http://www.yale.edu/cgp (not cpg)
So I go to this page and see what they have to offer. The main page begins "The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century." OK, that's the story, what is the source for this? It takes some searching to find. There is much talk about some "tribunal" (which you can bet your last riel, if it ever actually does anything, will not touch former KR people like Hun Sen, who now runs Cambodia). Then there's lots of project self-congratulatory stuff. It mentions this is a US State Department funded project, so you know that it will be objective. One funny bit is the funding began in 1994 - from 1979-1993 the US was sending the KR military aid, helped it keep its UN seat and so forth, by 1993 the Vietnamese had been pushed out fully, so the State Department does an about face and starts peddling the old nonsense it stopped peddling in 1979.
The most serious arguments seem to be in "The Demography of Genocide: Cambodia and East Timor", which claims to address the important issues I'm talking about, so let's take a look at that. Page 2 of the article (which is numbered page 586) begins:
"Cambodia's last census before the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975 was held in 1962. It counted the country's population at 5.729 million".
Well let's ignore that Khmer Rouge (to describe the Communist Party of Cambodia) is not a real term, just like Viet Cong (to desribe Vietnam's NLF) is not a real term either. The KR took power in April 1975? That would be a surprise to the person who did take power in Cambodia in April 1975, Sihanouk, the person Lon Nol threw out in a coup (helped by the CIA) in 1970. Is he being accused of being the head of the Khmer Rouge? Or even in the Khmer Rouge? The number of times Sihanouk is mentioned in the article "The Demography of Genocide": zero. This is a stunning omission. The head of the government is the former prince and leader of Cambodia, yet that is not even mentioned, we're not even told of his existence, just that the "Khmer Rouge" took over in April 1975. I don't even know what to say.
OK then let's skip forward a bit.
"The most detailed post-genocide population figure is a government count of 6,589,954 people at the end of 1980."
This is the population figure the Vietnamese gave at the end of 1980. It was not a census - Cambodia would not have another census until 1998. Obviously Cambodian refugees in other countries were not counted. This is the cornerstone of the genocide evidence. If the 1980 population given by the Vietnamese is correct, the population of Cambodia grew 860,000 from 1962 to 1980, or 15%. This would of course be minus refugees in Vietnam or Thailand, as well as those who died from the 500,000 tons of bombs the US Air Force unloaded on Cambodia. The 1962 census, and the 1980 population population guess by the Vietnamese, is the main evidence offered for the genocide by the US State Department funded study.
I'm not really sure where this genocide of one out of every five people, which by genocide I assume means they were killed with guns or sharp bamboo sticks or something, comes from. The evidence is about as thin as there could be, which is why over the project dedicated to it, it is not discussed much. Because there isn't any. And if you can ignore the source of funding, the date the funding started, and the complete omission of any mention of Sihanouk in this report, well, you're right on the US State Department's always-at-war-with-Eastasia schedule - 1959-1979 KR is evil, 1979-1993 keep KR in UN, send aid, 1994- on the outs again.
Lance