Getting Away with Genocide?

Twenty-five years after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime, not one Khmer Rouge leader has stood in court to answer for their terrible crimes. Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis show how governments that often speak the language of human rights shielded Pol Pot and his lieutenants from prosecution during the 1980s. After Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, the US and UK governments backed the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and approved the re-supply of Pol Pot's army in Thailand. The authors explain how, in the late 1990s, the forgotten genocide became the subject of serious UN inquiry for the first time. The Cambodian government and the UN began complex and often controversial negotiations. In mid-2003 they reached agreement to hold a tribunal in Phnom Penh conducted jointly by international jurists and Cambodian lawyers and judges.