The Phnom Penh Post

In a recent blog post, Ross Douthat of The Atlantic explores the question of international intervention in relation to the recent natural disaster in Burma.

When, and how, the international community can insert itself into the business of sovereign nations is an ambiguous and multi-faceted issue.

The Cambodia Tribunal Monitor recently posted interviews about the ECCC with surviving Nuremberg prosecutors.

The 15-minute clip is worth watching. Highlights include:

* Description of the origin of "war crimes" as a concept.

I moved back to Cambodia in March from Tampa Bay, Fla., an area jokingly called "God's waiting room" by many in the United States. While the region's population has skewed somewhat younger over the last couple decades, it remains a destination for retirees and baby boomer "snowbirds" - those who migrate to Florida seasonally as weather worsens in their hometowns.

This backdrop probably made the transition to Cambodia - Tampa Bay's demographic opposite - even more striking. Cambodia often feels like a country full of children. Packs of young people, many raising each other, throng Phnom Penh's streets and the countryside's villages. Teenagers and twenty-somethings linger outside the capital city's various universities and provide a regular clientele for new hangouts like Lucky Seven.

Memorials are underway to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the Holodomor, and a political debate is raging.

Ukraine wants the 1932-33 famine recognized as "genocide." Russia, while acknowledging that millions died as a result of Soviet agricultural policies, insists the Ukrainian people were not directly targeted. Soviet citizens of numerous ethnicities and nationalities died during those years from starvation and related illnesses.

The trauma inflicted on victims of the Khmer Rouge continues to plague Cambodian communities psychologically - and physically.

Much has been made of the high rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among those who survived Democratic Kampuchea. But refugee organizations in the United States are now starting to highlight how these psychological wounds damage survivors' overall health. Chronic conditions such as diabetes - compounded by PTSD, anxiety and depression - are shortening the lives of many Cambodian Americans.

The National Cambodian American Health Initiative, a coalition of community groups and concerned individuals, declared "a state of health emergency" in the Cambodian American population in 2005.

As a child, my grandmother's stories of the Ukrainian Holodomor - "death by hunger" - had a profound effect on me. Decades after coming to the United States as a refugee, she could still recount, in vivid detail, the horrors she witnessed during the great famine of 1932-33.

Joseph Stalin had launched an aggressive program of collectivization against a resistant peasantry, and the death toll mounted. Some scholars today describe the "man-made" famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people; others believe it was a miscalculation on the part of the Soviet government. Either way, millions of Ukrainians died.

A teenager at the time, my grandmother said she saw "corpses that were still breathing, walking, crawling," streaming into Kiev from the barren countryside.

Elena Lesley blogged regularly about the Khmer Rouge tribunal as a Fulbright Fellow in Cambodia from April 2008 to August 2009. Although she has since returned to the U.S., she continues to follow events at the court and to post occasionally. She is pursuing a masters degree in Global Affairs at Rutgers University and will be conducting thesis research this coming year in Cambodia and Rwanda on a grant from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

Before launching the Tribunal Report blog, Lesley spent a year at the Phnom Penh Post as a Henry Luce Scholar in 2004-2005. 

A native of Portland, Ore., her writing has appeared in newspapers throughout the U.S. and on Granta.com and The Huffington Post. From 2005-2008 she worked as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.