Khmer Rouge

The true story of three western backpackers who were taken hostage in Cambodia in 1994. The Cambodian governments failed rescue attempt eventually led to tragedy and brought about the fall of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war.

While the United States battled Vietnamese Communists in the 1960s and 1970s, in neighboring Cambodia dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge declared war on their own people, enslaving and slaughtering anybody who disagreed with them. Sichan Siv knew he would soon be a target—ending up, perhaps, as one of the millions of anonymous human skeletons buried in his nation's Killing Fields—so he heeded his mother's pleas and ran.

This work tells of the events and personalities that shaped Cambodian history during the 13-year period between the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 and the signing of the 1991 peace accords that resulted in UN-administered elections. It offers a nuanced understanding of complex questions concerning human rights, economic reconstruction, institutional development and national sovereignty, issues that were framed by the legacy of the Khmer Rouge and by a Vietnamese occupation.

This pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia puts a human face on a dark period in Cambodia's history. It is the first sustained analysis of the widely held assumption that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had a centralized plan to liquidate the entire monastic order.

Follow the journey of a Khmer woman who, as a young girl, faced unending obstacles in order to survive. She saved her family from almost certain death as they escaped the Khmer Rouge regime and traveled to the Thailand border. She managed to keep her family together as a unit until they were able to seek refuge in the Philippines out of harm's way. Eight months later, she led her family to the States where they settled in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Cambodia has never recovered from its Khmer Rouge past - the genocidal regime of 1975-1979 and the following two decades of civil war ripped the country apart. This work examines Cambodian life in the aftermath, focusing on Khmer people of all walks of life and examining through their eyes key facets of Cambodian society, including the ancient Angkor legacy, relations with neighboring countries (particularly the strained ones with the Vietnamese), emerging democracy, psychology, violence, health, family, poverty, the environment, and the nation's future.

The Years of Zero—Coming of Age Under the Khmer Rouge is a survivor’s account of the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot’s sadistic and terrifying Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. It follows the author, Seng Ty, from the age of seven as he is plucked from his comfortable, middle-class home in a Phnom Penh suburb, marched along a blistering, black strip of highway into the jungle, and thrust headlong into the unspeakable barbarities of an agricultural labor camp. Seng’s mother was worked to death while his siblings succumbed to starvation.

The Khmer Rouge revolution turned Cambodia into grisly killing fields, as the Pol Pot regime murdered or starved to death a million and a half of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants.

How did Pol Pot, a tyrant comparable to Hitler and Stalin in his brutality and contempt for human life, rise to power? This authoritative book explores what happened in Cambodia from 1930 to 1975, tracing the origins and trajectory of the Cambodian Communist movement and setting the ascension of Pol Pot's genocidal regime in the context of the conflict between colonialism and nationalism.