I was in the midst of writing The Roots of Evil: The Psychological and Cultural Origins of Genocide and had finished an analysis of the “autogenocide” in Cambodia, when I was invited to attend a meeting of the seminar on Southeast Asia in which students wrote essays about their life experiences. I heard one student describe in personal terms the horrors in Cambodia that I knew so well from my research. But the tragedy of students from other Southeast Asian countries was also manifest in this meeting: young people, children and adolescents, fearing for their lives or in the hope of greater security and human dignity left their countries, alone or with their families.

Being a refugee is a tragically common human experience. Unfortunately, repression and violence that lead people to escape from their own country and seek refuge elsewhere have always existed. It is all too frequent in our century. Huge numbers of people were displaced and became stateless in Europe during the first part of the century. Millions of people became refugees in the wake of the Second World War. But this saga seems never ending, and the flow of those seeking refuge continues.

creating refugees: the origins of repression, torture, mass killings

A group of young Cambodian students in Paris, all members of the French Communist party, comrades in Communist study groups, became political associates and, ultimately, associates in designing a vision of a society that they attempted to fulfill by genocide.