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Getting Away With Genocide: Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge
Author: Tom Fawthrop, Helen Jarvis
Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press (October 12, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745320279
ISBN-13: 978-0745320274
Format: Hardcover, Paperback
Buy or View Detail (click on book image)

Book Description
This book covers the history of Cambodia since 1979 and the various attempts by the US and China to stop the Cambodian people from bringing the Khmer Rouge to justice. After Vietnam ousted the hated Khmer Rouge regime, much of the evidence needed for a full-scale tribunal became available. In 1979 the US and UK governments, rather than working for human rights justice and setting up a special tribunal, opted instead to back the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and approved the re-supply of Pol Pot's army in Thailand. Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis reveal why it took 18 years for the UN to recognise the mass murder and crimes against humanity that took place under the Killing Fields regime from 1975-78. They explore in detail the role of the UN and the various countries involved, and they assess what chance still remains of holding a Cambodian trial under international law - especially in the light of the recent development of International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia.

Getting Away With Genocide: Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge

By Admin | Monday, December 26, 2011
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: University of California Press
Publishing Date: 1st Edition, January 7, 2000
Paperback: 251 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9747551152
ISBN-13: 978-0520222472
ASIN: 0520222474
Format: Kindle Edition, Hardcover, Paperback
Buy or View Detail (click on book image)

Book Description
The horrific torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during the 1970s is one of the century's major human disasters. David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name "S-21." The facility was an interrogation center where more than 14,000 "enemies" were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes. Fewer than a dozen prisoners left S-21 alive.

During the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) era, the existence of S-21 was known only to those inside it and a few high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials. When invading Vietnamese troops discovered the prison in 1979, murdered bodies lay strewn about and instruments of torture were still in place. An extensive archive containing photographs of victims, cadre notebooks, and DK publications was also found. Chandler utilizes evidence from the S-21 archive as well as materials that have surfaced elsewhere in Phnom Penh. He also interviews survivors of S-21 and former workers from the prison.

Documenting the violence and terror that took place within S-21 is only part of Chandler's story. Equally important is his attempt to understand what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and the rest of us. Chandler discusses the "culture of obedience" and its attendant dehumanization, citing parallels between the Khmer Rouge executions and the Moscow Show Trails of the 1930s, Nazi genocide, Indonesian massacres in 1965-66, the Argentine military's use of torture in the 1970s, and the recent mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda. In each of these instances, Chandler shows how turning victims into "others" in a manner that was systematically devaluing and racialist made it easier to mistreat and kill them. More than a chronicle of Khmer Rouge barbarism, Voices from S-21 is also a judicious examination of the psychological dimensions of state-sponsored terrorism that conditions human beings to commit acts of unspeakable brutality.

Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison

By Admin | Friday, December 16, 2011