Customer Reviews

China, Cambodia, Vietnam Triangle

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While most researchers were working refugee camps along the Thai border looking into the atrocities being committed by the Khmer Rouge, Burchett was doing the same along the Vietnamese border and also had rare access to Vietnamese military archives (since his research was then seen as a useful a tool against China.) Burchett quotes extensively from the KR documents seized along the Thai border during February-April 1979, and states that major Democratic Kampuchea archives were captured by the Peoples Army of Vietnam. His research regarding these documents is backed up by many PAVN military history books and senior commander memoirs published after 1979.

The recent closing order of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal clearly states that despite the "efforts" of the UN-assisted tribunal's Investigative Judges, the Vietnamese government did not respond to their requests for the very "evidence" of the crimes of the Pol Pot regime that the Vietnamese had once waved to the world as the justification for their 1979 invasion. The 30,000 Vietnamese civilians killed by KR troops inside Vietnamese territory now appear to be awkward to mention and blissfully easy to forget in the context of the tribunal, though photographic evidence of those atrocities has been on public display seven kilometers from the border for the rest of the world to see for 30 years now.

A strange world it is, but we can continue to assume that politics once again trumps justice for victims of crimes against humanity.