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The single most sensitive issue facing Cambodia today concerns the question of accountability for the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. The matter of genocide justice in the country is not merely a legal or political question, but also personal. Public opinion surveys suggest that the overwhelming majority of Cambodians want the Khmer Rouge leadership to be prosecuted for their crimes. To date, however, the country's political elite has been very reluctant to grant this wish, in part because nobody has completely clean hands. Killings during the Khmer Rouge regime constituted war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. Yet 25 years after the regime responsible for these crimes was ousted from power, no senior leader of that regime has yet faced justice before a court of law. One reason is that the politics of achieving genocide justice in Cambodia have proven to be particularly intractable.

During 1975–1979, under the Khmer Rouge regime, over 1.8 million people died due to hunger, disease or murder. Though there were numerous deaths even before the Khmer Rouge regime, these have been overshadowed by the crises happening throughout it. Both politics and economics became unstable during these periods, which resulted in a humanitarian emergency: a profound social crisis in which a large number of people die and suffer from war, disease, hunger, and displacement. However, even after the Khmer Rouge regime, the humanitarian emergency continued, due to the vulnerability of the society to man-made and natural disasters. This continuing crisis of Cambodia is due to its overpoliticized state, which stemmed from the structural weakness of the society as demonstrated by its history. With its ruling elite and Cambodia's autocracy, corruption persisted and factionalism weakened the nation's ability to fight war and retain its basic social services.

This is a study about how the killing of almost two million people by the Khmer Rouge brought about the great importance now attached to an annual ritual that emphasizes assisting the dead in their after-lives by transferring merit for their benefit. The chapter provides accounts of how ritual performances on behalf of the dead are performed at major Buddhist temples in Phnom Penh as well as in the rural areas of Cambodia. There are extensive interviews with the relatives of survivors.

This chapter provides an overview of the geography, people, and history of O'Thmaa, a village nestled between the Cardamom Mountains to the west and the Elephant Mountains to the southeast. Today the region is accessible by a road, yet by Cambodian standards it is still “remote,” “far away,” and “in the mountains and forest.” The Cambodians of the plains consider the place uninhabitable and dangerous; for the locals who live here, it is simply their milieu. Between 2002 and 2003, O'Thmaa village had a total population of 175, composed of forty households with an average of 4.4 persons per household. The village is located in the commune known as Prei Phnom. This chapter discusses the villagers' history, both locally and contextualized within the wider history of Cambodia. It shows that the Khmer Rouge revolution and civil war ended much later for the people in both Prei Phnom and the adjacent commune, Doung Srae, than it did for most Cambodians.

This chapter analyses the key weaknesses of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). It begins with an overview of the Cambodian conflict setting and the establishment of UNTAC. It then focuses on the local behaviour that most significantly determined the operation’s effectiveness: Khmer Rouge non-compliance with its ceasefire, disarmament, and demobilization obligations. The subsequent section looks beyond the structural constraints of mandates and resources to analyse UNTAC’s power and, significantly, to critically examine its limits. While the absence of an enforcement mandate and the use of poorly designed sanctions limited the operation’s coercive power, the chapter questions the common assumption that a more coercive posture means a more powerful peace operation.

This chapter studies the relation between state-sanctioned ideology and daily life. It analyzes the combination between daily terror and music, song, and dance in Cambodian genocide. It notes that during this genocidal period, the Khmer Rouge banned older, “counterrevolutionary” aesthetic practices, and created hundreds of new songs and dances in order to promote revolutionary change and encourage the destruction of the regime's enemies.

This chapter begins with a description of Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek reproduce master narratives of Vietnamese liberation. Both sites, which were rehabilitated and curated during the early years of the Vietnamese-ruled People’s Republic of Kampuchea, continue to engage a memory politics that obscures and makes unfeasible collective commemoration and diasporic reconciliation. The chapter addresses the problem of atrocity tourism, wherein former Khmer Rouge sites have since become popular destination points for a profitable, foreign-driven economy.

Chapter 3 examines US involvement in the establishment and operations of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Nearly twenty years after the Cambodian genocide, and years of domestic pressure, Congress made it US policy to investigate the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and help establish a tribunal. The decision was made before the Cambodian government and UN had come to that conclusion, however, and a decade of negotiations ensued passed before a tribunal was created. The first US War Crimes ambassador, David Scheffer, was determined to see the court established, and encouraged a number of compromises in order to get the court up and running. When the court was finally established, Congress refused to fund it, primarily because one well-placed staffer on the Hill did not trust Cambodia’s prime minister. Eventually, this position shifted and the United States provided some funds to address some of the problems the court faced.

This chapter examines a different logic guiding the strategy of subversion: tie-down. This strategy is evident in Thailand’s subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The case traces how Thai fears of Vietnamese aggression after the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia influenced Bangkok to support the Khmer Rouge to sow chaos inside Cambodia. An interesting and important feature of the Cambodia case is the “tabula rasa”-like state of the country after the Vietnamese imposed a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. That is, although the Vietnamese defeated Cambodia’s former leaders, upon victory neither Vietnam nor its new puppet regime exercised any meaningful degree of state authority. Nor was there any state to govern due to the Khmer Rouge’s devastation of the country. This blank-slate-like feature mitigates concerns about reverse causality and the influence of initial levels of within-country variation in state authority, and therefore allows the chapter to draw more valid inferences about the effect of Thai subversion on Vietnamese efforts to consolidate state authority in Cambodia. As with the previous chapter, this in-depth case study provides a look at the effects of subversion on state authority in a more micro way.

This chapter studies the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which greatly desacralized and overturned all aspects of social life, such as gender relations and family. It looks at a Buddhist-Khmer culture that was based on ritual and political subordinated tempered by the Khmer-Buddhist emphasis on kindness, mutuality, and compassion. The first section is on refugee studies and the concept of the human, while the second section looks at the air attacks during the 1970s and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the armed forces of Pol Pot. A description of Cambodia before and during the Pol Pot regime is also provided in this chapter.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Khmer Rouge regime, which pursued an untenable agricultural revolution and which was also determined to eradicate any signs of a Western influence. The Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia, Democratic Kampuchea and dismantled centuries-old traditions and prerevolutionary socioeconomic infrastructures. This book focuses on both collected and collective memorialization, beginning with author James Young’s examination of Holocaust memorials and remembrance. It investigates how Cambodian American cultural producers have rearticulated and reimagined the Killing Fields era using three distinct and unfixed modes of negation: dominant-held erasures, refugee-oriented ruptures, and juridical open-endedness.

This chapter presents an overview of the methods and sources used in victim estimation for the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cambodia and discusses major reasons for differences among the existing estimates. The 2010 estimate of the BH death toll produced under the auspices of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is discussed. Suggestions for selecting the most reliable methods are offered and justified. For low-death-toll conflicts and countries with good availability of individual level sources on war deaths, such as Bosnia, empirical counting combined with (MSE) undercount estimation is very reliable. Extrapolation of random samples is less reliable owing to massive and complex population movements. For high-death-toll conflicts and countries like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where statistical sources on the population are dramatically lacking, the best approach must always be proposed based on realities of the particular conflict studied.

This chapter discusses the concept of trust as well as attempts to recover trust after radical distrust swept O'Thmaa and its neighboring communities from the civil war years through the period of Democratic Kampuchea and into the 1980s and 1990s. It first provides a theoretical background on the notion of trust before turning to the ethnography of trust and distrust in Southeast Asia. It then explains how the intrinsic interconnections between trust and moral and social order made trust the object of the Khmer Rouge's vehement attack, in part by seeking to expunge even—and especially—the most intimate expressions of trust in the sphere of family and kinship relations. It also examines the ways that the people of O'Thmaa are trying to rebuild trust in the moral/social order and personal trust with each other while contending with the residue of distrust left by the Khmer Rouge conflict. Finally, it considers how sentiments of trust and distrust are understood and mobilized by villagers in response to sweeping social changes.

This chapter discusses the stories of Cambodians in Hawaiʻi. Their story is in large part the story of war and of refugees, uprooted and displaced from their homeland. However, it is also the story of tremendous resilience, courage, hope, and renewal. The narrative of Cambodians in Hawaiʻi is unique and heretofore has been largely untold. Rather than arriving as explorers or plantation workers, as did many other immigrants to Hawaiʻi, most Cambodians came, as one respondent put it, “either by accident or by luck, depending upon how you look at it.” Indeed, of the mass exodus of refugees, few made it to Hawaiʻi.

This chapter identifies parallels between Buddhism and Khmer Communism and provides an overview of the nature of Khmer Rouge ideology. It considers the communist distaste against the tenets of Buddhism, citing the ways in which Buddhist concepts have eroded the progress that the communists strive for, such as the monks' lack of productivity or the concept of karma encouraging passivity among the populace. Yet at the same time there has been some acceptance of Buddhist values and moralism among communist ranks. After discussing these parallels, the chapter attempts to take a middle path that focuses on both external and indigenous factors that had shaped the uniquely virulent form of communism displayed during the Democratic Kampuchea period.

Chapter 8 discusses the impact of the Khmer Rouge regime on the people of Cambodia and the importance of documenting the evidence of violence. This study focuses on the important work being done at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center analyzing the skeletal remains of the victims. In particular, a recent study performed on a sample of Khmer Rouge victims is discussed and, through analysis of the perimortem trauma, confirms eyewitness accounts that blunt force trauma to the base of the skull was often utilized to execute the victims.

This chapter focuses on the manner in which Buddhist practice was restricted and finally extinguished by the Khmer Rouge. At the local level, policies were implemented in one of two ways, either dogmatically and with ill-considered fervor or in ways that still left scope for determined individuals, sometimes with the connivance of sympathetic officials, to maintain a minimal level of religiosity. In the case of a very limited number of courageous elderly monks and laypeople, living the life of a white-robed ascetic became an option, if only for a short period. A slightly larger group resolutely confronted their terrors and performed devotions in secret. But by far and away the largest proportion of previously active Buddhists rapidly and completely abandoned any semblance of the religious life.

In this chapter, the author continues with the story of Ta Kam, whose moral ignorance was allegedly the reason for his betrayal of his neighbors and extended kin during the Khmer Rouge era. Ta Kam's case is emblematic in a number of ways. According to O'Thmaa villagers, Ta Kam's generation committed bad deeds against one another, but he was seen as the sole representative of those deeds. The author considers the motivations that villagers ascribe for Ta Kam's actions and juxtaposes them with his own story. In particular, she examines the choices and decisions of Ta Kam in the civil war years prior to the formal establishment of Democratic Kampuchea. She also discusses the subject of moral judgment as well as the four salient themes of face, patronage, merit, and sacrifice, confining her analysis to Buddhism as it is locally practiced and understood.

This chapter first surveys the close historical ties between the governments of China and Cambodia, as well as between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). It then presents data on Cambodia’s dependence on Chinese “aid” and other forms of capital, including foreign direct investment (FDI). It argues that both the relatively high levels of Chinese funding as well as the “no strings attached” nature of that funding, which lacks the conditions for political and economic reforms often attached to foreign aid by other governments and multilateral institutions, provide additional leverage for China over Hun Sen’s government. The chapter shows how China uses this leverage both to help its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) overcome the high risk in Cambodia’s investment environment for their very specific (immobile) assets and to gain the support of the Cambodian government on issues vital to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea. The chapter specifically analyses cases of Chinese investments in Cambodian hydropower projects and shows how Chinese influence over the Cambodian government helps overcome domestic opposition to these projects and secures long-term guarantees for the profitability of investments in this sector.

In this prologue, the author narrates her tour of the sites that comprised the old Cambodian village of O'Thmaa on the final days of her fieldwork, which formed the basis of this book. Accompanied by a neighbor named Pu Thon, she went on to see the original village's four parts, each containing a group of households whose members were related to one another by birth or marriage. The four parts formed a loose arc that together made up O'Thmaa village. Some of the houses belonged to Khmer Rouge soldiers and their families. Pu Thon spoke about the calamitous events that destroyed the O'Thmaa village in the early 1970s, during the time of the Khmer Rouge revolution and civil war. The author also reflects on how she was able to gain the trust of Pu Thon, as well as others in the village, who at first could not understand why she was there and what she was doing.