Twenty-five years after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime, not one Khmer Rouge leader has stood in court to answer for their terrible crimes. Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis show how governments that often speak the language of human rights shielded Pol Pot and his lieutenants from prosecution during the 1980s. After Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, the US and UK governments backed the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and approved the re-supply of Pol Pot’s army in Thailand. The authors explain how, in the late 1990s, the forgotten genocide became the subject of serious UN inquiry for the first time. Finally, in 2003, the UN and the Cambodian government agreed to hold a trial in Phnom Penh conducted jointly by international jurists and Cambodian
This Khmer Translation is dedicated to Vann Nath, famous Cambodian painter and one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng prison, who died on 5 September 2011, just as this book was in the final stages of production. The cover is Vann Nath’s untitled last major work depicting Duch as he faces the consequences of his crimes, sitting in a field of skulls of the victims with the judgment of the Trial Camber of the ECCC in front of him. (Vann Nath’s family kindly gave permission to us to reproduce this work. Photo courtesy of Jim Mizerski)”