On trial, he became the only defendant yet to come close to telling the truth about what happened.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak passed away on Aug. 18 at the age of 78. RFA Executive Editor Dan Southerland tells the story of a dangerous road trip with the famous commentator at the outset of the war in Cambodia in 1970.
As the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh sheds light on horrors perpetrated by that regime thirty years ago, Dan Southerland recalls that reporters and photographers were also not spared.
Dith Pran, the hero of "The Killing Fields," was an interpreter and “fixer” in 1970. It was the first year of the war in Cambodia, a time when many Cambodians truly believed that they could defeat the Vietnamese Communists. At that time, the Khmer Rouge were just emerging as a military force that would ultimately conquer the country and send Dith Pran to a labor camp.
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, starting a four-year reign of terror in Cambodia. RFA’s chief editor Dan Southerland visits battlefields he covered as a war correspondent from 1970-75. In these blogs, Southerland reports how many older Cambodians are trying to forget the Khmer Rouge trauma, while younger Cambodians know little of their own history.
Interviewing refugees can be tricky business. They sometimes tell you what they think you want to hear. Some exaggerate in order to gain sympathy.
The brother of one of the world’s most notorious mass murderers is sleeping peacefully in his hammock.
In the later stages of the war in Cambodia, refugees began to describe the widespread killing of civilians in areas under Khmer Rouge control.
Nothing looks familiar to me except the empty highway stretching straight ahead toward Vietnam. But I can still make out the place where my two colleagues disappeared, never to be seen again
"I find few scars of war and conflict here that might remind them of what happened when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and killed more than 1 million—some say as many as 2 million—of Cambodia’s people."