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.

The EXTRAVAGANT CRUELTY of the VAJIRALONGKORN JUNTA 4 YEARS of NON-STOP VIOLATION of DEMOCRACY, LAW and HUMAN RIGHTS A critical appraisal of current polical events in Thailand Prepared by ACT4DEM ry

Cambodia is preparing to relive the horrors of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) as the surviving leaders of the regime brace themselves for trial. Consensus on what constitutes an appropriate punishment for those responsible for the deaths of millions, however, eludes Cambodians and international observers alike. Until the end of the nineteenth century, punishment in Cambodia usually consisted of fines, enslavement, amputation of the nose or ears, or torture. Guilt extended to the entire family of the perpetrator. Incarceration was used to determine guilt or innocence, rarely as a punishment in itself. During the colonial period (1863-1953), the French introduced the practice of imprisonment as a penalty for crime, retained by all subsequent Cambodian governments. Although assimilated into the penal system, the concept of incarceration was no deterrent for criminals – guards frequently allowed prisoners to leave the prison compound in order to attend to personal business. The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 saw further externally imposed changes implemented by the international community in an attempt to bring the Cambodian penal system into line with recent developments in western human rights discourse. This paper asks whether western notions of appropriate punishment can be reconciled with Cambodian Buddhist tenets of kamma and dhamma, and how the imposition of western values on the Cambodian penal system, through colonial and more contemporary forms of imperialism, has altered traditional ideas of Cambodian punishment.

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.