This post is going to horrify and appall you, and I'm going to be graphic because what happened in Cambodia less than forty years ago should not be dumbed down or diminished for the sake of sensitive souls: millions of people were brutally murdered at the hands of their neighbours and countrymen (and women) and it's a horrific history of which a lot of the West are blissfully unaware.
In 1969, as part of the Vietnam War, the US started a second 'secret war' i.e. undisclosed to the public, in the east of Cambodia, in an attempt to rid the Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) of their trail from North to South Vietnam, as this trail took them through Laos and Cambodia. The east of Cambodia was bombed for 6 years, killing thousands and making thousands more refugees as they fled a war that their country was not involved in. This assisted in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political faction who used the situation in the east as a way to win support from the rural, working class by blaming the government and the wealthier citizens who lived in the cities for the crisis. The rural rice farmers were largely uneducated and were easily won over in blaming the urban class for the strife. The Khmer Rouge's political aim was to restore the country to its former traditions, removing technology, education and progress and replacing it with farming, extreme nationalism and communism - no-one was to own property of any kind, anything you grew belonged to everyone and there was to be no reliance on or trade with other countries; self-sustainability was crucial to their ideology. Anyone of mixed heritage was considered inferior or undesirable.
In 1975, with the end of the Vietnamese war (and therefore the bombing in the east of Cambodia) Khmer Rouge troops drove into the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, to cheers and celebration from the crowds because the war was finally over. However, within hours they started evacuating citizens from the city, demanding they leave to the countryside because 'the Americans were going to bomb all cities' in retaliation. People from all walks of life, rich and poor, old and young, were forced from all the cities with the promise that they could return in 3 days time. This was a lie.
Many people were making the journey on foot, with few supplies due to the previously mentioned lie about how long they would be away from home. Those who had cars or bikes soon abandoned them as petrol was not made available. The Khmer Rouge marched the urban citizens into the countryside, with the majority of the people walking for 10-14 days before reaching the village or rural town that they were permitted to stay in and build themselves a new life. The urban families were shunned in these new communities due to the Khmer Rouge belief that it was urban Cambodians that had caused the nation's troubles. They were made to work on farms but unused to field labour, they were struck for slow work or for growing tired more quickly than the rural workers.
Families were often separated, with the teenagers and people in their early twenties going to labour camps. Some younger children were 'headhunted' if they showed that they were strong or hardworking and were sent to child soldier camps where they were taught how to kill. They were encouraged to spy on their families on the rare occasions they were allowed a visitation and to tell the Khmer Rouge if their parents had said anything negative about the government.
Slowly people started disappearing; Khmer Rouge soldiers would show up at houses in the villages and take people away under pretences such as requiring assistance with paperwork in the next village or a van being stuck in the mud a few kilometres away. Some didn't even bother to lie but just took the suspects away. These people never returned. The people initially targeted by the new government were educated people who might question this new way of life in Cambodia or those who might resist or rise up against them. Teachers, doctors, professors, anyone who spoke a foreign language, even people who wore glasses were seen as a threat and therefore were imprisoned and soon after, executed. Other people were essentially worked to death, with a combination of overwork and underfeeding. If you were caught stealing food, you were injured or killed because the food you grew was collective food and you were therefore stealing from the government. Women were severely beaten for attempting to beg for more food for their children and the majority of children under five died from malnutrition. Those that survived were often physically underdeveloped, stunted from lack of nutrition at a crucial stage of development.
The Khmer Rouge created execution centres, now infamously named 'the killing fields', where the undesirable citizens were taken to be killed en masse. I recently learned that at the Nazi concentration camps, the gas chambers were developed because the Nazis didn't want their elite citizens to be traumatised by killing so many people. The gas chambers removed people's 'guilt' or level of actual involvement because they weren't physically executing the victims themselves. The theory was that the Nazi soldiers involved with the executions would not have blood on their hands in the same way so could then go on to continue the master race relatively unscathed from their own murderous past. The Khmer Rouge, by contrast, were thoroughly unconcerned by the impact their orders to kill would have on their followers: it was kill when ordered to or be killed yourself, and they meant it. Worse still, ammunition was precious to the Khmer Rouge and the victims were not deemed 'important enough' to use bullets on; Khmer Rouge soldiers had to kill each of their victims by hand. So they were hacked with blunt tools; beaten with hammers; hoes, scythes and rakes found new uses; even thick, jagged palm branches were turned into weapons. At the killing fields memorial site outside Phnom Penh, which once was a series of mass graves, over 300 people were systematically killed this way every day. Up to 20,000 of these killing fields have been found since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. The worst thing I saw at the killing fields outside Phnom Penh was something called 'the killing tree': this was where soldiers took babies and toddlers by their ankles and beat them against the tree until they died. I burst into tears at this point of the visit and had to walk away for a while. The Khmer Rouge had a phrase which roughly translates to 'if you want to kill a weed, you need to eliminate the roots' which is why they even killed children: they wanted no one left from families who had been targeted, to grow up wanting vengeance against the Khmer Rouge.
As well as visiting the killing fields memorial site, we also visited the S-21 jail, which was once a high school in the centre of Phnom Penh but was converted into a jail, interrogation centre and torture chamber. This is where people were brought when suspected of guilt against the Khmer Rouge. They were accused of crimes such as collusion with the CIA and the KGB and charged as spies and traitors against their country. However, they would not be killed until they had confessed their crimes and so were imprisoned and tortured until they would sign a confession. They were then essentially signing their own death warrant. The guards knew that these were false confessions but they either didn't care or were afraid of being at the receiving end of the torture, so kept on with their actions. After a prisoner escaped from his cell and commited suicide by jumping off the building, the soldiers put up barbed wired to ensure no one else could die of their own accord. This was the only photograph I took that day.
Khmer Rouge medics were trained for four months, all doctors having been eliminated in the initial purge of educated and therefore undesirable Cambodians. They practised injections on pillows and learnt anatomy by cutting people open who were still alive. This was the level of dedication to ridding the country of any progress it had made in the previous few centuries; kill doctors and replace them with untrained amateurs. The hypocrisy: Pol Pot, the head of the Khmer Rouge, was himself a university graduate and was fluent in Khmer (the Cambodian language) and French. The majority of his cabinet were equally well educated. Many had even studied abroad in France and came from the cities - these were not the revolutionary children of farmers rising against the aristocracy, they were cunning, evil people with messed up ideologies and no regard for human life.
Ultimately, between two and three million people were killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in the space of four years. That made up over a quarter of the population at the time. And this all happened within the last 40 years. Representatives from the Khmer Rouge held a seat in the UN until 1993, despite what they had done. It wasn't until the early 2000s that any of the leaders were charged with genocide and crimes against humanity and by that time Pol Pot had escaped justice by dying in 1998, some say from suicide, after it was announced that he would be turned over to an international tribunal. The international community has a horrible habit of allowing genocide and other crimes against humanity to happen and not really doing much to prevent it, stop it from continuing or even really punishing those who were involved. It's a sad reality that no-one offered help to the Cambodians when they were dying from starvation or being systematically killed, yet when a few terrorist attacks happen in the West by extremists, all military forces are at the ready to search and destroy. There is an odd view of right and wrong in the world, about who we choose to protect and who we allow to suffer, all depending on the Western agenda. That doesn't seem right to me at all.
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