Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States
Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States

Author: Michael Haas

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2020-04-13

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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United States foreign policy toward Cambodia has been a disaster. Based on interviews with more than 100 public officials, evidence is presented that Washington created the Khmer Rouge, sustained the Khmer Rouge with more than $70 million in and nonlethal aid and more in military assistance--a Faustian Pact based on neorealist realpolitik strategy based on Cold War thinking even after the end of the Cold War. Under pressure nationally and internationally, Washington stopped supporting the Khmer Rouge and agreed to a peace agreement developed by Australia, France, and other countries. The first edition of the book provides a detailed description of exactly who and what happened, including a discussion of an alternative strategy--pluralist foreign policy based on the "Asian Way" of diplomacy. The second edition, written three decades later, demonstrates how American foreign policy tried to cultivate democracy in Cambodia but failed because China was able to provide more aid and investment--but with strings attached. The new Faustian pact binds Phnom Penh with Beijing. In both editions the alternative foreign policies are examined quantitatively by Options Analysis. In the first edition, the analysis demonstrates why calculations were so wrongheaded. The second edition evaluations options for current policymaking by Washington toward Cambodia, with surprising conclusions regarding how to promote democracy in a country that has been a one-party state that violates democratic norms and prefers the prosperity that China has brought despite the consequences of deterioration of the environment, new health problems, increased slumdwellers, and a debt that Phnom Penh may never repay to Beijing. Both editions provide a sobering account of the failure of American policy to achieve democratic goals.

Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States
Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States

Author: Michael Haas

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1991-11-30

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0313388342

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This provocative analysis of U.S. relations with Cambodia from the 1950s to the present illuminates foreign policy issues that remain especially pertinent in the aftermath of the Cold War, as we attempt to formulate new approaches to a changed but still threatening international situation. Based on interviews with more than 100 diplomats, journalists, and scholars who have been involved with the Cambodian peace process, Michael Haas' book brings to light new information on a complex chain of events and casts doubt on official accounts of U.S. policies toward Cambodia. Haas sorts through the tangle of misinformation, anti-communist hysteria, secret operations, and other policy miscalculations that he contends were instrumental in defeating the unaligned government of Prince Sihanouk and setting the stage for the Khmer Rouge takeover and massive slaughter in Cambodia. He examines the strategic assumptions underlying U.S. efforts to sustain the Khmer Rouge after its defeat by Vietnam in 1979, and the unraveling of that policy when the unilateral withdrawal of Vietnamese troops eliminated any reasonable justification for it. Haas attributes U.S. failures in Cambodia to a combination of the idealistic desire to remake the world in a democratic image, a belief in U.S. omnipotence, and the realpolitik tradition of using power to advance U.S. commercial and security interests whenever they seem to be threatened. Through the method of options analysis, Haas proposes a model of international relations based on self-determination and democratic principles. Urging reflection on the lessons of Cambodia as policies are developed for the 1990s, this book will be important reading for diplomats, policymakers, journalists, and academics with an interest in foreign policy analysis and conflict resolution, communism, and Southeast Asia.

The Pol Pot Regime
The Pol Pot Regime

Author: Ben Kiernan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0300142994

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This edition of Ben Kiernan's account of the Cambodian revolution and genocide includes a new preface that takes the story up to 2008 and the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal. Kiernan's other books include 'Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur' and 'How Pol Pot Came to Power'.

Pol Pot
Pol Pot

Author: Philip Short

Publisher: John Murray

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 1444780301

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Pol Pot was an idealistic, reclusive figure with great charisma and personal charm. He initiated a revolution whose radical egalitarianism exceeded any other in history. But in the process, Cambodia desended into madness and his name became a byword for oppression. In the three-and-a-half years of his rule, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling peasants became a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the 'killing fields'. Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice and prosperity mutate into one of humanity's worst nightmares? Philip Short, the biographer of Mao, has spent four years travelling the length of Cambodia, interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge movement and sifting through previously closed archives. Here, the former Khmer Rouge Head of State, Pol's brother-in-law and scores of lesser figures speak for the first time at length about their beliefs and motives.

Voices from S-21
Voices from S-21

Author: David Chandler

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 052092455X

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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. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2000. 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

Genocide in Cambodia
Genocide in Cambodia

Author: Howard J. De Nike

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-05-23

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 0812205464

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The Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and aggressively pursued a policy of radical social reform that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians through mass executions and physical privation. In January 1979, the government was overthrown by former Khmer Rouge functionaries, with substantial backing from the army of Vietnam. In August of that year a special court, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal, was constituted to try two of the Khmer Rouge government's most powerful leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. The charge against them was genocide as it was defined in the United Nation's genocide convention of 1948. At the time, both men were in the Cambodian jungle leading the Khmer Rouge in a struggle to regain power; they were, therefore, tried in absentia. Genocide in Cambodia assembles documents from this historic trial and contains extensive reports from the People's Revolutionary Tribunal. The book opens with essays that discuss the nature of the primary documents, and places the trial in its historical, legal, and political context. The documents are divided into three parts: those relating to the establishment of the tribunal; those used as evidence, including statements of witnesses, investigative reports of mass grave sites, expert opinions on the social and cultural impact of the actions of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, and accounts from the foreign press; and finally the record of the trial, beginning with the prosecutor's indictment and ending with the concluding speeches by the attorneys for the defense and prosecution. The trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary was the world's first genocide trial based on United Nations's policy as well as the first trial of a head of government on a human rights-related charge. This documentary record is significant for the history of Cambodia, and it will be of the highest importance as well to the international legal and human rights communities.

Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields
Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields

Author: Kim DePaul

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780300078732

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Publisher Fact Sheet This extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts by Cambodian survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s offers searing testimony to an era of brutality, brainwashing, betrayals, starvation, & gruesome executions.

The Tragedy of Cambodian History
The Tragedy of Cambodian History

Author: David Porter Chandler

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780300057522

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The political history of Cambodia between 1945 and 1979, which culminated in the devastating revolutionary excesses of the Pol Pot regime, is one of unrest and misery. This book by David P. Chandler is the first to give a full account of this tumultuous period. Drawing on his experience as a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh, on interviews, and on archival material. Chandler considers why the revolution happened and how it was related to Cambodia's earlier history and to other events in Southeast Asia. He describes Cambodia's brief spell of independence from Japan after the end of World War II; the long and complicated rule of Norodom Sihanouk, during which the Vietnam War gradually spilled over Cambodia's borders; the bloodless coup of 1970 that deposed Sihanouk and put in power the feeble, pro-American government of Lon Nol; and the revolution in 1975 that ushered in the radical changes and horrors of Pol Pot's Communist regime. Chandler discusses how Pol Pot and his colleagues evacuated Cambodia's cities and towns, transformed its seven million people into an unpaid labor force, tortured and killed party members when agricultural quotas were unmet, and were finally overthrown in the course of a Vietnamese military invasion in 1979. His book is a penetrating and poignant analysis of this fierce revolutionary period and the events of the previous quarter-century that made it possible.

Pol Pot's Little Red Book
Pol Pot's Little Red Book

Author: Henri Locard

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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This handbook of slogans, interspersed with historical commentary and contextual analysis, describes the Khmer Rouge regime and exposes the horrific foundation upon which it constructed its reign of terror. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Phnom Penh. In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of their government, they made a tabula rasa of Cambodian society and culture, forcing the people to evacuate the cities and move to the countryside. They instituted a total collectivism based on the doctrine of "Pol Pot-ism," the Cambodian version of fundamentalist Maoism. Assembled in this collection are the sayings that make up a "newspeak" uttered by the Khmer Rouge cadres: slogans, maxims, advice, instructions, watchwords, orders, warnings, and threats. All were spoken in the name of the ominous Angkar--a faceless and lawless "Organization"--n order to indoctrinate, control, and terrorize the populace. These sayings have been collected from survivors throughout Cambodia between 1991 and 1995. They form the macabre, bare-bones skeleton of Khmer Rouge ideology.

Golden Bones
Golden Bones

Author: Sichan Siv

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0061983160

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While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls. Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand." He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.