Pinyin Roumaji to Wade-Giles conversion table

Abstract

Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, in collaboration with numerous Khmer people, have produced a unique, scholarly volume about Kampuchea that endeavors to answer the critical question of “why?” What are the events that precipitated the rule of the Khmer Rouge and why did they turn against their own people? This book is a collection of well-documented essays, arranged in chronological order, that examines the long-term, endemic conditions that resulted in Kampuchea's dark age of 1975–79. Much of the work was translated from original Khmer sources, and two of the Kampuchean writers, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, were prominent socialists who were executed by the Khmer Rouge after 1975. Well-known and sometimes obscure events are described through the eyes of witnesses interviewed in Kampuchea, Thailand, Australia and France. This book is not a diatribe against the unspeakable horrors that befell the Kampuchean people. The facts have their own grim eloquence.