Story Archive
2010-07-27
On trial, he became the only defendant yet to come close to telling the truth about what happened.
2009-08-19
Conservative columnist Robert Novak passed away on Aug. 18 at the age of 78. RFA Executive Editor Dan Southerland tells the story of a dangerous road trip with the famous commentator at the outset of the war in Cambodia in 1970.
2009-07-20
As the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh sheds light on horrors perpetrated by that regime thirty years ago, Dan Southerland recalls that reporters and photographers were also not spared.
2008-04-04
Dith Pran, the hero of "The Killing Fields," was an interpreter and “fixer” in 1970. It was the first year of the war in Cambodia, a time when many Cambodians truly believed that they could defeat the Vietnamese Communists. At that time, the Khmer Rouge were just emerging as a military force that would ultimately conquer the country and send Dith Pran to a labor camp.
2006-07-20
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, starting a four-year reign of terror in Cambodia. RFA’s chief editor Dan Southerland visits battlefields he covered as a war correspondent from 1970-75. In these blogs, Southerland reports how many older Cambodians are trying to forget the Khmer Rouge trauma, while younger Cambodians know little of their own history.
2006-06-20
Interviewing refugees can be tricky business. They sometimes tell you what they think you want to hear. Some exaggerate in order to gain sympathy.
2006-05-19
The brother of one of the world’s most notorious mass murderers is sleeping peacefully in his hammock.
2006-05-04
In the later stages of the war in Cambodia, refugees began to describe the widespread killing of civilians in areas under Khmer Rouge control.
2006-04-21
Nothing looks familiar to me except the empty highway stretching straight ahead toward Vietnam. But I can still make out the place where my two colleagues disappeared, never to be seen again
2006-04-14
"I find few scars of war and conflict here that might remind them of what happened when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and killed more than 1 million—some say as many as 2 million—of Cambodia’s people."
