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Elizabeth Becker (born October 28, 1947) is an American journalist and author. She has written five books and is best known for her reporting and writing on Cambodia.
Elizabeth Becker graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in South Asian Studies and studied language at the Kendriya Hindi Sansthan in Agra, India. She was an Edelman fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her papers on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge are held at The University of Washington Southeast Asia Library as the Elizabeth Becker collection.
Becker is the mother of two adult children. She is married to William L. Nash and lives in Washington, D.C.
Becker began her career reporting from Cambodia during the Vietnam War for the Washington Post as a local stringer. She joined the newspaper’s staff in Washington. She was the Senior Foreign Editor of National Public Radio where she received two DuPont Columbia awards as executive producer for reporting South Africa's first democratic elections and the Rwandan genocide.
Becker is the author of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, which won the 2022 Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard [1] and the 2022 Sperber Prize from Fordham. [2] Her first book When the War Was Over, a modern history of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won a Robert F. Kennedy book citation. That book includes her visit to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and interview of Pol Pot. Rithy Panh made the documentary film Bophana based on an excerpt of the book. Her early investigation of the Khmer Rouge was detailed in A Problem from Hell; America in the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power. She is also the author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism and America's Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.
Becker was summoned to testify as an expert witness before the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
In December 1978, Becker was a member, with Malcolm Caldwell and Richard Dudman, of the only group of Western journalists and writers to visit Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge had taken power in April 1975. [3] [ citation needed ] On December 22, their last day in the country, the three interviewed Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia. Pol Pot told Becker and Dudman he expected NATO to help him fight against communist Vietnam. He spoke to Caldwell about economics. They returned to their guest house in Phnom Penh when, at about 11:00 p.m. that night Becker was awakened by the sound of gunfire. She stepped out of her bedroom and saw a heavily armed Cambodian man who pointed a pistol at her. She ran back into her room and heard people moving and more gunshots. Several hours later a Cambodian came to her bedroom door and told her that Caldwell was dead. She and Dudman went to his room. He had been shot in the chest and the body of a Cambodian man was also in the room, possibly the same man who had pointed the pistol at Becker. [4]
The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by then Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary, politician and dictator who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979. Ideologically a Maoist and a Khmer ethnonationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia’s communist movement the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981, his rule converted Cambodia into a one-party communist state. He perpetrated the Cambodian genocide of which from 1975 to 1979 between 1.5 and 2 million people died, approximately a quarter of Cambodia's entire population. His iron rule ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, occupying the whole country in two weeks, ending the genocide, toppling the Khmer Rouge and establishing a new Cambodian government.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, or simply Tuol Sleng, is a museum chronicling the Cambodian genocide. Located in Phnom Penh, the site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng and it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge and the secret police known as the Santebal. On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died on 2 September 2020 while serving a life sentence.
Khieu Samphan is a Cambodian former communist politician and economist who was the chairman of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, although Pol Pot remained the General Secretary in the party.
Ieng Sary was the co-founder and senior member of the Khmer Rouge and one of the main architects of the Cambodian Genocide. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot and served in the 1975–79 government of Democratic Kampuchea as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. He was known as "Brother Number Three", as he was third in command after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. His wife, Ieng Thirith, served in the Khmer Rouge government as social affairs minister. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict.
Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge. He also briefly served as acting Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He was commonly known as "Brother Number Two", as he was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, General Secretary of the Party, during the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979. In 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, and a further trial convicted him of genocide in 2018. These life sentences were merged into a single life sentence by the Trial Chamber on 16 November 2018. He died while serving his sentence in 2019.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers is a 2000 non-fiction book written by Loung Ung, a Cambodian-American author and childhood survivor of Democratic Kampuchea. It is her personal account of her experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime.
Ieng Thirith was an influential intellectual and politician in the Khmer Rouge, although she was neither a member of the Khmer Rouge Standing Committee nor of the Central Committee. Ieng Thirith was the wife of Ieng Sary, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea's Khmer Rouge regime. She served as Minister of Social Affairs from October 1975 until the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
Benedict F. "Ben" Kiernan is an Australian-born American historian who is the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.
John Dawson Dewhirst was a British teacher and amateur yachtsman who was one of nine westerners, and two Britons, known to have been killed by the Khmer Rouge during the rule of Pol Pot.
James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell was a Scottish academic and a prolific Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American foreign policy, a campaigner for Asian communist and socialist movements and a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. Caldwell was murdered a few hours after meeting Pol Pot in Cambodia, though who was responsible for the murder remains debated.
Richard Beebe Dudman was an American journalist who spent 31 years with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during which time he covered Fidel Castro's insurgency in Cuba, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the Watergate scandal, the Iran-Contra scandal, and wars and revolutions in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Far East. He was chief of the Washington bureau during the 1970s which landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the totalitarian dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 effectively ended the United States-backed Khmer Republic of Lon Nol.
Operation Freedom Deal was a military campaign led by the United States Seventh Air Force, taking place in Cambodia between 19 May 1970 and 15 August 1973. Part of the larger Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War, the goal of the operation was to provide air support and interdiction in the region. Launched by President Richard Nixon as a follow-up to the earlier ground invasion during the Cambodian Campaign, the initial targets of the operation were the base areas and border sanctuaries of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong (VC).
The Ba Chúc massacre was the mass killing of 3,157 civilians in Ba Chúc, An Giang Province, Vietnam, by the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea from April 18 to 30, 1978. The Khmer Rouge took the local villagers to temples and schools to torture and kill them. The residents who fled to the mountains in the following days were also brutally slaughtered. Almost all the victims were shot, stabbed or beheaded.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, commonly known as the Cambodia Tribunal or Khmer Rouge Tribunal (សាលាក្ដីខ្មែរក្រហម), was a court established to try the senior leaders and the most responsible members of the Khmer Rouge for alleged violations of international law and serious crimes perpetrated during the Cambodian genocide. Although it was a national court, it was established as part of an agreement between the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United Nations, and its members included both local and foreign judges. It was considered a hybrid court, as the ECCC was created by the government in conjunction with the UN, but remained independent of them, with trials being held in Cambodia using Cambodian and international staff. The Cambodian court invited international participation in order to apply international standards.
Cambodian genocide denial is the belief expressed by some academics that early claims of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979) in Cambodia were much exaggerated. Many scholars of Cambodia and intellectuals opposed to the US involvement in the Vietnam War denied or minimized reports of human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary reports as "tales told by refugees" and US propaganda. They viewed the assumption of power by the Communist Party of Kampuchea as a positive development for the people of Cambodia who had been severely impacted by the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. On the other side of the argument, anti-communists in the United States and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their belief that the victory of Communist governments in Southeast Asia would lead to a "bloodbath."
The Cambodian genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population in 1975.
The United States (U.S.) voted for the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) to retain Cambodia's United Nations (UN) seat until as late as 1993, long after the Khmer Rouge had been mostly deposed by Vietnam during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and ruled just a small part of the country. It has also been reported that the U.S. encouraged the government of China to provide military support for the Khmer Rouge. There have also been related allegations by several sources, notably Michael Haas, which claim that the U.S. directly armed the Khmer Rouge in order to weaken the influence of Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia. These allegations have been disputed by the U.S. government and by journalist Nate Thayer, who argued that little, if any, American aid actually reached the Khmer Rouge. Academic scholar Peter Maguire writes that the U.S. "gave $85 million to the Khmer Rouge between 1980 and 1986," roughly half of which occurred "during the crucial years of 1979 and 1980."
When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution is a 1986 non-fiction book by American journalist Elizabeth Becker. The book recounts Becker's 1978 reporting trip to Democratic Kampuchea, accompanied by journalist Richard Dudman and academic Malcolm Caldwell, upon the invitation of senior Khmer Rouge officials. Becker was one of the few foreigners to travel to the country during the regime, and included her interviewing Pol Pot. It was loosely adapted into the 2024 Rithy Panh film Meeting with Pol Pot.
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