Autor/Autorin
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime led by the dictator Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot (1925 or 1928-1998), murdered almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population of around eight million at the time[1].
In 1979, the Vietnamese army invaded neighbouring Cambodia, ousted the regime and put a stop to the mass murder. Hun Sen, who has ruled the country since 1985 and was himself a Khmer Rouge official until 1977, has little interest in coming to terms with the genocide in terms of justice or society. The population is still suffering from the consequences of the mass murder. Opposition parties are being dissolved or, like independent daily newspapers, massively obstructed, corruption is widespread and the judicial system is only formally independent. The peace process in Cambodia still has a long way to go.
The roots of the Khmer Rouge regime go back to the decolonisation process in Indochina. Pol Pot came into contact with socialist ideas and communist groups during a period of study in colonial France (1949-1953). After Cambodia gained independence in 1953, Pol Pot returned to his homeland and joined the Communist Party of Cambodia (CPK), which did not regard the ruling Socialist People’s Party led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012) as the legitimate representative of an independent Cambodia. Sihanouk, who had already been appointed king by France in 1941 and acted as the colonial power’s governor, led the country to independence and pursued a moderate socialist course of moderate nationalisation, while accommodating France’s economic and strategic interests and continuing to receive support from the former colonial power in return.
The CPK was part of the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI), which sought a socialist revolution in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Over the course of the 1950s, it increasingly positioned itself in radical opposition to Sihanouk’s government, which was close to the people but ruled the country autocratically and gave opposition forces little room for manoeuvre.
The KPK was initially controlled by the Viêt Minh from neighbouring Vietnam. Founded in 1941, this heterogeneous resistance and independence movement, which comprised communist as well as bourgeois and nationalist groups, fought against the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, which collaborated with the French colonial administration under the leadership of the Vichy regime. The puppet government installed by the National Socialists in the unoccupied part of France in 1940 after the surrender of France provided military facilities in Vietnam to the Japanese Empire, which was allied with the Nazi regime, and in return sought to maintain the French pre-war colonial status in Indochina.
After the Japanese capitulation in 1945 and the proclamation of Vietnam’s independence, H’ô Chí Minh became Prime Minister (until 1955) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. However, the conflict over Vietnam’s independence did not end there. France under Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970, President from 1959-1969) attempted to restore the pre-war colonial status quo ante in Indochina after 1945, but was defeated by the Viêt Minh under H’ô Chí Minh’s leadership in the First Indochina War (1946-1954). From 1949 onwards, the military conflict was already part of the developing East-West polarisation due to the support of the Chinese Communists for the Viêt Minh, who were victorious in the Chinese civil war, and the military aid provided by the USA for France. In the course of the „Cold War“, the economic and ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the USA and their respective allies, the conflict in the struggle for spheres of influence shifted several times to developing countries and regions that found themselves in a situation of social and political upheaval after the Second World War and the dissolution of the European colonial empires. South-East Asia was also caught up in this global polarisation in the 1950s[2].
Following the Geneva Indochina Conference (26 April 1954 – 20 July 1954), which was attended by France and the Viêt Minh, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and the USA, France gave up its colonial claims to Indochina. Cambodia and Laos gained their independence. Vietnam was divided. The Viêt Minh retreated to the north of the country beyond the 17th parallel, while the USA assumed the role of protecting power for South Vietnam and supported a nationalist, anti-communist government established there under Prime Minister Ngô Đinh Diêm (1901-1963) as a bulwark against communist North Vietnam. The Geneva Agreement provided for free elections for the whole of Vietnam in 1956, which were intended to pave the way for reunification, but were thwarted by the South Vietnamese side in view of an expected election victory for the communists. The USA was in favour of the elections in its official statements, but behind the scenes supported Diêm’s efforts to prevent the elections. As East-West polarisation progressed under President Eisenhower, the so-called domino theory had gained considerable influence, according to which, like falling dominoes, a Southeast Asian state would inevitably drag other countries in the region with it if it came under communist rule.[3] As a result of the elections thwarted by South Vietnam, there were repeated military clashes between the National Liberation Front supported by the North and South Vietnamese government troops from 1955 onwards. As the South Vietnamese government came under increasing pressure, the USA intervened militarily from 1964, the conflict became internationalised and escalated into the Second Indochina War, which was instrumentalised to a far greater extent than the First Indochina War in the East-West conflict against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the end of the war, the military victory over South Vietnam and the USA (1975). He died in 1969.
From the end of the 1960s, civil society protests in the USA and Western democracies against the Vietnam War, against racist thought structures, militarism and imperialism intensified. The apartheid regime in South Africa and the Vietnam War, whose civilian victims increasingly became the focus of Western media attention due to American bombing, took on a symbolic character in the course of a change in values and social debate. In this debate, Ho Chi Minh became a figure of identification for social movements in Western industrialised nations at the end of the 1960s.
The rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia is closely interwoven with these foreign policy developments. After his return from France in 1953, Pol Pot initially worked as a teacher. During a student revolt, Pol Pot and some other supporters of the Communist Party went underground and built up an armed guerrilla group called the Khmer Rouge, which quickly gained popularity after North Vietnamese units increasingly used Laotian and Cambodian border areas as retreats and the US Air Force included these regions in its bombing campaigns from 1965 onwards. From 1969, US President Richard Nixon (1913-1994, term of office: 1969-1974) had East Cambodia systematically bombed. This expansion of the Vietnam War to the neighbouring states massively weakened the Cambodian government, while the Khmer Rouge found increasing support among the rural population and were able to quickly increase their influence, not least with the initial support of North Vietnam. The guerrillas gained further support from the mid-1960s due to uprisings by the rural population as a result of land expropriations without adequate compensation, which the government countered with massive violence. Villages were bombed and massacres carried out[4].
Weakened by this development, head of state Sihanouk was ousted in 1970 by a right-wing conservative military coup led by officer Lon Nol (1913-1985), who had already held a leading position during the counter-insurgency, and forced into exile in China. The new military rulers worked closely with the USA and explicitly authorised the bombing of eastern Cambodia, which claimed the lives of between 200,000 and 700,000 Cambodians[5].
Sihanouk eventually allied himself with the Khmer Rouge, who were able to capture the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 as a result of the unstable situation caused by the war and coup. Subsequently, the Khmer Rouge established one of the cruellest regimes of terror of the 20th century. They established a radical communist dictatorship that strived for an original, classless agrarian society. They divided the population into an „old“, urban-dominated people and a „new“ people of agricultural labourers. The new rulers set up state-owned agricultural collectives in which the population had to work in standardised clothing, largely without technical aids and under guard with poor supplies. The regime turned the country into an agricultural labour camp, so to speak. Money and private property were abolished, all religion, language and culture of minorities were banned, cultural institutions and schools were destroyed.
Residents of the cities were deported to the countryside to work, and the two million inhabitants of Phnom Penh were forced to march to rural regions within a few days. Tens of thousands died in the course of these forced relocations. City dwellers were considered enemies of the people per se; Buddhists, Christians and Muslims were victims of the murder campaigns, as were members of ethnic minorities, including Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and, in particular, the Muslim Cham ethnic group. Intellectuals did not fit into the Khmer Rouge’s radical communist image of man and society: wearing glasses or owning books was enough to be arrested and murdered. All teachers were executed. Moreover, waves of political purges were directed against representatives of the overthrown Nol dictatorship, but also against the Khmer Rouge’s own apparatus. At least 1.7 million people were murdered during the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror or died of epidemics, hunger or due to the living conditions in the labour collectives.
The „S-21“ internment and torture centre in Phnom Penh, today a memorial to the genocide, became a symbol of the Khmer Rouge’s terror.[6] This interrogation prison had nothing in common with the Soviet and Chinese labour and re-education camps (Gulag, Laogai); the centre was designed to exterminate people and social groups declared enemies of the people. The way out of „S-21“ usually led to Choeung Ek, 17 kilometres from Phnom Penh, one of the more than 300 killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, execution site and mass grave. Today, Choeung Ek is the main memorial site for all victims of the regime. Of more than 17,000 prisoners, just seven survived their imprisonment[7].
When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, the Communist Party of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam lost all influence over the former combatants in the neighbouring country. Due to the country’s complete isolation, reports of the atrocities only reached the world public in fragments. The accounts of the few survivors who managed to escape abroad were often dismissed as anti-communist American propaganda against the backdrop of the East-West conflict and the polarisation of public discourse in Western democracies in the context of the Vietnam War.
The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese army in 1979 put an end to the systematic mass murder. The Vietnamese occupying power installed a puppet government, the Revolutionary People’s Council under the leadership of Heng Samrin (born 1934), who, like most of the members of this government, which was only given limited power by the Vietnamese side, had once fought for the Khmer Rouge and had fled from the regime’s political purges to one of the neighbouring countries. 220,000 Vietnamese soldiers remained stationed in Cambodia and key political positions were placed under Vietnamese control.
A misguided agricultural policy as part of the Khmer Rouge’s forced collectivisation, the flight of numerous agricultural workers following the fall of the regime and the confiscation of parts of the rice harvest by the Vietnamese occupying army led to a famine at the end of 1979, which claimed around 200,000 more Cambodian victims. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the border area with Thailand and waged a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese occupying forces. Between 1979 and 1992, around 750,000 Cambodians fled to Vietnam and Thai refugee camps to escape the ongoing civil war between the Vietnamese occupying forces and the Khmer Rouge.
This conflict was also instrumentalised in the East-West conflict. The USA, which, like the People’s Republic of China, regarded the occupation of Cambodia as an attempt by the Soviet Union to promote Vietnamese expansion in Asia, supported the Khmer Rouge with weapons after its defeat in the Vietnam War. Human rights considerations were not taken into account until the discovery of numerous mass graves in the 1980s brought the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge to the attention of the world public and made direct US military aid for Pol Pot’s guerrilla force politically impossible.
When Prince Sihanouk re-entered the political arena under pressure from the USA and formally replaced Pol Pot as the political leader of the Khmer Rouge, while de facto keeping the reins in his hands and continuing the guerrilla war against the Vietnamese occupying forces on a military level, US arms aid for the Khmer Rouge was channelled via China.
The 1980s were characterised by attempts by the Khmer Rouge, with Western support, to overthrow the government installed by Vietnam, which was not recognised by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cambodia due to US pressure.
Movement in the deadlocked situation only came at the end of the 1980s, when Michael Gorbachev initiated talks with the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam to resolve the Cambodian problem with the aim of putting the Soviet Union’s relationship with China and the USA on a new footing. The Vietnamese side agreed to withdraw all troops from the neighbouring country by 1990. As expected, the implementation of this troop withdrawal led to a resurgence of the Khmer Rouge and an intensification of hostilities with the Vietnamese-appointed government in Phnom Penh, which continued until the end of the 1990s.
After the end of the East-West polarisation, the United Nations also repositioned itself with regard to the Cambodian question and initiated efforts to end the armed conflict, to politically stabilise the country and to contain the Khmer Rouge’s power ambitions. The Paris Peace Agreement of 23 October 1991, which placed the country under UN supervision for eighteen months as part of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) mission, set the course for Cambodia’s future development.[8] Under the protection of a peacekeeping force, the United Nations took over the administration of the country in order to secure a long-term ceasefire, enable refugees to return safely, draw up a constitution and prepare for free elections. The country’s armed forces were to be reduced by seventy percent of their original strength and human rights were to be monitored.[9] These elections for a constituent assembly took place on 23 May 1993, but were boycotted by the Khmer Rouge, who repeatedly attacked the country with guerrilla attacks until 1998.
The pro-royal FUNCINPEC (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendent, Neutre, Pacifique et Coopérativ, National Unity Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia), founded by Norodom Sihanouk in 1981, emerged victorious from the UN-supervised election and, together with the nationalist-conservative Cambodian People’s Party (Parti Populaire Cambodgien, CPP) under the leadership of Hun Sen formed a coalition government (1993-2006) in the constitutional monarchy established by the Constituent Assembly, which de jure granted the monarch some room for manoeuvre, although this was successively restricted by the executive under Hun Sen’s influence in the following years. The UNTAC mission ended with the election, with only a few employees remaining in the country to support the government in setting up administrative structures, particularly the judiciary.
King Sihanouk abdicated in October 2004 and his son Norodom Sihamoni (born 1953) succeeded him on the royal throne. However, control of the military, police and judiciary is in the hands of Hun Sen, who is also supported by the leading business enterprises.[10]
Sen declared his party the winner of the parliamentary election held on 28 July, which was described as a farce by international observers after the largest opposition party, the conservative and economically liberal CNRP (Cambodian National Rescue Party), was banned before the election. For several years, Cambodia has been on the path to a one-party dictatorship with an increasingly precarious human rights situation, in which the king is largely restricted to representative functions[11].
In Hun Sen’s Cambodia, critics disappear without trace or are arbitrarily arrested, detained without trial or exiled. Torture is practised in the country’s prisons, the press is subjected to censorship, the majority of generals in the armed forces and senior officials in the judiciary and administration are personally dependent on Hu Sen. His rule is based on violence and oppression. Numerous opposition members, journalists, trade union representatives and human rights activists have fallen victim to assassination attempts. The perpetrators, many of whom are known, have not been prosecuted in a single case[12].
Hun Sen, himself a former functionary of the Khmer Rouge terror regime, is also hardly interested in finding the truth or a judicial reappraisal of the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge. Instead, he paints a horror scenario of chaos and a new flare-up of civil war if a line is not drawn under the past[13].
The last combat units of the Khmer Rouge only surrendered at the end of 1998 after the death of Pol Pot following the promise of amnesties. Fighters of the Khmer Rouge were integrated into the regular army and sometimes still hold influential positions there, as well as in the administration.
Due to the duration of the conflict and the changing constellations in the civil war – Norodom Sihanouk was an opponent and later ally of the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen, commander of a regiment until 1977, was fought by them until 1998 – the lines of conflict of the unresolved past run through almost all generations, social classes and even families. Finding the truth and coming to terms with the past through the courts are still being blocked. The Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror is largely ignored in school curricula, while Hun Sen is celebrated as the „saviour of the nation“ every year on the bank holidays of „Victory over Genocide“ on 7 January and instrumentalises the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against humanity to consolidate his position of power. There is no critical debate in the Cambodian public.
Moreover, even after the Cold War, neither the USA nor China were interested in seeing their complex involvement in the conflict addressed by a national or international tribunal and repeatedly blocked the establishment of an international court in the UN Security Council.
After the end of the terror regime, 27 years passed before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, ECCC) was able to begin its work in July 2006.[14] The hybrid nature of the tribunal is unique in international law. The tribunal consists of both international and Cambodian judges. A majority rule, which was enforced by the United Nations due to the lack of independence of the Cambodian courts, ensures that every decision requires the approval of at least one international judge.
The tribunal’s mandate is limited to the period of Khmer Rouge rule between 1975 and 1979 and its leaders at the time. The former director of the „S-21“ camp, Kaing Guek Eav (born 1942), was sentenced to 35 years in 2010 and to life imprisonment on appeal in 2012. A further four defendants, including the former chief ideologue of the Khmer Rouge Nuon Chea (b. 1926), number two in the hierarchy after Pol Pot, received life sentences for crimes against humanity in 2014. Two of the defendants, the former foreign minister and the former social affairs minister of the terror regime, died during the trial. Two trials against four other defendants from the regime’s middle management are still ongoing forty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror.[15]
Due to the advanced age of the defendants, the court is running out of time. Hun Sen in particular seems to be playing for time and relying on a biological settlement of the problem without any in-depth examination of the burden of the past. With reference to the pending cases, he is calling for the trials to be stopped and is trying to obstruct their progress.
The NGO Human Rights Watch speaks of obstruction of justice, delays and corruption and points out, among other things, that the Cambodian executive has refused to execute the tribunal’s arrest warrants in several cases. In view of the at least 1.7 million people murdered and the fact that the tribunal has only achieved three convictions in the twelve years of its existence and the Cambodian government has shown no willingness to cooperate, the human rights organisation called for an end to the UN involvement in March 2015, otherwise the tribunal threatens to finally degenerate into a farce and permanently damage the already low level of trust of millions of victims and their families in the country’s non-independent justice system.[16] In view of the resistance put up by Hun Sen’s increasingly autocratic regime to a legal investigation into the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, the lack of independence of the Cambodian judiciary and the lack of interest on the part of the USA, the Soviet Union and China in an investigation into their instrumentalisation of the region’s conflicts during the „Cold War“, it is impossible to speak of a successful prosecution. 17]
Nevertheless, the tribunal also had a positive impact. These primarily had an impact in the area of social education and debate. The proceedings helped to expose the crimes of the Khmer Rouge to Cambodian society and remove the taboos surrounding them. The trials are public. Between 2009 and 2014, more than 150,000 visitors attended the trials and school classes followed the progress of the proceedings.
In addition, the non-governmental Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) was established in the shadow of the tribunal and has since grown into the largest archive on the rule of the Khmer Rouge. The centre’s interactive website is an essential component of an incipient social discourse that can currently only be promoted beyond the regime’s official history policy on the basis of non-governmental institutions. Forty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, the debate about the regime’s crimes is only just beginning.
Cambodia is a young country. Most Cambodians have no direct memory of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror and almost half of the population is under the age of 24. Less than ten per cent of the population are older than fifty, and 2019 marks the fortieth anniversary of the fall of the regime. Due to the taboo surrounding the genocide of their own people in politics and society, the younger generation has little knowledge of the genocide. Nevertheless, the past is omnipresent. Immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, its political instrumentalisation began. The downfall of the terror regime, which was ideologically based on a historically unique exaggeration of communist ideas, is the central legitimisation basis for the expansion of the ruling CPP’s power, which, according to the official interpretation of history, helped Cambodia to a second birth and for Hun Sen’s claim to leadership, who stylises himself as the saviour of the nation in this view of history. This legend serves to legitimise the expansion of Cambodia into an authoritarian one-party state and the progressive control over the legislative, judicial and executive branches, the banning of opposition parties and the persecution of critical media. A supposed resurgence of the Khmer Rouge and a new civil war serve as a threat scenario in this picture. Disclosure of Hun Sen’s involvement in the Khmer Rouge terror regime and the reintegration of numerous functionaries of the regime into the CPP and the state administration would shake this legitimisation construct.
Forty years after the collapse of the terror regime and more than twenty years after the end of the civil war, Cambodia is still suffering the consequences. The minimum wage is around $170 per month and the cost of living is high. There is no state healthcare or pension scheme, and corruption is omnipresent. Many Cambodians are more concerned with coping with everyday life than with coming to terms with the past.
However, there is resistance to the one-party regime, the repressive nature of which has become increasingly apparent since the 2018 elections, which degenerated into a farce, not least due to the banning of the most important opposition party, the liberal Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which emerged from democracy movements. Despite restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of expression, the cause of the economic difficulties is less and less associated with the Khmer Rouge regime and the civil war, but is increasingly being blamed on economic policy incompetence and corruption at all levels of Hun Sen’s autocratic government, which would hardly have been able to maintain its power in free elections in 2018.
Although it is currently calm on the surface, this calm does not reflect the mood of the people, according to the prominent human rights activist Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights (CCHR) until 2015 and founder and president of the independent political science think tank future forum, which has set itself the goal of developing a new vision, a new way of thinking.[18] He attributes the current deceptive calm to the repressive measures following the banning of the CNRP, but states that a government that is not recognised by its own people will eventually face major problems: „You can dissolve a political party, but not the will of the people.“[19]
[1] Estimates range from 1.7 million to over two million murdered. See Rudolph J. Rummel, ‚Demozid‘ – Der befohlene Tod. Mass murders in the 20th century. Münster 2006, p. 136.
[2] An overview: Heinz Gärtner, The Cold War. Alliances-Crises-Conflicts. Wiesbaden 2017.
[3] A good introduction: Marc Frey, History of the Vietnam War. The tragedy in Asia and the end of the American dream. Munich 92010 (1st ed. 1998). Cf. also the articles in: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB) (ed.), Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ), „Vietnam „, vol. 27 (2008), 30 June 2008. on the role of Ngô Đinh Diêm: Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngô Đinh Diêm and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam 1950-1963. Still on domino theory: Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century. Chicago 1994.
[4] Rummel, ‚Demozid‘, p. 138.
[5] Rummel, ibid.
[6 ]Official website of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: http://tuolsleng.gov.kh/en/.
[7] Further information: https://www.uni-marburg.de/icwc/monitoring/monitoring-marburg-icwc-eccc-kamdoscha-khmer-rouge-tribunal/bericht_choeung_ek_killing_fields_1.pdf
[8] Cf. Thorsten Bonacker, André Brodocz, Werner Distler, Katrin Travouillon, „Deutungsmacht in Nachkriegsgesellschaften. Zur politischen Autorität internationaler Administrationen in Kambodscha und im Kosovo“, in: Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen , 21. Jg (2014), H. 2, pp. 7-36.
[9] UN Resolutions 810 (8 March 1993), 826 (20 May 1993), 835 (2 June 1993), in: https: //www.un.org/depts/german/sr/sr_93/s-inf-49.pdf, pp. 114-122; see also: https: //undocs.org/S/RES/880(1993) on Resolution 880 of 4 November 1993 on the termination of the UNTAC mission.
[10] Cf. https://www. hrw.org/de/news/2018/06/27/kambodscha-hun-sens-grausame-generaele
[11] Cf. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42006828 and https://www.amnesty.d e/jahresbericht/2018/kambodscha
[12] Cf. the findings of Human Rights Watch, 12 January 2015: https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/01/12/30-years-hun-sen/violence-repression-and-corruption-cambodia
[13] Cf. for example The Cambodia Daily, 27 February 2015: https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/hun-sen-warns-of-civil-war-if-eccc-goes-beyond-limit-78757/.
[14] The official website of the tribunal: https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en.
[15] On Kaing Guek Eav: https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/articles/all-you-need-know-about-duch-appeal-judgment On Nuon Chea: https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/indicted-person/nuon-chea and https://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/%5Bdate-in-tz%5D/20181217%20Summary%20of%20Judgement%20Case%20002-02%20ENG_FINAL%20FOR%20PUBLICATION.pdf. On the other defendants: https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/court/summary-judgement-case-00202-against-nuon-chea-and-khieu-samphan.
[16] https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/22/cambodia-stop-blocking-justice-khmer-rouge-crimes.
[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html
[18] https://cchrcambodia.org/ and https://www.futureforum.asia/
[19] Cf. https://www. deutschlandfunk.de/parlamentswahl-in-kambodscha-ein-autokrat-klammert-sich-an.799.de.html?dram:article_id=424102
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http://www.ccc-cambodia.org/en/ngodb
(Database with NGOs in Cambodia)
(Website of the Sleuk Rith Institute (combination of Museum of Genocide Remembrance, Research Institute for Conflict and Human Rights Studies and Democracy Development))
(Website of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam))
http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/
(Independent website for monitoring the ECCC Tribunal)
(Website of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum)
(Website of the Genocide Studies Programme of Yale University)
https://www.amnesty.de/jahresbericht/2018/kambodscha
(Current information on the human rights situation in Cambodia from Amnesty International)
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/cambodia
(Current information on the human rights situation in Cambodia from Human Rights Watch)
(Website of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights (CCHR))
(Website of the political science think-tank future forum founded by the human rights activist Ou Virak)
https://harvardhrj.com/ou-virak/
(Harvard Human Rights Journal (31, 2018): Interview with Ou Virak
(Website of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC))
http://aseanmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/APHR_Cambodia-MPs-Report_Mar-2017.pdf
(Website of the Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights, APHR)