Getting Away With Genocide : Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge

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 lawyers and judges. Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis reveal why it took 18 years for the UN to recognise the crimes against humanity that took place under the Killing Fields regime. They assess the prospects for the tribunal that could embarrass some former world leaders and a number of governments.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices