Ben Kiernan

The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975-79, and East Timor, 1975-80

In this research note Ben Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp), scrutinizes estimates of the number of people killed in the two most recent cases of genocidal mass murder in Southeast Asia: Cambodia and East Timor. He concludes that the two cases were proportionately comparable, though many more people died in Cambodia. Each tragedy took the lives of over one-fifth of the population.

Introduction: Conflict in Cambodia, 1945-2002

Before World War II, Cambodia was a heavily taxed, relatively quiet corner of the French empire. Its population was 80 percent Khmer, 80 percent Buddhist, and 80 percent rice-growing peasants. Up to a fifth of the population were ethnic and religious minorities: Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Chams worked mostly in rubber plantations or as clerks, shopkeepers, and fisherfolk, while a score of small ethnolinguistic groups, such as the Jarai, Tampuan, and Kreung, populated the upland northeast. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the reimposition by force of French colonial control of Indochina provoked armed nationalist resistance by both Viet Minh and Khmer Issarak (“independence”) forces. Protracted anti-colonial conflict in both Vietnam and Cambodia fostered the emergence by 1951 of a Vietnamese-sponsored Cambodian communist movement, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which won increasing though not unchallenged preeminence among Issarak nationalists contesting French control of their country. KPRP members, led by former Buddhist monks, slowly gained leadership of the nationwide Khmer Issarak Association, which adopted for its flag a silhouette of Angkor Wat’s five towers on a red background. One faction of the independence movement initially called itself “Democratic Kampuchea” — the title later used by the Pol Pot regime as the official name of its Khmer Rouge state. An anti-KPRP grouping used for its flag a three-towered motif of Angkor, the future flag of Democratic Kampuchea. Members of another anticommunist splinter group carried out racist massacres of ethnic Vietnamese in 1949, and of Chams in 1952. Saloth Sar, then a student in Paris calling himself the “Original Khmer,” returned home in 1953 and briefly served in the communist-led Issarak ranks. He later assumed the nom de guerre Pol Pot. Cr itical Asian Studies

Cover-up and Denial of Genocide: Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines

Of an estimated population in 1788 of over half a million, fewer than 50,000 Australian Aborigines survived by 1900. Most perished from introduced diseases, but possibly 20,000 Aborigines were killed by British troops, police, and settlers in warfare and massacres accompanying their dispossession. In a neighboring island a century later, Indonesias invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999 took more than 120,000 lives, out of a population of 650,000. Australias public and press were largely sympathetic to East Timors right to self-determination. But a small circle of publicists and commentators, favoring the Suharto regimes anticommunism, denounced reports of the ongoing Timor tragedy and encouraged Canberras diplomatic support for Jakarta. Some of these same Australians also opposed the gathering movement for Aboriginal land rights and reconciliation. Legal victories won by Aborigines in the 1990s, including High Court judgments and a 1997 Human Rights Commission finding that they had been subjected to genocide, exerted pressure on conservative prime minister John Howard, provoking a campaign by his supporters to deny that genocide had occurred. A common feature of these two cases of Australian genocide denial was “right-wing” refusal to concede legitimacy to causes enlisting “left-wing” support.

The Cambodian agony

In the summer of 2008, a conflict that appeared to have begun in the breakaway Georgian territory of South Ossetia rapidly escalated to become the most significant crisis in European security in a decade. The implications of the Russian-Georgian war will be understood differently depending on ones narrative of what transpired and perspective on the broader context. This book is designed to present the facts about the events of August 2008 along with comprehensive coverage of the background to those events. It brings together a wealth of expertise on the South Caucasus and Russian foreign policy, with contributions by Russian, Georgian, European, and American experts on the region.

Orphans of genocide: The Cham muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot

Few regimes in history, even those led by atheists, have successfully managed to abolish religion. In Pol Pots Democratic Kampuchea (DK)from 1975 to 1979, all religious practice was prohibited and...

Kampuchea's ethnic Chinese under pol pot: A case of systematic social discrimination

(1986). Kampucheas ethnic Chinese under pol pot: A case of systematic social discrimination. Journal of Contemporary Asia: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 18-29.

The Specter of Genocide: The Study of Mass Murder and Genocide

The twentieth century has been well described as an “age of extremes.” There were two world wars, major revolutions, colonial and anticolonial conflicts, and other catastrophes. All too often mass murder of noncombatant civilians marred these conflicts. The murders were usually state-sponsored or officially sanctioned. Indeed, by midcentury the pattern struck some scholars as so alarming that they began groping for new words to describe it. The Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin introduced the concept of genocide in a small book published during the Second World War. Later he helped prod the United Nations into formulating its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The convention defined genocide broadly as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts included killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and also deliberately inflicting conditions on a people such as “to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The convention condemned measures like the prevention of births so that a people would die out and forcible transfer of a groups children to another group. Because the Genocide Convention is a good starting point for discussion of the phenomenon, we analyze both its nature and its implications.

The Cambodian crisis, 1990–1992: The UN plan, the Khmer Rouge, and the State of Cambodia

AbstractThree factors explain the dramatic acceleration of the Cambodian peace negotiations from June to October 1991. A long-term factor was the worlds continuing isolation of the Phnom Penh regi...

William shawcross, declining Cambodia

AbstractIt is not often that an entire group of people change their minds on a foreign policy issue, at least within a short space of time. On Kampuchea, this did occur around 1978, when most of th...

Vietnam and the governments and people of Kampuchea

AbstractIn December 1978, the Far Eastern Economic Review discussed the prospects of the newly-fanned United Front for National Salvation (UFNS) in Kampuchea led by Heng Samrin. It quoted Western i...