ABSTRACT
Throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s I worked to promote and protect human rights in Cambodia, and, in particular, to document the Khmer Rouge genocide and assist Cambodians in seeking redress for those terrible crimes. Perhaps my experience is somewhat different from most of the contributors to this volume in as much as my own efforts against genocide were more those of a human rights activist than a scholar. Further, it is probably an oddity for a non-country specialist to have spent so much of a professional life working on a human rights and humanitarian disaster in a small and distant place. Notwithstanding, what led me to these endeavors was a series of personal progressions not particularly unusual for someone coming of age in the 1960s: from civil to human rights, and from the Holocaust to the Cambodian genocide via the war in Vietnam and Amnesty International.
