After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide

Craig Etcheson

Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005 - Political Science - 256 pages

For 25 years, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge have avoided responsibility for their crimes against humanity. For 30 long years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the Cambodian people suffered from a war that has no name. Arguing that this series of hostilities, which included both civil and external war, amounted to one long conflict--The Thirty Years War--Craig Etcheson demonstrates that there was one constant, churning presence that drove that conflict: the Khmer Rouge. New findings demonstrate that the death toll was approximately 2.2 million people--about half a million more than commonly believed. Detailing the struggle of coming to terms with what happened in Cambodia, Etcheson concludes that real justice is not merely elusive but may, in fact, be impossible for crimes on the scale of genocide.

This book details the work of a unique partnership, Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program, which laid the evidentiary basis for the forthcoming Khmer Rouge tribunal and also played a key role in the international advocacy necessary for the tribunal's creation. It presents the information collected through the Mass Grave Mapping Project of the Documentation Center of Cambodia and reveals that the pattern of killing was relatively uniform throughout the country. Despite regular denial of knowledge of the mass killing among the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge, Etcheson demonstrates that they were not only aware of it, but that they personally managed and directed the killing.

Contents

• The Thirty Years War: 1
• A Desperate Time: 13
• After the Peace: 39
• Documenting Mass Murder: 53
• Centralized Terror: 77
• Terror in the East: 87
• Digging in the Killing Fields: 107
• The Persistence of Impunity: 129
• The Politics of Genocide Justice: 141
• Challenging the Culture of Impunity: 167
• Notes: 191
• Selected Bibliography: 229
• Index: 245

Popular passages

Page 241 - Law on the Establishment of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea ("the Law") aimed at bringing that Law into conformity with the Agreement.

Page 243 - Report of the Secretary- General on the Establishment of a Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Page 242 - Report of the Group of Experts for Cambodia Established Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 52/135...

Page 242 - Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 40 of the Covenant — Initial reports of States parties due in 1979: note by the Secretary- General . CCPR/C/7 — -Provisional agenda and annotations — Sixth session.

About the author

Craig Etcheson is a principal founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. He works with governments, international organizations, and NGOs in the search for ways to help heal nations that are recovering from genocide and other extreme violence. He has been a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of several book-length treatises on extreme conflict, including The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (1984).

Bibliographic information

• Title: After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide; Praeger Security International
• Author: Craig Etcheson
• Contributor: Greenwood Press (Westport, Conn.)
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005
• ISBN: 027598513X, 9780275985134
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / Civil Rights