Cambodian killing fields why

Traditional dancers performed in honor of his policies. Outside, survivors like Srey Heng, now a street vendor selling water and soft drinks, cast a more somber figure compared with the scenes inside. An estimated 1. I was an educated girl from a middle-class family. I could read, write, and think.

I was proud of my family and my roots. I was scared that they would hear my thoughts and prayers, that they could see my dreams and feel my anger and disapproval of their regime. I was always hungry. I woke up hungry before sunrise and walked many kilometers to the worksite with no breakfast. I worked until noon. My lunch was either rice porridge with a few grains or boiled young bananas or boiled corn.

I continued working till sunset. My dinner was the same as lunch. I couldn't protest to Angka, but my stomach protested to me that it needed more food. Every night I went to sleep dirty and hungry. I was sad because I missed my mom. I was fearful that this might be the night I'd be taken away, tortured, raped, and killed.

I wanted to commit suicide but I couldn't. If I did, I would be labeled "the enemy" because I dared to show my unhappiness with their regime.

My death would be followed by my family's death because they were the family of the enemy. My greatest fear was not my death, but how much suffering I had to go through before they killed me. They kept moving us around, from the fields into the woods. They purposely did this to disorient us so they could have complete control. They did it to get rid of the "useless people. Those who did not produce their quota. We were cold because we had so few clothes and blankets. We had no shoes.

We were sick and had little or no medical care. They told us that we "volunteered" to work fifteen hours or more a day in the rain or in the moonlight with no holidays. We were timid and lost. We had to be silent. We not only lost our identities, but we lost our pride, our senses, our religion, our loved ones, our souls, ourselves. The Khmer Rouge said they were creating a utopian nation where everyone would be equal.

They restarted our nation by resettling everyone and changing everything back to zero. The whole nation was equally poor. But while the entire population was dying of starvation, disease, and hopelessness, the Khmer Rouge was creating a new upper class. Their soldiers and the Communist party members were able to choose any woman or man they wanted to marry.

In addition to boundless food, they were crazed with gold, jewelry, perfume, imported watches, Western medicine, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, silk, and other imported goods. My dear friend Sakon was married to a handicapped Khmer Rouge veteran against her will. He was mentally disturbed and also suffered from tetanus. At night he woke up from his sleep with nightmares of his crimes and his killings. After that, he beat her. One night, he stabbed my friend to death and injured her mother.

Survivors told their stories to shocked audiences, and in the s the Hollywood movie The Killing Fields brought the plight of the Khmer Rouge victims to worldwide attention.

Pol Pot was denounced by his former comrades in a show trial in July , and sentenced to house arrest in his jungle home. But less than a year later he was dead - denying the millions of people who were affected by this brutal regime the chance to bring him to justice.

The UN helped establish a tribunal to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, beginning work in Only three Khmer Rouge leaders have ever been sentenced. Kaing Guek Eav - known as Duch - was jailed for life in for running the notorious Tuol Sleng prison.

In November , the tribunal also found them guilty of genocide over the attempted extermination of the Cham and Vietnamese minorities. It remains the first and only genocide conviction against the Khmer Rouge. Cambodian Genocide Program. Human Rights Watch. Money, private property, jewelry, gambling, most reading material and religion were outlawed; agriculture was collectivized; children were taken from their homes and forced into the military; and strict rules governing sexual relations, vocabulary and clothing were laid down.

The Khmer Rouge, which renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, even insisted on realigning rice fields in order to create the symmetrical checkerboard pictured on their coat of arms. At first, Pol Pot largely governed from behind the scenes. He became prime minister in after Prince Norodom was forced to resign. By that time, border skirmishes were occurring regularly between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. The fighting intensified in , and in December the Vietnamese sent more than 60, troops, along with air and artillery units, across the border.

On January 7, , they captured Phnom Penh and forced Pol Pot to flee back into the jungle, where he resumed guerrilla operations. Throughout the s, the Khmer Rouge received arms from China and political support from the United States, which opposed the decade-long Vietnamese occupation. In a Khmer Rouge splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He died in his sleep on April 15, , at age 72 due to heart failure.

A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that ruled Cambodia, under the leadership of Marxist dictator Pol Pot, from to Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, serving as premier from to Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, the Cuban Missile Crisis began after he positioned nuclear weapons 90 miles from During the late s and early s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States.