This is a history lesson (stolen from Michelle Cook) because if you are anything like me or the rest of my squad, you probably are unaware of the realities of the genocide that took place here in Cambodia only 30 years ago…
Half of the country is under the age of 20 years old. 80% is under the age of thirty years old.
This is because of a genocide that took place not so long ago. In fact, most of you reading this were alive during this time. If you were born before the year 1980, this happened in your lifetime. The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Under the Khmer Rouge, it is estimated that some 2 million people were either executed or died as a result of what was going on.
The Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urband areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into “Old People” through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.
In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about “two or three kilometers” outside the city and would return in “two or three days.” Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the “threat of American bombing” and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would “take care of everything” until they returned.
The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population (“New People”) into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labor camps.
Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered, to make the agricultural communism, as Pol Pot envisioned it, a reality. The planned relocation to the countryside resulted in the complete halt of almost all economic activity: even schools and hospitals were closed, as well as banks, and industrial and service companies.
During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state (including intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses) and killing many others for even breaching minor rules.
The Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed “enemies”:
Anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments.
Professionals and intellectuals-in practice this included almost everyone with an education, or even people wearing glasses (which, according to the regime, meant that they were literate). Ironically and hypocritically, Pol Pot himself was a university-educated man (albeit a drop-out) with a taste for French literature and was also a fluent French speaker. Many artists, including musicians, writers and film makers were executed.
Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Thai and other minorities in Eastern Highland, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monks.
“Economic saboteurs:” many of the former urban dwellers (who had not starved to death in the first place) were deemed to be guilty by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.
We were told by our contact that before the Khmer Rouge took over, there were over 1,000 Christian pastors in Cambodia. That number was reduced to 3. We visited one of the torture chambers in Phnom Penh as well as one of the actual killing fields where thousands were executed only minutes away. S-21 Prison has now been turned into a museum. Before the days of the Khmer Rouge, it was a high school. When the country was overtaken, the high school was turned into a prison where thousands of people were held captive and tortured for months before being sent on a truck to be executed at the killing field.
For obvious reasons, the day we went to Tuol Sleng (the S-21 prison) and the Killing Fields was a hard day for all of us. But I think one of the biggest reasons it was so hard for all of us was that none of us had any idea of the extent of it, no one ever told us.
So I figured it would be good to share, just in case you were like us and had no idea.
