Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio? (original) (raw)
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While working our way through the literature dealing with the Cambodian drama, which took place during the regime known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK) (used somehow improperly to cover the period 1975-1979 and corresponding to the rule of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), when DK technically did not exist before March 1976), it became clear that our understanding of this period of Cambodian history was not only dependent upon the efforts of the students of Cambodia, but also constrained by the broad political and normative environment. It is thus along these lines that we shall present the reviewed scholarship. In its early stage, as we shall see first, the scholarship has been victim of the characteristics of the Communist rule in Cambodia. Then, the second wave of scholarship has been partly dependent upon considerations linked to international politics. However, these difficulties prove to be beneficial. Indeed, they generated, at the empirical level, a wealth of documentation and archives that are not usually available in the countries having known such transformations. This second wave of scholarship will continue, research being notably dependent upon access to new archival material. At the theoretical level, efforts by students of Cambodia to correct previously flawed or incomplete explanations led to controversies out of which came a greater and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the Communist period, of its pre-conditions and of its grim achievements. This conducted to a new phase of research, partly overlapping the previous one, characterised by a focus on processes, and greatly benefiting from previously accumulated scholarship, which furthermore endeavoured to study a potential link between genocide and nation-ness, this term referring to a collective feeling or consciousness that characterises the specific identity, “the nation”. Indeed, in the Cambodian case, references are made throughout the whole body of knowledge to the nationalist character of DK, or more exactly to its “ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, chauvinistic or racist” stance, while, more generally, the significance of nationhood and of some of its potential components such as racism, has bearing for genocide, notably in the framework of the UN genocide definition.
Extract violencein Cambodia extract 01
In 1939, the German sociologist Norbert Elias published his groundbreaking work The Civilizing Process, which has come to be regarded as one of the most influential works of sociology today. In this insightful new study tracing the history of violence in Cambodia, the authors evaluate the extent to which Elias's theories can be applied in a non-Western context. Drawing from historical and contemporary archival sources, constabulary statistics, victim surveys, and newspaper reports, Broadhurst, Bouhours, and Bouhours chart trends and forms of violence throughout Cambodia from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Analysing periods of colonisation, anticolonial wars, independence, civil war, the revolutionary terror of the 1970s, and postconflict development, the authors assess whether violence has decreased and whether such a decline can be attributed to Elias's civilising process, which identifies a series of universal factors that have historically reduced violence. Preface This book examines how key transitions in Cambodia's 150 years of modern history have impacted on the prevalence and forms of violence in this country. A substantial and mostly unanticipated decline in crime and violence has occurred in Cambodia since the 1991 peace agreement. In the last 20 years the homicide rate has been reduced by about 90%-an impressive achievement. Our analysis of this contemporary decline in violence does not over-rely on the immediate past but is based on a long-term historical review of criminological evidence, and we hope yield insights into the general characteristics of violence as well as the factors that drive increases and decreases in lethal violence. The processes of social change unfold gradually, and unevenly, over generations, and inquiries limited to a decade or two cannot grasp their complexities and implications. It is in historical contexts that change in both social institutions and individual behaviours may be discerned. Observing the ebb and flow of the scale and forms of crime and violence over 150 years revealed a gradual shift from collective violence to private acts driven by interpersonal conflicts and pathologies. The overall trend of violence in Cambodia follows sympathetically the general pattern of long-term declines and individualisation of violence in Western Europe as it underwent the processes of civilization observed by Norbert Elias (1939) and Steven Pinker (2011). In both cases this trend was subject to a-periodical surges of violence that disturbed the otherwise cascade-like decline in inter-personal violence and homicide.
Crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s are known as being among the most violent massacres of the 20th century. Yet, the legal characterization of such acts as genocide has been subjected to important legal and conceptual controversies, both inside and outside the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) – the court in charge of judging the last surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. In consequence, very restricted genocide charges have been retained in the 2010 indictment issued against these Khmer Rouge leaders. Such a decision indubitably disappointed many victims who considered that their suffering was not recognized. Given the fact that the ECCC trial for genocide started on 17 October 2014, a discussion about the limited scope of that indictment appears particularly appropriate, in order to grasp the issues of the coming debates. This paper analyses the legal constraints of the characterization of the Khmer Rouge crimes as genocide, in the particular context of the ECCC.
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Using an overview of the existing literature, including both primary and secondary sources, this paper lays out a detailed history of the Pol Pot Regime. This paper originally appeared at the Free University of Berlin, 2008.