Best Books on Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge and Cold War in Asia

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia killed approximately two million people, roughly a quarter of the country's population. They did it not secretly but openly, as a matter of policy. Cities were emptied. Schools and hospitals were shut down. Currency was abolished. The educated were murdered for being educated. Glasses were enough to mark someone as an intellectual and therefore a target. The Khmer Rouge called this Year Zero. ## How It Happened The Khmer Rouge did not appear from nowhere. Cambodia's catastrophe was shaped by Cold War politics as much as by ideology. The United States bombed Cambodia heavily during the Vietnam War, targeting North Vietnamese supply routes that passed through Cambodian territory. Between 1969 and 1973, American B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodia than the Allies dropped on Japan in the entire Second World War. The bombing killed tens of thousands of civilians and drove hundreds of thousands of rural Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, who offered a simple explanation for their suffering: the cities and their elites were to blame, backed by foreign powers. When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, the same month Saigon fell to North Vietnam, the new government moved with extraordinary speed. Within days, every city in the country was evacuated at gunpoint. People were told it was temporary, a measure to protect them from American bombing. It was not. They were marched into the countryside to work the fields in conditions that killed them in enormous numbers through starvation, disease, and execution. ## Books That Bear Witness **"First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung** is one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Khmer Rouge period. Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took power. Her father was a military officer for the old regime, which meant the family had to hide their identity to survive. The book follows Ung through the regime's collapse and into her later life as a land mine activist. Its power comes from the child's perspective, which captures the incomprehension of ordinary family life colliding with systematic state violence. **"The Gate" by François Bizot** is a very different kind of book. Bizot was a French ethnologist working in Cambodia when he was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971, before they took power. He was interrogated for months by Duch, who would later become the commander of S-21, the Khmer Rouge's main torture and execution center. Bizot was released, one of very few people to survive contact with Duch. During the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, he worked at the French embassy and witnessed the evacuation of the city. His account is haunted by his complicated relationship with Duch, whom he knew as a man before the world knew him as a mass murderer. **"A History of Cambodia" by David Chandler** provides the essential historical context that the memoirs assume. Chandler spent decades as the leading Western academic historian of Cambodia, and this book traces the country from its ancient origins through the Angkor period, French colonialism, independence, the Sihanouk years, the American bombing, the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese occupation, and the slow emergence of a post-genocide state. Without this context, the Khmer Rouge can seem like an inexplicable aberration. Chandler shows why it was not. ## The Cold War Dimension One of the most disturbing aspects of the Khmer Rouge's rise and survival is the role played by Cold War politics. After Vietnam drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, the United States, China, and the Western powers continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the United Nations. The reason was simple: Vietnam's intervention was seen as Soviet-backed, and supporting any alternative, even the Khmer Rouge, was preferable to legitimizing Vietnamese influence in the region. This meant that Khmer Rouge units continued to operate along the Thai border through the 1980s, receiving tacit support from Thailand and tacit tolerance from Western governments, while survivors inside Cambodia tried to rebuild. The genocide was not an accident of history. It was enabled and then protected by the logic of great-power competition. ## What Remains The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, established to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, began work in the 2000s and secured convictions against the most senior surviving figures, including Duch and the regime's nominal head Nuon Chea. By then, most of the leadership had died of old age. Cambodia today is a functioning state with a young population that has grown up after the genocide. The memory of what happened is preserved in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in the S-21 complex where Duch interrogated and killed thousands. Reading about what happened there is not comfortable. It should not be. --- ## Further Reading Find more books on this period and region at [/category/history](/category/history).