Khmer Rouge

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.

This fascinating book recounts the remarkable tale of a career U.N. official caught in the turmoil of international and domestic politics swirling around Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. First as a member of the U.N. transitional authority and then as a personal envoy to the U.N. secretary-general, Benny Widyono re-creates the fierce battles for power centering on King Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Chanrithy Him felt compelled to tell of surviving life under the Khmer Rouge in a way "worthy of the suffering which I endured as a child."

In the Cambodian proverb, "when broken glass floats" is the time when evil triumphs over good. That time began in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia and the Him family began their trek through the hell of the "killing fields."

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.

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.

Work hard. Raise children. Retire. And in between all that, have a little fun, eat good food, and travel. A normal life, for normal people.
For Kim and Helen Chuor, normal was what they desperately sought, without the in between stuff. During the five traumatic years of starvation and deprivation at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, all they wanted was the basics: food, a home, their family and most of all, safety.

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s.

In this clear and concise volume, author David Chandler provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation.

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia—a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge—no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) since 1962 and as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), he has been widely blamed for trying to destroy Cambodian society.

Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen is the biography of the Cambodian leader whose private life has been a closely guarded secret. Fully updated and revised from the authors’ first edition (Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia, published 1999), this volume is based on recently declassified archival documents and hours of new interviews with Hun Sen, his wife Bun Rany, son Hun Manet, other family members and associates.