely. If the word “pure,” when used by adherents of revolution, in effect means “barbarous,” perhaps the best the world can hope for in its future political upheavals is a revolution that is as “corrupt” as possible. Such skewed values are, indeed, already rife in some quarters. During the 1960s, Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China was admired by many leftist intellectuals in the West, because it was supposedly “pure”—particularly by contrast with the bureaucratic stodginess of the Soviet Union. Yet that revolution, as the Chinese are now beginning to admit, grimly impoverished the country’s science, art, education and literature for a decade. Even the Chinese advocates of “purity” during that time, Chiang Ch’ing and her cronies in the Gang of Four, turned out to have been as corrupt as the people in power they sought to replace. With less justification, there are intellectuals in the West so committed to the twin Molochs of our day—”liberation” and “revolution”—that they can actually defend what has happened in Cambodia.

Where the insane reversal of values lies is in the belief that lotions like “purity” or “corruption” can have any meaning outside an absolute system of values: one that is resistant to the tinkering at will by governments or revolutionary groups. The Cambodian revolution, in its own degraded “purity,” has demonstrated what happens when the Marxian denial of moral absolutes is taken with total seriousness by its adherents. Pol Pot and his friends decide what good is, what bad is, and how many corpses must pile up before this rapacious demon of “purity” is appeased.

In the West today, there is a pervasive consent to the notion of moral relativism, a reluctance to admit that absolute evil can and does exist. This makes it especially difficult for some to accept the fact that the Cambodian experience is something far worse than a revolutionary aberration. Rather, it is the deadly logical consequence of an atheistic, man-centered system of values, enforced by fallible human beings with total power, who believe, with Marx, that morality is whatever the powerful define it to be and, with Mao, that power grows from gun barrels. By no coincidence the most humane Marxist societies in Europe today are those that, like Poland or Hungary, permit the dilution of their doctrine by what Solzhenitsyn has called “the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice” from a Christian tradition. Yet if there is any doubt about what the focus of the purest of revolutionary values is, consider the first three lines of the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea:

The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains of the Cambodian fatherland,

The sublime blood of the workers and peasants, The blood of revolutionary combatants of both sexes.

— David Aikman

Currently stationed in West Berlin as TIME’S Eastern European bureau chief, Aikman was the magazine’s last staff correspondent to leave Cambodia, a few days before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.

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• > Journals
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• > Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark...

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Why did you kill: the cambodian genocide and the dark side of face and honor.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Why did you kill? From the first day I arrived in Cambodia to conduct ethnographic research, I had wanted to pose this question to a Khmer Rouge who had executed people during the genocidal Democratic Kampuchea regime (April 1975 to January 1979)- When the Khmer Rouge—a radical group of Maoist-inspired Communist rebels—came to power after a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died, they transformed Cambodian society into what some survivors now call “the prison without walls” (kuk et chonhcheang) . The cities were evacuated; economic production and consumption were collectivized; books were confiscated and sometimes burned; Buddhism and other forms of religious worship were banned; freedom of speech, travel, residence, and occupational choice were dramatically curtailed; formal education largely disappeared; money, markets, and courts were abolished; and the family was subordinated to the Party Organization, Ângkar . Over one and a half million of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants perished from disease, over-work, starvation, and outright execution under this genocidal regime (Kiernan 1996).

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• Volume 57, Issue 1
• Alexander Laban Hinton
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2659025

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A History of the Cambodian Genocide

2008, The Khmer Rouge Regime (1975-1979)

Using an overview of the existing literature, including both primary and secondary sources, this paper lays out a detailed history of the Pol Pot Regime. This paper originally appeared at the Free University of Berlin, 2008.

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Fifth Annual Conference of the Asian Executive Sumary, 2005

The bloodiest revolution that swept through Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 was one of the fiercest which has made Pol Pot as one of this century's worst mass murders. Pol Pot led the KR in a reign of violence, terror, fighting, famine, fear, and brutality over Cambodia and turned the country into one vast labor camp in their effort to create a model of agrarian collective. The human costs of the revolution were horrific. More than 1.7 million people - or roughly one seventh of the country's population – killed. The main purpose of this research is to investigate collective memories of the atrocities of Pol Pot KR regime. Memory seems to be central to Cambodian political history. They are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to them through museums, historic sites, and public arts. However, the collective memories of the Pol Pot KR regime are in the very contradictory situation. They have been obviously trapped at the crossroads: both to remember and to forget the disgusting tragedy. Examining several categories of significant cultural and political remembrance, I introduce three main categories of the construction of Cambodian collective memories. The first category is state-sponsored representation, the second is community representation, and the third is natural representation. The differences allow one to distinguish between political and cultural options of remembrance in existing societies. I have noticed that the process of making and evoking memory of Pol Pot KR regime is highly political so far. Most forms of the remembrance in Cambodia are state-sponsored representation, meaning that they are deliberately created by the recent regime to gain political supports from Cambodian people while sacrificing Khmer and Buddhism beliefs. Two central sites for the construction of memories: Genocidal Tuol Sleng Museum and Choeung Ek Killing Fields Memorial displaying skulls and bones of KR victims, for example, are dubbed Auschwitz on the Mekong. These state-sponsored representations of the KR regime are by design resembling the Holocaust of Hitler Nazi's Germany. The memory of the atrocities of the KR regime is an endeavor caught between the push of politics and the pull of people emotion.

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Visitors to Southeast Asia have the opportunity to see three distinct Cold War narratives. Museum exhibits in Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, and Jakarta inform the public about specific acts of violence and murder during the ideological struggles of 1945 to 1989. Drawing from Paul Ricoeur and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this chapter considers the ways in which the official voice of the state constructed Cold War narratives of violence and victimization in several Southeast Asian museums, a process of remembering, forgetting, and silencing. While these public history institutions emphasize the violence and tragedy of the Cold War and use similar narrative structures, themes, and formats, their political perspectives are so dramatically different as to create the feeling of parallel realities. Indeed, the Indonesian and Vietnamese museums can be read as ideological mirror images of each other, with the Cambodian sites seemingly above the Cold War political dichotomy. A comparative analysis of Jakarta’s Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes (Monumen Pahlawan Revolusi) complex, Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remnants Museum (Bảo tàng Chứng tích chiến tranh), and Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is the focus of this chapter.

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Report of the Cambodian Genocide Program, 1994-1997

A Report to the United States Department of State Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific  February 1998

A. INTRODUCTION  The Cambodian genocide, in which at least 1.7 million people lost their lives, stands as one of the worst human tragedies of the modern era. In Cambodia, as in Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, extremist politics conspired with a diabolic disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. The Cambodian genocide is unique, though, in that for many years it remained largely undocumented, and is only now being investigated for the purposes of bringing its perpetrators to justice.

In December 1994, the Cambodia Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University received a grant of $499,000 from the Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific, U.S. Department of State. This grant expired December 31, 1997. Upon receiving the grant, the CGP immediately began the work of documenting the mass killings in Cambodia during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime headed by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979. The Cambodian Genocide Program aims 1) to collect and study all extant information about this period in Cambodian history, 2) make this information available to a court or tribunal willing to prosecute Cambodian war criminals, and 3) generate a critical, analytic understanding of genocide which can be marshaled in the prevention of political violence against populations elsewhere in the world. The Cambodian Genocide Program has advanced these goals through a variety of activities which fall into four categories: documentation, preservation, research, and training.

The Cambodian Genocide Program began this work at an auspicious moment in the Cambodian political landscape, as certain obstacles which previously stood in the way of bringing closure to the genocide had been removed. With the end of the Cold War, the diplomatic and economic embargo placed on Cambodia by the U.S. ended, opening up the international flow of trade in ideas and information, as well as goods. The U.N. mission that oversaw democratic elections in Cambodia in 1993 resulted in the political isolation of the Khmer Rouge, which had been, up to that point, still a vocal, and to some, a credible political party. Finally, in 1994 the U.S. Congress adopted the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, which expresses the American government’s commitment to the pursuit of justice for the victims of the genocide. With the Cambodian government and the international community in harmony for the first time on the subject of the genocide, the Cambodian Genocide Program’s agenda was not only well supported both within and outside Cambodia, but also very timely.

This report provides an overview of the CGP’s objectives, and outlines its accomplishments to date.

Harnessing resources which represent over twenty years of careful scholarship at a critical moment in Cambodian and international politics, the Cambodian Genocide Program is integrating a vast range of source materials to illuminate the social and political environment in which nearly one fifth of all Cambodians died. The detailed picture of the Cambodian genocide which is emerging is not only comprehensive and exhaustively corroborated, but is also being made accessible to a broad range of Cambodians, international scholars, and legal professionals. Continued work by the CGP and its newly independent partner, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), will not only fill a substantial gap in the available scholarly resources on the Cambodian genocide, but will also serve as a significant prototype for the future study of genocidal activity elsewhere. Not least, it will be of great assistance to the United Nations investigatory commission now in formation, and to any prospective international tribunal. The powerful tools that the CGP is assembling in the interests of documentation and justice, both in Cambodia and around the world, represent an unprecedented attempt to combine scholarship, state-of-the-art technology, and international legal instruments to help bring closure to one of the worst human disasters of the 20th century.

B. OVERVIEW OF OBJECTIVES  The Cambodian Genocide Program has three broad objectives. First, it seeks to produce a comprehensive account of the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-79). Existing information about this period of Cambodian history can be found in a wide range of locations, in a variety of languages, and in a range of physical conditions from useable to completely deteriorated. The CGP has undertaken to locate and identify all sources of information on this period, consolidate and analyze it, and preserve primary source materials which are at risk of being lost to decay, theft, or sabotage. In addition to consolidating existing sources of information on the Cambodian genocide, the CGP has also commissioned newly researched historiographical essays on the Khmer Rouge period. These essays provide detailed analyses of different features of the Cambodian genocide not well documented in existing materials.

The second major aim of the Cambodian Genocide Program is to see that the appropriate resources are available to any tribunal or commission of inquiry which undertakes to bring the leaders of the Cambodian genocide to justice. Toward this end, the CGP is constructing a comprehensive database of information which details the activities of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, its personnel, chains of command, and corroborating evidence linking specific individuals in the regime to specific crimes against humanity. To supplement the existing archival evidence, the CGP has completed computerized satellite mapping of mass graves in half of the country.

In addition to providing documentary evidence of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities, the Cambodian Genocide Program has also begun developing the professional capacities required to ensure an effective inquiry. The CGP has conducted two courses in Phnom Penh to train twenty Cambodians in international human rights and criminal law and in the practical aspects of holding a tribunal or truth commission. These professionals are now well qualified to assist a Cambodian or international commission of inquiry into the Cambodian genocide.

The Cambodian Genocide Program’s third objective is to advance a more theoretical understanding of genocide as a political phenomenon. Based on thorough documentation and analysis of the Cambodian genocide, from its earliest manifestations through to the international pursuit of justice, the CGP works to identify characteristics of this particular tragedy which may contribute to the identification, anticipation, and prevention of genocidal activities in other parts of the world. For example, from the research conducted to date, it is clear that the vision for Cambodian society advanced and brutally imposed by the Khmer Rouge is deeply rooted not only in conceptions of racial purity and communist utopianism, but also in conditions of modernity. From the elaborate bureaucracy of Democratic Kampuchea to the modern weaponry the Khmer Rouge deployed against its enemies, Pol Pot’s regime held fast to the idea of a centralized political order that sought to maintain total control over its citizens at any cost. To the extent that these features of the Cambodian genocide resonate with genocidal regimes elsewhere, we can now begin to sketch out the contours of genocidal intent and behavior in a more general way, and thereby hopefully work to avoid similar tragedies. As a natural outgrowth of the Cambodian Genocide Program’s work, Ben Kiernan, Director of the CGP, is writing a book on 20th century genocide, and the CGP has given birth to a new interdisciplinary research program on genocide studies at Yale, the first of its kind in the United States. With a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Genocide Studies Program began in January 1998 as a two-year Sawyer Series of Faculty Seminars on comparative genocide.

C. CGP ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

The Cambodian Genocide Program is a multidisciplinary, international institution with facilities in the USA, Cambodia, and Australia. It is based at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS). The CGP is sponsored by YCIAS, the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. CGP Director Ben Kiernan is Professor of History and author ofThe Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996). In 1995-96, Dr. Craig Etcheson served as Program Manager, and in 1997 as Acting Director. Kristine Mooseker is the CGP’s Business Manager. Dr. Helen Jarvis, of the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management (SISTM) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, is the CGP’s Documentation Consultant. Nereida Cross is database specialist. There are teams of CGP researchers and staff in both New Haven and Sydney. The CGP’s partners include the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh (Youk Chhang, Executive Director), as well as other institutions at Yale such as the Institute for Biospheric Studies and the Center for Earth Observation, and at the University of New South Wales, such as the School of Geomatic Engineering. Prof. Harold H. Koh of Yale Law School, Director of the Schell Center, and Ronald C. Slye, Associate Director in 1995 and 1996, have supervised the Center’s participation in the CGP’s Legal Training Project.

D. PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

1. Documentation

CGP operations span four continents: North America, Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Documentation operations include compiling the Cambodian Genocide Data Base (CGDB); providing World Wide Web access to our systems; the mass grave mapping project; preservation, cataloguing and analysis of the vast, newly-discovered Khmer Rouge archives; and additional work related to bringing the Program to a successful conclusion in terms of historical and legal evidence.

(i) The Cambodian Genocide Program Website

The principal objective of the Cambodian Genocide Program is the documentation of war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. The centerpiece of this work is the Cambodian Genocide Data Base (CGDB). Using state-of-the-art technology, this data base was mounted on the World Wide Web on January 27, 1997, making its findings available globally ( www.yale.edu/cgp ). Other CGP materials, such as a selection of scanned photographs of various aspects of Democratic Kampuchea, an organizational chart of the personnel of Tuol Sleng prison, and translated excerpts from the confidential diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry under Ieng Sary, written in 1976-79, were also made available on the web.1

The CGP website was well-received. It was immediately awarded the Internet Site of the Day award by Academe Today, the on-line journal of the Chronicle of Higher Education(Academe Today Daily Report, January 28, 1997), and was named as History Site of the Week of March 16, 1997 by World History Compass. The CGP website was also the subject of a televised report on Cable News Network (CNN) on February 1, 1997, a New York Times Editorial Notebook (April 21, 1997), a San Jose Mercury News editorial (June 27, 1997), and other favorable press commentary, including long articles in the Sydney-Melbourne magazine Good Weekend (March 29, 1997), and Der Speigel (April 1997).

The number of daily recorded ‘visitors’ to the CGP website has always exceeded 500, reaching 4,500 ‘hits’ per day in late January 1997, 3,000 per day in February-March, 800 per day in early April, 13,200 on 21 April (after the New York Times editorial appeared), 2,000-5,000 on April 22-24, and 1,000-1,500 in May, and then, as the Cambodian crisis developed in June 1997, rising to an average of 20,000 ‘hits’ per day.

1 See Ben Kiernan, ‘Ieng Sary’s Role in the Pol Pot Regime,’ Phnom Penh Post, January 24, 1997.

(ii) The Cambodian Genocide Data Base

The Cambodian Genocide Data Base (CGDB) was developed by the CGP in collaboration with a team led by Helen Jarvis, CGP Documentation Consultant and Head of the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. It contains a suite of information pertaining to massive violations of human rights in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. In the January 1997 preliminary release of CGDB, much of the information was focused on “S-21,” also known as the Tuol Sleng Prison, which was the headquarters of the Khmer Rouge secret police.

The Cambodian Genocide Data Base has four components: bibliographic (CBIB), biographic (CBIO), photographic (CIMG), and geographic (CGEO). Along with the publicly accessible Website, the CGP has also released a CD-Rom version of the first three of these databases.2 - The CBIB bibliographic data base currently contains 2,500 records, mostly of primary documents in the Khmer language but also including all books, articles, and documents on the Khmer Rouge period in other languages. The CGP is attempting to create an indexed catalogue of all known primary and secondary documentary resources pertaining to gross violations of human rights during the Khmer Rouge regime. At present the Bibliographic Database contains records on the bulk of the secondary literature on the Khmer Rouge regime, as well as a large sample of the primary documents now known to have survived the years since the Khmer Rouge fell from power, including a full catalogue of all existing records of the Khmer Rouge prison at Krang Ta Chan, in rural Takeo Province.

The CBIB datastructure allows up to 40 fields of cataloguing information on each book, article or document.

- The CBIO biographic database currently contains about 6,000 records on specific individuals, mostly Khmer Rouge military and political leaders, but also on some of their victims. The CGP has collected information on members of Khmer Rouge political and military organizations. Also included is data on victims of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom were not members of any Khmer Rouge organization. We had entered information on some 6,000 persons into the Biographic Database as of December 1996. The largest category includes those Khmer Rouge who wrote “confessions” (usually under torture) in Tuol Sleng Prison.

We gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Cornell University Library’s Southeast Asia Collection to include information from Cornell’s catalogue of Tuol Sleng confessions. Other sources drawn upon for this preliminary release of the CGDB Biographic Database include a Tuol Sleng list of prisoners arrested in 1976 (including many not known to have written confessions), translated transcripts from a series of 500 interviews with Cambodians conducted by Ben Kiernan since 1978, and various of the secondary sources listed in the “sources” field and documentation of the Biographic Database. We have attempted to indicate the source for all information included. There are multiple records on a number of key individuals.

We have attempted to include information on all members of the Khmer Rouge organization who held positions of authority from the district (srok) level upwards, including regional (damban), zone (phumipeak) and center (mocchim) officials, and all officers of the Khmer Rouge armed forces from company (kong anousena thom) level and above. The CGP has information regarding the personal histories of many more Khmer Rouge personnel and victims in our archives. We will continue to add additional information to the CGDB Biographic Database.

There are up to 70 fields and subfields of information on each individual.

- The CIMG photographic database currently contains about 6,000 images of victims who were photographed by the Khmer Rouge upon arrest.

The Cambodian Genocide Program has obtained and scanned more than 10,000 photographic images pertaining to various aspects of gross human rights violations under the Khmer Rouge regime. In the initial release of data from our existing archive, we focussed on the victims of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, the notorious “S-21” extermination center.

More than 5,000 photographs were taken of prisoners being processed into the facility for interrogation and execution. For the vast majority of these photographs, the identity of the victim is unknown. The photographs are displayed along with a response form for CGDB users to contact us by e-mail to suggest names and other biographical data for unknown victims they may recognize. We encourage users to assist in identifying these victims, but we ask that information be submitted to the CGP only in cases where identification is reasonably certain. The CGP then attempts to correlate the suggested names and/or additional biographic details with other information in our possession, to obtain a positive identification of the victim. Informants may choose to remain anonymous if they wish. Where possible, we plan to electronically link these photographs to CBIO records on those individuals in the photographs.

In future releases of information in the CGDB Photographic Database, the CGP will add many other images relating to massive violations of human rights in Cambodia, including photographs of additional victims, Khmer Rouge personnel, genocide sites such as “killing fields” and prisons, forced labor work brigades, damage to religious buildings and artifacts, and more.

- The CGEO geographic database is a mapping database currently containing approximately 50 maps with data on over 100 ‘genocide sites’ - prisons, mass graves, and memorials - associated with the Khmer Rouge execution system, including over 5,000 mass grave pits.

In 1995, with the support of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the CGP initiated a project to create detailed maps of the infamous Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields,” those places where large numbers of Cambodians were killed and buried in mass graves. By December 1996, CGP mapping teams had collected data from 37 of Cambodia’s 172 districts, in nine provinces. In every district investigated, mass graves dating from the Khmer Rouge regime were located and examined by CGP researchers. A total of 5,192 mass grave pits were identified at these sites. Based on the patterns of violence and population distributions in the Khmer Rouge regime, the CGP estimated that the total number of mass grave pits in Cambodia may be as high as 20,000.

At most of the sites containing mass graves, CGP researchers have also identified Khmer Rouge-era prison facilities at or near the mass grave site. This fact, along with witness testimony and records of the Khmer Rouge security services obtained by the CGP, led us to conclude that most mass graves hold the remains of victims of centrally-organized violence, rather than of other causes of death such as disease or starvation. In addition to mass grave pits and prison facilities, the CGP also mapped the locations of memorials erected since 1979 in remembrance of Khmer Rouge victims.

The maps in the Geographic Database currently contain information on approximately one hundred and forty different sites in nine provinces, mostly in southern and eastern Cambodia. With the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the CGP is now constructing a comprehensive inventory of the resting places of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. We also plan to add tables of data already collected to the maps in this database, so that users can identify the particular characteristics of each genocide site.

2 See ‘Yale Genocide Records Released as CD-Rom,’Cambodia Daily, January 23, 2998, p. 11.

Forthcoming New Release

In order to make all this new information generally available, we plan for 1998 an extensive new release to supplement the CGDB. Based on current rates of data acquisition, information processing and storage capacity, the bibliographic data base will soon contain 3,500 records, mostly of primary documents in Khmer. The biographic database will eventually contain over 20,000 records on specific individuals, mostly Khmer Rouge military and political leaders, but also on some of their victims. The photographic database will contain up to 1,000 images of primary documents plus about 7,000 images of victims, perpetrators and genocide sites. The geographic database will soon contain the

Home — Essay Samples — Science — Noam Chomsky — A Study of Chomsky’s Writings on The Cambodian Genocide

A Study of Chomsky’s Writings on The Cambodian Genocide

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Outlook on the Cambodian Genocide

How it works

The Cambodian Genocide was a slaughter of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge who was led by Pol Pot, from 1975-1979. Pol Pot who was the Prime minister of Cambodia at the time killed Cambodians by execution, forced labor, and famine.  Pol Pot renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. The reign was ended after 4 years when Vietnam invaded and caused the collapse of the regime. The Cambodian Genocide was the result of a social engineering project by the Khmer Rouge, attempting to create a classless agrarian society.

When the regime had finally ended over 1.7 to 2.5 million Cambodians had been killed, over 21% of the population was killed by this genocide.

The genocide started because Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, used his power as a social engineering project to get rid of the Cambodian people after being trusted by the Cambodian people to protect them. He changed the name of the country to show his power over the Cambodians. “The name of the new nation was Democratic Kampuchea” (Schanberg). The United States also played a role in the rising of the Khmer Rouge. The United States bombed most of the countryside of Cambodia. They also influenced the politics of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge used the United States’ actions to recruit followers and as an excuse for the brutal policies they exercised when in power.

“A communist group known as the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, seized control of Cambodia and made the Cambodians work in forced labor camps” (Schanberg). Many cambodians were executed, while many died to famine from the lack of food that was given to them. Pol Pot abused his power when taking control of the Khmer Rouge. “The Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement was founded in 1960” (World Without Genocide). This enabled him to change to Cambodian people and the whole country. Pol Pot used the United States bombing and political influence to get himself in a position to take over the country and cause the genocide.

The Cambodian genocide could have been prevented. The U.S. bombings and political influence caused the Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement to be made and to rise to power of the country with Pol Pot. If this group was not allowed to rise to power so easily and the U.S. did not get involved the genocide could have taken a different turn and could have been stopped. “The US bombings aided the genocide by killing many Cambodians” (Prevention). The bombings by America caused many Cambodians to flock to the Khmer Rouge who promised they could protect them. If other countries were more observant and conscious to the events happening in Cambodia they could have stopped the terror of the Khmer Rouge.

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Cambodian genocide.

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                          The Cambodian genocide is one of the most horrible and saddest genocide to date spanning form 1975-1978. As Cambodia gained there independence from France in 1953 the country was controlled by prince Sihnaouk. In February of 1969 America started to bomb Cambodia in secret. After a year of bombing a small time communist party the Khmer Rouge, started demonstrations in the large cities such as phon-phen. At that time the prince of Shanouk was visiting Paris, a pro-American general by the name of Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk and joined the communist party of the Khmer rouge. War had struck Cambodia at this point. In April 1970 Vietnamese and American troops invaded southeast Cambodia in the look for the Vietcong guerilla fighter in the rainforests of Cambodia. Lon Nol was proven to be not a well skilled military and political leader. Corruption worsened and Cambodians started believing that the country would be better of with the Khmer rouge and past prince sihnaouk. During that time the Khmer rouge was gaining power and falling away form their Vietnamese allies. Soon the Khmer rouge overthrew the over Lon Nol as he fled form the city April 1, 1975. On April 17 the first Khmer troops entered the capital with their leader Pol Pot. They were welcomed with cheers and white flags. This was the start of the Cambodian genocide.              As Pol Pot realized his power now he immediately started his Khmer society. He started his society on an eight point program in his program he began the process of taking away all liberties of the people. He started to evacuate all people from all towns, abolish all markets, abolish currency, make monks grow rice, execute leaders of the Lon Nol regime, establish cooperatives throughout the country, dispose of the Vietnamese minority, and dispatch troops to the border mainly near Vietnam. as the Cambodian people were taken from their towns each person was told to write their last occupation so the Khmer could execute enemies and any intelligence that threatened them.

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Essays Related to cambodian genocide

1. cambodia, laos and communist china.

Cambodia and Laos are the same in many ways. ... Cambodia became independent on November 9, 1953.1 Laos has been independent around the same time as Cambodia, but thought of as less thought of than Cambodia. ... French control in Cambodia ceased on March 2, 1955. ... More the 90 percent of the population live in rural areas.5 The most important and educational activates are conducted by the Family Welfare Association to recruit acceptors for the government and its own planning services.6 Laos is only half the size of Italy and is an ancient Buddhist Kingdom of Lan Xang.7 There are many...

• Word Count: 1129
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

2. Genocide

Genocide will occur in the Future Mass genocides have taken place during the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, and Rwanda and many other tragic events. ... However, this attempt was proved to be futile when in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. Over a course of time, the KR slaughtered 2 million Cambodians. Did the United Nations stop this genocide? No, "the killing fields of Cambodia were shut down by the Vietnamese The U.N. would have never approved of that intervention" according to Robert Walzer, co-author of The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention. ...

• Word Count: 898
• Approx Pages: 4

3. Fighting to Stop Genocide

The Cambodian Genocide occurred as the Khmer Republic was trying to move all of the Cambodians, this eventually led to there being too many and they then decided to kill the Cambodians. ... This lasted about thirty years until the next large scale genocide in 1975, this is when the Cambodian genocide began. ... Genocide affects everyone, and it's best that every time that genocide occurs among other countries that someone else steps in and stops the genocide before countless lives are lost. ... Genocide took over a large part of the twentieth century, alone there were five large scale ge...

• Word Count: 1647
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

4. Education and Democracy in Japan

Education provided the framework for a successful Japanese democracy, and its absence in Cambodia precipitated its demise in the 1970s. ... For over one hundred years, until the end of World War II, Cambodia remained a French colony. ... Lon Nol, worried about maintaining power, did not continue educational reforms. 17 As unrest grew in Cambodia, a small communist group known as the Khmer Rouge fed on people's fears and rapidly gained power until the Cambodian civil war broke out. ... During the Khmer Rouge's spectacularly brutal reign, a time in which the "blood of Vietnam&quo...

• Word Count: 1503
• Approx Pages: 6

5. The Genocide In Rwanda

The Polish author Raphael Lemkin was the first to coin the phrase "genocide". ... Genocide was unique because of the motivation behind it (Destexhe, 2). ... This is not to mention Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mengistu's Ethiopia. ... The next genocide was the most well known, that of Hitler and the Jews. ... The Rwandan "genocide" is classified as genocide because it fits the definition as set forth by the UN. ...

• Word Count: 1869

6. East Timor Genocide

Genocide: the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group . ... How could this man, a man who cause a previous genocide pass unnoticed and untouched? Was this really the product of priority, Cambodia or Indonesia? ... It was America's foreign policy at the times of the Indonesian and East Timor genocides, which was quite puzzling. ... Especially inaccurate was the New York Times in their reporting of the '65 genocide, a genocide, which was depicted in a benign way. ...

• Word Count: 2195
• Approx Pages: 9

7. Elie Wiesel - Messenger to Mankind

He aided Cambodian Refugees in 1981 and got involved with the Kissinger commission in 1984. ... He also aided refugees in Cambodia in 1981 and worked on brining food to Cambodia soon after. ... In 1985, Wiesel testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Genocide Treaty. He spoke as a witness who had seen the horrors of Genocide at work to try and get the treaty ratified. ... He stated that those who engage in genocide shouldn't be part of any human community and that to avoid future genocides; people had to first remember what had happened in the past (Chmiel). ...

• Word Count: 1402

8. Genocide Of Indigineous Australia

Could it be that most understand genocide on one level only? For many, and especially Australians, genocide is something of the Germans, Cambodians and Hutus, not the Australians. As for the rest of the world, the experience of the indigenous people of Australia is not as familiar as the images of Auschwitz or the Killing Fields of Cambodia. ... What is genocide? Firstly one must understand exactly what is meant by the term "genocide". ...

• Word Count: 2923
• Approx Pages: 12

9. The Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge used many tactics to take over Cambodia from the original Cambodian government, including the United States sponsorship to start a civil war and kill around two million Cambodians, in what now matches up with only the Holocaust as one of the largest genocide's in the twentieth century. ... They are also well known for the fact that since the genocide of the Cambodians, none of the members have been tried in court (Brunner 1). The Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia for four hellish years. ... Pol Pot was a member of the Cambodian Democratic Party in the early 1950's, wh...

• Word Count: 1789

A Year of Living Among Genocide Apologists

Diana buttu on what life in israel has been like since oct. 7, 2023..

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One year. I cannot believe that it has been one year. One year of witnessing Palestinians try to retrieve mangled bodies from the sites of Israeli bombs – whether they be homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, or even tents. One year of seeing children scream in fear, in physical pain, in emotional pain, knowing that the world is and always will be cruel. One year of watching one of the most vibrant Palestinian cities, Gaza City, turned into rubble. One year of worrying about friends and futures. One year of explaining over and over again that Palestinians deserve to live and to be free; that Oct. 7 is the result of decades of Israeli brutality and oppression; and that nothing – absolutely nothing – justifies genocide .

Yet, Israeli society has been drunk on perpetrating crimes. Unlike in the West, where Israelis try to portray themselves as victims, in Israel, the image is the exact opposite: that of strong, undefeatable soldiers who assert their superiority over Palestinians. This is what explains the many TikToks proudly showing Israeli soldiers blowing up Palestinian universities and homes. This is what explains the desire to show them torturing Palestinians and the endless videos of Israelis dressed in hijab and with dirt on their faces mocking Palestinian women and children who have survived Israel’s relentless bombs. Israel is the place where superiority (and cruelty) is on full display. 

Throughout the past year, I have been asked what it is like to live in Haifa, among Israelis. Thinking about my answer, I find myself thinking about my parents, who were both born before the Nakba but were raised in Nazareth, a city that was taken over and became part of Israel. I find myself thinking about my late father, and what it was like for him to live among the very people who perpetrated the Nakba, who were apologists for the Nakba, or who denied the Nakba. I find myself thinking about how invisible Palestinians were then – and now – to Israelis, how dehumanized we were then and now. I think about the ways my parents – and the 150,000 other Palestinians who remained in what became Israel – maneuvered their fragile existence among the criminals and their cheerleaders. Their homeland was sacrificed and transformed into a large Israeli military base, while their bodies became the repositories of Israeli cruelty. Israeli policies are premised on the idea that what cannot be achieved through force can only be achieved through more force.

I think about this because that pattern of invisibility and disregard for Palestinian lives continues to this very day, including in Haifa. It is part of the ethos of the state. Today, as Israel makes daily raids on Palestinian cities and towns, imprisoning (and, of course, torturing) thousands, destroying homes, and tearing up cities with bulldozers, Israel’s cruelty and short-sightedness are on full display. As Israelis discuss why all Hamas leaders have not yet been assassinated (as though that were legal), toast one another on TV after Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination , and joke about blowing people up during Israel’s pager attack, little thought, if any, is given to any of the consequences of such actions. For them, the flattening of six buildings in Beirut, the killing of about 2,000 Lebanese people over the past month , and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians mean absolutely nothing. There are no major protests demanding that Israel stop the genocide; just protests (which have all but completely died down) demanding that Israel strike a deal to bring back the Israeli captives.

As an example of what it is like to live in Israel, one only needs to look to the experience of a 12-year-old girl.

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