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The Pol Pot Regime: Rate, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rogue, 1975-1979. By BEN KIERNAN. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. xiii, 477 pp. $35.00.
This handsomely produced study is based largely on materials gathered by the author in Cambodia, France, and Thailand in 1979-80, supplemented by additional interviews and archival work. The book's virtues lie in the wealth of oral testimony collected so soon after the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) and in Kiernan's use of unexploited materials including Khmer Rouge commercial records and confidential documents from DK. Weaving together these cacophonous sources, Kiernan builds up a poignant picture of cruelty and suffering. According to his estimates, generally accepted by other writers, DK was responsible for 1.7 million deaths or 21 percent of Cambodia's population in 1975. Kiernan documents the disaster and looks for the policies that caused it. His thesis (p. 26) is that "the race question" formed one of the two "most important themes" in the DK period, the other being the leaders' "struggle for central control."
Does racism...