Overview

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.

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9780275985134

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Reviews

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

<p> [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. - <p>MultiCultural Review

<p> [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. - <p>MultiCultural Review

Author Information

Craig Etcheson is a principal founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. He works with governments, international organizations, and NGOs in the search for ways to help heal nations that are recovering from genocide and other extreme violence. He has been a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of several book-length treatises on extreme conflict, including The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (1984).

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