Download or read book Escape from Democratic Kampuchea written by Dr. Seiha Chea and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir recalls his traumatic experiences under the genocidal regime, which unfold like scenes of a fast-paced thriller. Dr. Chea is now retired and lives with his family in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
Download or read book Escaping the Khmer Rouge written by Chileng Pa and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia for three years, eight months and twenty days. After overthrowing Lon Nol in April 1975 and establishing a so-called Democratic Kampuchea, the Communist-sponsored government was responsible for the deaths of as many as two million people, almost one-third of the country's population. Here, Chileng Pa vividly recalls life under the Cambodian Communists. Attempting to conceal his identity as a policeman for the previous government, Chileng changed his name and moved his family to the village of Prayap, near the Vietnamese border. In April of 1977, after two years of starvation and cruelty at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Chileng was forced to watch as Communist guerillas brutally murdered his wife and two-year-old son. With nothing left for him in Prayap Chileng fled to Vietnam, but eventually returned to Cambodia as part of a Vietnamese invasion force that would end the bloody reign of the Khmer regime. In 1981 Chileng and his new family found their way to America. His "simple strand of remembrance" serves to honor all those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Download or read book Trials and Tribulations written by Dr Seiha Chea and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stay Alive My Son written by Pin Yathay and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia. In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields. With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the "New People," displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness. Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. "Stay alive, my son," he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border. First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of Stay Alive, My Son includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin Yathay's message.
Download or read book The Elimination written by Rithy Panh and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil. The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Download or read book Children of Cambodia s Killing Fields written by Kim DePaul and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Fact Sheet This extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts by Cambodian survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s offers searing testimony to an era of brutality, brainwashing, betrayals, starvation, & gruesome executions.
Download or read book Cambodian Culture since 1975 written by May Mayko Ebihara and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the civil war of the 1970s, Cambodia has suffered devastating upheavals that killed a million ' people and exiled hundreds of thousands. This book is the first to examine Cambodian culture after the ravages of the Pol Pot regime-and to bear witness to the transformation and persistence of tradition among contemporary Cambodians at home and abroad. Bringing together essays by Khmer and Western scholars in anthropology, linguistics, literature, and ethnomusicology, the volume documents the survival of a culture that many had believed lost. Individual chapters explore such topics as Buddhist belief and practice among refugees in the United States, distinctive features of modern Cambodian novels, the lessons taught by Khmer proverbs, some uses of metaphor by the Khmer Rouge regime, the state of traditional music, the recent revival of a form of traditional theater, the concept of pain in Khmer culture, changing conceptions of gender, and refugees' interpretation of American television. Together the essays map a contemporary Cambodian culture, which, for over two hundred thousand Khmers, is now firmly entwined in the social fabric of the urban West.
Download or read book The Rise And Demise Of Democratic Kampuchea written by Craig C Etcheson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the rise of Kampuchean communism from its inception in 1930 to the present. The author analyzes the socioeconomic and political conditions that brought Cambodia to an explosive stage in 1970 and documents the cataclysmic transformation that followed. The protagonist in this ongoing historical drama is the revolutionary movement known as the Khmer Rouge, or "Red Khmers." Their revolution was so ultraradical that even the communists were appalled. The Soviets studiously ignored it, the Chinese vainly tried to moderate it, and the Vietnamese ultimately destroyed it. In an attempt to explain the Khmer revolution—one of the most violent in modern political history—the author focuses on the ideology created by a key group of Khmer Rouge leaders. The theoretical and historical significance of the Khmer revolution and the state of Democratic Kampuchea has received little attention from scholars, and far too much of what has been written has been motivated by a bewildering array of ideological and geopolitical interests. This book is one of the first to apply a systematic analytical framework to the creation, growth, and destruction of Democratic Kampuchea.
Download or read book The Tragedy of Cambodian History written by David Porter Chandler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political history of Cambodia between 1945 and 1979, which culminated in the devastating revolutionary excesses of the Pol Pot regime, is one of unrest and misery. This book by David P. Chandler is the first to give a full account of this tumultuous period. Drawing on his experience as a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh, on interviews, and on archival material. Chandler considers why the revolution happened and how it was related to Cambodia's earlier history and to other events in Southeast Asia. He describes Cambodia's brief spell of independence from Japan after the end of World War II; the long and complicated rule of Norodom Sihanouk, during which the Vietnam War gradually spilled over Cambodia's borders; the bloodless coup of 1970 that deposed Sihanouk and put in power the feeble, pro-American government of Lon Nol; and the revolution in 1975 that ushered in the radical changes and horrors of Pol Pot's Communist regime. Chandler discusses how Pol Pot and his colleagues evacuated Cambodia's cities and towns, transformed its seven million people into an unpaid labor force, tortured and killed party members when agricultural quotas were unmet, and were finally overthrown in the course of a Vietnamese military invasion in 1979. His book is a penetrating and poignant analysis of this fierce revolutionary period and the events of the previous quarter-century that made it possible.
Download or read book Hidden Genocides written by Alexander Laban Hinton and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust. The contributors to this collection look at these cases and others from a variety of perspectives. These essays cover the extent to which our biases, our ways of knowing, our patterns of definition, our assumptions about truth, and our processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the characteristics of generational transmission, the structures of power and state ideology, and diaspora have played a role in hiding some events and not others. Noteworthy among the collection’s coverage is whether the trade in African slaves was a form of genocide and a discussion not only of Hutus brutalizing Tutsi victims in Rwanda, but of the execution of moderate Hutus as well. Hidden Genocides is a significant contribution in terms of both descriptive narratives and interpretations to the emerging subfield of critical genocide studies. Contributors: Daniel Feierstein, Donna-Lee Frieze, Krista Hegburg, Alexander Laban Hinton, Adam Jones, A. Dirk Moses, Chris M. Nunpa, Walter Richmond, Hannibal Travis, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey
Download or read book Cambodia 1975 1978 written by Karl D. Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most devastating periods in twentieth-century history was the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia. From April 1975 to the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation in late December 1978, the country underwent perhaps the most violent and far-reaching of all modern revolutions. These six essays search for what can be explained in the ultimately inexplicable evils perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Accompanying them is a photo essay that provides shocking visual evidence of the tragedy of Cambodia's autogenocide. "The most important examination of the subject so far.... Without in any way denying the horror and brutality of the Khmers Rouges, the essays adopt a principle of detached analysis which makes their conclusion far more significant and convincing than the superficial images emanating from the television or cinema screen." --Ralph Smith, The Times Literary Supplement "A book that belongs on the shelf of every scholar interested in Cambodia, revolution, or communism.... Answers to questions such as `What effect did Khmer society have on the reign of the Khmer Rouge?' focus on understanding, rather than merely describing." --Randall Scott Clemons, Perspectives on Political Science
Download or read book In The Shadow Of The Banyan written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday
Download or read book The Master of Confessions written by Thierry Cruvellier and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned journalist Thierry Cruvellier takes us into the dark heart of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge with The Master of Confessions, a suspenseful account of a Chief Interrogator's trial for war crimes. On April 17, 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge, led by its secretive prime minister Pol Pot, took over Cambodia. Renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea, they cut the nation off from the world and began systematically killing and starving two million of their people. Thirty years after their fall, a man named Duch (pronounced "Doïk"), who had served as Chief Prison officer of S21, the regime's central prison complex, stood trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unlike any other tribunal defendant, Duch acknowledged his personal responsibility, pleaded guilty, and asked for forgiveness from his victims. In The Master of Confessions, Thierry Cruvellier uses the trial to tell the horrifying story of this terrible chapter in history. Cruvellier offers a psychologically penetrating, devastating look at the victims, the torturers, and the regime itself, searching to answer crucial questions about culpability. Self-drawing on his knowledge, and experience, Cruvellier delivers a startling work of journalistic history—by turns deeply moving, horrifying, and darkly funny.
Download or read book The Khmer Rouge written by Nhem Boraden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive yet concise narrative of the history of the Khmer Rouge, from its inception during the 1950s through its eventual reintegration into Cambodian society in 1998. The Khmer Rouge: Ideology, Militarism, and the Revolution That Consumed a Generation examines the entire organizational life of the Khmer Rouge, looking at it from both a societal and organizational perspective. The chapters cover each pivotal period in the history of the Khmer Rouge, explaining how extreme militarism, organizational dynamics, leadership policies, and international context all conspired to establish, maintain, and destroy the Khmer Rouge as an organization. The work goes beyond inspecting the actions of a few key leadership individuals to describe the interaction among different groups of elites as well as the ideologies and culture that formed the structural foundation of the organization.
Download or read book Year of the Rabbit written by Tian Veasna and published by Drawn & Quarterly. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One family's quest to survive the devastation of the Khmer Rouge Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family’s desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country’s major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens. Cartoonist Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Khmer Rouge takeover, as his family set forth on the chaotic mass exodus from Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit is based on firsthand accounts, all told from the perspective of his parents and other close relatives. Stripped of any money or material possessions, Veasna’s family found themselves exiled to the barren countryside along with thousands of others, where food was scarce and brutal violence a constant threat. Year of the Rabbit shows the reality of life in the work camps, where Veasna’s family bartered for goods, where children were instructed to spy on their parents, and where reading was proof positive of being a class traitor. Constantly on the edge of annihilation, they realized there was only one choice—they had to escape Cambodia and become refugees. Veasna has created a harrowing, deeply personal account of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.
Download or read book Music of the Ghosts written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “novel of extraordinary humanity” (Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing) from New York Times bestselling author Vaddey Ratner reveals “the endless ways that families can be forged and broken hearts held” (Chicago Tribune) as a young woman begins an odyssey to discover the truth about her missing father. Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as “the Old Musician” and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country. She meets a young doctor who begins to open her heart, confronts her long-buried memories, and prepares to learn her father’s fate. Meanwhile, the Old Musician, who earns his modest keep playing ceremonial music at a temple, awaits Teera’s visit. He will have to confess the bonds he shared with her parents, the passion with which they all embraced the Khmer Rouge’s illusory promise of a democratic society, and the truth about her father’s end. A love story for things lost and restored, a lyrical hymn to the power of forgiveness, Music of the Ghosts is a “sensitive portrait of the inheritance of survival” (USA TODAY) and a journey through the embattled geography of the heart where love can be reborn.
Download or read book The Cambodian Wars written by Kenneth Conboy and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most Americans, Cambodia was a sideshow to the war in Vietnam, but by the time of the Vietnam invasion of Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 and the subsequent war, it had finally moved to center stage. Kenneth Conboy chronicles the violence that plagued Cambodia from World War II until the end of the twentieth century and peels back the layers of secrecy that surrounded the CIA's covert assistance to anticommunist forces in Cambodia during that span. Conboy's path-breaking study provides the first complete assessment of CIA ops in two key periods-during the Khmer Republic's existence (1970-1975), in support of American military action in Vietnam, and during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies (1981-1991), when the CIA challenged Soviet expansion by supporting exiled royalists, Republicans, and even former Communists trying to expel the Vietnamese from their country. Through interviews with dozens of CIA Cambodia veterans-as well as special forces officers from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia-he sheds new light on the contributions made by foreign intelligence services. Through information gleaned from the U.S. Defense Attache's Office in Phnom Penh, he offers a detailed look at the development of the Khmer Rouge military structure, while his use of Vietnamese-language histories released by the People's Army of Vietnam helps more fully illuminate the PAVN's participation in the Cambodian wars. More than a simple expos of CIA activities, however, The Cambodian Wars is also an authoritative history of that country's struggles over half a century. Conboy examines Cambodia as kingdom, colony, republic, revolutionary state, and Vietnamese satellite, and offers fresh insight into the actions of key players-Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Sisowath Sirik Matak, Son Ngoc Thanh, and others-that will enlighten even those who think they know that country's history. Three decades in the making, The Cambodian Wars tells a little known chapter in the Cold War in which non-communists pulled off a surprising victory. Featuring dozens of photos covering events from 1970 to the trial of Pol Pot in 1997, it is must reading for anyone interested in contemporary Southeast Asian history, CIA covert operations, and the Vietnam War.
