Ben Kiernan - "Challenging Pol Pot: The Courage and the Fate of Hou Yuon, one of Cambodia’s ‘Three Ghosts’"

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Abstract: Cambodia’s “Three Ghosts” were Marxist parliamentarians of the Sihanouk era (1953-70), popularly elected to Cambodia’s National Assembly in 1962, re-elected in 1966, but then threatened by Lon Nol’s military. They fled for their lives the next year. All three joined the Khmer Rouge rebels but were widely thought to have been killed by the military. Two of them, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, were later murdered by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, but the third, Khieu Samphan, was appointed that regime’s head of state, and is currently serving a life sentence for extermination and genocide, imposed by the UN-sponsored Cambodia tribunal.

Especially during its brutal rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea leadership sought to overcome internal opposition and even faced armed resistance to its widespread party purges, its genocides of ethnic minorities, its murder of up to a million Cambodians, and the 700,000 deaths by starvation, disease, and overwork that resulted from its policies. This talk will examine the motives and tactics behind one specific murder that occurred during the first year of that regime. Had Pol Pot’s group spared the country’s leading dissident Marxist Hou Yuon in 1975, his continuing outspoken activism might well have inspired broader opposition among Khmer Rouge members as well as other Cambodians, and likely helped resist the regime’s genocidal campaigns.

Speaker: Ben Kiernan A. Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University Founding Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program, MacMillan Center (1994-2015); Professor of International & Area Studies, MacMillan Center (2005-2021); Faculty Affiliate, International Security Studies, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs

Sponsored by: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies Yale Genocide Studies Program