Customer Reviews

When The War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge Revolution, Revised Edition

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A wonderful anecdotal account of the Khmer Rouge Kampuchea. Elizabeth Becker did a great job of researching the materials and wrote this book in an easy to read style. Don't get a wrong impression, because it is truly a gift to be able to write in an easy to read style and at the same time be very informative. Becker has this gift. I did a thesis paper on a topic inspired by this book. Becker wonderfully wove accounts of all aspects of lifestyles from various Cambodians prior to the takeover by Pol Pot and his Marxist thoeries, and then what happened to each and every one of them during the Khmer Rouge. I really got wrapped up in all of the peoples' accounts. Take the time to read this book, because it presents a shocking portrail of what happened in Cambodia

Elizabeth Becker vociferously condemns American policy towards China, as one major reason the world ignored Pol Pot's massive deportations and slaughter, after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Yet, it was Elizabeth Becker (along with many others in the antiwar U.S. media) in her Washington Post articles who mocked those who were trying to tell the world about the communist genocide. When Lon Nol came to Washington, D.C. in October 1978, asking for American aid in hopes of stopping the Khmer Rouge genocide against their own people, it was Elizabeth Becker who called his visit "an embarrassment." And two months later, Becker was invited to visit Pol Pot's Cambodia (one of very few journalists) where she eluded her eyes to Cambodia's destruction, and even wrote that Pol Pot's "system was working." Western academics and the liberal media denied the brutality of the Khmer Rouge before and after 1975. If Elizabeth Becker and others within the media did their job, instead of denouncing those who tried to tell us the truth before, during and after Pol Pot's communist struggle, history may have been very different.

Worth the price just for the detailed account of the conduct and aftermath of the less than totally successful $2 billion United Nations effort to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia. Becker's account of the December 1978 killing of Malcolm Caldwell is riveting. Her incorporation of the personal stories of victims of the Pol Pot regime's Tuol Sleng extermination center helps readers better understand the atmosphere of those terrible days. Readers wanting further detail on Tuol Sleng should read David Chandler's "Voices from S-21" and Vann Nath's "Cambodian Prison Portrait".

Elizabeth Becker's WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER stands out from the many fine books written about Cambodia during the 1970s for one major reason: she was one of the only Westerners invited into the country, and conducted one of the very few interviews with Pol Pot. As it turns out, the visit did not go smoothly, and she ended up having to be evacuated out as the Vietnamese army swept towards Phnom Penh.

Becker's writing is more scholarly than accessible, so - unless you already have an interest in the subject - you may find this to be rough going. Nonetheless, her research is airtight, and her recountings of developments in Cambodia between April 1975 and her late 1978 visit are methodical.

Becker did become known as - initially - a skeptic of the first wave of horror stories emerging from the country, and she doesn't address this directly here, but she does posit (on page 153) a fundamental quality of the Cambodian revolution that would indicate why so many outsiders (and many Cambodians as well, pre-revolution) were so severely caught off-guard by the speed and extremity of the insanity that descended upon the country: the 'front' government-in-exile (from which the Khmer Rouge emerged) was constructed as "a hall of mirrors," with the apparent leaders actually figureheads, stationed in faraway neutral spots and delivering speeches, while the real leaders - unknown and pseudonymous, contrived - with machiavellian precision - to usurp a messy and extremely violent civil war and turn it into an ill-considered, theory-drenched utopian revolution. This facade did not completely disintegrate until nearly 2 years into the existance of a genocidal regime whose leaders were essentially unknown.

Becker makes this compelling, and digs into the humanistic and psychological extremism of the story. Afforded the opportunity to travel to Cambodia, she and two journalist companions were shown a number of factories and potempkin villages, spotting bits of evidence (in spite of the manicured presentation given them by their KR minders) that would essentially confirm the horror stories they had been hearing. Becker was allowed to interview Pol Pot, who discoursed in a fashion so paranoid and disassociative as to call his psychological stability into question; Becker's recollection of the event is notable for it's ornate grimness. And then Becker and her travelling companions were ambushed, on the eve of the invasion that ejected the KR from power.

A vast, comprehensive, difficult and disturbing history of Cambodia from 1975 to the end of 1978; of specialized interest perhaps, but also a valuable history of one of humanity's worst atrocities.

-David Alston

If I am able to give this book more than a five-star rating, I would. I read many books about Cambodia and I truly like this one the most. It contains very important information that is relevant to Cambodia before the takeover of the country by the communist Khmer Rouge, during the Pol Pot regime, and the struggle of the world's superpowers to find a resolution to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s. This book is superb. It was written in an easy-reading style, without ambiguity, confusion or repetition. Every detail throughout the book is very true, especially during the Pol Pot regime, because I am one of the survivors of that vile regime that murdered approximately two million people. I believe that the author has enormous amount of knowledge and experiences about the Cambodian affairs. As a Washington Post journalist, she had to live in Cambodia during the Lon Nol regime, therefore she became an expert on Cambodian matters. I sincerely thank her for an extraordinary accomplishment of publishing this book. This book would be a masterpiece for generations of Cambodian people to read and learn about what went wrong that led to the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the peace process that troubled the Five Permanent U.N. Security Councils for many years of trying to solve the problem of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Unfortunately, Cambodia became the battleground for the world's superpowers (The United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, and China) and the innocent Khmer people became their victims. In When Slaves Became Masters, the author wrote, "When the elephants are attacking one another, only the ants got killed." The Soviet and the Chinese were afraid of direct confrontation with the United States, thus they used the Vietnamese as their puppet to teach Americans a lesson and the Cambodian civil war got entangled with it. As a result of this war Cambodia was turned into a bloodbath of the twentieth century. I believe that the United States was mostly responsible for it because the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime was set up to fail by the Nixon's administration and the democrats at the Capitol Hill who opposed a U.S. intervention in Cambodia and immediately passed the Cooper-Church amendment after Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown. Due to the Nixon's and Kissinger's poorly strategy to defeat the Viet Cong's intrusion in Cambodia caused the death of millions of innocent lives in such a short period of time (3 years, 8 months and 20 days). Some democrats at the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate who once blindly praised Pol Pot also are responsible for this holocaust. The Pol Pot regime survivors who barely made it alive lost many of their love ones, emotionally affected for life, displacement and separation from relatives. A segment of this book describes the story of Sita Deth which is very compelling due to the fact that S-21 (Toul Sleng prison) that was run by Kaing Kek Eav (revolutionary name Duch) murdered approximately 16,000 men, women, and children. The victims were merely former bureaucrats of the defeated Lon Nol regime, soldiers, policemen, students, teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, bourgeoisie, and capitalists. Other innocent people who were brought to Toul Sleng prison were implicated by other prisoners who received extreme method of tortures and they just confessed to anything to relieve the excruciating pain for the moment. The majority of the prisoners were accused of working for the American CIA even though they repeatedly admitted that they didn't know the acronym CIA stands for, or the Soviet KGB, and Vietnamese agents. Any one of those associations was a ground for execution. False confessions were extracted from innocent people by the prison guards who were completely brainwashed by Angka Pakdekvat (revolutionary organization) and a lack of compassion based on atheist belief. The reign of terror was run by fear of death; therefore, every order must be followed. It was the regime that, "today's executioner could become tomorrow's victim." Other victims were vaguely accused of plotting against the Angka Pakdevat for its failure. This last group of victims was the former Khmer Rouge leaders themselves. Only 13 of the 16,000 prisoners survived because the prison guards didn't have time to kill them off on January 7, 1979 when the Vietnamese troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge (Cambodian communist) regime. The reason that the prisoners' wives and children were brought prison and be killed, was the Khmer Rouge leaders believed that, "to destroy the weeds, their roots have to be pulled." The name of the head of the Toul Sleng prison, Kaing Kek Eav, doesn't sound like a descendant of a Cambodian native. His complexion, physical appearance and facial features are of the descendant of the Chinese or Sino-Vietnamese, therefore, the mass killing that was committed under his watch was highly questionable of whom was really behind the plot. I strongly recommend this book to every Cambodian people to read so that tragedy would not be repeated, plus Westerners who are interested in knowing more about the superpowers' political games in Indochina.

1) The Khmer Rouge didn't win the war after the Vietnamese's invasion. The Khmer Rough won the war in 1975, against the Lonol's regime. The Vietnamese's invasion is in 1979; this invasion pushed the Khmer Rough into the jungle bordered with Thailand.

2) As far as I know, the Khmer Rough didn't commit the atrocities until the it won the war (1975). These atrocities lasted until the Vietnamese invasion in 1979.

3) I read the first edition of this book years ago. I remembered that it was a decent book.

The book is very well written. The account is detailed, and the author keeps the reader interested and wanting to know more. The history is woven very well with personal stories. I read the book during my travel to Cambodia and finished it upon my return. It was an excellent companion to make my visit more memorable experience. This book is a must read if you are interested in Cambodia.

After seeing the killing fields of Cheoung Ek and the torture centre of Tuol Sleng, I needed to know what caused this madness. Now I understand.

There are a number of excellent works on Cambodia. Shawcross's "Sideshow" is excellent, but limited because it was written shortly after the Khmer Rouge took power, and lacks the longer perspective. Having worked with NGO's in Cambodia, the history becomes relevant to those attempting to reduce the current corruption. The Vietnam War, Sihanouk, the Lon Nol period, the Khmer Rouge period, and the Hun Sen period all have become part of a stew that is present day Cambodia. Even for those of us keenly interested in the history, the events of the past are extremely confusing. Sihanouk was a master-manipulator-balancer, but he was the spine running through the periods. The alliances, the fights, the Cold War, the ideologies, intertwine in a way that requires this methodical examination. Becker has parsed obscure events, as well as the people who remained secretive to the core. She has weaved virtually all of the important details, from Samlaut, to the UN elections, into a logical narrative that removes not only the fog of war, but the fog of a sordid history.

In addition, Becker captures the moral ambiguities of the history: Should we as Americans have supported the communists or the racists like Lon Nol? Should we have really supported the Khmer Rouge after we knew about the genocide, against the Vietnamese who invaded? Should we have supported the Chinese who allowed Kissinger to sell out the US in Vietnam, and Lon Nol in Cambodia? There is certainly enough doubt and guilt to go around. No one looks good except perhaps those who somehow survived it all.

I found Becker's descriptions of her two weeks in Phnom Penh, and the murder of Malcolm Caldwell, worthy of its own story. I know where she was, and I could visualize events. I personally have met some of the characters mentioned in Becker's study, and I found her descriptions to be accurate. I have heard many personal stories of the horrors, visited the killing fields and have struggled to figure out the extent of the depravity marking the period. Becker's history rings true.

Although the writing kept me interested throughout, I did find myself at times skipping a few pages because of the excess detail. But for the scholar, I see the utility of the detail.

Anyone who wants to learn about the history needs to read this book. It's the gold standard for understanding the issues. I would also recommend Shawcross and Chandler, as well.

If you're looking for a book detailing the personal experiences of survivors of the killing fields, this book is not for you. "When the War Was Over" focuses more on the politics within Cambodia and the countries which affect it. Entire chapters are devoted to the political climate in Vietnam, the United States, China, the Soviet Union and Thailand. Elizabeth Becker analyzes them in excruciating detail, but I did come away with a deeper understanding for how the problems in Cambodia developed and the aftermath of the wars.

This book does require quite a bit of concentration. At times, I would lose track of who a certain politician was or what was his role. I felt like I was reading a textbook. It would make a good reading assignment. Very analytical, a little dry, maybe needed a more human element. The personal stories were short and quickly buried beneath the behemoth mound of politics. Overall, an enlightening experience, but I had to push myself through it.