The recent killings repeat a pattern of political violence that has recurred all too often at crucial moments in Cambodia’s history – even after the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which were intended to bring not only peace, but also democracy and human-rights protection to the country’s long-suffering people. No country in the world deserved all three more, ravaged as it was for two decades by massive United States bombing, civil war, a genocidal reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge, invasion by Vietnam, and more civil war – with some two million dead as a result.