ABSTRACT
For three hundred years, the territory that is now Cambodia has experienced repeated episodes of local violence, external control, and severe isolation, a fate David Chandler has called the tragedy of Cambodian history. 1 The recent chapters of this history have included a period during which more than a million Cambodians died from execution, starvation, and disease as a result of the policies and practices of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, as well as two periods during which national sovereignty was effectively lost, first to Vietnamese domination and then to a United Nations peacekeeping mandate.
