‘It was not comfortable during that time. It was all about hardship and the dead. I am also a victim of that regime, too. I saw the hardship and saw how Pol Pot arrested and burnt. … It was the consequence and I am a victim.’ This quote is drawn from an interview that I conducted with a former cadre of the Khmer Rouge during the research for my previous book, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Williams, 2021b) that dealt with motivations for people to participate in genocide. The 55-year-old man clearly acknowledges that he is a former Khmer Rouge, part of the regime that was responsible for the deaths of around two million people during their rule from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. He spoke about his involvement in the mass displacement of people from the capital Phnom Penh and his time at the S-21 security centre, the Khmer Rouge's highest and most lethal torture and interrogation prison. And yet, at the same time, he clearly also claims victimhood.

It is certainly not wholly unusual for perpetrators to make claims to victimhood (Williams and Jessee, 2024); but what is more remarkable is how other people in society react to these claims: in Cambodia this claim can go unchallenged and is even echoed by many of those non-Khmer Rouge victimized by the regime. For example, one woman in the country's northwest told me that ‘there's no anger towards them because we were all villagers. They were just being brainwashed so they followed those people. And now they passed away because they are victims just like me’.