ABSTRACT
Several weeks after the overthrow of the Pol Pot the regime on January 7, 1979, I left Australia for Thailand to commence the fleldwork for a planned Ph.D. dissertation on early twentieth-century Cambodian colonial history. The next four months in Thailand, spent mostly in a Khmer-speaking village in Surin province near the Cambodian border, improved my Khmer and offered opportunities to visit refugee camps and speak to Cambodians who had recently crossed the border. Within a month of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, China launched its own invasion of northern Vietnam, with chilling implications for many Cambodians living near the Thai border. I wrote several reports from there. By the end of 1979, I had revised my planned dissertation topic. I set about writing a history of the Khmer Rouge and of the Pol Pot regime that had perpetrated mass murder against its own people and their neighbors, and had brought Cambodia to the center of an international storm.
