Genocides, Remembered and Forgotten

Of all the modern genocides, the mass slaughter of two million Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 was probably the least understood at the time of the killing. Cambodia was cut off from the world. With the war in Vietnam over, the United States and other great powers stopped paying attention to Indochina, as did most of the international press. After the Vietnamese Army overthrew the Khmer Rouge, in January, 1979, the United Nations continued to recognize the deposed regime as the legitimate government of Cambodia. The Vietnamese liberators-turned-occupiers lacked credibility on the subject of human-rights abuses, although they had put an end to the worst of them in Cambodia. Cold War thinking led Western and Southeast Asian countries and China to back the Khmer Rouge for years.