ABSTRACT
Benedict F. Kiernan, educated in Australia and currently teaching at Yale University, is the world's leading authority on the genocide that took place when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot ruled Cambodia from 1975 through 1978. Pol Pot had disagreements in Paris with Hou Yuon, later a popular Marxist intellectual who would be one of the first victims after Pol Pot's seizure of power in 1975. Thus Beijing's sponsorship provided Pol Pot's faction with maneuverability that it would not otherwise have enjoyed. As the party later put it, ''when the storm came had to come and take shelter in our refuge.'' In March 1970, the Vietnam War engulfed the country. Although it was indigenous, Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without US economic and military destabilization of Cambodia, which began in 1966 after the American escalation in next-door Vietnam and peaked in 1969-73 with the carpet bombing of Cambodia's countryside by American B-52's.
