This is a book with few heroes, plenty of villains, and no easy answers to some of the most vexing questions of our time. Those looking for the “glass half full” optimism that characterized much of the human rights scholarship during the 1990s should read no further. This is a sad story with an inconclusive ending. Its only certainty is an insistence on the necessity for humility when trafficking in the pain of others.¹

I have spent much of the past decade searching for legal, historical, and moral forms of accountability for the three-year, eight-month, and twenty-day rule of Pol...

In 1993, I ran into a friend from California in the Columbia University library. He told me that two mutual friends from high school, Chris Riley and Mark Norris, were going to Cambodia to restore the original Tuol Sleng prison photographs. I had been curious about Cambodia since I had first heard the name Pol Pot in the Dead Kennedys’1980 punk rock anthem “Holiday in Cambodia.” Their machine-gun lyrics described a hell on earth. While I knew that over one million Cambodians died during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, I had never heard of Tuol Sleng prison.

Riley and...

A single cannon shot marked the dawn of April 17, 1975 and the surrender of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces. The rebels controlled most of the country, and Phnom Penh’s population had grown to two million as rural peasants sought refuge from the fighting in the countryside. Fallen Prime Minister Long Boret and Deputy Prime Minister Prince Sirik Matak never imagined their American patrons leaving them to face the same battle-hardened soldiers the United States had failed to bomb into submission. Since 1970, the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime had waged a brutal war against the...

The head of S-21 prison was another former academic named Kang Keck Ieu, better known as Brother Duch. According to David Chandler,“Duch became one of the half dozen most important leaders in the country.”He ran a tight ship on which both guards and inmates feared for their lives.The torturers, guards, and other staff at S-21 numbered around 1,500 young men and women between the ages of 15 and 19, all recruited from what their intellectual leaders considered “pure” or “clean” peasant backgrounds. ¹

Most of the young cadres at s-21 would not see their families for years; many would not...

“I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, announced in 1980. Brzezinski seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of inter-communist warfare. After Secretary of State Vance’s resignation that year, Brzezinski’s views ruled.¹ The remnants of the Khmer Rouge had settled in three main camps on the Thai border: Pailin, Phnom Malai, and Preah Vihear. The largest camp, Site 8, had a population of 50,000 scattered throughout the villages southeast of Aranyaprathet. Pol Pot was rumored to be in a secret jungle military base, dubbed Zone 87 after his Khmer Rouge alias, “87.”...

After my first trip to Cambodia, I became interested in interviewing more Tuol Sleng guards, staff, and survivors—above all, the Tuol Sleng photographer, if he was even alive. Legitimate war crimes trials seemed so beyond the limits of the possible in 1994 that I turned my attention to the more practical tasks of historical accountability. Only about 6,000 of approximately 14,000 Tuol Sleng negatives had been recovered. My most reliable contacts continued to steer me toward the Vietnamese colonel who had created the Tuol Sleng Museum. During the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, Colonel Mai Lam served as Vietnam’s “Cambodian...

All of the clamor over leng Sary’s amnesty over-shadowed the defection of many of the men who had carried out his orders. One who emerged from the nameless, faceless ranks was an elite Khmer Rouge propaganda officer named Nhem En. In the predawn hours of November 15, 1995, En had slipped into the jungle armed with an AK-47, a walkie-talkie, and a videotape of the terrain surrounding the last Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng. He claimed to have been one of the leaders of a secret, pro-democracy movement.When Ta Mok heard of this, he sent a team of twenty...

At 8:30 a.m. on March 30, 1997, Sam Rainsy’s Khmer Nation Party had just begun a political rally in a Phnom Penh park when four grenades landed in the middle of the gathering of 150. Rainsy was shielded from the blast by bodyguards, one of whom was killed instantly by the explosions, along with dozens of other demonstrators. Two of the grenades were thrown from behind the crowd and one or two more were tossed from a passing car or motorcycle. When the crowd began to pursue the attackers on foot, they were stopped at gunpoint by soldiers loyal to...

When I arrived in Cambodia in November 1999, Sok Sin picked me up at the airport. He was already anticipating a business boom and acting as if the war crimes tribunal was a fait accompli. Although I had no objections to seeing leng Sary and Nuon Chea in a defendant’s dock, I still doubted the Cambodian prime minister’s political will. Sok Sin drove to the Foreign Correspondents Club and we went upstairs. Three middle-aged American women sat in the shade of the third-story veranda, each fawning over her recently adopted or purchased Cambodian baby. Looking down at the park across...

The Cambodian war crimes debate dragged on into the new millennium with basic questions still unresolved and both parties trading blame for the stalemate. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote Prime Minister Hun Sen a threatening letter in February 2000 blaming Cambodia’s CPP government for the lack of progress. Neither side was willing to cede control. Furthermore, this was only a subsidiary of a larger conflict:“universal jurisdiction” versus national sovereignty.¹

U.S. Senator John Kerry traveled to Phnom Penh again in April, attempting to restart negotiations between the United Nations and the Cambodian government. Led by Ambassador to Cambodia Kent Wiedemann and...

By 2003, war crimes trials were still nowhere in sight. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Hun Sen’s bluff in February 2002 by withdrawing from the trial discussion. Annan accused the Cambodians of negotiating in bad faith, and stated that he believed they were neither interested in nor capable of conducting fair trials. But although the UN had officially pulled the plug, there were back-channel efforts to jump-start the negotiations. It seemed that Hun Sen might simply be using the trial issue as a public relations distraction, like he had in 1998.

I returned to Cambodia in January to complete the...

After five years and eleven rounds of talks, Cambodian representative Sok An and UN representative Hans Corell initialed a provisional war crimes tribunal agreement on March 17, 2003. The Cambodian prime minister ceded very little. Under the unwieldy “mixed” tribunal plan, the Cambodians would have a 3–2 majority on the war crimes court and a 4–3 majority on the appeals court. All binding decisions would require a majority-plus-one vote. This so-called “supermajority” was meant to counter the possibility of the Cambodians voting as a bloc and ruling by majority. The co-prosecutors, one UN and one Cambodian, would prepare...