Father searches for truth
OFF a dusty track in Trapeang Chranieng village lies a half-finished Buddhist pagoda, its unpainted walls still exposed to the mid-afternoon sun. Like many across Cambodia, the new building – as well as a nearby shrine, built in 2007 – is dedicated to the spirits of those killed in the village while it was under...
Revisiting Lon Nol’s Cambodia
Forty years on, former participants reflect on the country’s star-crossed republican experiment
In the shadow of Vine Mountain
With an Australian inquest set to revisit the killing of three Western tourists by Khmer Rouge in 1994, former cadres in Kampot reflect on the events that led to the men’s capture and killing
Corruption may undermine Khmer Rouge justice
ON 17 February, a gaunt former school teacher walked into a packed courtroom in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, flanked by lawyers and lit by the flashes of the international press corps. Amid the procedural banalities of the ensuing hearing, an observer could be forgiven for mistaking the momentous nature of the event: more...
Time running out for Khmer Rouge justice
THE crimes of the Khmer Rouge are well known. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s regime of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ turned Cambodia into a ‘land of blood and tears’ — a vast agrarian social experiment that enslaved the population and led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. After nearly three decades of legal...
More Thoughts on International Justice
After getting myself up to date with the slow progress of the Khmer Rouge trials, I’ve put together a new article for the London-based libertarian magazine Spiked Online, which has since been published and ‘syndicated’ (i.e. copied and pasted) to a number of Cambodian news blogs. In my piece, I take a critical look at...
Cambodia: whose tribunal is it anyway?
The West is turning the trial of surviving members of the Khmer Rouge – its former allies – into a piece of self-promoting political theatre
Trying the Khmer Rouge
In between lounging in the backyard and assaulting Robert Fisk’s brick-like The Great War For Civilisation, I’ve been immersing myself in readings about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal — scheduled, after nearly two decades of diplomatic evasion and acrimonious negotiations, to begin operation sometime in 2008. But after again reading about the tribunal’s tortuous gestation, I’m...
REVIEW: ‘Khmers Stand Up!’ by Justin Corfield
Prior to my going to intern at the Phnom Penh Post in March, I’ve assembled a long list of Cambodia-related reading material, covering politics, history, language, anthropology and travel writing. The first cab off the rank was Khmers Stand Up! by Justin Corfield, a history of the right-wing Khmer Republic that lasted from the deposition...
