I don’t think I’ve every met a person that didn’t know about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. Unfortunately, I doubt that many of those same people could recount the even more recent genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. In the span of four years (1975-1979), his government killed over 2 million Cambodians. That accounts for 1/4 of their population.
Pol Pot was introduced to Marxism while studying in France. After his return he immediately joined the underground communist movement. Due to complicated instability within the Cambodian government, some of which came from after shocks of the Vietnam war, Pol Pot was able to march an army of uneducated, teenage guerrilla warriors into the capital city and assume control. His goal was to cleanse his society in the same fashion as Mao Zedong in China’s Agricultural Revolution. He forced the cities to be evacuated into the villages in order to create a new purely agricultural society. Anybody that threatened that goal was simply exterminated. He wanted the society to remain uneducated, so he put to death anyone showing intellectual promise.
We were able to visit one of the many “killing fields” used by Pol Pot. At this particular site, over 20,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered. It was an erie experience walking around the mass graves. Many of the graves have been excavated, but thousands of people still rest in the ground. After heavy rain storms the soil shifts and the bones rise to the surface. You can literally see the bones coming out of the dirt paths that everyone walks on. Signs warn against stepping on them. It’s as if the ground won’t allow the dark secrets of this place to go unnoticed.
The ‘killing tree’ bears witness to the brutality of the murders. Children were stripped from their mothers, picked up by their feet, and then violently swung against this tree until they were dead.
A memorial stupa now stands in the middle of this field. It holds 9,000 of the skulls that were recovered from the graves.
As for the people responsible for these actions, very few have been brought to justice. Kang Kek lew (aka Comrade Duch) was the first to be convicted. His sentence for genocide – 35 years in prison.
