"I first visited Cambodia in 1975," Ben Kiernan writes. "None of the Cambodians I knew then survived the next four years." In The Pol Pot Regime, Kiernan presents the first definitive account of the four-year reign of terror known as "Democratic Kampuchea." Working very closely with Cambodian sources, including interviews with hundreds of survivors and the archived "confessions" extracted by the Khmer Rouge from political prisoners just before their execution, Kiernan depicts the horrific nature of Pol Pot and his thugs with chilling specificity, and his historical analysis makes a valuable contribution to understanding how they were able to come to power in the wake of the Vietnam War.


From Library Journal
Pol Pot, the paramount leader of Democratic Kampuchea, trumps Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as the most bloodthirsty ruler of modern history. In fewer than four years, Pol Pot's regime caused the death of 1.7 million people in Cambodia, one-fifth of the population. Using hundreds of interviews with survivors, Kiernan, the leading authority on modern Cambodia, meticulously examines Pol Pot's killing machine and clears up many misconceptions found in earlier studies. In chilling detail, he shows that Pol Pot, obsessed with fantasies of ethnic purity and national grandeur, tried to exterminate the Cham, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao minorities in his country. Finally, internal revolt supported by Vietnam caused the regime's collapse. An important book for students of genocide as well as scholars of Southeast Asia.?Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
As the international community struggles to deal with "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia and brutal massacres in Central Africa, Australian-born Kiernan, controversial head of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies, synthesizes a generation of research on the 1975^-79 reign of terror in "Democratic Kampuchea" by the Khmer Rouge, who last year labeled Kiernan an "arch war criminal." Drawing on more than 500 interviews and newly available archival material, Kiernan, author of nearly a dozen studies of Cambodian history, documents the appalling extent of the Cambodian catastrophe; the significant internal resistance to the Khmer Rouge; and the racialist and totalitarian attitudes by which Pol Pot's regime justified the death, by starvation and disease as well as torture and murder, of some 1.5 million of their 8 million countrymen (disproportionately destroying "new people" considered to be influenced by foreign cultures in addition to ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Lao, the Islamic Cham people, and smaller Cambodian minority groups). An essential acquisition. Mary Carroll


Book Description
What was the nature of the regime that turned Cambodia into grisly killing fields and murdered or starved to death 1.7 million of the country's eight million inhabitants? In this riveting book, the first definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution, a world renowned authority on Cambodia shows how an ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies led a group of intellectuals to impose genocide on their own country. This edition includes a new preface recounting the fatal disintegration of the Khmer Rouge army, the death of Pol Pot, the United Nations' foray into the struggle to bring his surviving accomplices to justice, and the damning new evidence they could face.


From the Back Cover
"A deeply detailed, meticulously reported history. . . . Important [and] valuable." -Sydney H. Schanberg, Nation "One of the most important contributions to the subject so far." -R. B. Smith, Asian Affairs "This is not the first account of Pol Pot's terror... But Mr. Kiernan's is perhaps the most complete and the closest to Cambodian sources." -Economist


About the Author
Ben Kiernan is the A.He was founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Program from 1994 to 1999.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What was the nature of the regime that turned Cambodia into grisly killing fields and murdered or starved to death 1.7 million of the country's eight million inhabitants? In this riveting book, the first definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution, a world renowned authority on Cambodia shows how an ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies led a group of intellectuals to impose genocide on their own country. This edition includes a new preface recounting the fatal disintegration of the Khmer Rouge army, the death of Pol Pot, the United Nations' foray into the struggle to bring his surviving accomplices to justice, and the damning new evidence they could face.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal