Khmer Rouge

Cambodia has a grizzly recent past, one that I had never heard about before stepping foot in Phnom Penh. Apparently, not many other of my peers had either. This trip has been similar to my college education in that the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

So here is the story as I was able to put it together. During the Vietnam-America war, America bombed part of the Ho Chi Minh trail that went through Cambodia. Cambodia’s government was weak and the spillover of fighting was enough to disturb the fragile state. As a result, a group known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) came to power, under the leadership of a guy named Pol Pot.

The Khmer Rouge had the goal of turning Cambodia into an agricultural “workers paradise”. They emptied the cities by killing anyone that attempted to stay. They killed anyone that appeared educated. Teachers, doctors, and even monks were killed. If somebody was wearing glasses, they would kill them. The killing was systematic and organized.

After the defeat of America, Vietnam was already in military mode. They went into Cambodia and were able to kick out the Khmer Rouge in 1978. When all was said and done, between 1 and 3 million people had been killed.

When we were in Phnom Penh, we visited a high school that had been converted into a prison. The Khmer Rouge was extremely unstable and high ranking officials were often accused and killed for being traitors. There was even a whole section of the prison that was dedicated to “VIP” prisoners. There were tons of torture devices left in the prison.

After seeing the prison, we went to the killing fields. These had been discovered in the 1980’s. Thousands of remains were found here. There are hundreds of fields like the one we saw scattered all around Cambodia, and more are being found. There was a monument, and inside were thousands human skulls stacked three stories high.

Cambodians are extremely docile people. They were an easy target to terrorize, as they would not fight to defend themselves. It is awful that no other country stepped in when this was going on. I can see why the United States would not want to right after being defeated in Vietnam, but somebody should have done something. People always talk about “fighting for peace”, and this is a crock of shit. The Khmer Rouge was not a particularly strong regime. This would have been a clean cut and relatively easy war for peace, yet nobody took it up. Cambodia was extremely poor, and had nothing to offer the victors, so nobody did anything to stop the genocide.

Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge were pushed into a lawless and uncontrolled region in the mountains by the Thai border when Vietnam took over. Many of them still live there, and have not been tried for their crimes. Pol Pot recently died of old age in his compound in the mountains. Like I said, Cambodia has nothing to offer politically or financially, so everybody just looks the other way.

Seeing these places was extremely hard to take. It is hard to imagine how big a group of 2 million people is. Edison Field sells out at around 50,000, so you would need 40 Edison Field’s to house all of the people that were killed. You can see a kind of sorrow in a lot of the older people in Cambodia who went through this. I can’t believe that in my 16 years of education I had never heard of the Cambodian genocide. What a joke. The things I saw this day will stick with me for a long long time.