Only days before Vietnamese forces over-ran Phnom Penh in 1979, the Khmer Rouge leadership urged the last of the Cambodian god-kings, Prince Sihanouk, to argue its case before the UN.
After being installed in a luxury suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, the prince denounced the invasion as a violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty before the UN Security Council. Then one night he made a short-lived dash for freedom, seeking political asylum in the United States.
Bowing to Chinese pressure, the US declined. This remarkable story is one of many to be found in this account of the 25-year fight to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.
By August, Prince Sihanouk was lobbying member states to leave Cambodia’s seat in the General Assembly vacant (thereby reversing his earlier plea).
‘You have never protested,’ said Sihanouk’s open letter to the UN, ‘let alone asked those responsible who were sitting among you for an account of this genocide worse than the one committed by the detestable Nazis.’
In the end, 71 countries—including Australia, the UK, the US and Canada—backed the right of the ousted Pol Pot regime to be represented at the UN.
‘I was told to engineer the result on the Credentials Committee,’ said US delegate Robert Rosenstock before the vote. ‘I think I now know how Pontius Pilate felt,’ he later said.
Getting Away with Genocide? catalogues the ‘frustrations, the delays and dashed hopes’ of those closely aligned with the Cambodian fight for justice, alongside the shifting Cold War realpolitik in the UN and the US State Department that has meant that not one Khmer Rouge leader has answered for the murder of two million Cambodians.
Written by Tom Fawthrop, a British journalist who has reported on south-east Asia since 1979, and Helen Jarvis, an Australian academic and adviser to the Cambodian government’s Task Force on the Khmer Rouge trials, Getting Away With Genocide? presents its case with great urgency.
This is not surprising, as the few witnesses who survived the killing fields have died, or are ageing fast.
The book includes profiles of the key Khmer Rouge personnel, most of whom are now aged in their late 70s or 80s.
Pol Pot, for example, the man from a well-off background (his sister was one of the king’s concubines) who returned from studies in Paris armed with a revolutionary brand of Marxism-Leninism, died seven years ago.
One of the priorities of the Vietnamese after ‘liberating’ Cambodia was to set