Overzicht van de politieke situatie in Cambodja

This edition of Ben Kiernan's account of the Cambodian revolution and genocide includes a new preface that takes the story up to 2008 and the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal. Kiernan's other books include 'Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur' and 'How Pol Pot Came to Power'.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975, they inherited a war-ravaged and internationally isolated country. Pol Pot’s government espoused the rhetoric of self-reliance, but Democratic Kampuchea was utterly dependent on Chinese foreign aid and technical assistance to survive. Yet in a markedly asymmetrical relationship between a modernizing, nuclear power and a virtually premodern state, China was largely unable to use its power to influence Cambodian politics or policy. In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha traces this surprising lack of influence to variations between the Chinese and Cambodian institutions that administered military aid, technology transfer, and international trade. Today, China’s extensive engagement with the developing world suggests an inexorably rising China in the process of securing a degree of economic and political dominance that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Yet, China’s experience with its first-ever client state suggests that the effectiveness of Chinese foreign aid, and influence that comes with it, is only as good as the institutions that manage the relationship. By focusing on the links between China and Democratic Kampuchea, Mertha peers into the “black box” of Chinese foreign aid to illustrate how domestic institutional fragmentation limits Beijing’s ability to influence the countries that accept its assistance.

Pol Pot was an idealistic, reclusive figure with great charisma and personal charm. He initiated a revolution whose radical egalitarianism exceeded any other in history. But in the process, Cambodia desended into madness and his name became a byword for oppression. In the three-and-a-half years of his rule, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling peasants became a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the 'killing fields'. Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice and prosperity mutate into one of humanity's worst nightmares? Philip Short, the biographer of Mao, has spent four years travelling the length of Cambodia, interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge movement and sifting through previously closed archives. Here, the former Khmer Rouge Head of State, Pol's brother-in-law and scores of lesser figures speak for the first time at length about their beliefs and motives.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

"Excellent and absorbing.... Indispensable to any attempt to understand the Khmer Rouge." -William Shawcross New York Review of Books "A dramatic account of Pol Pot's rise to power in 1975 and his direction of Cambodia's autogenocide.... David Chandler has given us an absorbing and authoritative portrait of Brother Number One and a fascinating insight into Cambodia's cruel history." —Frederick Z. Brown New York Times Book Review "This first biography of Pol Pot is valuable not just for what it tells us about Cambodia's past, but for helping us understand the present and perhaps predict the future.... Superbly written, pioneering work. Chandler makes up for the paucity of details about Pol Pot's life by painting a rich tableau of his times and setting out the historical context of his policies.... The only plausible portrait of the man whose gentle persona and brutal actions remain an enduring paradox." -Nayan Chanda Far Eastern Economic Review "This book is particularly welcome. Although a work of scholarship, [it] has the fast pace of a thriller.... [Chandler's] analysis rings true, and he has no ideological axe to grind; he is willing to go where the evidence takes him." -Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly "Chandler's gracefully written biography of the enigmatic revolutionary of this century, Saloth Sar (alias Pol Pot), deserves wide readership.... Chandler successfully walks a fine line, condemning Pol Pot and all his works, but trying to understand what motivates him.... Recommended without reservation." -Choice "No biographer could hope for a more elusive or enigmatic subject than Pol Pot. From interviews and extensive research, Chandler pieces together a riveting account of the life of this inaccessible man who was alternately mild mannered, cultivated, and genocidal.... Highly recommended." -Library Journal In Cambodia's recent, tragic past, no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. In this revised edition of the first book-length study of the man, the historian David P. Chandler throws light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot, illuminating the ideas and behavior of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history.

Explores how a Pol Pot rose to power in the 1960s in Cambodia and his role in the genocide within the country.