Ben Kiernan

A photo of genocide scholar Ben Kiernan, October 15, 2002.

Photo by Mike Marsland.

Benedict F. Kiernan (born 1953 in Melbourne, Australia) is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is a prolific writer on the Cambodian genocide. Kiernan has also published prize-winning work on the global history of genocide.

Biography

In his early twenties, Kiernan visited Cambodia as a young radical left wing student and an enthusiastic supporter of the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, but left before the Khmer Rouge expelled all foreigners in 1975. Alhough from 1975 to 1978 Kiernan doubted the scale and even the existence of genocide then being perpetrated in Democratic Kampuchea -- despite mountains of evidence from reputable journalists from France, Britain, Australia and the United States, utilising refugee interview on the Thai-Cambodia border -- he changed his mind in late 1978 after the Khmer Rouge came into open conflict with their former comrades who ruled Vietnam. He then belatedly began a series of interviews with several hundred refugees from Cambodia. He even learnt the Khmer language with the help of this then wife, Chanthou Boua, and carried out extensive research in Cambodia and among refugees abroad, and has since written many books on the topic. Kiernan's writings are controversial among Cambodia scholars because of his sympathies for the defecting Khmer Rouge factions from the Eastern Zone, led by Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, and Hun Sen, who were installed in power in Phnom Penh by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979.

From 1980 onwards, Kiernan worked with Gregory Stanton to bring the Khmer Rouge to international justice. Kiernan abandoned that effort in 1999 after Hun Sen, the strongman of Cambodia (one of the former Khmer Rouge whom Kiernan still admires), announced that it was time to "dig a whole and bury the past." A few weeks after Hun Sen's statement Kiernan resigned as head of Yale's Cambodia Genocide Program. A Khmer Rouge Tribunal was established under the joint authority of the United Nations and the Cambodian government in 2006. In recent years Hun Sen has said that he wants the tribunal to finish after the trials of two cases against a total of five people, which means that unlike in Nazi Germany, or even in Bosnia, the vast majority of Khmer Rouge killers (many of whom hold positions in the current Cambodian government) will never face justice. Until now Kiernan has not dissented from Hun Sen's position.

Kiernan had obtained his Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia in 1983 under the supervision of David P. Chandler, one of several scholars whom Kiernan later turned against. He joined the Yale History Department in 1990, and founded the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in 1994, and the comparative Genocide Studies Program in 1998. He is the author of over 100 scholarly articles on Southeast Asia and genocide. Kiernan currently teaches history courses on Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War and genocides through the ages.

According to Kiernan, in 1995 a Khmer Rouge court indicted, tried and sentenced Kiernan in-absentia for "prosecuting and terrorizing the Cambodian resistance patriots". However no documentary evidence has ever been produced to support this assertion.

Kiernan is married to the award winning historian of the American South Glenda Gilmore.

Select Publications and Awards

In an article in the Walrus Magazine, Kiernan and Taylor Owen wrote that recent evidence reveals that Cambodia was bombed by the U.S. far more heavily than previously believed. They conclude that "the impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide."

His 2007 book, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press), received the 2008 gold medal from the U.S. Independent Publishers association for the best work of History published in 2007, and the German Studies Association’s biennial Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book published in 2007 or 2008 dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context, covering the fields of history, political science, and other social sciences, literature, art, and photography.

In June 2009, the book’s German translation, Erde und Blut: Völkermord und Vernichtung von der Antike bis heute, won first place in Germany’s Nonfiction Book of the Month Prize (Die Sachbücher des Monats). Kiernan’s writings have appeared in fourteen languages. His books on Cambodian history include How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (first published in 1985), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (Transaction, 2007). In 2008, Yale University Press published the third edition of his 1996 book, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. Kiernan’s anthology Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002.

Criticism of Kiernan's Scholarship

Kiernan's work before 1978, especially his work with the publication News from Kampuchea, as well as in several other publications, has been criticized as being pro-Khmer Rouge.

Kiernan became a fierce critic of Khmer Rouge behavior only after the Khmer Rouge openly came into conflict with Vietnam. Peter Rodman states that "When Hanoi turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became respectable for many on the Left to "discover" the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge-qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years. Kiernan fits this pattern nicely. His book even displays an eagerness to absolve of genocidal responsibility those members of the Khmer Rouge who defected to Hanoi and were later reinstalled in power in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978."

Kiernan's book The Pol Pot Regime has been severely criticised for its serious scholarly flaws by Dr Stephen Heder of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Ironically, in 1994, Kiernan was awarded a $499,000 grant by the State Department to help the Cambodian government document the Khmer Rouge's abuses. Stephen J. Morris, at the time a research associate in the department of government at Harvard University cited statements Kiernan had made regarding the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, denying the extent and centrally directed nature of the Khmer Rouge mass executions, starvation and disease. In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Morris claimed that Kiernan's earlier opinions made him a poor choice to study Khmer Rouge abuses. Gerard Henderson, executive director of Australia's Sydney Institute stated that Kiernan had "barracked for the Khmer Rouge when the Cambodian killing fields were choked with corpses." The State Department award, which was administered by the East Asia and Pacific Bureau of the State Department, angered the then Assistant Secretary of State, Winston Lord, who had been unaware of it until after it was publicised by Morris in the Wall Street Journal. Lord made clear that there would be no further grants to Kiernan from his Bureau. The following year Kiernan applied for a further grant from the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Labor and Human Rights. The then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for that Bureau, Catherin Dalpino, and another State Department official, Kiernan's old friend Gregory Stanton, who both sympathised with Kiernan's political views, were instrumental in Kiernan receiving a supplementary award of $1,000,000.

Selected bibliography

• Kiernan, Ben (1976). "Social Cohesion in Revolutionary Cambodia". Australian Outlook. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Kiernan, Ben (October–December 1979). "Vietnam and the Governments and People of Kampuchea". Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Kiernan, Ben and Boua, Chanthou (1981). Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981. Zed Books Ltd.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Kiernan, Ben (2004) [1985]. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10262-3.
• Kiernan, Ben (1986). Cambodia: The Eastern zone Massacres.
• Kiernan, Ben (1986). Cambodge: Histoire et enjeux.
• Kiernan, Ben (2002) [1996]. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09649-6.
• Kiernan, Ben (1998). Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie, et pouvoir.
• Kiernan, Ben (2007). Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300100983.
• Kiernan, Ben (2007). Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial, and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1412806682.

External links

• Kiernan's bio at Yale
• Cambodian Genocide Program
• Genocide Studies Program
• Behind the Peace Agreement in Cambodia
• PBS interview with Kiernan
• Aztag interview with Kiernan
• Interview with Kiernan on "New Books in History"