![]() In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime’s security police, the Santebal. Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. Two died in prison awaiting prosecution or during their trial, but three survived to face judgement and are now serving life sentences. ![]() These convictions mean that most of the surviving top leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime have now been jailed, prosecuted, or convicted of crimes they committed when in power in 1975-79. Both men were also convicted of extermination and various other crimes against humanity, and were sentenced to life imprisonment. The court convicted Pol Pot’s former deputy, Nuon Chea, and the Khmer Rouge regime’s head of state, Khieu Samphan, of genocide of the ethnic Vietnamese minority of Cambodia, and also convicted Nuon Chea of genocide of the country’s Cham Muslim minority. On July 18, 2007, Cambodian and international co-prosecutors at the newly established mixed UN/Cambodian tribunal in Phnom Penh found evidence of “crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture and religious persecution.” On November 16, 2018, the Cambodian and international judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) ruled that the former Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot had perpetrated genocide in Cambodia while it held power during 1975-1979. As in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. ![]() The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.
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