laura all over! - phnom penh, day 2

Dec 17 2009

phnom penh, day 2

This was the day I went to the Killing Fields and the Toul Sleng Prison.

Since most Westerners probably don’t know much about the Khmer Rouge, I’ll post a little info from Wikipedia:

Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.1 million people, as of 1975), it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.

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.

After four years of rule, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of an invasion by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and was replaced by moderate, pro-Vietnamese Communists. It survived into the 1990s as a resistance movement operating in western Cambodia from bases in Thailand. In 1996, following a peace agreement, their leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organization. Pol Pot died on 15 April 1998, having never been put on trial.

The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country’s total population (estimates range from 850,000 to 2.5 million) under its regime, through execution, torture, starvation and forced labor. Because of the large number of deaths, and because ethnic groups and religious minorities were targeted, the deaths during the rule of the Khmer Rouge are often considered a genocide as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.

And actually while traveling, I saw on the news that one of the leaders was still on trial. Right now. It’s horrible to what extent this affected Cambodia, and that it seems no one will be punished for it.