After the Killing Fields

The story of the 25-year effort to bring to justice the architects of the Cambodian genocide For 25 years, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge have avoided responsibility for their crimes against humanity. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the Cambodian people suffered from what the author calls a 'Thirty Years War', in which one "constant, churning presence" drove the conflict: the Khmer Rouge. New findings demonstrate that the death toll was approximately 2.2 million - about a half million higher than commonly believed. Detailing the struggle to come to terms with what happened in Cambodia, Etcheson concludes that real justice is not merely elusive, but in fact may 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 Centre 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. Demonstrates that the death toll in Cambodia is significantly higher than is commonly believed Argues that upcoming trials will probably have little impact on the perpetrators Demonstrates that the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge was aware of, managed, and directed the killing Relevant to high-profile trials for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda