Cambodia Was Abused
In the late 1960s, the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, was often considered the most beautiful city in South East Asia. Cambodians were described as a docile and passive people. Cambodia’s political, economic and human decent began in the 1970s when the Vietnam War spilled across the border. This war-neutral country of Cambodia was illegally and secretly bombed into a state of unlawful order, for which they are still recovering.
Out of the forest came victors, the Khmer Rouge. Their power had grown in higher proportion than their numbers. In April 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge army entered the capital of Phnom Penh. At gun point, they marched the 3 million inhabitants out of the city. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, demanded total social revolution. Cambodian history was to begin again at the Year Zero. There were to be no families, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no mail, an no money; only work and death. The Khmer Rouge banned all forms of money. The city had nothing.
The entire Cambodian population was forced into the country side. In Pol Pot’s warped vision of utopia, money was banned, religion outlawed and life easily expendable. Buddhist monks were declared parasites. Of the two and a half thousand monks at the start of Pol Pot’s murderous regime, only 70 survived. The renamed Democratic Republic of Kampuchea became a notion of workers and peasants. They worked in the fields for 16 hours a day. Those that fell by the wayside were simply executed. Hundreds of thousands of people died from exhaustion, hunger and disease. Thousands of people were systematically murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Their crimes, they spoke French, they had an education, they wore glasses.
In 1979, the Vietnamese liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge. Over the four years of Pol Pot’s rule, more than two million people went missing and were presumably murdered. These people lost their lives in Pol Pot’s quest for utopia. That was almost one third of the population of Cambodia.
Cambodia was left with nothing and civil was ensued in the rural regions of the country until 1998. At that time, Cambodia received very little financial aid from Western countries. The reason…
Cambodian people continue to suffer from its history of abuse.
Recommended Movies:
The Killing Fields, 1984
S21, Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, 2005
Recommended Books:
First They Killed my Father, Loung Ung, 2006
Video Links (Warning: graphic images):
3:19 min Tribute to Survivors of the Killing Fields
4:24 min Remembering the Killing Fields
52 min Cambodia (Year Zero)
The Killing Fields Now. Thousands of children were found dead right here.
Old School House (Torture Chamber)
