It Was 40 Years Ago Today

[Pdoggg]

Cambodia has done a remarkable job rebuilding their country.

 

Greedy corrupt leaders are certainly better than the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

 

But does it have to be one or the other?

 

Talking with the people of Phnom Penh (not a random sample) it is clear to me that the Cambodian National Rescue Party had the support of the vast majority of the people but hanging chads and election fraud perverted true democracy in the last election.

 

 

 

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Tearful survivors on Friday marked 40 years to the day since the black-clad Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, ending a civil war but heralding a terror that killed a quarter of Cambodians and turned the capital into a ghost town.

A few hundred people, including monks and elderly regime survivors, gathered early Friday at Choeung Ek -- the most notorious of the regime’s “Killing Fields” on the capital’s outskirts -- burning incense and saying Buddhist prayers at a memorial stupa housing the skulls and bones of victims.

The event commemorates the April 17, 1975 triumph of the hardline communist Khmer Rouge over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol.

 

Initially, as the soldiers entered Phnom Penh astride tanks, their distinctive red-chequered scarves fluttering behind them, they were given a cautious welcome by the city’s war-weary residents.

 

That warmth swiftly turned to horror as the cadres evacuated the city of two million people at gunpoint, in one of the largest forced migrations in recent history.

 

The sick, elderly and very young perished, their bodies littering the roadsides, as the “bourgeois” city dwellers were marched into the countryside to scratch a living from the parched, over-used soil.

 

By the time the tyrannical rule of Pol Pot -- or “Brother Number One” -- was ousted four years later, an estimated two million Cambodians had been killed by execution, starvation or overwork as the Khmer Rouge drove the country back to “Year Zero” in a madcap agrarian peasant revolution.

Among them were 36 of Huot Huorn’s relatives. Of her family she survived alongside three of her sisters.

“Forty years ago Pol Pot turned Cambodia into a hell -- a ghost land,” she told AFP with tears in her eyes after lighting incense for her loved ones.

 

“I still hate that regime... their sins are vivid in my eyes now. They starved us, jailed people with no food and water until they died... I saw them smash childrens’ heads against a tree trunk.”

Horror untold

    Only after the regime was forced out by Vietnamese soldiers in 1979 did the scale of the its atrocities emerge, with the bones of thousands of victims uncovered at several mass graves, including at Choeung Ek.

 

The scrub of land was the resting place of thousands of people perceived to be enemies of the revolution.

 

Many had first suffered at Phnom Penh’s notorious torture house -- Tuol Sleng, or S21.

The former school-turned-torture-chamber has also been preserved as a grisly testament to the horrors of the era, which ended when the Khmer Rouge were forced to retreat to jungle hideouts.

In 2010, a UN-backed war crimes court sentenced former Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to 30 years in prison -- later increased on appeal to life -- for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 people.

He was the first person to be held accountable for the regime’s crimes.

 

Last August the two most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders -- Nuon Chea, 88, known as “Brother Number Two”, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83 -- were given life sentences for crimes against humanity.

 

Both have appealed.

 

Their two-year trial focused on the forced evacuation of Cambodians from Phnom Penh into rural labour camps as well as murders at one execution site.

 

In March, the court charged three more former Khmer Rouge members with crimes against humanity, ignoring warnings by strongman Cambodian premier Hun Sen -- a mid-ranking regime cadre before he defected -- that further prosecutions risked reigniting conflict.

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Regional/2015/04/17/Cambodia-marks-40-years-since-evacuation-of-Phnom-Penh/

[Gutsy]

It's hard to imagine such a human tragedy of genocide happened in most of our life time.  I took a Thai ladyboy with me to Angkor Wat, and then on to Phnom Penh.  After visiting the killing fields, and S15 (torture prison) because I was fascinated by this, I thanked her for coming with me everywhere I dragged her and asked her what she thought about everything we had seen.  "I glad I born in Thailand"

 

Amazing that it took Viet Nam to liberate/topple the Khmer Rouge.  Really surprising that they withdrew and let them pick up the pieces without annexing the country.  

[bumblebee]

I remember reading the news in 1979 when Cambodia was liberated and all this info about the killing fields became common knowledge.  I recall thinking as a 14 year old how tragic it was to see kids my age and younger emerging from this nightmare.  Many a night walking home through those same quiet streets in PP a few years back it was easy to imagine that there was nobody behind those doors and windows just as it had been 37 years or so previous.

[xyzzy]

My first trip to PP was in 2008. I remember thinking, while walking around late at night, that lots of former solders that hacked off people's body parts were wondering around free. I eventually became very comfortable in PP but it took a little while.

[Kahuna]

The Bard wrote, "What a piece of work is man!"

 

Indeed we are.....................

 

The frightening part to me is, I think given the right circumstances, we're all capable of creating our own personal killing fields...............

 

Shame on us...............