THE KHMER ROUGE
The Khmer Rouge was a weird, ultra-Maoist revolutionary group led by a weird, ultra-Maoist revolutionary named Pol Pot. It presided over one of humanity's most appalling reigns of terror. Between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, about 21 percent of the population (an estimated 1.7 million people) died, a higher rate than in Nazi-occupied Europe or Rwanda. If the same percentage of people were to do die in the United States about 50 million people would be dead.
Only the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda rank with the Khmer Rouge years in terms of numbers and horror. What is particularly incomprehensible about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is that they were committed by Cambodians against Cambodians, in some cases by Khmer Rouge members against fellow Khmer Rouge members.
The Khmer Rouge means “Red Cambodians” (Red is the color of Communism). In the Khmer Rouge national anthem Cambodia is referred to as the land "of bright red blood, which covers towns and plains." Khmer Rouge members wore red checked scarves around their necks to identify themselves. When they seized power in 1975 they renamed Cambodia “Democratic Kampuchea.”
Patrick Falby of AFP wrote that while much of the focus is “on the notorious "Killing Fields" years of 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge was actually a major force in the country for decades, dragging China, the United States, Vietnam and Thailand into the maelstrom. Begun in the 1960s as a movement of Cambodian peasants and intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge was backed by Vietnamese communists who were waging war next door against US-backed South Vietnam. As US planes dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs aimed at Viet Cong resistance bases along the border, the wreckage encouraged tens of thousands to join Pol Pot's nascent communist movement. [Source: Patrick Falby, AFP, February 18, 2009]
The Khmer Rouge got a further boost after the corrupt anti-communist government of General Lon Nol seized power in 1970 from the country's hereditary ruler, Norodom Sihanouk, and won US backing. Residents cheered the local guerrilla fighters when they took over the sleepy capital Phnom Penh in April 1975 but hospital patients were soon being torn from their beds as the entire population was marched from the city. The Khmer Rouge made no compromises installing its vision of communism, and with the backing of China, enslaved its people over the next four years. Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork or were executed under the Khmer Rouge, which abolished religion, schools and currency, and exiled millions to vast collective farms.
Books, Films and Websites on the Khmer Rouge
Book: The French ethnologist Francios Bizot was one of the few foreigner to get close to the Khmer Rouge regime and survive to tell the story. His book “The Gate” (Knopf, 2003) is one of the most compelling accounts of the Khmer Rouge years. “Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs of Survivors” by Dith Pran (Yale University, 1997) is a good collection of first hand accounts of survivors of the Khmer Rouge years. “When the War was Over” by Elizabeth Becker is a history of modern Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.
Other Books: “When Broken Glass Floats, Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge” by Chanrithy Him (Norton & Company); “First They Killed My Father, A Daughter of Cambodia Remember” by Loung Ug. (HarperCollins); “The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, the Holocaust and the Modern Conscience” by William Shawcross; “When the War Was Over” by Elizabeth Becker (Simon and Schuster, 1986); “The Tragedy of Cambodian History” by David Chandler; “Report from a Stricken Land” by Henry Kamm (Arcade Publishing, 1998).
Websites: The Documentation Center of Cambodia : dccam.org
Information about the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge is now available on the Internet through the U.S.-government and Yale University-funded Cambodia Genocide Program (CGP). The information includes photographs of victims and their final confessions, maps of mass graves and prisons, biographies of Khmer Rouge leaders and documents from the trial in which Pol Pot and his right-hand man Ieng Sary were tried in absentia. Cambodian Genocide Program website: http://www.yale.edu/cgp
Films:"The Killing Fields," which won three Academy Awards in 1984; “Enemies of the People” a 2009 documentary; and “Missing Picture”, a 2012 film by Cambodian director Rithy Panh, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the category for best Foreign Language Film. See Film
Early History of the Cambodian Left
The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases: the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before World War II; the ten-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar (Pol Pot after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967-68 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea regime, from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987*]
Much of the movement's history has been shrouded in mystery, largely because successive purges, especially during the Democratic Kampuchea period, have left so few survivors to recount their experiences. One thing is evident, however, the tension between Khmer and Vietnamese was a major theme in the movement's development. In the three decades between the end of World War II and the Khmer Rouge victory, the appeal of communism to Westerneducated intellectuals (and to a lesser extent its more inchoate attraction for poor peasants) was tempered by the apprehension that the much stronger Vietnamese movement was using communism as an ideological rationale for dominating the Khmer. The analogy between the Vietnamese communists and the Nguyen dynasty, which had legitimized its encroachments in the nineteenth century in terms of the "civilizing mission" of Confucianism, was persuasive. Thus, the new brand of indigenous communism that emerged after 1960 combined nationalist and revolutionary appeals and, when it could afford to, exploited the virulent anti-Vietnamese sentiments of the Khmers. Khmer Rouge literature in the 1970s frequently referred to the Vietnamese as yuon (barbarian), a term dating from the Angkorian period. *
In 1930 Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Communist Party by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in Tonkin, in Annam, and in Cochinchina during the late 1920s. The name was changed almost immediately to the ICP, ostensibly to include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos. Almost without exception, however, all the earliest party members were Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a handful of Cambodians had joined its ranks, but their influence on the Indochinese communist movement and on developments within Cambodia was negligible. *
Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodia bases during their war against the French, and, in conjunction with the leftist government that ruled Thailand until 1947, the Viet Minh encouraged the formation of armed, left-wing Khmer Issarak bands. On April 17, 1950 (twenty-five years to the day before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh), the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups convened, and the United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was Son Ngoc Minh (possibly a brother of the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh), and a third of its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According to the historian David P. Chandler, the leftist Issarak groups, aided by the Viet Minh, occupied a sixth of Cambodia's territory by 1952; and, on the eve of the Geneva Conference, they controlled as much as one half of the country. *
In 1951 the ICP was reorganized into three national units — the Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Itsala, and the KPRP. According to a document issued after the reorganization, the Vietnam Workers' Party would continue to "supervise" the smaller Laotian and Cambodian movements. Most KPRP leaders and rank-and-file seem to have been either Khmer Krom, or ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia. The party's appeal to indigenous Khmers appears to have been minimal. *
According to Democratic Kampuchea's version of party history, the Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the 1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement, which still controlled large areas of the countryside and which commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about 1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a "Long March" into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile. In late 1954, those who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Pracheachon Party, which participated in the 1955 and the 1958 National Assembly elections. In the September 1955 election, it won about 4 percent of the vote but did not secure a seat in the legislature. Members of the Pracheachon were subject to constant harassment and to arrests because the party remained outside Sihanouk's Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it from participating in the 1962 election and drove it underground. Sihanouk habitually labeled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and their associates. *
During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth), and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng), emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused divergent revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line, endorsed by North Vietnam, recognized that Sihanouk, by virtue of his success in winning independence from the French, was a genuine national leader whose neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South Vietnam. Champions of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right wing and to adopt leftist policies. The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk. In 1959 Sieu Heng defected to the government and provided the security forces with information that enabled them to destroy as much as 90 percent of the party's rural apparatus. Although communist networks in Phnom Penh and in other towns under Tou Samouth's jurisdiction fared better, only a few hundred communists remained active in the country by 1960. *
Pol Pot
Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, was one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. Described by Sihanouk as "our Ivan the Terrible, Our Stalin,” he has been held directly responsible for the all the people who died in Cambodia in the Khmer Rouge years. First used in 1977, Pol Pot was nom de guerre that has no meaning. Pol Pot's real name was Saloth Sar. His disciples called him "Brother Number One."
In addition to being one the 20th century's cruelest leader, Pol Pot was also one of its most secretive and mysterious figures. He was rarely photographed, rarely seen, rarely interviewed. Most people in the Khmer Rouge never saw him. Only a handful of photographs of him exist. One taken in 1980 interview, shows him sitting at a table in the jungle, smiling and looking serene as he answered questions.
Pol Pot was described by people who met him as pudgy, polite, gentle, serene, sincere and possessing polished manners. A Western diplomat told the New York Times, "part of what is so eerie about Pol Pot is that anyone has who has met him leaves with an impression of a man who is sweetly smiling and terribly deferential."
Pol Pot had a bland, affable face and a gentle demeanor. He worked as a school teacher for a while, liked to play the violin and had a low, melodious voice. “He was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome but attractive," wrote Elizabeth Becker, who interviewed him in 1978. "his features were delicate and alert and his smile nearly endearing. There was no question to his appeal. Physically, he had a strong, comfortable appearance. His gestures and manner were polished, not crude." In the hour long interview she said he railed against the Vietnamese but never raised his voice. "At most he nodded his head slightly and licked his dainty wrist for emphasis," she wrote.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, was one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. Described by Sihanouk as "our Ivan the Terrible, Our Stalin,” he has been held directly responsible for the all the people who died in Cambodia in the Khmer Rouge years. First used in 1977, Pol Pot was nom de guerre that has no meaning. Pol Pot's real name was Saloth Sar. His disciples called him "Brother Number One."
In addition to being one the 20th century's cruelest leader, Pol Pot was also one of its most secretive and mysterious figures. He was rarely photographed, rarely seen, rarely interviewed. Most people in the Khmer Rouge never saw him. Only a handful of photographs of him exist. One taken in 1980 interview, shows him sitting at a table in the jungle, smiling and looking serene as he answered questions.
Pol Pot biography: “Brother Number One” by David Chandler (1992).
Pol Pot’s Early Life
Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) was born in 1925 (some sources say in 1928), when Cambodia was a French colony, on a 44-acre farm in a village near Kompong Thom (90 miles north of Phnom Penh). He was the eighth of nine children. His father was a farmer with connections to the Cambodian royal family. His mother was known for her charitable works. A sister and cousin were in the royal ballet.
Pol Pot's older brother Saloth Seng told the New York Times, "He was a very polite boy; he never caused trouble." His youngest brother Saloth Nhep said, "I was very close to him in school. He was a nice boy, very polite. He was happy and sometimes made jokes...He said what he meant but he would laugh and make a joke of it." Like other Cambodians, Pol Pot's brothers and sisters were driven from the homes during the Khmer Rouge years and lost family members. His sister, Saloth Roeung, told the New York Times, "I am not happy that I share even a drop of blood of his blood. If our parents were alive today, they would be very sad."
At the age of six Pol Pot left his family to live in Phnom Penh with the cousin who was a dancer in the royal ballet (she had also given birth to a child fathered by a Cambodian prince). Pol Pot lived for a while at the royal palace and was enrolled at a monastery. He later studied at an elite, French-run primary school. He liked French literature but failed his exams to enter a high school and studied carpentry at a trade school instead. A former classmate recalled, “His manner was straightforward, pleasant and very polite...He thought a lot but said very little.”
Pol Pot in France
When Pol Pot was in his 20s, he received a scholarship from the royal government to study "radio-electricity" in France (other sources say he attended a school for printers and typesetters and also studied civil engineering). He traveled to France in 1949 and stayed there for three years. Described by one source as a "determined, rather plodding organizer," he failed to obtain a degree, but, according to the Jesuit priest, Father François Ponchaud, he acquired a taste for the classics of French literature as well as for the writings of Marx. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987]
In 1952, he joined the French Communist Party, which at that time was known for its Stalinist views, and befriended people like Ieng Sary and Son Sen, who later became his top aides in the Khmer Rouge. Recalling his time in France, Pol Pot told the Vietnam News Agency in 1976, "I joined a progressive student movement. As I spent more of my time in radical activities, I did not attend many classes." He also reportedly spent much time reading poetry and, for a while, worked on a highway project in Yugoslavia.
While in France, Pol Pot met Khieu Ponnary, a Cambodian school teacher several years older than him. They were married after they returned to Cambodia. She too was a committed communist. Her sister married Ieng Sary. In the 1970s, Pol Pot and Khieu Ponnary were divorced. She suffered from mental illness and was sent to a mental hospital in China. She died in July 2003.
Paris Student Group
During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized their own communist movement, which had little, if any, connection to the hard-pressed party in their homeland. From their ranks came the men and women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during the 1960s, led an effective insurgency against Sihanouk and Lon Nol from 1968 until 1975, and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987*]
Pol Pot was member of the Paris student group. Sary. Another member was Ieng Sary.He was a Chinese-Khmer born in 1930 in South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in France. Khieu Samphan, considered "one of the most brilliant intellects of his generation," was born in 1931 and specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris. In talent he was rivaled by Hou Yuon, born in 1930, who was described as being "of truly astounding physical and intellectual strength," and who studied economics and law. Son Sen, born in 1930, studied education and literature; Hu Nim, born in 1932, studied law. *
These men were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of Asian communism. Two of them, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, earned doctorates from the University of Paris; Hu Nim obtained his degree from the University of Phnom Penh in 1965. In retrospect, it seems enigmatic that these talented members of the elite, sent to France on government scholarships, could launch the bloodiest and most radical revolution in modern Asian history. Most came from landowner or civil servant families. Pol Pot and Hou Yuon may have been related to the royal family. An older sister of Pol Pot had been a concubine at the court of King Monivong. Three of the Paris group forged a bond that survived years of revolutionary struggle and intraparty strife, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith (also known as Ieng Thirith), purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two well-educated women also played a central role in the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.*
The intellectual ferment of Paris must have been a dizzying experience for young Khmers fresh from Phnom Penh or the provinces. A number sought refuge in the dogma of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party, the most tightly disciplined and Stalinist of Western Europe's communist movements. In 1951 the two men went to East Berlin to participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered to have been a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with Khmers who were fighting with the Viet Minh (and whom they subsequently judged to be too subservient to the Vietnamese), they became convinced that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer students in Paris belonged, into a platform for nationalist and leftist ideas. In 1952 Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, and other leftists gained notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the "strangler of infant democracy." A year later, the French authorities closed down the KSA. In 1956, however, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped to establish a new Marxist-oriented group, the Khmer Students' Union. *
The doctoral dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan express basic themes that were later to become the cornerstones of the policy adopted by Democratic Kampuchea. The central role of the peasants in national development was espoused by Hou Yuon in his 1955 thesis, "The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization," which challenged the conventional view that urbanization and industrialization are necessary precursors of development. The major argument in Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis, "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development," was that the country had to become self-reliant and had to end its economic dependency on the developed world. In its general contours, Khieu's work reflected the influence of a branch of the "dependency theory" school, which blamed lack of development in the Third World on the economic domination of the industrialized nations. *
Pol Pot Returns to Cambodia
In 1953, after writing an anti-royalist tract in which he called the king “a malodorous running shrew that just people must eliminate,” Pol Pot’s scholarship was canceled and he was ordered home. While he was in France, his family had fallen on hard times. Some relatives lost their land; others were forced to pull rickshaws.
Upon returning to Cambodia, Pol Pot joined the Communist Party in Cambodia and began working as a teacher at a private high school. He taught French, history, geography and civics and by all accounts was very popular. In “Brother Number One” , David Chandler wrote that as a teacher he was "eloquent but unpretentious, honest, humane, easy to befriend—and easy to respect.”
While working as a teacher, Pol Pot engaged in underground Communist activities. At that time there were several communist organizations in Cambodia, the most powerful of which was the Vietnamese-backed Indochinese Communist Party. In 1954, Cambodian communist felt they were betrayed by their counterparts in Vietnam when the Vietnamese secured favorable terms in a peace treaty with France and one of terms of the agreement was convincing the Cambodia communists to give up their fight.
After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party work first in Kampong Cham Province (Kompong Cham) and then in Phnom Penh under Tou Samouth's "urban committee." His comrades, Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon, became teachers at a new private high school, the Lycée Kambuboth, which Hou Yuon helped to establish. Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959, taught as a member of the law faculty of the University of Phnom Penh, and started a left-wing, French-language publication, L'Observateur. The paper soon acquired a reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic circle. The following year, the government closed the paper, and Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Khieu by undressing and photographing him in public — as Shawcross notes, "not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or forget." Yet the experience did not prevent Khieu from advocating cooperation with Sihanouk in order to promote a united front against United States activities in South Vietnam. As mentioned, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim tried to "work through the system" by joining the Sangkum and by accepting posts in the prince's government. Hardliners like Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen advocated resistance. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987]
Establishment of the Khmer Rouge
In 1960, Pol Pot met with other communists in a corner of a Phnom Penh rail yard and helped form Cambodia's first non-Vietnamese-supported communist party, the Khmer Workers Party. By 1963 Pol Pot was the leader of the group, which was given the name the name Khmer Rouge in 1963 by King Sihanouk after he launched an anti-communist crackdown.
It is not clear how Pol Pot became leader of the Khmer Workers Party. According to one report he ordered the assassination of his predecessor. In 1963, after the Sihanouk crackdown, he and his friends Ieng Sary and Son Sen fled to Vietnam.
In late September, 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. This pivotal event remains shrouded in mystery because its outcome has become an object of contention (and considerable historical rewriting) between pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese Khmer communist factions. The question of cooperation with, or resistance to, Sihanouk was thoroughly discussed. Tou Samouth, who advocated a policy of cooperation, was elected general secretary of the KPRP that was renamed the Workers' Party of Kampuchea (WPK). [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987 *]
His ally, Nuon Chea (also known as Long Reth), became deputy general secretary; however, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were named to the Political Bureau to occupy the third and the fifth highest positions in the renamed party's hierarchy. The name change is significant. By calling itself a workers' party, the Cambodian movement claimed equal status with the Vietnam Workers' Party. The pro-Vietnamese regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) implied in the 1980s that the September 1960 meeting was nothing more than the second congress of the KPRP. *
On July 20, 1962, Tou Samouth disappeared. He may have been the victim of Sihanouk's police, but some observers suggest that Pol Pot, who had built up a strong faction within the party, had him eliminated. In February 1963, at the WPK's second congress, Pol Pot was chosen to succeed Tou Samouth as the party's general secretary. Tou's allies, Nuon Chea and Keo Meas, were removed from the Central Committee and replaced by Son Sen and Vorn Vet. From then on, Pol Pot and loyal comrades from his Paris student days controlled the party center, edging out older veterans whom they considered excessively pro-Vietnamese. *
Khmer Rouge in the 1960s
In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Rotanokiri (Ratanakiri) Province in the northeast. This is a region inhabited by tribal minorities, the Khmer Loeu, whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced assimilation) at the hands of the central government made them willing recruits for a guerrilla struggle. In 1965 Pol Pot made a visit of several months duration to North Vietnam and China. He probably received some training in China, which must have enhanced his prestige when he returned to the WPK's liberated areas. Despite friendly relations between Sihanouk and the Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk. In September 1966, the party changed its name a second time, to the Kampuchean (or Khmer) Communist Party (KCP). Adopting the label "communist" suggested that the Cambodian movement was more advanced than Vietnam's (which was merely a "workers' party"), and was on the same level as China's. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987]
From 1963 to 1965, Pol Pot and a handful of followers lived under humiliating Vietnamese protection on a military base in Vietnam called “Office 100.” In 1965, Pol Pot walked for two months along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to reach Hanoi, only to be scolded for his nationalist rather than revolutionary agenda.
Pol Pot traveled to China just as the Cultural Revolution was gaining momentum. He was welcomed warmly by Beijing Communists, who later would be a key ally, and was inspired by what he saw there. After that he moved into the Cambodian jungle, where he lived the rest of his life with the exception of the four years between 1975 and 1980, when the Khmer Rouge was in power.
After a peasant uprising over a rice tax in Battambang Province in 1967, Pol Pot formed an armed guerrilla group. By 1970, he had 3,000 soldiers fighting under him. During the American bombing of Cambodia, the Vietnamese moved deeper into Cambodia and the Cambodian communist movement spread with them. Under these conditions, the Pol Pot insurgency was able to recruit more fighters. After the 1970 coup, the Vietnamese Communists allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge and provided them with training and arms. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987]
Image Sources:
Text Sources: Documentation Center of Cambodia, dccam.org, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Tourism of Cambodia, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, NBC News, Fox News and various books and other publications.
Last updated May 2014