The story of the 25 year effort to bring to justice the architects of the Cambodian genocide, this study explains why those who orchestrated the murder of 2.2 million people continue to escape responsibility.
For 25 years, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge have avoided responsibility for their crimes against humanity. For 30 long years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the Cambodian people suffered from a war that has no name. Arguing that this series of hostilities, which included both civil and external war, amounted to one long conflict—The Thirty Years War—Craig Etcheson demonstrates that there was one constant, churning presence that drove that conflict: the Khmer Rouge. New findings demonstrate that the death toll was approximately 2.2 million people—about half a million more than commonly believed. Detailing the struggle of coming to terms with what happened in Cambodia, Etcheson concludes that real justice is not merely elusive but may, in fact, be impossible for crimes on the scale of genocide.
This book details the work of a unique partnership, Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program, which laid the evidentiary basis for the forthcoming Khmer Rouge tribunal and also played a key role in the international advocacy necessary for the tribunal's creation. It presents the information collected through the Mass Grave Mapping Project of the Documentation Center of Cambodia and reveals that the pattern of killing was relatively uniform throughout the country. Despite regular denial of knowledge of the mass killing among the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge, Etcheson demonstrates that they were not only aware of it, but that they personally managed and directed the killing.
Reviews
"[E]tcheson's great contribution is his orderly, detailed relating of DC-Cam's postwar research into the organization and location of mass murder as well as international legal efforts to bring surviving perpetrators to account."—MultiCultural Review
"More than 25 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, those responsible for genocide and human rights violations in Cambodia have yet to answer for their crimes. Why has justice for the Cambodian people been so elusive? Etcheson argues that a culture of impunity persists in Cambodia, and that national reconciliation and healing will require a properly conducted war crimes tribunal, perhaps overseen by the UN. The author describes the efforts of the Documentation Center of Cambodia in amassing proof that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge ordered mass executions throughout Cambodia during the 1975-79 regime. But the abuses began earlier and continue to the present. Moreover, no one in Cambodia's political elite is completely untainted. Etcheson's historical and legal concerns are intertwined, since the evidence from documents, interviews, and eyewitness accounts, backed up by physical evidence from mass graves, is meant to combat the denial syndrome that is part of Cambodia's tragic and apparently intractable situation. These essays will appeal mainly to specialists in Cambodian political history and international politics, as well as to other readers interested in legal remedies for political violence and genocide. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty."—Choice
"After the Killing Fields is a thorough description of the step-by-step accumulation of evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes."—Times Literary Supplement
Endorsements
"How did the Khmer Rouge get away with genocide? Craig Etcheson's After the Killing Fields answers this deceptively simple question. Etcheson has mapped killing fileds, interviewed the killers themselves, and his decades of empirical research in Cambodia have endowed him with refreshing common sense. After the Killing Fieldsshould be mandatory reading for anyone interested in Cambodia and international law."—Peter Maguire, author of Law and War: An American Story and Facing Death in Cambodia
"Etcheson's absorbing study reflects almost a quarter century of sustained and fruitful work on Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (1975-1979) and on what has happened in Cambodia since then. Etcheson draws on extensive field-work, archival research and his own analytical skills to bring the horrors of the Khmer Rouge into focus and to make readers aware of the many faceted, saddening aftermath of that murderous regime. At a time when trial for at least some of the Khmer Rouge leaders seems finally in sight, After the Killing Fields is a timely and sobering study of the vitality of realpolitik, the need for justice in Cambodia, the pains of memory, and the fragility of reconciliation."—David Chandler, Author of Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
