Supposed autogenocide?!
Michael Turner Says:
October 13th, 2006 at 8:15 a.m.
>...Well, that would require substantiating the supposed Cambodian
Autogenocide, which killed anywhere from 1.5 to 3 million people,
depending whose sourceless fabrications you believe. Good luck with
that project, Tom. Every couple years, I try to get that one pinned
down, and most of the hard data that has emerged since the Vietnamese
left Cambodia points in the other direction. The Yale Genocide Project
likes to total up numbers based on estimates of the numbers of mass
graves and how many might be in them. Strangely enough, they never get
around to any of the exhumations and forensics that would determine
likely causes of death or actual mass-grave body counts. And nobody
else does either. Why check in with reality when you've got such a
great bogeyman myth going? Why settle for substantiated figures that
might be in the range of 150,000-300,000 Khmer Rouge murders when you
can be the steward of one of the great genocide-story legacies of the
20th century? Why embarrass the U.S. government, the source of so much
Cambodian foreign direct assistance these days, with a rough estimate
of the number of bodies riddled with bomb shrapnel from B-52 runs that
dumped maybe a quarter ton of bombs per capita on the countryside?
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/pol_pot1.html
By DAVID CHANDLER
>...His harsh, utopian policies, derived in part from Maoist China,
drove an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians--or one in five--to their
deaths from malnutrition, illness or overwork. At least 200,000 more
were executed as enemies of the state. The ratio of deaths to
population made the Cambodian revolution the most murderous in a
century of revolutions.
On Chandler, Kiernan, Chomsky, Lacouture, Caldwell, Summers, and Porter http://www.jim.com/canon.htm
The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia
Even Vickery says 750,000 deaths.
>...Ben Kiernan, noted academic and author of the serious and worth
reading book How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985) and co-editor with David
Chandler of such other notable works as Revolution and Its Aftermath
(1983), will lead the U.S. State Department funded Yale University
program that will create a database documenting Khmer Rouge genocidal
crimes. We know from this thesis, however, that there is another story
to Dr. Kiernan; the story of a young, idealistic graduate student,
mesmerized by the idea of a people's revolution and socialism. Ben
Kiernan was a leading Khmer Rouge defender during Democratic
Kampuchea.[268] With all due respect to him and the studied work he
has done since 1979, he deserves to be canonized for being a leading
proponent of the STAV on Cambodia.
In fact, it was not until Kiernan interviewed five hundred Cambodian refugees in the camps in 1978 or 1979 that he recognized that he had been "late in realizing the extent of the tragedy in Kampuchea."[269] In what amounted to a mea culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979, entitled "Vietnam and the Governments and People of Kampuchea," he writes,
I was wrong about ... the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973 was not simply a grass-roots reaction, and expression of popular outrage at the killing and destruction of the countryside by U.S. bombs, although that helped it along decisively. There can be no doubting that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the population by that chauvinist section of the revolutionary movement that was led by Pol Pot. In my opinion this violence was employed in the service of a nationalist revivalism that had little concern for the conditions of the Khmer people, or the humanitarian socialist ideals that had inspired the broader Kampuchean revolutionary movement. [Emphasis added.][270]
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/ 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. As in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale.
Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime's security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University's Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of January 2006, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations, maps, and an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide, as well as the CGP's newly-enhanced, interactive Cambodian Geographic Database, CGEO, which includes data on: Cambodia's 13,000 villages; the 115,000 sites targeted in 231,00 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965-75, dropping 2.75 million tons of munitions; 158 prisons run by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979, and 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits; and 76 sites of post-1979 memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge.
To examine these, and other information we have discovered, click on one of the links on the sidebar.
For a more detailed introduction to the CGP, click here. Aid to Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), 1995-2005