Collective Amnesia on the Memory of the Khmer Rouge

Thirty years after Cambodia’s worst nightmare and hell, the matter of the Khmer Rouge is now found in a secondary school textbook in the country. For the first time, the genocide will be taught. Unfortunately, its textbook entry is all of these few lines: “Between 25 and 27 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge leaders held an extraordinary congress to draft a new constitution and rename the country ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ A new government, led by Pol Pot, fell into place, after which Cambodians were killed.”

That is all what students will know about the regime that killed nearly a quarter of the country’s population at that time. The very brief description that is not even half a page does not, at all, talk about genocide or that the Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a vast labor camp between 1975 and 1979 where more than 1.7 million people perished. There is a mention of the duration of Pol Pot’s regime as “three years, eight months and twenty days” but no mention of its genocidal proportions.

The collective amnesia curriculum has led to the following figures according to a survey conducted by the Center for Human Rights (University of Berkeley): only 6% of Cambodians designate the school as their first source of information on the subject, while 84% received it at home. A devastating effect on collective memory this. Two thirds of Cambodia’s population was born after the fall of Pol Pot, and many young Cambodians now ignore this period in their history. “When we talk to students of genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge, they think that it’s fiction,” says the Vice-Minister of Education.

The inclusion of the portion of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s official history is a sensitive subject. There had been debates on what should be the right way to teach it in school. Now, with its first ever mention in a classroom textbook, some details have been left out, such as the question of whether Vietnam “liberated” Cambodia in 1979. According to the Center of Human Rights, only 3% of Cambodians are now able to identify and name the five accused (Khieu Samphan, Duch, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Thirith).

They should not forget what is said about those who do not remember the past.

Trials in Cambodia Expose the Cogs in a Killing Machine

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

An archival photograph of the guard detail at Tuol Sleng prison, taken during the Khmer Rouge’s rule in Cambodia in the 1970s. Him Huy, who was a prison guard at the time, is fourth from left.

ANLONG SAN, Cambodia — “We were victims, too,” said Him Huy, the head of the guard detail at the Tuol Sleng torture house, who took part in the executions of thousands of people at a Khmer Rouge killing field.

Seth Mydans/The International Herald Tribune

Mr. Him Huy, now 53, oversaw the executions of thousands for the Khmer Rouge. “I had no choice,” he said.

As the prisoners knelt at the edges of mass graves with their hands tied behind them, executioners swung iron bars at the backs of their heads, twice if necessary, before they toppled forward into the pits.

“I had no choice,” Mr. Him Huy, 53, said. “If I hadn’t killed them, I would have been killed myself.”

As the trials of five senior Khmer Rouge figures get under way near Phnom Penh, the capital, they raise questions about the guilt — or victimhood — of lower-ranking cadres like Mr. Him Huy, the people who carried out the arrests, killings and torture, who are unlikely to be tried.

As guard and executioner at Cambodia’s most prominent torture house, Mr. Him Huy personifies the horror of the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, when at least 1.7 million people died of starvation and overwork as well as torture and execution.

But in the severe and paranoid world of the Khmer Rouge prison, guards and torturers themselves worked under threat of death, and Mr. Him Huy saw a number of his colleagues kneel at the edges of their graves for that blow to the back of the neck.

“I used an iron bar about that long,” he said, spreading his hands wide as he told his story late last month, “and about as thick as my big toe.”

At night, sometimes two or three times a week, Mr. Him Huy said, he drove trucks full of prisoners to the Choeung Ek killing field, where he logged them in 20 or 30 or 80 at a time and then confirmed that they had been killed.

He asserted that he had personally killed only five people, as demonstrations of loyalty to his superiors.

At least 14,000 people were arrested and interrogated at Tuol Sleng prison, which was officially known as S-21 and is now a museum. Only a handful survived.

Mr. Him Huy is back home in this village 50 miles south of Phnom Penh. A farmer and the father of nine, he is optimistic, hard-working and quick to smile, seemingly comfortable to be who he is and at ease with his memories. Neighbors seem to like him.

“Even the young people, when they have a party they always invite him,” said his wife, Put Peng Aun. “If there’s a party, he’s got to be there.”

Asked to describe himself, Mr. Him Huy said: “I’m not a bad person. I’m a good man. I never argue with anyone. I never fight with anyone. I have good intentions as a human being.”

But some of those who knew him at the prison remember him harshly. One survivor, Bou Meng, said Mr. Him Huy beat and tortured him, poking at his wounds with a stick. “His face was so mean,” Mr. Bou Meng told the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private research center. “Today he looks gentle.”

Two of Mr. Him Huy’s co-workers at Tuol Sleng, quoted by the historian David Chandler in his book on the prison, “Voices From S-21,” remembered him as “a seasoned killer, an important figure at the prison and a key participant in the execution process.”

Mr. Him Huy is evasive about the extent of his duties at the prison. But what he did there, he said, he did on pain of death.

“I am a victim of the Khmer Rouge,” he said without hesitation. “I did not volunteer to work at S-21.

“We were all prisoners, those who killed and those who were killed,” he said. “And in fact, for a lot of the staff there, the day came when they were killed, too. In the daytime we’d be eating together, and in the evening some were arrested and killed.”

In a 2001 book about the prison staff called “Victims and Perpetrators?” the Documentation Center calculates that at least 563 members of Tuol Sleng’s staff, about one-third of the total, were executed while working there.

In a way, Tuol Sleng was a microcosm of the nation, where half-starved and overworked people lived in constant fear of being arrested and killed, often for reasons they never learned.

The first defendant in the United Nations-backed tribunal is Mr. Him Huy’s former boss, the prison commandant, a tough, sharp-eyed man named Kaing Guek Eav and generally known as Duch. His trial began last month.

It was Duch who signed execution orders for both prisoners and errant staff members. Indeed, Mr. Him Huy rose to become fifth or sixth in the chain of command after his superiors were pulled from their jobs and killed.

“Yes, I did kill people,” he said. “I did transport people to Choeung Ek. I did verify lists of people at Choeung Ek. But Duch ordered me to do all of that.”

Many Cambodians appear to accept this common defense among former Khmer Rouge cadres: that they had no choice but to be cruel, fearing for their own lives. It is a defense Duch himself has offered in the past.

Chum Mey, another survivor of Tuol Sleng, described 12 days and nights of torture and terror, but without bitterness toward his abusers. “My thought is not to put the blame on Him Huy because I don’t know what I would have done in his place,” he said. “I don’t think I would have been able to disobey.”

Like most other guards and torturers at the prison, Mr. Him Huy was recruited young — easily molded, brutalized and indoctrinated into the paranoia and extremism of this closed world.

The son of a clerk at a fishing company, he joined the Khmer Rouge insurgency at the age of 12 and was transferred to work in the prison when he was 18.

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he spent a year in a local jail as punishment for his role in the regime, as many former Khmer Rouge cadres did.

Thirty years have passed since the Khmer Rouge were ousted by Vietnam. Mr. Him Huy is no different from his neighbors, raising a big family and tending to his beans and corn and rice.

At the end of a long interview, he headed back to his bean field, filling a canister with pesticide and marching down the rows of long yellow beans, swinging a hose from left to right.

He made sure, he said, to walk with the wind behind him so that none of the pesticide would blow back in his face.

Cambodia: WHY WOULD IT KILL ITs OWN PEOPLE? [KH]

Remembering the victims

An all too common a sight in Cambodia at one of 70+ memorials across the country

The genocide memorial at Wat Ampe Phnom, next to the river

Wat Ampe Phnom is a holiday resort for Cambodians, usually resounding to the squeals of laughter, the patter of the fortune-tellers and the smell of cooked food, but it also has a dark history, as a killing zone of the Khmer Rouge. Between 1975-79, the KR used Wat Ampe Phnom as a prison and the area surrounding the pagoda as a mass gravesite, containing an estimated 4,000 victims. A lovely old nun, Reung, told me that many of the pits containing the bodies were dug up as desperate locals searched for gold in the aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion before the local authorities began exhuming the bodies properly in the early 80s. She said that a large number of pits remain untouched. The genocide memorial stands close to the riverbank and has skulls on the top level, with leg and arm bones, and clothing, on the lower level. Another witness was Un Hak, who showed me a tree where women were tied or nailed to the trunk and their stomachs slit open and their bodies buried at the base of the tree. Scratch the surface anywhere in Cambodia and these stories are common place. That's why a trial, even after all these years, is important for Cambodians to feel as though all that pain and suffering has not been forgotten, and those who gave the orders, are brought to justice.

Leg and arm bones, and clothing, on the lower level

The skulls are kept on the upper level of the memorial

Khmer rouge & Khmer sérei genocide in Vietnam

Cambodian Genocide - Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

Phnom Penh After Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge evacuated the city, forcing all of the inhabitants, even the sick and the old to march out into the country and live on collective farms.

Recently found manuscript of late Cambodian Buddhist monk speaks of terror by Khmer Rouge

For years, Ly Van Aggadipo was a spiritual mentor to many Cambodian refugees in this old mill city, guiding followers at the Glory Buddhist Temple through family troubles, work problems and recurring nightmares from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. But his own internal struggles with the Khmer Rouge era remained a mystery, and those who knew him say he rarely spoke of his desperate flight from war-torn Cambodia. Then, soon after his death last year, friends found a collection of the monk's poetry tucked under stacks of old Buddhist texts. On worn pages were handwritten, carefully crafted poems describing his memories of labour camps—infant executions, starvation and dreams of escaping to America. Now followers are seeking to publish the poetry, even as the discovery of this vivid historical record of the atrocities has reopened for many a painful time in their own lives that they still have not reconciled. "It put us in tears again," said Samkhann Khoeun, 45, who studied under Ly Van. "We couldn't believe it. When I read (the work), it was so vivid. It refreshed the memory." Everyone knew the basics of Ly Van's life, Khoeun said. "But we didn't know the details and no one ever asked. He was so busy helping us," Khoeun said. Born in 1917 in a small Cambodian village, Ly Van and his family lived through the 1970s rule of the Khmer Rouge regime, which perpetrated one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. An estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation, disease and executions due to the radical policies of the communist group. According to the temple's biography of Ly Van, he was forced to work on farms and public projects for 14 hours a day. It was during this time that the monk witnessed mass executions and large-scale starvation. In early 1979 when Vietnamese soldiers invaded Cambodia, Ly Van and thousands of others fled to Thailand through dangerous terrain and later ended up in Lowell. Today some 20,000 Cambodians reside in or around the city, making it second only to Long Beach, California, for the largest number of Cambodians living in the United States. In Lowell, Ly Van helped establish the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, and he led the Glory Buddhist Temple from 1988 until his death in January 2008. Khoeun and others found the manuscript just days after Ly Van's body was cremated. In one translated verse, Ly Van writes about how he and other refugees fled to Thailand by travelling through treacherous mountains packed with thieves and landmines. It was a well-known trek where Thai soldiers pushed refugees over cliffs at gunpoint while those fleeing tumbled over each other trying to escape. Ly Van wrote: "Surrounded by corpses as we walked, slept and ate, an unbearably foul smell "Emanated from the swollen, rotten bodies, most of which were missing limbs and heads." He also wrote of the conditions of a refugee camp in Thailand where women were raped, men were frequently beaten and families faced filthy living facilities. "...we had to sleep on the bare concrete floor, like animals "Dirty water and stench-filled raw sewage floated everywhere "We were swarmed by mosquitoes constantly, resulting in rashes all over our bodies." Kowith Kret, whose parents were executed by the Khmer Rouge, said it was hard to read the monk's account because it brought back the past. "But it is the fact," said Kret, who also studied under Ly Van. "People have to accept the experience they've been through." George Chigas, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell who has seen copies of the poems, said the monk wrote in a rare 11-syllable metre style that is more than 1,000 years old in Cambodian literature. "It showed great devotion to cultural tradition and, at the same time, tries to preserve something that had been lost," Chigas said. That's important, Chigas said, especially since the Khmer Rouge regime burned old texts and killed scores of writers and artists. He compared Ly Van's writing to Loung Ung's memoir, "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers," as an act of "trying to put old demons to rest." So far more than half of Ly Van's poems have been translated from Khmer to English, Khoeun said. Members of the Glory Buddhist Temple are selling a CD of Ly Van's work read in Khmer and expect the rest of the manuscript to be translated by the end of the year. They also are aiming to raise US$40,000 to get 5,000 bilingual copies published by April 2010. So far, two publishers in Cambodia have expressed interest and the group still is searching for a US publisher. After reading the poems, Khoeun said, he and other refugees have more questions for Ly Van. Questions, such as, when did he have time to write? What was life like in a refugee camp right before coming to America? And how many late relatives of the refugees did Ly Van know? "He knew my grandfather who died right when I was born. I never asked him about that," Khoeun said. "I guess I always took him for granted."

Khmer Rouge Prison S21

Most travel stories are of the happy-go-lucky variety. Every once in a while, however, one visits a place that evidences the vicious, dark side of mankind. Khmer Rouge Prison 21, known as Tuol Seng, is one such place. It is a stark reminder of the cruelties humanity can visit upon itself.

Tuol Sleng

In 1962, the high school of Ponhea Yat was opened in the center of Phnom Pehn. The school consists of three buildings in a horseshoe layout with each building having three stories. In the 1970s, the name was changed to Tuol Svay Prey High School. In May of 1976, the school became the headquarters of the Khmer Rouge genocide campaign in Cambodia.

The infamous Khmer Rouge was the ruling party of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, with fighting going on for many more years. Led by Pol Pot, also known as Brother Number One, the party is estimated to have killed as much as 1/3rd of the population of Cambodia through murder and starvation. The Khmer Rouge has justly been compared to Hitler for its brutal genocidal actions. Tuol Sleng represents the most brutal example.

Tuol Sleng covers roughly a city block, but is tucked back among alleys in Phnom Pehn. During the Khmer’s rule, two folds of iron sheets encased in electrified barbwire to prevent escape enclosed it. Prisoners were chained to walls and tortured on a daily basis until they admitted crimes against the state. The prisoners were required to follow ten regulations. A shocking sampling include:

1. Do not try to hide facts by making excuses. You are strictly prohibited from contesting me.

2. While being lashed or electrocuted, you must not cry at all.

3. Disobey any rule and you will get 5 lashes with an electric wire.

Much like the Nazi concentration camps, the Khmer Rouge documented ever prisoner and atrocity. Upon arrival, each prisoner’s picture was taken and a detailed biography was documented. Prisoners were then confined to cells approximately the size of a closet by chaining them to iron posts. Daily torture was undertaken through beatings, electric shock and other atrocities. At the end of their imprisonment, prisoners were marched about two miles to the killing fields. To save bullets, the Khmer Rouge beat them to death.

The atrocious numbers for Tuol Sleng:

From 10,500 to 14,500 adult prisoners.

Another 2,000 children prisoners.

Only 2 Khmer have ever been prosecuted for the atrocity.

Today, Tuol Sleng is a genocide museum. The walls are full of pictures of the prisoners. Men and women. Boys and girls as young as 5 years old. There are still bloodstains on the floors of the interrogation rooms.

Why visit or write an article about Tuol Sleng? Traveling is about discovery, even if the subject is something horrible. Failing to recognize the dark side of humanity dooms us to repeat those failings. The Nazi concentration camps existed in the 40s, Tuol Sleng in the 70s, and today similar atrocities are occurring in North Korea and Darfur. Will we ever learn?

Khmer Rouge Regime and Genocide in Cambodia

A man shows the skulls of Khmer Rouge victims to a boy in Tuolsleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.

Funding for a UN-backed international tribunal to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders is almost secured, but as the clock ticks likely defendants are ageing while many question the court's form and utility.

Some top Cambodian officials are privately reluctant about the trial of those responsible for the Khmer Rouge's totalitarian rule that oversaw the deaths of up to two million, fearing revelations about their own pasts.

The Khmer Rouge Regime

Cambodia is a country in South East Asia, less than half the size of California and twice the size of Scotland. Once it was the center of the ancient kingdom of the Khmer, and its capital was Angkor, famous for its 12th century temples. The present day capital is Phnom Penh. In 1953 Cambodia gained independence after nearly 100 years of French rule. In the 1960s the population was over 7 million, almost all Buddhists, under the rule of a monarch, Prince Sihanouk.

In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup. The leader of the new right-wing government was lieutenant-general Lon Nol, who was made president of the 'Khmer Republic'. Prince Sihanouk and his followers joined forces with a communist guerrilla organisation founded in 1960 and known as the Khmer Rouge. They attacked Lon Nol's army and civil war began.

Cambodia was also caught up in another country's war. Cambodia's neighbour to the east is Vietnam, which had also fought against the French to gain independence. When the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was divided in two: communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam (backed by the USA). Civil war immediately broke out. The Viet Cong, a group of Vietnamese communist guerrillas (backed by North Vietnam and China), based themselves in the jungles of South Vietnam and fought against the South Vietnamese army from there. In 1964, the USA entered the Vietnam war, with airpower, firebombs and poisonous defoliants, but found they could not budge the determined Vietnamese communists. The inconclusive war in Vietnam cost many American and Vietnamese lives, devastated the country, and achieved nothing but misery for anyone caught up in it, including the Cambodians.

Under Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia had preserved neutrality during the Vietnamese civil war by giving a little to both sides:

Vietnamese communists were allowed to use a Cambodian port to ship in supplies, the USA were allowed to bomb - secretly and illegitimately - Viet Cong hideouts in Cambodia. When US-backed Lon Nol took over, US troops felt free to move into Cambodia to continue their struggle with the Viet Cong. Cambodia had become part of the Vietnam battlefield. During the next four years, American B-52 bombers, using napalm and dart cluster-bombs, killed up to 750,000 Cambodians in their effort to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines.

The Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement in 1970 was small. Their leader, Pol Pot, had been educated in France and was an admirer of Maoist (Chinese) communism; he was also suspicious of Vietnam's relations with Cambodia. The heavy American bombardment, and Lon Nol's collaboration with America, drove new recruits to the Khmer Rouge. So did Chinese backing and North Vietnamese training for them. By 1975 Pol Pot's force had grown to over 700,000 men. Lon Nol's army was kept busy trying to suppress not only Vietnamese communists on Cambodian territory but also Cambodia's own brand of communists, the Khmer Rouge.

In 1975 North Vietnamese forces seized South Vietnam's capital, Saigon. In the same year Lon Nol was defeated by the Khmer Rouge. It's estimated that 156,000 died in the civil war - half of them civilians.

Under Pol Pot's leadership, and within days of overthrowing the government, the Khmer Rouge embarked on an organised mission: they ruthlessly imposed an extremist programme to reconstruct Cambodia (now under its Khmer name Kampuchea) on the communist model of Mao's China. The population must, they believed, be made to work as labourers in one huge federation of collective farms. Anyone in opposition - and all intellectuals and educated people were assumed to be - must be eliminated, together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society.

So, at short notice and under threat of death, the inhabitants of towns and cities were forced to leave them. The ill, disabled, old and very young were driven out as well, regardless of their physical condition: no-one was spared the exodus.

People who refused to leave were killed; so were those who didn't leave fast enough, and those who wouldn't obey orders.

All political and civil rights were abolished. Children were taken from their parents and placed in separate forced labour camps. Factories, schools and universities were shut down; so were hospitals. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists and professional people in any field (including the army) were murdered, together with their extended families.

Religion was banned, all leading Buddhist monks were killed and almost all temples destroyed. Music and radio sets were also banned. It was possible for people to be shot simply for knowing a foreign language, wearing glasses, laughing, or crying.

One Khmer slogan ran 'To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.'

People who escaped murder became unpaid labourers, working on minimum rations and for impossibly long hours. They slept and ate in uncomfortable communes deliberately chosen to be as far as possible from their old homes. Personal relationships were discouraged; so were expressions of affection. People soon became weak from overwork and starvation, and after that fell ill, for which there was no treatment except death.

Also targeted were minority groups, victims of the Khmer Rouge's racism. These included ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai, and also Cambodians with Chinese, Vietnamese or Thai ancestry. Half the Cham Muslim population was murdered, and 8,000 Christians.

The imposition of a murderous regime always leaves its leaders afraid: afraid of losing power, failing to prevent vengeance, and facing betrayal by ambitious rivals. The Khmer Rouge repeatedly interrogated their own members, imprisoning and executing them on the slightest suspicion of treachery or sabotage.

Civilian deaths in this period, from executions, disease, exhaustion and starvation, have been estimated at well over 2m.

The Khmer Rouge's links with China meant hostility between the Pol Pot government and Vietnam (soon to be briefly invaded by China for ill-treating Vietnam's ethnic Chinese). In 1978 Vietnam invaded Kampuchea and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. The guerrillas were driven into the western jungles and beyond to Thailand. Vietnam (now a communist republic forging links with the Soviet Union) set up a puppet government composed mainly of recent defectors from the Khmer Rouge. This new socialist government was comparatively benign, but found it hard to organise the necessary reconstruction programme: Pol Pot's policies had ruined the economy, there wasn't much foreign aid; all the competent professionals, engineers, technicians and planners had been killed.

The Khmer Rouge in retreat had some help from American relief agencies - 20,000 to 40,000 guerrillas who reached Thailand received food aid -and the West also ensured that the Khmer Rouge (rather than the Vietnam-backed communist government) held on to Cambodia's seat in the United Nations: the Cold War continued to dictate what allegiances and priorities were made.

The Khmer Rouge went on fighting the Vietnam-backed government. Throughout the 1980s the Khmer Rouge forces were covertly backed by America and the UK (who trained them in the use of landmines) because of their united hostility to communist Vietnam. The West's fuelling of the Khmer Rouge held up Cambodia's recovery for a decade.

Under international pressure, Vietnam finally withdrew its occupying army from Cambodia. This decision had also been forced by economic sanctions on Cambodia (the US's doing), and by a cut-off in aid from Vietnam's own backer, the Soviet Union. The last troops left Cambodia in 1989, and its name was officially restored. In the 1978-1989 conflict between the two countries (and their behind-the-scenes international string-pullers) up to 65,000 had been killed, 14,000 of whom were civilians.

In Cambodia, under a temporary coalition government, it was once again legal to own land. The state religion, Buddhism, was revived. In 1991 a peace agreement between opposing groups was signed. Democratic elections, and a peacekeeping force to monitor them, were arranged for 1993, and the former monarch, Prince Sihanouk, was elected to lead the new government.

The Khmer Rouge guerrillas, of course, opposed Cambodia's political reforms, but their organisation had begun to crumble.

Many defected to the new government; many entered into deals to get immunity from prosecution. When Pol Pot accused one of his close aides of treachery, leading Khmers arrested him, and in 1997 staged a show trial. The government, meanwhile, made plans for a tribunal to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. Not surprisingly, those who have spoken publicly all lay the blame for genocide on Pol Pot, and claim no knowledge of the killing. They have also blamed people who are dead and can't argue, or accused 'enemy agents' from the American CIA, the Russian KGB, and Vietnam, all said to have organised the atrocity for obvious political reasons.

From 1995 mass graves began to be uncovered, revealing the genocide's horrifying extent. The resurrected bones and skulls have been preserved to create simple and potent memorials of the dead in 'the killing fields' where they died. At the torture center in Phnom Penh, where the Khmer Rouge terrorised and murdered their own members, not only skulls but also identity photographs of the victims are displayed on the walls: this bleak, unhappy place has also become a memorial.

In 1998 Pol Pot died of natural causes. His last home in the jungle, a complex of huts and bunkers, which is also the site of his cremation, has become an attraction for visitors. The government has plans to create a fully equipped tourist resort there, in the hope of reviving a trade which had collapsed after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001.

Source: Peace Pledge Union, www.ppu.org.uk

Pol Pot

Pol Pot, who become responsible for the deaths of over two million of his own people, was born Saloth Sar in a small Cambodian village about 140 kilometers north of Phnom Penh. His date of birth is uncertain although French records give it as May 25, 1928.

At age six he went to live with his brother at the Royal household in Phnom Penh. Here he learned Buddhist precepts and discipline. At age eight he went to a Catholic primary school, where he remained for six years. It was here that he picked up the basics of Western culture, as well as the French language.

In 1949, Pol Pot went to study in Paris on a government scholarship. It was here that he got his introduction to Communism, joining the French Communist Party. After four years of exposure to Stalinist Communism he returned to Cambodia in 1953.

Within a month he had joined the Communist resistance, becoming a member of the Indochina Communist Party (IHC) which was dominated by the Viet Minh.

The 1954 Cambodian elections saw the Communists throw in support with the Democrats. The Democrats were soundly defeated, however, by the incumbent Government of Prince Sihanouk who now held absolute power. Pol Pot now took up a post as a teacher in a private college. He also spent his time recruiting the educated classes to the Communist cause. The Government, however, began a Communist crackdown and Pol Pot was forced to flee to the Jungles near the Vietnam border to avoid arrest. For the next seven years he would spend his time in the Cambodian jungle hiding from the police.

Over the ensuing years the communists bided their time as they built up their strength for a take-over attempt. They were bolstered by the North Vietnamese who were waging warfare against the Cambodian Government. A major Vietnamese victory in 1971 allowed the Communists to take control of certain areas of the country. In 1973 the communists launched a major attack on the Government but this was halted by American bombing. A final Communist assault began on January 1, 1975. This time they were victorious. On April 17, Communist forces entered Phnom Penh. Within 24 hours they had ordered the entire city evacuated. This process was repeated in other cities resulting in more than 2 million Cambodians being forced out of their homes. Many of them starved to death.

Pol Pot was now Prime Minister of Cambodia, which he promptly renamed Kampuchea. In August, 1976 he unveiled his Four Year Plan, which detailed the collectivisation of agriculture, the nationalization of industry and the financing of the economy through increased agricultural exports. This plan caused untold misery to the nation with many thousands dying in the paddy fields. Crops needed to feed the population were marked for export. Malnutrition was rampant, made worse by the Communist insistence on traditional Cambodian medicine. Pol Pot also started the infamous S-21 interrogation center where more than 20,000 men, women and children were tortured to death.

Throughout 1976 and ’77 skirmishes with Vietnam continued. In December 1977 The Vietnamese made real inroads in Kampuchea.

Pol Pot, however, held on for another year. By January, 1979 the Vietnamese forces had actually reached Phnom Penh. The Kampuchean Government fled by train while Pol Pot was taken by helicopter to Thailand. His last public appearance was an interview in December 1979. For the next 19 years he remained in exile in the Thai jungle. Pol Pot died in 1998.

Source: www.essortment.com

Cambodia

Very little is known about prehistoric Cambodia, although archeological evidence has established that prior to 1000 BC Cambodians subsisted on a diet of fish and rice and lived in houses on stilts, as they still do today. From the 1st to the 6th centuries, much of Cambodia belonged to the southeast Asian kingdom of Funan, which played a vital role in developing the political institutions, culture and art of later Khmer states. However, it was the Angkorian era, beginning in the 8th century, that really transformed the kingdom into an artistic and religious power.

Forces of the Thai kingdom of Ayudhya sacked Angkor in 1431, leaving the Khmers plagued by dynastic rivalries and continual warfare with the Thais for a century and a half. The Spanish and Portuguese, who had recently become active in the region, also played a part in these wars until resentment of their power led to the massacre of the Spanish garrison at Phnom Penh in 1599. A series of weak kings ruled from 1600 until the French arrived in 1863. After some gunboat diplomacy and the signing of a treaty of protectorate in 1863, the French went on to force King Norodom to sign another treaty, this time turning his country into a virtual colony in 1884.

Following the arrival of the French, a relatively peaceful period followed (even the peasant uprising of 1916 was considered peaceful). In 1941 the French installed 19-year-old Prince Sihanouk on the Cambodian throne, on the assumption that he would prove suitably pliable. This turned out to be a major miscalculation as the years after 1945 were strife-torn, with the waning of French colonial power aided by the proximity of the Franco-Viet Minh War that raged in Vietnam and Laos. Cambodian independence was eventually proclaimed in 1953, the enigmatic King Norodom Sihanouk going on to dominate national politics for the next 15 years before being overthrown by the army.

In 1969 the United States carpet-bombed suspected communist base camps in Cambodia, killing thousands of civilians and dragging the country unwillingly into the US-Vietnam conflict. American and south Vietnamese troops invaded the country in 1970 to eradicate Vietnamese communist forces but were unsuccessful; they did manage, however, to push Cambodia's leftist guerillas (the Khmer Rouge) further into the country's interior. Savage fighting soon engulfed the entire country, with Phnom Penh falling to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

Over the next four years the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot's leadership, systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians (targeting the educated in particular) in a brutal bid to turn Cambodia into a Maoist, peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. Currency was abolished, postal services were halted, the population became a work force of slave labourers and the country was almost entirely cut off from the outside world. Responding to recurring armed incursions into their border provinces, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, forcing the Khmer Rouge to flee to the relative sanctuary of the jungles along the Thai border. From there, they conducted a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government throughout the late 1970s and 80s.

In mid-1993, UN-administered elections led to a new constitution and the reinstatement of Norodom Sihanouk as king. The Khmer Rouge boycotted the elections, rejected peace talks and continued to buy large quantities of arms from the Cambodian military leadership. In the months following the election, a government-sponsored amnesty secured the first defections from Khmer ranks, with more defections occurring from 1994 when the Khmer Rouge was finally outlawed by the Cambodian government.

The uneasy coalition of Prince Ranariddh's National United Front and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party fell violently apart in July 1997, and when the dust settled Hun Sen assumed sole leadership of Cambodia. Elections in mid-98 returned Hun Sen to this position, despite grumbling from opposition candidates about dodgy electoral practices. While his democratic credentials are far from impressive, the one-eyed strong man has proved to be something of a stabilising force for Cambodia.

Pol Pot's death in April 1998 from an apparent heart attack was greeted with anger (that he was never brought to trial) and scepticism (he has been reported dead many times before). The UN has pulled out of trials of other surviving 'top level' Khmer Rouge leaders on war crimes charges because the independence of the tribunals is doubtful.

Future stability is tied to improving the country's long-suffering economy, eradicating the entrenched culture of corruption, reducing the size of the military and answering the troubled question of royal succession.

Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party won elections in 2003, but political stalemate lasted until June 2004, when Hun Sen found a coalition partner and could resume his prime ministership. In October 2004, King Sihanouk announced his intention to abdicate on account of ill health and annoyance at the country's political infighting.

The Khmer Rouge, and a region, on trial

Skulls - Legacy of Khmer Rouge

Former Khmer Rouge cadres have repeatedly suggested that the tribunal should also take into account the events that led up to the Khmer Rouge's rise to power in 1975 and hold former US leaders, including former national security adviser Henry Kissinger, accountable for their role in the illegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia during Washington's conflict with Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Those suggestions have been batted back out of hand, however. Many Cambodians wonder whether the UN-led tribunal isn't yet another instance of outside interference in their country's internal affairs, staged more in the interest of superpower politics than real reconciliation. Truth and justice, they fear, will only be a small part of the tribunal's final verdict.

Who Killed Khmer People?

Khmer Rouge derives from the French word, Khmer + Rouge = Red Khmer

Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, and in 1976 Khmer Rouge established a new constitution with the new flag under offical name, Democratic Kampuchea Khmer Rouge means Red Khmer translated from French and it was named by former King and Prime Minister Norodom Sihanouk. As one of the most violent regimes of the 20th century, the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of approximately 1.7 million people by execution, starvation and forced labor.

Known Name of Khmer Rouge:
• Khmer Rouge
• Democratic Kampuchea
• Pol Pot Regime
• Genocide Regime
• Killing Fields
• Cambodian Communists
• Red Khmer
• Communist Party of Cambodia
• Cambodian Genocide
• Khmer Krah-Ham (in Khmer, means Red Khmer)
• Angkar (in Khmer, means Government)

Brief Background of Khmer Rouge:

The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical Communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society. In 1970, aided by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, Khmer Rouge guerrillas began a large-scale insurgency against Cambodian government forces, soon gaining control of nearly a third of the country.

By 1973, secret U.S. bombings of Cambodian territory controlled by the Vietnamese Communists forced the Vietnamese out of the country, creating a power vacuum that was soon filled by Pol Pot's rapidly growing Khmer Rouge movement. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, overthrew the pro-U.S. regime, and established a new government, the Kampuchean People's Republic.

As the new ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia. The cities were evacuated, factories and schools were closed, and currency and private property was abolished. Anyone believed to be an intellectual, such as someone who spoke a foreign language, was immediately killed. Skilled workers were also killed, in addition to anyone caught in possession of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, or any other modern technology. In forced marches punctuated with atrocities from the Khmer Rouge, the millions who failed to escape Cambodia were herded onto rural collective farms.

Between 1975 and 1978, an estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and famine. In 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh in early 1979. A moderate Communist government was established, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreated back into the jungle.

In 1985, Pol Pot officially retired but remained the effective head of the Khmer Rouge, which continued its guerrilla actions against the government in Phnom Penh. In 1997, however, he was put on trial by the organization after an internal power struggle ousted him from his leadership position. Sentenced to life imprisonment by a "people's tribunal," which critics derided as a show trial, Pol Pot later declared in an interview, "My conscience is clear." Much of the international community hoped that his captors would extradite him to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, but he died of apparently natural causes while under house arrest in 1998.

Cambodian Meo Soknen, 13, stands inside a small shrine full of human bones and skulls, all victims of the Khmer Rouge, near her home in the Kandal Steung district of Kandal province, Cambodia.

Images of genocide victims are displayed on the walls of the Tuol Sleng Musuem of Genocidal Crime, formerly the Khmer Rouge torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav. Photograph: Corbis

An Introduction to The Khmer Rouge Trials

An Introduction to the Khmer Rouge Trials was produced by the Secretariat of the Royal Government Task Force, Office of the Council of Ministers, Kingdom of Cambodia with the generous assistance of Australian Legal Resource International (ALRI) on behalf of the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAid). Reproduction of part or all of this booklet for non-profit purposes is permitted and encouraged provided that acknowledgement is made of this source and our donors.

Khmer Rouge Is killer khmer people over 2.millians

The Khmer Rouge swept to power in 1975. Three years, eight months and 20 days later, at least 1.7 million people — nearly one-quarter of Cambodia’s population — were dead from execution, disease, starvation and overwork, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

The organization has been at the forefront of recording the atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. Tuol Sleng was one of 189 similar institutions across Cambodia. Duch is the first former Khmer Rouge leader to stand trial.

The tribunal, which is made up of Cambodian and international judges, does not have the power to impose the death penalty. If convicted, Duch faces from five years to life in prison. The trial is expected to last three or four months.

Probably the most important thing about this court is: even after 35 years, you are still not going to get away with it. That is the message,

said Chief Prosecutor Robert Petit.

When proceedings began last month, more than 500 people — including three survivors from the prison Duch ran — filled the tribunal. About 50 people came from Kampong Thom province, the birthplace of now-dead Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I was dreaming about my time at S-21,

Vann Nath, one of the few survivors of the prison run by Duch, told The Phnom Penh Post last month. Even though Duch was not a senior leader with the movement, many Cambodians were relieved that one of the regime’s former leaders was facing justice, said Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

I think there is a feeling of, well you know, finally — now it’s finally happening after all these years of waiting — hearing, fighting, negotiating. People have that kind of sense of relief that it’s now moving. When I ask people around the center today, people say, ‘Oh, it’s about time.’