Khmer Rouge

Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia enacted a program of organized mass violence that resulted in the deaths of approximately one quarter of the country’s population. Over two million people died from torture, execution, disease and famine. From the commodification of the ‘killing fields’ of Choeung Ek to the hundreds of unmarked mass graves scattered across the country, violence continues to shape the Cambodian landscape.

The Chronicle of a People's War: The Military and Strategic History of the Cambodian Civil War, 1979-1991 narrates the strategic and military history of the Cambodian Civil War, especially the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), from when it deposed the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 until the political settlement in 1991.

Senator George McGovern (remember him?) publicly called for international intervention in 1978 to save Cambodia from barbarism. But most on the left were ambiguous (the stories beggar belief...give the revolutionaries time...they will grow out of their wildness). Cambodia was invisible in the world consciousness at the time - the west wanted nothing but peace and quiet after the Vietnam tumult.

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.

Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates perpetrators to kill.

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.

A lyrical journey of self-acceptance as the author questions and comes to term with the Killing Fields and other genocides. This journey involves traveling inside oneself and to a distant past to discuss what it means to be Khmer, a hyphenated American, and different misconceptions about Cambodians and Cambodia, a place that still haunts and inspires her.

On April 12, 1975, just days before Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized control of Phnom Penh, Vincent's father missed a chance to take his family and leave Cambodia on a US Marine Corp helicopter. Had they boarded the chopper, Vincent would not have had to endure four years of brutality and starvation.

A documentary account of the treatment of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, written by a keen observor of character and events. Life changed radically for the 15-year-old narrator when the regime took control, turning lives and values upside down. Anyone with education was marked for death; the people of the cities were driven into the countryside to a life of forced agricultural labor under harsh conditions. Positions of responsibility were given to the uneducated and unskilled.

The Khmer Rouge: Ideology, Militarism, and the Revolution That Consumed a Generation examines the entire organizational life of the Khmer Rouge, looking at it from both a societal and organizational perspective. The chapters cover each pivotal period in the history of the Khmer Rouge, explaining how extreme militarism, organizational dynamics, leadership policies, and international context all conspired to establish, maintain, and destroy the Khmer Rouge as an organization.