Will There Be a Trial for the Khmer Rouge?

2000 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Chandler

The scale of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is difficult to deal with (over one million Cambodians lost their lives), but efforts are now underway to bring at least some of the surviving leaders of the regime to justice. This essay explores the reasons for delay of the trials, citing:The absence of international precedents prior to the 1990s;The show trial of two Khmer Rouge leaders in 1979; andThe obstacles to a trial arising from geopolitical considerations in the 1980s (in which some powers now calling for a trial, including the United States, were effectively allied with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh).In the 1990s, following the Paris Peace Accords and the brief UN protectorate over Cambodia, demands for a trial came from overseas and from Cambodian human rights groups. The Cambodian regime considered the show trials of 1979 sufficient, however, and in 1998 Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen urged his compatriots to “dig a hole and bury the past.” Eager to regain foreign support for his regime after several brutal incidents in which political opponents were killed, Hun Sen has more recently agreed to limited international participation in a trial. A procedure targeting a few Khmer Rouge leaders seems likely in 2000, but Cambodian government control of the proceedings means that nothing like a truth commission or a wide-ranging inquiry will result.

2008 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 373-389
Author(s):  
Nina H.B. Jørgensen

AbstractThe world has witnessed many atrocities since the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge, marched into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and unleashed a regime of terror of more than three and a half years on the Cambodian people in which an estimated quarter of the population perished. However, the fate that befell this small South-East Asian nation continues to grip and challenge the imagination. Perhaps it is the notion of the State turning on its own people on such an unprecedented scale that is so difficult to fathom. Perhaps it is the tranquil, smiling populace, forging a space in the modern era against the proud backdrop of the ancient Angkorian temples that makes such a dark recent history so improbable. Or perhaps it is the scales of justice, finally weighing in, more than thirty years after the crimes in defiance of donor countries' ‘tribunal fatigue’, that have refocused the world's attention.The Khmer Rouge takeover had been preceded by a struggle for power which saw Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had abdicated and governed Cambodia since independence in 1953, overthrown by Prime Minister Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak on 17 March 1970. The new government was allied to the United States in the Vietnam War, fuelling Khmer Rouge resentment as well as that of Sihanouk who aligned himself with the communists. The Khmer Rouge gradually consolidated its power and control of territory, and when the time was seen to be ripe to institute the planned nationwide ‘agrarian dictatorship’, it easily overpowered the weak and corrupt Lon Nol government.


Plaridel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Annette Hamilton

Cambodia’s cinema history is strange and surprising. Popular films from France and the United States circulated through the Kingdom during the French colonial period. The 1950s and 60s saw extensive local production with the enthusiastic support of King Norodom Sihanouk, himself a passionate film-maker, but the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) destroyed most of the existing material, including hundreds of feature films, raw footage and countless other ephemeral documents. In 2006, after representations by film-maker Rithy Panh and others, the Bophana Audio-Visual Research Centre was established in Phnom Penh to comb the world for every fragment of film and audio material relating to Cambodia’s history in order to reproduce it in an accessible digitized form. The archival preservation and duplication has continued apace. However the ethical use of these materials presents challenges. Contemporary documentary makers and digital enthusiasts frequently use fragmentary footage to support their political or historical interpretations without attribution or context. This paper discusses a propaganda film featuring the former King Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique shot in1973 in collaboration with the Communist Chinese, the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. Short scenes and extracts from this film circulate online and appear in many documentaries. The “archive effect” of this footage raises questions about the source and circulation of archival images with significant historical and political consequences.


1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Sidney Weintraub

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney requested the opening of trade talks with the United States on September 26,1985. He did not use the words “free trade,” but that was the gist of the request. He explicitly rejected a common market or a customs union and implicitly dismissed the sectoral free-trade approach. The US administration responded positively and requested permission from the Congress to open negotiations. Negotiating teams have been appointed and discussions are taking place. All the actors noted that the negotiations will be difficult and may last several years. After more than a decade of avoiding the issue, Canada has acted. The context is complex because of growing US protectionism, including concern over certain imports from Canada, especially lumber. Fear of this protectionism was one reason for the Canadian decision. Another was concern about the future of Canada's economy. The Canadian economy has performed poorly for much of the past ten years.


Author(s):  
Syed Akbar Hyder

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was one of modern South Asia’s most renowned poets, his work a favorite not only of first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but of millions. Over the course of his later life, he had to navigate the complex realities of partition, a condition that refracted the larger bi-polar Cold War world in which he found himself. He raised his voice against illegal occupations, confronted religious charlatans, and protested the rule of military dictators. He was incarcerated in Pakistan, the country he embraced, while simultaneously impacting popular culture in neighboring India. He received the Soviet Union’s highest literary award even as he was once denied a visa to the United States. Through all of this, Faiz spoke of ways in which to rise from the parochial human to the universal being. This essay will focus on the modes of Faiz’s discourse that connect his present with liberatory moments of the past; in turn, this connects his personal struggle with those of everyday people, humanity writ large. The paper will draw from discourses of world citizenship that are embedded in Islamic mysticism (Sufism) to show how these discourses helped frame Faiz’s outlook and his critique of a world defined by negating opposites.


2002 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 131-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Schabas

Probably more has happened in the past five years to the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide than in the previous 50, that is, in the half-century following its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948.Indeed, for the first five decades of its existence, the Convention was largely ignored by lawyers, viewed by most of them — as Georg Schwar-zenberger famously remarked — to be ‘unnecessary when applicable and inapplicable when necessary’. Over the years there had been attempts to apply the ‘g-word’ to a wide range of atrocities and gross violations of human rights, including those of China in Tibet, of Iraq against the Kurds, of the United States in Vietnam as well as towards its African-American and aboriginal populations, of Pakistan in Bangladesh, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Israel in Lebanon. But in each of these cases, some interpretative flair was required in order to stretch the definition to fit the crimes, and the efforts were not always very convincing. In 1990 scholars Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn wrote that ‘the wording of the Convention is so restrictive that not one of the genocidal killings committed since its adoption is covered by it’.


Author(s):  
Ella Inglebret ◽  
Amy Skinder-Meredith ◽  
Shana Bailey ◽  
Carla Jones ◽  
Ashley France

The authors in this article first identify the extent to which research articles published in three American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) journals included participants, age birth to 18 years, from international backgrounds (i.e., residence outside of the United States), and go on to describe associated publication patterns over the past 12 years. These patterns then provide a context for examining variation in the conceptualization of ethnicity on an international scale. Further, the authors examine terminology and categories used by 11 countries where research participants resided. Each country uses a unique classification system. Thus, it can be expected that descriptions of the ethnic characteristics of international participants involved in research published in ASHA journal articles will widely vary.


Crisis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shannon Lange ◽  
Courtney Bagge ◽  
Charlotte Probst ◽  
Jürgen Rehm

Abstract. Background: In recent years, the rate of death by suicide has been increasing disproportionately among females and young adults in the United States. Presumably this trend has been mirrored by the proportion of individuals with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether the proportion of individuals in the United States with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide differed by age and/or sex, and whether this proportion has increased over time. Method: Individual-level data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 2008–2017, were used to estimate the year-, age category-, and sex-specific proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. We then determined whether this proportion differed by age category, sex, and across years using random-effects meta-regression. Overall, age category- and sex-specific proportions across survey years were estimated using random-effects meta-analyses. Results: Although the proportion was found to be significantly higher among females and those aged 18–25 years, it had not significantly increased over the past 10 years. Limitations: Data were self-reported and restricted to past-year suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Conclusion: The increase in the death by suicide rate in the United States over the past 10 years was not mirrored by the proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide during this period.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-165

By late August, the crisis that had been brewing between the prime minister and president came to a head; Abbas's government, though backed by the United States, had been undermined during its four months in office by deterioration on the ground and continuing tensions with Arafat, which centered in particular on control of the Palestinian security forces. Abbas's letter of resignation, published in al-Hayat on 9 September, was translated in Mideast Mirror the same day.


Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document